Essay 1: Review, focus, and extend overall seminar experience to demonstrate learning and preview potential applications in research, teaching, or creative writing.

Charles Colson

10 July 2010

Cultural Narrative as a Mode of Organization

          A number of possibilities have been offered for organizing a seminar on American immigrant literature.  The “rags-to-riches” narrative does not fit most of the individual accounts I have read.  Though they rise to relative American comfort (sweat shop employees may become teachers, menu girls may become nurses), many spend their lives doing odd jobs like Dagoberto Gilb’s Juan Romero or wearing bald spots in the factory floor like La Tere, who smelled of fish.  Few make such a dramatic socioeconomic transition in one generation as Andrew Carnegie.  Analyzing the course selections in terms of the “American Dream” seems fraught with challenges due to the contested nature of the concept (buying a two-bedroom adobe in El Paso? becoming a member of the country club? owning a chain of clothing stores?), though I suppose it would make for lively class discussion.  Trying to find a “coming of age” theme stretches the age limits for some of the characters in our reading selections.  “Initiation” works for the majority, but not all achieve membership in the “club” due to the color code.  “Conversion,” with its paradigm shift, transformation of values, and resultant behavioral changes deserves consideration as an organizing trope.  But what of those who cannot or will not give up some of their old habits (running a pancake restaurant like a Chinese village aristocrat or continuing to practice Islam)?  Neither do these schema adequately describe the minority experience.  Examining immigrant literature in terms of a cultural narrative has a number of features to recommend it and a limited number of shortcomings.

          Treating the immigrant experience as a narrative provides a “plot, line of action or unfolding of events” and the story’s progression allows us to identify stages in the chronological process of immigration common to all as well as variations among groups and individuals (White n.p.).  Both “push” and “pull” factors account for the first stage, departure from the old world.  Some are drawn by the promise of religious freedom or financial opportunity; others are driven by economic adversity, ethnic persecution, or political repression.  Next, immigrants travel to a new world.  Technological developments have changed the nature of the trip, of course, but the journey is still a physically and psychologically stressful experience.  Third, the new arrivals experience culture shock and may well face resistance, exploitation, and discrimination from those who preceded them.  The following stage is assimilation, partaking of the dominant culture’s values—not only customs of food and dress or forms of work and play but those ideas of family, marriage and gender; those attitudes toward sex, age and death; those ideas of social harmony, order, power and freedom—derived from the British folkways of the original immigrants (Fischer 797).  Curiously enough, the more thoroughly assimilated immigrants become, the more they can see what is lacking in American society, especially in contrast to the presence of those values or behaviors in their original culture.  Rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity constitutes an optional fifth phase.  As might be expected, there are individual variations in the midst of the common progression.

Studying the cultural aspect of the narrative offers the opportunity to distinguish patterns to note those individual variations.  Old World Jewish immigrants have to give up parts of themselves in order to assimilate.  The women in Yekl and “Soap and Water” both speak Yiddish and appear drab to the American eye.  When Gitl first arrives, her husband’s heart sinks at her “uncouth and un-American appearance” (Cahan ch. 4).  She smells of the steerage, wears a wig and “dowdy” clothing, and has put on weight around the waist.  The laundress evidently does not measure up to American standards either, as the dean of the teachers college pronounces her skin “oily,” hair “unkempt”, fingernails “sadly neglected,” collar “uneven,” belt “awry, and her dress lacking “freshness” (Yezierska n.p.).  They both suffer loss in the process of acculturation.  Gitl loses a husband and gains another who appreciates her traditional values.  The substitute teacher loses her friends from the sweatshop and gains one from “the other side” who values her as a person.

