American Dream?

            America.  It is a world where there exists “…plain beautifulness…,” “…spick-and-span cleanliness…,” and people with “spotless, creaseless clothes…” (Yezierska 212-213).  It is a world where there exists religious and ethic freedom and purity (Bradford).  It is a world where names like “Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Givenchy, Dior, [and] Ralph Lauren…” give new meaning (and a new price tag) to beauty (Raban 345). 

            This is the American Dream that exists in the eyes of the immigrant.  The immigrant, before coming to America and assimilating into American culture, envisions “…a land flowing with milk and honey…,” in which the riches are overflowing and accessible (Exodus 3:17).  However, the American Dream remains mostly that: a dream.  This is not the America that many immigrants come to know.  When becoming a part of American culture, many immigrants are faced with the harsh realities of the real America.

            This real America.  It can be a world where the portion of one’s “lunch depended on [someone else’s] mood of the minute” (Yezierska 167).  It can be a world where religious and ethic freedom and purity begin to uphold values and ideas that it once stood against (Bradford).  It can be a world where name brands like Louis Viutton and Ralph Lauren give way to the other side of capitalism, which is a homeless man, “holding a tin mug and wearing a sandwich-board that [says] I AM Blind / PleASE HELP me/thank you & / GOD BLESS YOU (Raban 347).  

            Before I signed up for the course, I had my own speculations about the world in which I grew up.  Being a minority in a world that services the dominant culture, I recognized the immigrant and minority plight before we even began to discuss it in class.  From my perspective, it is easy to see the dominant culture as privileged (when I refer to the dominant culture, I refer to upper-middle class Anglo-Saxon males).  There are more of them there are of, say, lower-middle class African-American women (me!) and, for, this reason, they are automatically in the advantage.  I always envisioned life as a fish bowl with names written on several pieces of paper, like a raffle.  Isn’t it true that the more your name is in the bowl, the higher your chances are of winning the jackpot?  I think that this is true in life. It is not to sound depressing or hopeless, but realistic.  I think, in a lot of ways, many immigrants and minorities feel the same way about dominant culture.  For this reason, many tend to, instead of differentiating oneself from dominant culture, many tend to assimilate into the dominant culture in order to have more of a chance in that fish bowl.

            The fish bowl scenario leaves little chance for the immigrant or minority to want to not assimilate.  I think that the dominant culture will always be the dominant culture due to the fact that the dominant culture will do everything in its power to remain that way.  Bread Givers  gives us a more optimistic viewpoint however in dominant culture-immigrant relations.  At the end of the story, Sara and Hugo come to a compromise of the values that they will most likely teach their children.  Sara becomes a little bit Americanized and Hugo takes a little bit of the immigrant characteristics.  In Raban, however, he refers to the notion of the dream.  In a sense, he explains that dreams give people hope, but that they also allow people to feel pain and regret when these drams are not realized.  In a sense, “in America everything is a different as possible, and dreams are far more real to Americans than they are to [people in other countries]” (Raban 356).  Dreams allow us to have a purpose.  What is wrong with American Dream anyway if it allows someone who has not had religious freedom in his or her own country to have such freedom?  What about the immigrant that must earn a few pennies doing laundry work, like Sara in Bread Givers?  In her own country, she might now have been able to get a job (some countries, women are not allowed to work, nor have any say in the financial affairs). 

            I think that a relationship between minority, immigrant, and dominant culture exists currently.  The relationship is that the immigrant is disillusioned and heartbroken by the dominant culture, the dominant culture is often ignorant of and confused by the minority and the immigrant, and the minority is left confused trying to find a place in a world where they are the outsiders to both the dominant culture (a culture in which they grew up on the outside from) and the immigrant. [ML]