As American As

            We have the term “American”; what do we make of it? The word is often used to bring to light the “otherness” in people – the foreignness. It is used to distinguish between good – American – and bad – un-American; it is used to turn human beings into heroes and villains. And yet, it is rarely defined. If, when we say something – or, more to the point, someone – is American, we simply mean they live in America and are part of its economic and political structure, then the word is grossly misused. The word is said as if there existed somewhere a pure-blooded, flawless being – a true “American.” But, since it’s clear that no such person, or group exists, the meaning of the word must be further clarified. In class, we have discussed several distinct groups of people, and how they relate to the country in which they live; specifically the groups are immigrant, minority, new-world immigrants, dominant culture and model minorities. Like the culture of America itself, these groups are far from homogenous, and have complex relationships with America. By examining the stories of these people, one discovers that an American is, by definition, a combination of ever-changing voices and experiences; there is nothing uniform in the details of these groups of people, yet there is often a unity in spirit that is overlooked by superficial differences.

            “What then is the American?”, Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur so aptly asks in his Letters from an American Farmer. In answer, he lists a number of European counties, certainly accurate for the earliest American settlers, “they are mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes,” and appears to consider this mix of races as American. He also explains, however, that Americans are something entirely new; to use terminology from the class itself, they are immigrants. These immigrants founded the country just over two-hundred years ago, thus, at its very birth, America has been shaped by a variety of cultures, languages and ideas. As St. Jean de Crevecoeur explains, “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” It is unclear whether the author means that all of the various cultures will disappear and become something new, or that they will mix and exist together, differences alongside similarities. What is clear is that Americans are something “new”, a nation comprised entirely of immigrants.

            These early immigrants became what is sometimes called the dominant culture, but later generations of immigrants did not have the benefit of establishing a society for themselves. Like the parents in Sui Sin Far’s story “In The Land Of The Free,” immigrants who came to the US had the challenge of adapting and assimilating to the existing society, an experience which could sometimes be terrifying. The parents of this story are Chinese immigrants, bringing their infant son to America for work and economic opportunity, but before they even get off of the boat, they are shocked into the reality of American law and bureaucracy. They are forced to give up their son until official papers can be obtained for him. In an early passage, the father tries to explain the situation to one of the men who has just informed him of the rule: “ ‘I had no fear of trouble. I was a Chinese merchant and my son was my son.’ ‘Very good Hom King,’ replied the first officer. ‘Nevertheless, we take your son’ ” (5). Here we see the disconnect between what Hom King and his wife see as a simple condition, and the expectations and laws of a foreign government. Not only is their son taken, but when he is returned – after ten months – he no longer receptive to his mother and hides in the dress of the white woman who has been looking after him. The parents have been made to comply, a vicious assimilation, to American custom, and their son, in his earlier, formative years, has already learned been removed from his family and heritage. They came expecting to fulfill their vision of the American dream, prosperity, peace, freedom, but were blindsided by something entirely different.

The parents in Sui Sin Far’s story have experienced firsthand the absolute power and impersonality of the US’s “dominant culture”. The phrase denotes the group of people that make up the majority of the population and, thus, are the ones mainly in power. They are principally white; they are those European immigrants that Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur describes in his letters. An important feature of the dominant culture of America, especially important in regards to our ever-evolving vision of the “American”, is that it is the culture that immigrants assimilate to, or remain separate from. This dynamic between willing assimilation, or compliance with dominant culture values, ways of life and beliefs, and resistance of said assimilation is useful when considering the relationships between the various types of Americans, the minority group being no exception.

This next group, minorities, differ from the standard immigrant narrative in that they didn’t come to America willingly, but were either taken here force, as with African slaves, or removed from their land, as with the Native Americans who lived here originally. Looking back, again, to the letters of Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, we see the terrible disparity between the dominant culture, slave-holding whites, and the minorities, African slaves:  “With gold, dug from Peruvian mountains, they order vessels to the coasts of Guinea; by virtue of that gold, wars, murders, and devastations are committed in some harmless, peaceable African neighborhood, where dwelt innocent people, who even knew not but that all men were black.” African-Americans, of course, are now a legitimate of American society, yet they remain a minority. They still maintain a culture of their own, with various degrees of assimilation to the dominant culture, some not at all, some as best they can. Crevecoeur also makes the point that what essentially marks them as different from other Americans is that “Day after day they drudge on without any prospect of ever reaping for themselves…” So, as the author sees it, it is the ability to work for one’s own benefit that, the freedom to do so, that also makes one American.

