Identity and Assimilation: Different Immigrant Narratives

            “Communities are units of belonging whose members perceive that they share moral, aesthetic/expressive or cognitive meanings, thereby gaining a sense of personal as well as group identity. In turn, this identity demarcates the boundary between members and non-members” (Kennedy& Roudometof 6). Applying this definition to the American society is somewhat problematic, for one encounter many sub-identities, or in another term hyphenated identities that belong to the whole American one. This heterogeneousness is a normal phenomenon to be found in an immigrant nation like the United States. 

The reader of immigrant literature encounters different voices of the American narrative, where two identities tend to experience ebbs and flows assimilating to a third one. While the dominant culture does not have to give up any of its basic traits to meet any other group or its narrative halfway, immigrants and minorities, though differ in their relation to the dominant culture, have no way to belong to the nation, and be identified by it other than assimilating into its mainstream culture. Immigrant and minority groups differ in the degree of willingness to assimilate to the mainstream America. At the same time, dominant culture reacts differently to their efforts of assimilation.

Defining the dominant culture to which other groups assimilate takes us back to the beginning of European colonization of the new world. Whereas the first thing an immigrant does in a foreign country or land is to learn the language and traditions of the natives, the case for Northern and Western European immigrants was different. In fact, they landed and settled as colonizers with a pre-apprehension of an empty land waiting for them to populate and cultivate. British Pilgrims and Scottish-Irish immigrants brought their cultures with them and maintained them denying the presence of any indigenous people or culture. These two groups brought their values and traditions that survived to become the dominant culture. As to language, English survived while Native Americans languages as well as those of other immigrants receded. Therefore, English language and values, and Northern and Western European traditions are what the mainstream American culture became. This dominant culture works as the melting pot for immigrants who come willing to speak its language and embrace its values in order to successfully live, belong to, and identify with the main culture of the land.

The immigrant protagonist in Anzia Yezierska’s “Soup and Water” is willing to assimilate to the dominant culture, but is always rebuffed by the latter’s different agents. Since her infancy, she has held dreams, and latter spent many years of her adulthood searching for the spirit of America on its soil. Yet, she is not well-received nor granted belonging where she has dreamt and strived to belong.  The different appearance of Yezierska’s protagonist isolates her from her colleagues, her profession as well as the American society at large. Her shabby dirty clothes hinder her from climbing into a higher social class where she feels she belongs by virtue of her college education.  Cleanliness and clothing are social signs of belonging that she could not afford.  Despite all her efforts to belong, Yezierska’s persona in “Soap and Water” is never welcome, nor is given the opportunity to identify her self as American. Her attempts at assimilation always “come against the solid wall of the well-fed, well dressed world, the frigid white-washed wall of cleanliness”. However, she does not despond, rather she continues her search for America, which she finds finally represented in a woman professor who could overcome all cultural prejudices and see the human inside the unclean shabby girl. This happy ending is typical of the immigrant narrative.

A successful immigrant experience of assimilation and happy ending is lived by Joseph Palpaleo and his family. Unlike Yezierska’s protagonist who could not comply with the social signs of dress and cleanliness, Joseph Papaleo and his family’s identity materializes in their appearances “as well-dressed citizens devoted to disinfection of their carpet”. Like all newcomers, Papleo and his family face all kinds of discrimination and exploitation, but they are able to assimilate and identify with the traditions of the host society. Notwithstanding the great success of their assimilation, journey to the new world, past hardships and exploitation can not escape Papaleo’s narrative(objective 2, stage 1-2), nor does the rediscovery and reassertion of his ethnic identity (stage 5 of objective 2): “as the culminating dream of Grandpa/ (who liked to spit on floors while he talked)? Despite this clinging of Grandpa to the ethnic identity, Papaleo and his family succeeds in assimilating into and living by the traditions of the host society and its dominant culture.

While the standard immigrant narrative is that of successful assimilation and happy endings, the minority narrative resists assimilation and ends up experiencing a nightmare rather than a dream. Since immigrants come in pursuit of the American dream of economic advancement as well as of enjoying American ideals of freedom and equality, it is considered natural for them to adopt the traditions of the host society. On the other hand, minorities; who did not chose to make the journey, are not willing to identify with dominant culture. African Americans have been brought against their will, and all they found is slavery and segregation. Native Americans also did not choose to belong to the United States of America that has been established by taking their lands and destroying their societies. Therefore, resisting the traditions and identity of the mainstream American culture is found to be a natural reaction from minority groups who were forced into becoming parts of a system they never approve of, nor chose to belong to.

A good example of the minority narrative is James Baldwin’s “No Name in The Street” where Baldwin’s friends and community stick to their minority pattern of resisting assimilation into the dominant culture and cling to their cultural and ethnic identity. Only Baldwin goes the immigrant way and assimilates into the mainstream American culture through education. Notwithstanding his economic and professional successes, Baldwin’s attempts at assimilation can not be complete, for although he tries to follow the immigrant pattern of assimilation, he is still received by the dominant culture as a minority.

