The Full American Story

By nature, human beings are story-telling creatures. From the times of Homer, before these narratives were ever written down, humans passed along the ideals and beliefs that were important in their cultures through narratives. Immigration has always been at the very heart of America and the ideal of “The American Dream,” and that is why the narratives of the immigrant groups are vital to telling the story of American culture.  Immigrants the world over, come to America to seek a place to raise their families and try to do better for their children. Groups coming from each of the different nations and cultures all have their own individual tales, greatly affected by whether immigration was voluntary or involuntary, but generally encounter similar struggles dealing with the dominant culture.

 There are stages that most of the immigrant groups, voluntary or involuntary, pass through as they become part of American society. As has been discussed in class, the five stages of the immigrant narrative are :

Stage 1: Leave the Old World (“traditional societies” in Europe, Asia, or Latin America).
Stage 2: Journey to the New World (here, the USA & modern culture)
Stage 3: Shock, resistance, exploitation, and discrimination (immigrant experience here overlaps with or resembles the minority experience)
Stage 4: Assimilation to dominant American culture and loss of ethnic identity (departs or differs from minority experience)
Stage 5: Rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity (usu. only partial)

There are three main groups that pass through these stages among the immigrant and minority stories, standard immigrants who arrived voluntarily, minority immigrants who arrived either involuntary or had the country migrate to them, and the new world immigrants who often overlap the first two categories.

            Model minorities generally represent the idealistic narrative of the immigrants place in America. Asian immigrants are usually classified as part of the model minority, but this doesn’t mean that they escape struggle as they enter America. An example from In the Land of the Free shows the difficulty that can be encountered when immigrants take all of the appropriate steps to enter the country when their little boy is retained by the government because he was born after the paperwork was created for the merchant’s wife to come to America and was not listed on there.  The model minorities are often classified as such by their willingness to assimilate to American culture, and often meet with more success than other minorities. The narrative, In the American Society, tells the story of a Chinese immigrant who is takes over a pancake house and raises the business to support his family and enter the typical American dream. The level of assimilation is clear when the mother “had opinions, now, on how downtown should be zoned; she could pump her own gas and check her own oil…and was now interested in espadrilles, and wallpaper” (159).  The model minorities are more willing to assimilate into American culture because they became part of America voluntarily as opposed to the minorities.

            Minorities such as African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans were introduced to America involuntarily and are generally the least assimilated of all of the immigrant groups. In the case of the Native Americans and Mexican Americans, America came to them and expected them to assimilate to the dominant culture. The contrast between Harmony, the police officer and Albertine in American Horse, shows both sides of the Native American assimilation story. Harmony has become fully assimilated and is working for the police force while Albertine is struggling to keep her child from being taken from her and fighting with alcoholism because of her need to hold on to her culture because the opportunities are not as available to members of the minority culture to advance.  The level of opportunities for minorities is also exemplified in The Lesson, where the African American kids are taken to the fanciest toy store in New York, where they are shown the gap between themselves and the dominant culture where “some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven” (151).  The story, El Patron, shows the difficulties faced in the immigrant’s story between generations in the case of Papa and Tito. Papa is partially assimilating to the American culture while holding onto many of the cultural identities of Mexican culture. Tito has gone to college and is more Americanized and this creates problems with Papa’s understanding of Tito. Tito represents more of the dominant cultures ideas in the sense that he respects the authority as long as it agrees with his own morals.

            New World immigrants, or Afro-Caribbean immigrants often face the additional difficulty of being classified by the dominant culture as part of the minority group that they physically resemble, usually African American, while having more in common culturally with Hispanic immigrants and representing more of the traditional immigration stories.  In How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,  the main character uses this to his advantage to play up their anticipations based on whether they are classifying him as black or Spanish, even though he is really from the Dominican. The contrast between Hector, who has been living in America for years, and the rate of assimilation and success that his family members from Cuba achieve after they immigrate in Visitors, shows that success in the American culture as an immigrant is relative to the willingness and ability to assimilate.

            All of these narratives and perspectives are important to telling the story of America. America was founded by immigrants and has expanded greatly over its history because of the exploitation of immigrants while they are trying to establish themselves in this country. The story of America and it’s “melting pot” of cultures couldn’t be told accurately without including the stories of the people who came to this country in search of the American Dream, and faced either a nightmare, or tremendous hardships and obstacles securing their own piece of the dream. 

[Faron]