Throughout history the American public has been told that millions of people from various cultures immigrated to America seeking the “American Dream.”  The Statue of Liberty welcomes the immigrants with the famous poem by Emma Lazarus which begins: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  On the surface this is powerful!  It breathes the life of opportunity and hope for a prosperous future, but as one student on the 2004 Graduate class midterm put it “what next?”  It has been said that there are “two sides to every coin,” as well as “two sides to every story.”  So what is at first glance the beginning of a hopeful fairytale for the “tired…poor…huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is also a narrative of sacrifices made and endured; consensual and otherwise. 

The sacrifices made on behalf of all those directly or indirectly affected by immigration is such a sensitive subject that it is quite difficult to discuss openly.  There are issues of political correctness as well as issues of extreme emotions that surround immigration.  Additionally, the lines are fuzzy between who is an immigrant versus who is a minority, which adds to the complexity of discussions about such issues.  As a result, many people simply avoid communicating about immigrant and minority issues.  Fortunately, there is a great deal of literature written by immigrants and minorities that facilitates understanding through providing multiple perspectives that lead to a possible forum for discussing the issues surrounding immigrant and minority narratives. 

Some of the first immigrants in America were from Europe, but they were not the first inhabitants of America.  There were already people in America: Native American Indians.  With the arrival of the Europeans, the Native Americans were dislocated.  Life as they knew it was interrupted.  Whether they consented or not, they were forced to sacrifice the land they called home; the land they required for survival.  The Europeans quickly became the dominant culture and manipulated the situation to their advantage, causing the Native Americans to assume a minority status.  Native Americans did not necessarily immigrate to North America, but they were forced to leave their ways (old world) and assimilate to the ways of the dominant culture (new world).  However, the efforts of the dominant culture were met with resistance.  This is evident in Leslie Marmon Silko’s fictional piece “The Man To Send Rain Clouds.” 

Silko tells about two young men who find their grandfather dead.  He is found wearing a “Levi jacket and pants” which indicates he had assimilated somewhat by wearing the American clothes (IA 205).  The boys, Ken and Leon, had also assimilated enough to drive a truck and wear American clothes (Leon wore a “green Army jacket” (IA 206)).  Even their names were Americanized, but they still hung on to their Native American ways.  This is evident in their burial rituals.  They cover him with a red blanket, paint his face and throw “pinches of corn meal and pollen into the wind” (IA 205).  Then they asked grandfather’s spirit to “send [them] rain clouds” (IA 205).  They did not want a Christian burial for Grandfather, they only wanted the holy water “so [Grandfather] would not be thirsty” (IA 207).  Their refusal to accept the Christian burial is a form of resistance to the dominant culture.

Another familiar minority narrative is that of the African American.  African Americans are immigrants, but they did not immigrate of their free will.  Their free will was sacrificed as they were forced to America on ships and enslaved as servants for the dominant culture.  In the case of African Americans, the dominant culture did not want them to assimilate.  They wanted them to remain subservient.  In Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” the narrator, Sylvia, tells about Miss Moore who moves to her neighborhood and begins teaching the neighborhood children.  Miss Moore has assimilated just enough so that she “always look[s] like she [is] going to church,” but she is still relegated to living in the ghetto (IA 145).  In this story Miss Moore takes the children on a field trip to F.A.O. Schwarz, where they peer into a window at high priced toys.  The protagonist, Sylvia, makes the connection that a “$35 birthday clown . . . would pay for the rent and the piano bill too” (IA 150-151).  This narrative illustrates how Miss Moore helps the neighborhood children see that something has gone wrong in the world if some people can afford to buy a single toy that costs more than their rent.  Sugar questions the justice of a world where some children have more while she has much less: “Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?” (IA 151).  This narrative shows that minorities are not permitted to fully assimilate.  They never really belong to the dominant culture, nor do they fit into the immigrant narrative; they are minorities.