The cultural narrative of New World immigrants, on the other hand, gains another dimension due to their ability to return to the land of their birth.  Mexican immigrants are able to avail themselves of a “land bridge,” moving back and forth along a continuum of assimilation.  The hospital personnel of “The Last of the Menu Girls” use cultural characteristics to distinguish themselves from others in the borderland.  Nurse Luciano, the newlywed from Yonkers, speaks a sort of limited Spanglish (“Como se dice when was the last time you had a bowel movement?”) and is concerned about the inhuman treatment of illegal aliens.  Erminia, whose mother always had maids, gets her hair done in Juárez and seems to value “them” as servants.  Esperanza González, “dark and squat, pura india,” shows no sympathy at all for the man who lost his nose in a drunken brawl: “What do you expect?  He don’t espeak no Engleesh!”  “[T]ortured by her very face,” she rails at “Anglo sons of bitches” and “lousy wetbacks” alike (Chavez 91).  Rocío Esquibel (whose boyfriend, with his “hungry Church-of-Christ smile” and plastic seat covers must surely be an Anglo) admires the portrait of Florence Nightingale and wants to be more than a menu girl or ward secretary.  She earns Esperanza’s disgust for deciding to become one of those “healthy college students getting our hard-earned tax money” (Chavez 95).  José Esparza, Eutilia’s handsome but foolish husband, recognized the difference between himself and Mexicans from El Otro Lado even before they robbed his store in Agua Tibia.  Juan Romero, living less than two miles from the border, is conscious of those who cross the river in rags, “taking work, his work, at any price” (Gilb 95) but provides lunch and five dollars’-worth of employment to an old man who has left his little ranch in Mexico looking for yard work.  Though he literally loses his shirt, as he stares across to Juárez and looks in on his sleeping family Romero realizes that he has much more than the clothes on his back.  Retaining familiar cultural forms such as architecture, food, and language makes the transition less definite and participation more optional.  Living in a zone of such cultural mixture blurs lines of definition and seems to lessen the minority standing of immigrants in the dominant Anglo-American culture.

A cultural narrative approach enables us to notice not only assimilation but resistance.  We are able to distinguish between immigrant and minority stories and find the areas where they overlap.  Patricia Smith and Claude McKay have both suffered rejection from white Americans.  African-American Smith spent her childhood admiring idealized “Blonde White Women” around her, her efforts to conform echoing the ads in Ebony magazine.  McKay confesses his loves for the “cultured hell” of America and admires the “White City” for its ships, trains, spires, and towers, but the Jamaican immigrant “will not . . . bend an inch” (McKay n.p. ).  A racist color code has stipulated the terms of assimilation, but both Smith and McKay find a black identity outside of the dominant culture.  Resistance can also take the form of appropriating what is useful or negotiating the meaning of cultural markers.  In “The Lesson,” the vision of consumer paradise at F. A. O. Schwarz stimulates Sugar to reevaluate the nature of a democracy that does not provide an “equal crack at the dough” (Bambara 151).  Sylvia shows promise of channeling her rebellious streak into a determination for material success.  The Dominican teen who shares his advice for dating a “browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl, or halfie” is fully aware of the markers that distinguish him from the dominant culture, but he knowledgeably navigates the currents and snags of cross-cultural romance (time expectations, socioeconomic differences, intra-neighborhood ethnic power relations, language proficiency, racial stereotypes) to reach his goal.  “Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own” (Diaz 278).  The physical satisfaction of making it with a white girl is only part of the deed.  He wants to announce that he has counted coup on the other: “Lo hice, loco” (Diaz 279).

Cultural assimilation and resistance, by their very nature, occur in relation to a prevailing culture.  The American immigrant narrative begins with those immigrants whose culture later forms the background against which other narratives take place.  The results of my first research post leads me to argue that representing the dominant Anglo culture as limited to Puritan New England ignores the considerably different colonial cultures of the mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake Bay region, South Carolina and the backcountry.  Perhaps a colonial travel narrative or journal (Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium comes to mind) would provide an opportunity to contrast New England with the mid-Atlantic settlements.  A reconstructed family history such as West from Shenandoah: a Scotch-Irish family fights for America, 1729-1781 or Samuel Kelso/Kelsey, 1720-1796: Scotch-Irish Immigrant and Revolutionary Patriot of Chester County, South Carolina would supplement understanding of a second major strain in the dominant culture.  Gaining an understanding of that chronologically primary and subsequently dominant culture is essential to appreciating the experiences of later immigrants.

