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2019 Midterm2
(assignment) Sample Midterm2 Answers Part 1: Essays on Immigrants, Minorities, and New World Immigrants |
LITR 4340
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Eileen Burnett
April 14, 2019
The Threefold Path to Building
America
Social contracts are at the heart of the immigrant and
minority narratives; that is, they live, whether willingly or not, with the
understanding that the government under which they exist agrees to certain terms
and conditions, ensuring a certain quality of life. These contracts allow for
freedom of tradition and opportunity that encourage an influx of citizens to
build up the structure of the country. The social contract is not without its
flaws, however. On the one hand, immigrants come to this country with the hopes
that the treatment would be better than their previous home, thus coming into
agreement with the new land, free to live, work, and worship as they choose.
Minorities, however, do not reap the rewards of such an agreement. For them,
government exists to provide freedom to the masses at the expense of their
dignity, refusing them of even the most basic sovereignty over their own lives.
And yet another group exists, a new world immigrant that teeters
somewhere in the middle of the two, encompassing aspects of both the immigrant
and minority experience in a way that is both similar and unique. These three
groups have distinct experiences, and each contribute to the end result that is
our country today.
Family is perhaps one of the most common reasons people
immigrate to America. The American Dream and its promise of prosperity according
to effort is something that resonates in the hearts and souls of those who seek
a better life for those they love. As in
the case with the Nigerian immigrant family, the Ihedigbos in
Sandals in the Snow, such a promise
seemed not only within their reach, but attainable, as they all worked together
diligently to create the kind of life they had always hoped for. Though they
maintained many of their old ways, such as hairstyles and food choices cooked by
their mother, they sought to assimilate into the dominant culture with perhaps
more fervor than even the most devout American. They bought a home, invested in
the all-American family car, the Dodge Caravan, and bought anything of this new
life that struck their fancy- “especially if it was for the family” (IV, 152).
This reverence for the family and traditional values is also why the Ihedigbo
children easily reject the parts of the dominant culture that do not line up
with their value system, as in the lacrosse incident described on pages 160-163.
By sticking to their values, they retained the cultural tradition of reverence
to the family, and through their story of success – a big family that works
together for a common goal. This success story is perhaps the ideal situation in
which the typical immigrant finds themselves: the experience of achieving
success under a contract that allows them the freedom to do so.
Minorities do not share in this privilege, however.
Brought from their homelands against their will, most minorities had their
families and traditions ripped from their lives with the callous indifference of
a farmer separating a calf from a cow. Stories such as
The Interesting Narrative of the
Life of Olaudah Equiano, . . . the African by Olaudah
Equiano highlight the suffering of a people who are exploited so that their
captors can live “the good life.” From their capture (“they sometimes took those
opportunities of our parents absence to attack and carry off as many as they
could seize” Equiano relates) to their imprisonment (“I would have jumped over
the side, but I could not; and, besides, the crew used to watch us very closely
who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water”)
from which there was no escape, the life of the early American minority was
fraught with pain. Their traditions extinguished by rite of the color of their
skin, African immigrants, known as minorities, knew no such advantage to life in
America other than to continue to exist.
Alternately, the
narrative of the new world immigrant in relation to the social contract is just
as unique. Peoples from Central and South America, oftentimes fleeing a homeland
that is torn by warring groups and economic disaster, come to this country, only
to find that the contract does not apply to them entirely. Reyna Grande’s
The Distance Between Us contrasts the
longing for the homeland that broke the contract with the suffering in a new
place where acceptance would be tentative at best. The coded factor to this
contract, of course, is skin color, that which delineates their place in the
country, limiting their access to all the privileges that should be available to
them. The main character notices this difference in her father’s choice for a
new lover, saying “I wished her skin wasn’t so light and smooth looking, so
different from my mother’s sunburned face lined with wrinkles” (87). Like the
minority experience, family in the new-world immigrant’s story is a broken and
shredded similitude of the typical immigrant and dominant culture family.
Such a representation of family can be seen in J.