The other major group of American minorities is the Native Americans. These are the various groups of people living here before the early Americans came and swept them off of their land, using violence, broken treaties, and outright theft. The natives certainly had no desire to encounter the ever-expanding America, but it came to them. Numerically speaking they are a fraction of the population of the US – most died of disease, many starved or died as a direct result of contact with Americans – but they still exist in the nation today. Native American author, Chrystos, speaks as a voice for the unheard minority; in his poem, “I Have Not Signed a Treaty with the United States Government,” he voices, dramatically, the bitterness and anger of an entire people that have been abused and persecuted by America: “Everything the United States does to everybody is bad / No this US is not a good idea  We declare you terminated / You’ve had your fun now go home we’re tired   We signed / no treaty   WHAT  are you still doing here.” Not only does Chrystos feel righteous anger towards the past, she also has no desire to assimilate to the dominant culture. The poem radiates with strength and power, but unfortunately this kind of vitality has little political influence, and despite her wishes, the United States will probably not go back where it came from. Her rebellion will still be in the shadow of a great and terrible power.

There is another group of people, more vaguely defined than the other groups discussed, referred to, usually by the dominant culture, as “model minorities.” This group, as we’ve discussed in class, is more accurately described as “ideal immigrants.” They are, essentially, immigrants who assimilate seamlessly into the dominant culture and rarely inspire controversial conversation about race, oppression and so on. Eagerness to shed cultural markings and learn English are also signs of model minorities. This sometimes complicates relations between the various groups even further, as minorities or immigrants of the same race/culture may see this assimilation as betrayal; the dominant culture, on the other hand, may be willing enough to allow them to accept their traditions and ways, but may still segregate or discriminate against the model minorities in some way.

Complexity of this kind is typical in a third group of Americans, New World immigrants. These are modern immigrants ton the US, from the New World, the Western hemisphere. These immigrants are characterized by a mix of the standard immigrant narrative and the minority narrative in that they do come to the US willingly, but they often are treated as minorities upon arrival and/or they have had some experience with America meddling in their countries beforehand. Also, the close proximity of America to their home country makes total assimilation less appealing. In Paule Marshall’s “To Da-Duh, In Memoriam,” a family of immigrants from Barbados return to the island to visit family. The relationship between Da-Duh, the grandmother, and the narrator of the story, her granddaughter, exhibits this complicated mix of characteristics. Da-Duh, for example, has never been to America, but she has experienced the discrimination of the dominant (white) culture firsthand, as evidenced by her preferring her grandchildren to be “white,” or fair-skinned. She fiercely boasts about Barbados, constantly asking her granddaughter if they had anything like this in New York, where she lives; when she hears of all the luxuries and wonders of technology that are in New York, especially the mammoth Empire State Building, she loses some of her pride and becomes listless. Da-Duh eventually dies after English jets fly dangerously low over her village; a vain display of power that, again, shows white influence over the New World. The younger granddaughter, after her death, feels a longing for Barbados, for the place of her cultural heritage, that is typical for New World immigrants.

 Hispanic and Mexican immigrants make up the majority of the New World immigrants. Some of the characteristic struggles with assimilation occur in Richard Rodriguez’s “Hunger Of Memory.” In his story, a young man feels ostracized from most of his family for growing up learning English; what Spanish he knows, he feels uncomfortable speaking around the more fluent family. Obviously the younger generation, at least, those brought up in America, are more assimilated than the rest of their relatives. In fact, the narrator of the story is made fun of for his refusal to speak Spanish, as if the language itself contained the culture they were trying to maintain. He says later, referring to public support for bilingual education: An Hispanic-American writer tells me, ‘I will never give up my family language; I would as soon give up my soul.’ Thus he holds to his chest a skein of words, as though it were the source of his family ties…For as long as he can hold on to words, he can ignore how much else has changed in his life.” Rodriguez clearly notes the confusion and resistance most New World immigrants face to complete assimilation, yet insists that stubbornly hanging on to one’s own culture, in the form of language, and refusing to acknowledge the need to adapt into the new society, is destructive to the people like himself and his family. He, like others, has noted that maintaining a tradition of complete separateness from the dominant culture is merely insistence of superficial differences instead of focusing on the deeper similarities.

The subject of Mexican-American immigration is one that has recently been revealed to me at a more personal level. I now know some of those that have immigrated to America, in various ways and of various legalities, from Mexico. They are hard-working, simple and lovable people, that encounter resistance to their assimilation in the form of personal bigotry and a system that requires time and money to assimilate to. Their home is another country, yet they live and raise families here, so this has become their home as well. They are as American as the first pioneers of the nation who were just as foreign initially, just as hyphenated. They are part of the New World immigrants, as others we know are standard immigrants, minorities, “model minorities” or – like many of us – part of the dominant culture itself. They are American now, and will continue to improve and diversify the country as long as they remain here. Among its other virtues is America’s ability to adapt; and though those in power often resistance change, progress, in the form of an ever-mutating language, culture and streams of ideas, is something all Americans throughout the years have had in common.

[Ryan]