More significant still to comprehending the dominant culture is an appreciation for the role of race in the immigrant narrative.  Colonial and early American legal systems up and down the Atlantic coast authorized attacks on Native Americans and encouraged appropriation of their lands, but when large-scale Native-American slavery proved impractical, white English immigrants began to import black Africans to provide the labor for the production of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton that would make them rich.  Blackness became synonymous with slavery and all subsequent immigrants arrived in a racialized society.  What George Lipsitz calls a “possessive investment in whiteness” has influenced the rest of American history.  The result has been a culture that, to maintain its hegemony, “limited naturalized citizenship to ‘white’ immigrants, identified Asian immigrants as expressly unwelcome . . . and provided pretexts for restricting the voting, exploiting the labor, and seizing the property of Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans” (62).  As I explained in my second research post, becoming American meant becoming “white” in the eyes of the dominant culture.  Whiteness, like the dominant culture in America, became the ubiquitous, unremarked norm into which all other races and ethnicities were to be assimilated.  Failure to appreciate this leads to student misunderstandings like that demonstrated by Rhonda Fisher (“Definition of a Dominant Culture”), who surmises that “the style of America’s dominant culture is meant to go unnoticed.”  It is unnoticed because the white majority is in it and takes it for granted, because everyone else is “othered” and marked as different to what the white dominant culture assumes to be normal rather than by any conscious intention.  Careful examination of the relationship between ethnicity and race clarify this.

With such a wealth of variants in the cultural narrative and so many themes to discuss, choosing readings for a course in American immigrant literature is a formidable task.  Class time available to cover the material is a primary concern, but the availability of texts would seem to be the ultimate constraint.  Other criteria might include the relative numbers of the group present in the United States (Italians should certainly be represented) or the degree to which their stories are representative of the range of narratives.  Presenting immigrant groups in the chronological order of their appearance would tie them to historical events and trends in the dominant culture.  Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, China Men, for example, would cover generations from the transcontinental railroad to the Vietnam War.  In any case, it is important to carefully lay the foundation upon which subsequent narratives are built with a thorough understanding of the earliest immigrant cultures.  Early depictions of the dominant culture that emerges aid appreciation of the role of race as a cultural construct and its influence throughout American history.  New immigrants consume and incorporate some features of the culture around them, and while resisting others.  Relating succeeding narratives to historical changes in the American economy, laws and society aids consideration of the contested nature of culture and highlights the dominant culture’s efforts to maintain its hegemony. When organizing a study of multicultural literature in a nation of immigrants, there is nothing more natural than using the immigrant experience as an organizing narrative.

Works Cited

Bambara, Toni Cade. “The Lesson.” Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea Books, 2002. 145-152. Print.

Brown, Wesley and Amy Ling, eds. Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Revised ed. New York: Persea Books, 2002. Print.

Cahan, Abraham. Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. 1896. White n.p. Web.

Chavez, Denise. The Last of the Menu Girls. 1986. Vintage Contemporaries, 2004. Print.

Diaz, Junot. “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie.” Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea Books, 2002. 276-279. Print.

Fisher, Rhonda. “Definition of a Dominant Culture.” 2007. White n.p. Web.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.

Gilb, Dagoberto. “Romero’s Shirt.” The Magic of Blood. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. 94-100. Print.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities” American Historical Review. 90.3 (1985): 567-593. JSTOR. 2 July 2010.

Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.” White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. 61-84. Print.

McKay, Claude. “The White City.” White n.p. Web.

Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. Print.

White, Craig. LITR 5731 Multicultural Literature: American Immigrant Literature. English Department. University of Houston Clear Lake, n.d. Web. 9 July 2010.