There are three types of narratives we have discussed, at length, so far in this class.  These are the immigrant narrative, the minority narrative, and the narrative of people who fall somewhere in between.  These all follow a general pattern of interaction with America, with both good and bad concepts.  They are all also distinctly different form one another, which I will discuss, as well as my thoughts on how they overlap and what I think of clumping everyone into one of these three categories. 

            I am going to follow the structure of our class and start by describing the immigrant narrative.  This narrative is one that is applied to people who came to America of their own free will, usually for economic gain.  There are five stages of the immigrant narrative.  These are: leaving the old world;  journeying to the new world;  experiencing shock, resistance, exploitation, and discrimination;  assimilating to the dominant American culture and losing one’s ethnic identity;  and rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity. 

In her poem “When I Was Growing Up,” Nellie Wong shows the stage of assimilating to the dominant culture and losing one’s ethnic identity.  She talks of how, when she was growing up, she once “longed to be white.”  The rest of the poem talks of all the things she wished, all which make her whiter than her dark skin really was.  She says “…my sisters with fair skin got praised…I was proud of my English, my grammar, my spelling…I hungered for American food, American styles coded: white…a white man wanted to take me out, I thought I was special…”  Wong wanted nothing at all to do with her Chinese heritage, she wanted to be American, to be accepted. 

Anzia Yezierka’s “Soap and Water” is in some ways similar to this poem, and in some ways different.  The narrator is desperately trying to assimilate to American culture by going to college.  This attempt at assimilation, however, is met with discrimination.  The dean of her school, Mrs. Whiteside, refuses to give her her diploma because “Soap and water are cheap.  Anyone can be clean.”  She is also discriminated against with her coworkers at the laundry, who “had a grudge against me because I left them when I tried to work myself up.”  She becomes a beggar, and hates America until one day, she meets an old professor, Miss Van Ness, one of the few people who treated her as a person.  After visiting Miss Van Ness at her office, she leaves “singing a song of new life: ‘America!  I found America!’”  The irony of this is that she didn’t “find America” until she found someone who looked at her for who she was, not for the American she was definitely trying to be.  This illustrates stage five, rediscovering your ethnic identity. 

            The minority narrative is different from the immigrant narrative in that it deals with groups of people who are not in their present place on their own free will; they are there because the U.S.A. brought/put them there.  The two main groups that this encompasses are African-Americans and Native Americans. 

The Native Americans of course inhabited these lands long before the arrival of Europeans, but where either killed or shoved onto reservations.  Chrystos shows the lasting effect of anger that this has had on Native Americans in her poem “I Have Not Signed a Treaty with the United States Government.”  In this poem, Chrystos very angrily calls for the U.S. to leave her country.  She says “We don’t recognize these names on old sorry paper…Everything the United States does to everybody is bad…No this US is not a good idea…We revoke your immigration papers.”  That last line is so powerful, because it reminds the big, powerful U.S.A., the country who holds the lives of millions of immigrants in its hand, that itself was an immigrant, who came unwanted. 

The African Americans have a different history with the U.S.  They are here because of the institution of slavery, which was alive in “the land of the free” for the first 100 years of its existence (and long before we were a country).  Even though slavery was ended 150 years ago, African Americans are still struggling to be included in the mainstream of the American culture.  Toni Cade Bambara illustrates this in one of my favorite readings of this class so far, “The Lesson.”  In this story, a teacher in a poor, African American neighborhood, takes some students to F.A.O.  Schwarz.  When she asks the kids what they thought, there are many replies.  One kids says simply “White folks crazy.”  Another makes the observation that “I don’t think all of us here put together eat in a year what that sailboat costs ($1195).”  Finally the last student says “I think that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me.  Equal chance to pursue happiness means and equal crack at the dough, don’t it?”  This shows the minority narrative of being pushed down from the start, and having a harder time digging out of the hole.

Finally, we have the narrative for people who do not fit into one of the first two categories.  They are people who have aspects of the immigrant and minority narrative in them.  These include Mexican Americans, as well as many people from islands in the Caribbean.  These are people who have had some connection with the U.S. before, but are still coming to America for economic gain.  Their lands also might have once been apart of America, and they are more likely to travel back to their homeland because their journey is not near as far, and sometimes does not even cross an ocean. 

In “The Making of a Writer:  From Poets In The Kitchen,” Paule Marshall illustrates an instance of being closer to the immigrant narrative.  She was born in Barbados and grew up in New York.  As a teenager, she shows assimilation by falling in love with the “classic” novels of white American and European authors.  As time goes on, however, she realizes that “Something I couldn’t quite define was missing.”  What was missing was “works by those like ourselves.”  This is Marshall rediscovering her ethnic identity.  This got her thinking that about her true influences, and now she attributes her mother and her mother’s friends as her main influences in her writings. 

Nash Candelaria’s “El Patrón” illustrates both the immigrant and minority sides of Mexican American’s relationship to America.  The father in the story has a hierarchy that he follows:  Dios (God), El Papá (the Pope), and el patron (the boss).  Putting the boss in with God and the Pope illustrates his deference to bosses, who are usually white.  And if you hold someone in this high of a regard, you can never work your way up to equality with that person.  At the same time, his son shows the assimilation side.  He went to college, and now is in trouble with the law because he is dodging the draft.  Going to college and protesting the government are two major signs of assimilation.

There is a definite distinction between these three types of narratives.  What I have taken so far from our class, however, is that there are exceptions to each one.  Not everyone from Europe comes here because they want to, some come because they have to escape murder in their own country.  Not all African Americans are still struggling to overcome the stigma of slavery, many have assimilated are firmly entrenched in the mainstream of American society.  Some Mexicans are fully on the minority side, some are fully on the immigrant side. 

A question you asked was “Is it possible for Americans to talk systematically and constructively about race and ethnicity?”  With all the different races and culture we have represented in this country, I fully believe that it is.  However, for a discussion like this, the right people have to be present.  You need people who represent each different ethnicity with an open mind, constructive hostility, a good background in their own culture, and the confidence to defend themselves.  Too often race discussions end in anger and hatred, with nothing constructive coming out of them, only further divisiveness.  Only open minded people talking constructively can change this. [DG]