Christine Moon’s story, What Color Would
You Like, Ma’am?, where the main character, an Asian model minority named
Thien, seeks a better life through study. Similar to the Ihedigbo story of a
large family all working together to make a life for themselves, Thien’s family
all work in the family’s nail salon to create a better life. This story,
however, contrasts the Ihedgibo story in that there is pain and sacrifice
expressed in the struggle to retain tradition. In contrast to the confidence of
the Ihedigbo children, Thien seems conflicted in his desire to assimilate and
duty to his family, wanting to be a part of the carefree lifestyle of the
dominant culture children. “He was disappointed that another game of basketball
would be missed” (24) was his response to having to work rather than go out with
his friend. He ultimately chooses his family, however, both when he gives up
time with his friends to help fill in a vacancy in the staff and when he stays
up all evening to spend time with his father. Duty, the old-fashioned tradition
of immigrants, made him remember that “his parents needed him at the nail salon
in the morning” (24).
The story of Le Ly Hayslip in the excerpt from
Child of War, Woman of Peace
exemplifies this preoccupation with the traditional values of hard work and
dedication with a story of a woman who toils day and night as an outward sign of
her love for her family. Le Ly, the main character, works hard for her husband
and his family to prove herself as not only having the desire and gratitude to
be with them, but also to convince them of her right to be there as well.
Exercising the tradition in which she was raised, she dedicated herself to her
husband and her children, “working harder and longer than anyone” (IV, 114) so
that she could somehow earn her keep. To her, the contract became an avenue by
which, however unfair the circumstances, she could forge out a path to a life
worth living. In like manner, Anzia Yezierska’s
Soap and Water reiterates this idea
of hard work and dedication as being somehow ingrained into the psyches of
immigrants and minorities. She describes at length her labors at the laundry
facility, the hours she worked “bathed in the sweat of exhaustion” (internet,
11) to pay for the opportunity to earn a college degree, a symbol of the
American Dream. Like a ticket to access the good life, the ethics of hard work
echo the old-world traditions that unite the immigrant to this world.
However wonderful their traditions, however, the social
contract under which other groups have to live serve to mitigate their values
and reduce their assimilation to the new culture. Many minority and new world
immigrant groups, like El Salvadorians, African Americans, and American Indians,
also adhere to such belief systems of family, dedication, and hard work which
are limited by the contract in which they are subjected. In fact, because
minority and new world immigrant groups have been either forced to leave due to
governmental conflicts or taken against their will to a country that -in their
opinion- does not share their same values, groups like these tend to cling that
much more tightly to old world traditions and values than many immigrants do.
Oscar Hijuelos’s Visitors shows the
new world immigrant’s dichotomy of loyalty as the assimilated family struggles
with assimilation, while Equiano’s minority report recounts his dedication to
hard work in order that his freedom might be purchased. “Every day now” he
narrates, “[brings] me nearer my freedom” (Ch. 7). Ultimately this freedom he
bought him the right to have a family, to which he settled down with in as soon
as possible. In his story, one can see that immigrants are not the only ones in
search of the dream. In either case, resentment towards the dominant culture and
the contract that treats them unfairly builds, causing a bittenness of spirit.
For example, the American Indians have a great deal of
anger when it comes to American culture appropriating their traditions. Rather
than assimilating, American culture is seen as the antithesis of Native American
tradition, and therefore no part of their lives. Chrystos’ poem,
I Have Not Signed a Treaty with
the United States Government,
makes this quite clear with the statement: “we declare the United States a crazy
person” (4). She speaks of her father, grandfather, and grandmother in a way
that is indicative of a great deal of respect, using their voices as a
symbol of authority that is common to more traditional cultures.
She reiterates this sentiment of valuing family and rejecting the
dominant culture when she says that “The United States can’t dance can’t cook/
has no children no elders no relatives” (8-9), suggesting that somehow the
United States has it all wrong, and that the priority should be to get back to
the roots, of culture, one in which value of family, tradition, and hard work
isn’t commodified by a society that does not share in this opinion. In like
manner, the poem Blonde White Women
by Patricia smith can be seen to resonate with this same idea of tradition and
its importance by suggesting that to deviate from the dominant culture was seen
as a “treachery” (61). Her anger resonates with that of Chrystos in that the
traditions of her culture are somehow lesser in value because they don’t conform
to America’s expectations.
The ideas of tradition and family, though seen through
three different lenses result in three challenging yet unique experiences.
Culture, and and the contract under which a person lives, is as different from
the perspective of the person as the place from which they came, giving each of
these groups a distinct viewpoint regarding the country in which they live.
Though all are united in a shared love for family, hard work, and the traditions
that unite them throughout time, how they view the contract under which they
came to live under remains a subject that requires more study to understand.
