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2016 Midterm2
(assignment) Sample Student Midterm2 Answers Part 1: Essays on New World Immigrants |
LITR 4340
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Jennifer Robles
The Dominant Culture
Perspective: Visions of Ellis Island
American
ideals of immigrancy have included the view that immigrants want to come to the
“Land of Liberty” in order to make a fresh, new start. The dominant culture
presents imagery of immigrants arriving by the droves, happily arriving at Ellis
Island with very little luggage and excitedly waving small American flags. This
is the way I grew up imagining immigrants. They were people who came here
voluntarily, looking to do whatever it took to instantly fit right on in with
our culture. The problem is, I was born in 1984, thirty years after Ellis Island
officially closed. Why are Americans still being fed this happy picture of
immigrants when, clearly, it was well beyond present time? It is because this is
what the dominant culture expects its immigrants to be-- the ideal immigrants,
or the “model minority.”
The model minority is represented in those
long faded pictures of Ellis Island immigrants. Their ideology and history is
connected to the story of
“Old World” immigrants. Old World immigrants
are characterized as coming to America from the Eastern part of the world,
predominantly Europe and Asia, in three main waves. Their voluntary journey to
America was often a far distance from their homeland, making preserving family
and homeland ties difficult. As Dr. White states on his course website, the
“length of journey and difficulty of returning mean ‘you can't go back,’
implicitly encouraging commitment and
assimilation to American system and
values.” Old World immigrants “had migrated here in search of a better future”
(Mohr, The English Lesson), so they systematically assimilated into white
protestant’s, or the dominant culture’s values like, individualism, modernity
and invisibility in order to make the transition easier. The dominant culture
began to identify immigrants who exemplified the practices and values they
promoted by labeling them the “model minority.” To this day, the dominant
culture expects its immigrants to follow this model minority pattern, but the
paradigm of immigrants has changed in America’s latest wave of immigration.
Present immigration is going through a wave of “New World” immigrants, people
who emigrate from the Western world, primarily Mexico and the Afro-Caribbean.
Like the Old World immigrants, these immigrants come to America voluntarily.
They are looking to progress economically, as well as better their own
children’s futures. Paule Marshall wrote in “The Making of a Writer: From the
Poets in the Kitchen” that the immigrant mothers’ “ consuming ambition (was): to
''buy house'' and to see the children through.”
America is a “place where ‘'you could at least see your way to make a
dollar,'” the women said as they talked about how their homeland of Barbados was
“poor.” America represents wealth and, at times, even indulgence. In Martin
Espada’s poem “Coca-Cola and Coco Frio,” the character visits Puerto Rico from
America and he is described as being fat and having grown bored from drinking
Coca-Cola “familiar from candy stores in Brooklyn.” In Sandra Cisneros’
“Barbie-Q,” the barbies represent the exuberant materialism and perfectionism in
American society. To both New World and Old World immigrants, America is a place
for opportunity, growth and freedom.
Just as some Old World immigrants fled their countries
due to violence and persecution, some New World immigrants fled for the same
reasons. Edwidge Danticat in Children of the Sea” tells the story of how a group
of people are enduring harsh circumstances in a boat just so they can flee
Haiti. Through a dual narration, we get to see just how much they endured while
on the boat and why they would go through all of that just to come to America.
Haiti’s government brutalizes and terrorizes its people and now “if they come
into a house and there is a son and mother there, they hold a gun to their
heads, they make the son sleep with his mother...the soldiers can come and do
with us what they want.” America’s successful with immigration gives people like
Danticat’s characters a beacon of hope and “civilization.”
New World immigrants may come to America for similar
reasons as Old World immigrants, but they come from a different region of the
world, one that is much closer in proximity to America. New World immigrants
like Mexican-Americans, need only take a step over an invisible boundary in
order to go to Mexico or, for Afro-Caribbeans, take a short plane ride that is
closer to Miami than Seattle. It is this close proximity that New World
immigrants are less likely to assimilate. New World immigrants remain connected
to the country in which they came because it is much easier for them “to go
back” and visit family and friends often than the Old World immigrants could.