On the other hand, the immigrant narrative is slightly more definitive.  As objective 1 states the immigrant narrative is “the fundamental story-line of the dominant or majority culture in the USA.”  In other words, those who first immigrated to America came of their own volition and had much to look forward to . . . or did they?  In Anzia Yezierska’s “Soap and Water” the narrator, a Russian immigrant, tells how she longed to go to college to “to voice [her] thoughts” (IA 107).  She was determined that all that stood between her and her assimilation was an education.  The protagonist sacrificed for her education.  She “pinched, and scraped, and starved [herself] to save enough to [go] to college.  Every cent of the tuition fee . . . was drops of sweat and blood from underpaid laundry work” (IA 107).  She manages to finish college only to encounter the spokesperson for the dominant culture, Miss Whiteside, the dean of her college, who tells her that she is “unfit to be a teacher, because of [her] appearance” (IA 106).  Finally, the protagonist meets one of her former teachers, Miss Van Ness, who takes the protagonist under her wing and helps her “find America.”

Nellie Wong’s “When I Was Growing Up” is a similar story.  In Wong’s poem, the speaker explains that she once “longed to be white” (line 1) because “being Chinese / . . . was un-American” (29, 31).  She exhibits many the stages of the immigrant narrative as defined in Objective 2.  She “read magazines / saw movies, blonde movie stars, white skin / sensuous lips” (11-13) and wore “imaginary pale skin” (15) so she, too, could assimilate into the dominant culture.  She learned English, grammar and spelling allowing her to fit “into the group of smart children, / smart Chinese children, fitting in, / belonging, getting in line” (18-20).  Later, she became “anxious to fit / the stereotype of an oriental chick” (34-35), because that was what “a white man wanted” (32).  The speaker obviously sacrificed her heritage to assimilate into the dominant culture for acceptance.  Fortunately, the speaker comes to terms with her heritage as she matures and she knows “that once [she] longed to be white,” but not anymore (60).  She found her place in society as a Chinese American.

There is a third group in the immigrant story; a group that does not have a definite place in either the immigrant narrative or the minority narrative.  Mexican Americans fit into this category.  Perhaps this is because they did not cross an ocean to get to America and can easily cross back into their old world.  Whatever the reason, they are not clearly classified in one narrative or the other.  They seem to have characteristics of both the immigrant narrative and the minority narrative.  In the non-fiction piece, “Like Mexicans” by Gary Soto, he talks about how his grandmother always advised him to “marry a Mexican girl” (VA 301).  His grandmother believed that anyone who was not of color was an “Oakie,” and she believed that her grandson should marry someone who looked more like him; “a brown girl” (VA 302).  Much to Soto’s surprise, he falls in love and marries a Japanese girl, who had somewhat assimilated as evidenced by her driving a “Plymouth” and attending a “Japanese Methodist Church” (VA 303), but she is more like him than he originally thought because her family is also poor.  Soto’s people are caught between the immigrant narrative because they tend to intermarry, preventing them from fully assimilating, but they are also part of the minority narrative due to their skin color, and the fact that they cannot blend in completely with the dominant culture.  They must marry either one who is Mexican, or one who is “like Mexicans.”

Another example of a culture caught between the immigrant narrative and the minority narrative is the Afro-Caribbean narrative.  Like the Mexican Americans narrative, the Afro-Caribbean narrative involves a nearby home country or old world, which allows one to move between the two worlds more easily, thus interfering with the original idea of the immigrant narrative, and interrupting the assimilation process.  In Paule Marshall’s “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen,” she explains how she learned about language by listening to the conversations of the women who visited her mother’s kitchen.  Her people came to America from Barbados for economic reasons.  America was a place where “you could at least see your way to make a dollar” (VA 85), but the laws in America prevented them from “disciplining [their children] properly” as they would have done in the old world (VA 85).  Through their immigration to America they had to sacrifice many of their old ways, but they never completely assimilated due to their skin-color as it relates to the “color code.”  They are of African decent, which means they are dark-skinned.  “Western civilization often transfers the values it associates with ‘light and dark’ (good and evil) to people of light or dark coloring” (Minority Literature Objective 1d).  As a result the color of the Afro-Caribbean immigrant’s skin prevents him from being treated as a traditional American immigrant.

The idea of a “pot of gold” in the “American Dream” has attracted many immigrants to America.  We may never know how many immigrants actually attain their dreams by coming to America.  Who knows what immigrants expect to achieve on American soil?  I would venture to say that they possibly seek to enjoy the everyday freedoms so many Americans take for granted, especially those in the dominant culture.  Regardless, the first step to understanding the issues on both sides of the immigrant and minority narratives involves talking about the issues and the sacrifices made by all involved parties.  I believe literature provides a healthy venue for these discussions. [JO’G]