Despite all his economical and educational success, Baldwin cannot identify or be identified as a non-hyphenated American. Color Code plays a crucial role in minority identity. Baldwin embraces the American ideals of advancement through education and as he puts it: “he made it”. Though, the dominant culture can not look at him other than an African-American who is mostly identified by poverty, different traditions and different ways of living. The very scene of an African American man in a limousine is not a usual one, “the chauffeur was white. Neither did he want to drive a black man through Harlem to the Bronx,… it was not the chauffeur which the population looked on with such wry contempt”(287). At the same time, Baldwin can not fit right within the African American community, for he has already lost many an important aspect of his previous identity by embracing new ones: “I watched the mother watching me wondering what has happened to her beloved Jimmy, and giving me up”(290). Baldwin ends up living the minority ordeal of two different identities snatching him. He is split between the immigrant model and its desire to assimilate in order to succeed and prosper, and his minority pattern of holding on to his ethnic identity, the source of individual as well as collective pride.

Likewise, Native Americans live a similar experience to that of the African Americans. Both are minorities that are trapped within the dilemma of assimilating to the dominant culture and their determination to resist the traditions that are imposed upon them without their consent. While the Christian African Americans has to resist a dominating powerful culture that threatens their ethnic identity, and at the same time keeps discriminating against them on basis of color, Native American has to deal with a greater challenge, for their religious identity is different from that of the mainstream culture.

Native Americans have their own deities and traditions that they will not give up in favor of the Christian tradition practiced by almost the rest of the nation. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s short story, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” Toefilo is not given a Christian burial nor his family care to give him one.  The old man’s family “just wants him [Teofilo] to have plenty of water”, which is  in fact a pagan tradition practiced by native Americans who believe if they sprinkle plenty of water on the dead old man’s coffin, he will be able to send them  rain clouds. The irony is that they asked a Christian priest to use his holy water in order to perform their pagan tradition.  Again, this mixing of pagan beliefs with Christian tradition shows the minority ordeal of identity, a kind of assimilation and resistance shown in practicing one act; the burial of an old man.

Minority and immigrant narrative might overlap where minority narrative becomes so close to that of the immigrant in one or more instances. A different minority attitude is owned by Patricia Smith in her poem, “Blond White Women”. Unlike Baldwin, Patricia Smith’s narrative ends with contentment and happiness. Color interferes to modify Patricia Smith’s attempts at assimilation to the dominant culture.  The poet has tried to assimilate or rather to emulate white girls when she was a child. Her utmost desire has been to identify with them and be treated like them. However, when she encounters discrimination and denial to belong, her pride is wounded; thus, her original ethnic and racial identity resurfaces:  “I can find no color darker, more beautiful, than I am”.

A more overlap; or rather intermix between the immigrant narrative and the minority one happens in New World immigrant narrative. These groups embody both characteristics of the immigrant and minority communities. They are immigrants in the sense that they come willingly to the United States and consequently assumed to be wiling to assimilate and belong to the American identity. On the other hand, they are often mistaken for minority. New World immigrants are often identified by the dominant culture through the color of there skin which is mostly the case of Afro- Caribbean immigrants, or their genetic descent from native Americans which is the case of Hispanic and Mexican immigrants. Although these two groups share some common characteristics in their narrative and their attitude towards assimilation, each one of them still reserve some separate traits to define it from the other.

While Hispanic immigrant chose to come to the United States searching for opportunities, their attitudes towards assimilation differ from that of the standard immigrant narrative. Because of their genetic descent and blood mix with Native Americans, they are sometimes identified as minority. Also by virtue of their number, they can achieve a relative kind of success by living among people of there communities without the need to assimilate or to comply with the mainstream traditions of life in the United States. Some Mexican-Americans have lived their life in the United States without learning English, for they lived within Spanish speaking communities and did business among members of their communities. In Nicholas Mohr’s “The English Lesson”, Rudi is aware of this fact when he protests that his wife does not need to learn English because she works in his restaurant where “everybody that comes in speaks Spanish”(Mohr 21). However, his wife who is way younger than him adopts an immigrant model by being willing to learn the language and to have something in common with world outside her Spanish community and Rudi’s world.

Spanish students in Mohr’s short story have different attitudes towards assimilation and identity. Although all of them are willing to learn English in order to have better life  opportunities, their ideas of identity and belonging to the United States as citizens differ drastically from one another. Here, the political factor comes to the surface to separate economic aspirations from desires of identification as such or that. While the Dominican immigrant Aldo Fabrizi, adopts the standard immigrant narrative by willing to be an American citizen, his countryman Diego Torres assume a minority attitude and strongly opposes to one’s giving up his original or ethnic identity. Torres seems to blame the United States for the bad economy of his country which in turn has caused his migration. He seems not to forget the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic and uses this too to justify benefitting from opportunities of economic improvement in the United States without being grateful.

With all the above variations of immigrant and minority tendencies to assimilate into the dominant culture, success always requires, not only speaking the language, but also writing it in such a highly literate society. Resistance to assimilation is usually  strong among minority groups, while immigrants tend to be ready to adapt to the traditions of the host society where they come with the intention to live and succeed. In many cases, immigrant descendants are completely alienated from their original ethnic and may be religious identity, while minority groups proof to be more time-proof against assimilating to the main American culture. However both narratives often overlap especially with New World immigrants who gather in themselves attributes of both immigrant and minority narratives. After all, there  is no harm to integrate with the mainstream traditions of the nation where one lives, but it is highly beneficial to keep the good values that one or  one’s ancestors have brought from the old world, mainly strong family ties  and authentic human relationships.

Works Cited

Kennedy, Paul and Roudometof, Victor. Communities Across Borders. New York: Routledge, 2005