Their make-up of their identities such as, language, food, traditions, all
remain alive because New World immigrants have not completely disassociated with
their home country. This tarnishes the dominant culture's ideal immigrant image
because instead of American flags, they proudly wave their homeland’s flag. In
Nicholasa Mohr’s “The English Lesson,” his character Diego Torres sums up the
New World immigrant viewpoint perfectly: “OK, I prefer live happy in my
country...Pero this is no possible in the situation of San Domingo now...My
reasons to be here is to make money, man, and go back home buy my house and
property. I no be American Citizen, no way. I’m Dominican and proud!” He has
immigrated to America for classic immigrant reasons, but refuses to assimilate
(become a citizen) because he still proudly holds on to his Dominican
patriotism.
Because of the intense pride they have within their
culture and the need to identify with that, the narratives of New World
immigrants tend to parallel that of minority narratives. Minority cultures, such
as African American and Native Americans, typically resist the dominant culture
and maintain their own distinctive cultures and communities. New World immigrant
narratives often remark about how insulted they were if the dominant culture
confused their identity because they thought “they all look alike.” In “Silent
Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer recounts the time that her father was confused for
a Cuban: "’You Cuban?’ one man had asked my father, pointing at his name tag on
the Navy uniform -- even though my father had the fair skin and light-brown hair
of his northern Spanish background, and the name Ortiz is as common in Puerto
Rico as Johnson is in the United States. ‘No,...I'm Puerto Rican.’" Individual
countries like Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Mexico all have their own regional
languages and distinctive cultural nuances. The mother in “Silent Dancing”
refuses to let go of her cultural identifiers and maintains shopping at the “La
Bodega, for it was there that Mother breathed best, taking in the familiar
aromas of the foods she knew from Mama's kitchen.” Paule Marshall talked about
the importance of holding onto the language from the homeland in “From the Poets
in the Kitchen”: “If you say what's on your mind in the language that comes to
you from your parents and your street and friends you'll probably say something
beautiful.” Maintaining their own unique cultural identity is important to New
World immigrants, something the model minority chooses to give up.
Many New World immigrants also do not want to disconnect with their heritage
because they simply cannot completely embrace America and its dominant culture.
Because of the nearness to the new and old country, New World immigrants are
acutely aware of America’s involvement to their home country’s interventions,
invasions and exploitations.
America’s dominant culture has had a
historical precedent of taking over land. On American soil, it started with the
dominant culture seizing land from the American Indians and years later, taking
over land which was owned by Mexico. In the “Personal Memoirs of John N.
Seguin,” Seguin states that America was “already beginning to work their dark
intrigues against the native [Mexican-American] families, whose only crime was,
that they owned large tracts of land and desirable property.” In “How to Date a
Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie),” Junot Diaz attests to the 1965
U. S. military intervention in Civil War in Dominican Republic when he wants to
hide the fact that his mother recognizes the smell of tear gas, “Don't tell her
that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized its smell from
the year the United States invaded your island.” It is this knowledge, knowing
that America is not the most peaceful, nonviolent country in the world but,
rather, can be a domineering, avaricious force, that deters New World immigrants
for wanting to assimilate completely into the dominant culture.
The narratives of New World immigrants are often
reminiscent of the minority narrative in addition to the immigrant narrative. In
their roots, minorities differ from immigrants by in which way they came to
America. Immigrants come here voluntarily while minorities came to American
involuntary and were involved in some sort of force or removal. Minorities have
a history of oppression and exploitation due to color discrimination, by the
dominant culture. The dominant culture associates people through a color code,
most often seen through skin color. New World immigrant’s skin tones are much
darker than the dominant culture’s pale tone and immigrants like Afro-Caribbeans
are often associated with the African-American minority by way of the color code
and, in turn, suffer the same injustices, “they lashed out at it for the racism
they encountered” (Marshall, Poets). In “Barbie-Q,” the perfect, blonde dolls
represent perfection whereas the dolls must be turn brown, imperfect and
deformed in order for the Mexican Americans to own them. New World immigrants
identify with the prejudices of minorities due largely in part to the
established color code.
New World immigrants tend to blur the lines of
both Old World immigrant and minority narratives. Their attitudes and narratives
are a blend of immigrant and minority experiences. Because they identify with so
much of the minority narrative, the dominant culture has a hard time accepting
them as immigrants. America was founded on immigrants, immigrancy is ingrained
in our blood. We need immigrants in order for the rest of the world to see us as
“America: The Great Land of Opportunity.” But we need immigrants to be who the
dominant culture pictures, immigrants who “wrap their babies in the American
flag,/ feed them mashed hot dogs and apple pie” (Pat Mora, “Immigrants”). New
World immigrants do not fit into America’s picture-perfect immigrant mold and
the dominant culture now finds itself torn between resentment and acceptance.
