Karen Gonzales

Mid-Term Exam Part II

June 19, 2006

Americans, dominant culture assimilated Americans at any rate, for many decades, have celebrated the fabled “American Dream” as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty with her torch held high over New York Harbor and the plaque at her feet imploring, “Bring me your tired, you hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.. .bring these your troubled tempest tossed to me.”   They believed that the immigrants who came to our shores and borders, willing to work, willing to struggle, willing to sacrifice, would be welcomed and added to the great melting pot that the United States of America and Lady Liberty symbolized.  Many immigrants realized that dream and have been celebrated and held up as models of what a wonderful reality can unfold for those who held the “American Dream” dear.  In recent years, however, the imergence of immigrant and minority literature has put a new perspective on the dream – and let us see that the dream was sometimes a nightmare, sometimes a curse, and sometimes rejected.  

One of the first contributors to the immigrant narrative is Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur in “Letters from and American Farmer.”  He remarks on the pride an “enlightened Englishman” might feel when he surveys this young country and imagines he might say to himself, “this is the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by faction, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and impatient, took refuge here…”  He speaks of the American Dream, “We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained because each person works for himself…”  And he speaks of the great melting pot that was America in its infancy: “They are mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.  From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have risen.”   This early “melting pot” was comprised of white European races, but still made America unique.  Another “unique” quality a America possessed was the institution of slavery and the especially cruel way Americans practiced slavery.  De Crevecoeur in “Letter IX Description of Charles-Town; Thoughts on Slavery” observes, “While all is joy, festivity and happiness in Charles-town…they neither see, hear, nor feel for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labours all their wealth proceeds…the horrors of slavery, the hardship of incessant toils are unseen; and no one thinks with compassion of those showers of sweat and of tears which from the bodies of Africans daily drop.”  In this early letters from an immigrant, we hear about both the realization of the American Dream from part of this new society, the dominant culture, and the beginning of the American nightmare for another part –the slaves who will become the African American minority.

Anzia Yezierska writes about her immigrant experience in the early part of the twentieth century.  She seeks to fulfill her dream by getting an education.  She longs to express herself through writing and support herself by teaching and her dream is shattered when she is denied her diploma by a dean who faults her for her poor grooming and her personal appearance.  Yezierska finds this ironic as she is unkempt because of the work she must take in a laundry, keeping the dean and “polite” society in clean, white clothes.  She notes, “I had suffered the cruelty of their cleanliness and the tyranny of their culture…She was merely one of the agents of clean society, delegated to judge who is fit and who is unfit to teach.”  The hard working Americans of de Crevecoeur’s letters – “the rich and the poor not so far removed from each other” -  have formed a dominant culture and established harsh rules that no longer embraces all classes.  Yezierska’s struggle to reach her dream is made more difficult because of this reluctance of the dominant culture to admit those they see as inferior, but she, and those she writes about, strive overcomes these barriers to success. 

Nicholasa Mohr’s “The English Lesson” expresses, through the eyes of William and Lali, two young immigrants from Puerto Rico, the new immigrant’s desire to fit in and find success in America by learning the language.  When the predominately Spanish speaking students are asked to make a speech to the class about why they wantto learn English, all of the students say roughly the same thing,- they want to get a better job, they want to follow the American Dream.  A new theme in immigrant literature is introduced in this story however, when Diego Torres, a native of Santo Domingo, insists that he does not want to become an American citizen, “ I no be an American citizen, no way. I’m Dominican and I’m proud!”  Instead of wanting to jump into the melting pot, he desires to keep his identity and his Dominican citizenship.  He has only left his county to find work and he has his own dream – not the American dream – to pursue.

In “Silent Dancing”, Judith Ortiz Cofer discusses how skin color has played a part in the acceptance and (non)-assimilation of her family.  She writes of life in “El Building”, formerly in a Jewish neighborhood in Patterson, New Jersey, and the prejudice her family met when trying to rent, as Latinos, in that neighborhood.  Her father, light skinned so that “he could have passed for European,” tried “obsessively” to move them out of the barrio.   Her mother, on the other hand, felt comforted in the neighborhood where she could speak Spanish to her neighbors, and neighborhood stores welcomed  her without suspicious looks and carried brands familiar in Puerto Rico, brands that her mother had used.  Her father continued to try hold on to his American Dream for his family, by forbidding the children to play with the neighborhood children and bringing Christmas and television – two huge pieces of that dream – to his family.

The American Dream experience for Native Americans has been devastating.  The literature from the Native American culture reflects the hopelessness, the despair, the poverty and the insensitive treatment the native people have suffered for many decades at the hands of the European immigrants and the anger and bitterness they feel toward that culture.  “American Horse” by Louise Erlich tells the sad story of an alcoholic mother whose son is taken from her by child welfare.  It is a story of clashing cultures, the dominate culture wresting a child from his family, made dysfunctional in the first place by that dominant culture.  “The Man to Send Rain Clouds”, by Leslie Marmon Silko is a more up-lifting story, showing the resilience of the Native American in this family’s adherence to traditional customs, and their manipulation of the dominant culture by using their religious ceremonies shaped to their own end.  This is a specialized minority narrative that is still unfolding after two hundred years.

African American immigrant literature has a different view of the American Dream as well.  Immigrants by force, through slavery, they were not offered the American Dream, and many now do not wish to partake, but to keep their own special identities.  James Baldwin writes, in “No Name in the Street” of the difficulty experienced by two old friends grown apart, when they have different views of what the dream for African Americans should be.  When Baldwin tries to explain his views on the absolute wrongness and absurdity of young black men going to fight in Vietnam for a country, that refuses them equality and fair treatment at home, his friend does not understand.  He  concludes that, “the way the cards had falled meant that I hd to face more about them than they could now about me, knew their rent, whereas they did not know mine, and was condemned to make them uncomfortable.”  Spike Lee once said that his films were meant to make people uncomfortable.  It may be the function of some of our minority literature, too.