Dana Kato

The American Dream, A Sense of Visibility

When I signed up for this class, I quite honestly did not know what to expect. My major is Curriculum and Instruction, but I needed a few electives and this class sounded very interesting to me.  As a teacher of an increasing population of multicultural students, I am frequently looking for new material, both in terms of my own growth and in terms of stories that my students might connect with, so this class seemed a good choice.  But even though I am now composing this essay five hours away in a  Dallas hotel room (and missing free teacher night and $1 hot dogs at the Ranger game), I feel  I have been enriched from three different perspectives: first, as a graduate student reading the works of multicultural writers; second, as a teacher of multicultural high school students; and last, as an American citizen whose own family arrived here as immigrants from France, Germany, England, Ireland, and Scotland -the “Heinz 57” white American. The unifying thread for all of these perspectives is the immigrant/minority narrative and its connection to the elusive American Dream.

As a graduate student, I have been enlightened not only by these narratives, but also by the collaborative discussions about them facilitated by our astute instructor.  I enjoy the flow of ideas and the sharing of individual perspectives when it comes to the text.  (I plan to incorporate some of these presentation types in my own classroom this year.)  And though it is useful to understand the abstract terms (immigrant, minority, dominant culture, assimilation), the words mean little without the narrative. Could one imagine a math book without the illustrations and examples? It would still have verbal directions, but how tediously frustrating it would be to try to grasp onto only the abstract.  As a student I find that I can connect to the plight of the character (and the immigrant) through a narrative format. The character becomes a real person, and that person’s life and struggle touch me. “Momma and sisters kept the commercials going, to prove we were married in the palaces of soap….”  (from the poem “American Dream: First Report”) speaks of the immigrant family’s need to be accepted and the family’s ability to adapt quickly to the economic culture, which in turn transforms the immigrant into a “well-dressed citizen” (UA 88). Papaleo’s humor softens the cruelties of the assimilation process, but gains my respect for all that his family must go through in order to gain the American Dream, a dream that may come at a cost. The bitterness of Anzia Yerzierska’s narrator in “Soap and Water” (another piece connecting the motif of soap to that of success/social status) made me both sad and angry at the unfairness of her plight- one in which the American Dream seems to fail her, at least until the end, when she is plucked from the depths of despair to an ending of possibility… the possibility of being seen, of no longer being invisible?

According to the LITR 5731 syllabus, “Native Americans were already here, and immigration was the ‘American Nightmare’ instead of the American Dream.” The social contract offered Old World immigrants and later immigrants was never offered to the Native American, which is apparent in the words of William Bradford when he writes, “The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America…being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men…little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same” (Bradford 26).  From the beginning Native Americans are defined by the Puritan culture as savages, closer to beasts than to man.  As a teenager, I read a book about the Cherokee “trail of tears,” a book given to me by my grandmother who grew up near the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. This book depicts the betrayal of the Cherokee people by the U.S. government, ultimately leading to the deaths of many Cherokee during their forced removal to the Oklahoma territory. I listened to record albums such as Johnny Cash’s concept album Bitter Tears and just about anything by Native-American Buffy Sainte-Marie.  I felt angry for a while, and then another “issue” came along and my teenage angst turned elsewhere. Because I do not live these problems daily, I am able to do this, to become one of Raban’s “air people” whenever it is convenient.  So, for a long time, I have read very little literature about or by Native Americans, and to my surprise, the stories which impacted me the most as a student in this class were those dealing with the Native American minority. The stories, “American Horse” and “Gussek” both convey this bitter tone.  In “American Horse” a Native American child is physically removed by a woman from social services, who believes that she is saving the boy from a bad life by removing him from his mother and putting him (off Indian land) into foster care. It’s hard to say if it wasn’t the right thing to do, but the insinuation seems to be that it has been historically too easy for this to happen to a Native American child.  Reading “Gussek” left me filled with a sadness and despair, from the possibly suicidal and desperate Robert to the young nurse who suddenly chooses to fly above all the sad realities she finds in the village. Like me at times, she finds it easier to be above it all, making “them” invisible, especially when “we” suddenly begin to suspect that we are not so terribly different.

One characteristic of the traditional Old World immigrant narrative is the influence of the extended family, which can provide essential emotional support for the family member. In some of the assigned narratives, especially those involving minority groups and New World immigrants, there appeared to be either a lack of the extended family, or an extended family unwilling or unable (color code) to culturally assimilate. For example, in Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” although the children have a sense of community, they are isolated from the “dominant culture” world of Fifth Avenue.  Their realization of this parallel universe creates several reactions from the children, including self-consciousness, and anger. “But I feel funny, shame. But what I got to be ashamed about “(IA 149).”  She doesn’t know, says Alice. She doesn’t know that she is invisible… This past week I have been  training for AVID, a program which tries to reach students in junior high who might normally fall through the cracks of failure by high school. Its goal is to provide those students with the academic and moral support needed to enable them to attend and finish college. AVID targets students who would become first generation college graduates in their families and/or students in situations which make the concept of attending college an unreal expectation. At a luncheon, we heard student speakers who shared with us their personal journeys. These students were minority students; some were also immigrants. One girl in particular reminded me of Sylvia in Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson.”  She was about the same age as Sylvia and despite the polite façade she put on for the audience, a certain defensiveness clung to her fierce eyes and the scar on her cheek she had acquired in a fight. When asked why AVID had made a difference in her life, she looked straight at us and replied, “Respect.” The AVID experience is a type of assimilation experience in which these students learn to speak a new language and to operate within the structure of new world (AP classes). The AVID team acts as a surrogate extended family by supporting and caring for the student emotionally, by providing an academic structure and support system (missing from the lives of most of these students), and by setting high expectations for this student, while at the same time understanding that everyone slips up now and again. Some may suggest that this is assimilation into the dominant culture, yet I have no doubt that these kids will make their own mark on the dominant culture as well.

As an educator, I am increasingly aware that my life experiences do not match that of my students. Demographics are changing and I have students coming into my classes from many different backgrounds.  I usually have several who are first generation immigrants and several more who are second generation. These are not European immigrants, but are for the most part New World and South Asian immigrants.  For many of these students the extended family is still intact, but language, cultural, and economic barriers make the educational process challenging for both the students and myself.  I feel my experience in this class will better prepare me to understand some of the special issues faced by these students, such as the problem of being both an immigrant and a minority, and the ambivalent attitudes many New World immigrants have towards the U.S., such as the narrator in Junot Diaz’s humorous second-person narrative “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie.” “Don’t tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized the smell from the year the United States invaded your land” ( IA 277).  Many New world immigrants do not plan to cut off all ties to the old country, and like the narrator in Diaz’s story, who is a Dominican with “Africa” running “easily through his hair,” must also deal with a color code which marks them as a minority (IA 277). 

In researching the history of Japanese immigration to the U.S. and Seabrook Farms, I discovered quite a bit about Japanese immigration to the United States and about my children’s family. I discovered why my husband’s family ended up in New Jersey at a place called Seabrook Farms  I learned that “more nuclear American culture (and lower birth rates) may mean that Japanese Americans may have achieved assimilation as a model minority group, but at the cost of their cultural identity. According to Easton and Ellington, “What the future holds for fourth-generation Japanese Americans (the Yonsei) is unclear. The Japanese American ethnic community may disappear in that generation, or complete assimilation may bring about the demise of the values that pushed Japanese Americans to socioeconomic success “(5).  The vortex of dominant culture may accomplish the absorption of this “model minority,” as it has many Native American groups in the past, through intermarriage. In Fiddler on the Roof, a play I teach, the Russian Jewish father allows two of his daughters to bend tradition in order to make everyone happy, but when his third daughter elopes with a Christian, he cries, “If I bend that far, I’ll break!” and disowns her .He loves her, but does this still, drawing a line of difference between those cultures which almost completely assimilate into the dominant culture and those who may assimilate economically, but refuse or resist cultural or religious assimilation.

Throughout this survey of American immigrant and/or minority literature, I have been on a journey myself, a journey to grasp the traits of the immigrant narrative and its connection to the American Dream.  Early immigrants, like Bradford and the Pilgrims, arrived here in the 1600s seeing themselves as the only real men around and hoping for economic and religious opportunity for their people, their people, of course, not including the “savage” Indians. For them the American dream was to survive. Many of course did not.  But eventually hard work and prayer paid off and economic success ended their communal living.  Later other immigrants arrived, and like the Pilgrims, they struggled and attempted to assimilate, at least economically.  Some immigrant groups suffered religious and economic discrimination, while some achieved assimilation economically, but refused to assimilate culturally.  Still, to many the American Dream beamed like a beacon of hope on a foggy night. But to others the American Dream is still hidden; to the Native American and the African-American, who often viewed the white dominant culture as oppressors, it was never even there (until recent years, at least).  So what is the American Dream? Maybe the American Dream is really is just a feeling of entitlement, a feeling of visibility. For Raban, it’s flexible, one can have it or not, according to the class one exists in. His view of America and its commercial class I found intriguing, but a little too cynical. Yet it is a fair warning that we are heading towards two separate worlds in which the American Dream will have limited availability.  

Works Cited:

Brown, Wesley and Amy Ling, eds.  Imagining America. New York: Persea Books, 2002.

Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647. New York: The Modern Library, 1981.

Easton, Stanley E. and Lucien Ellington.  “Japanese Americans.” Multicultural America. 2006.  2 Jul 2008. http://www.everyculture.com/multi/Ha-La/Japanese-Americans.html

White, Craig. Lecture. Graduate course: LITR 5731. UHCL.  Summer 2008.