Lori Wheeler

5 July 2014

Beyond My Own Experience

            For a few years now, I have contemplated the idea of moving to New York City; I even submitted an application for a teaching position this year.  Alas, it was not meant to be—not right now anyway.  Among many other factors guiding this desire was that I wanted to understand what so many of my students were talking about when they discussed having to move, change homes, go to a new school, and make new friends.  You see, I have never had that experience.  I went away to college (surrounded by family and friends, mind you) for four years, but my permanent address never changed for 31 years.  And then I bought a house that is no more than a seven minute drive from the home in which I grew up.  I have no idea what it means to go to a new-new school or to experience the need to make new friends.  And so, coming into this course, I had so much to learn not just about who and when and how, but about the experience itself, the emotional side of being an immigrant.  More than anything, now I feel so much more inexperienced and sheltered.  If anything, despite being considered part of the dominant culture, I feel very much a minority. 

            Ever since I first visited New York City and toured Ellis Island, I have been fascinated with the immigrant story, but it has been just that—a story for me to read just like any other fiction.  I have read several young adult selections in which the main character is an immigrant living on the Lower East Side; I've read about the immigrant women working in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and the fire that destroyed it along with over one hundred of its workers, some of whom jumped to their death because the doors were locked against the workers to prevent theft; and I've read about the history of Ellis Island, which was mostly ruled by the ebb and flow of politics.  This course, however, has turned the immigrant story into so much more than just a story.  Even the fictional stories read in this course had an autobiographical air in that they described the true immigrant experience and did so in a way that made me consider more than just the plot or characters, but that made me want to connect specifically with the author.  I wanted to understand why he or she had written this story.  For those that were not autobiographical, what aspects of the story moved them to share it, and how much of their own experience did they write into the stories they wrote?  I want now to connect with immigrants and hear their own stories. I want to know if immigration cost Sui Sin Far or someone she knew a child the way it did for Lae Choo in her first months back in the US in the story "In the Land of the Free."  I want to ask Chitra Divakaruni what she saw that redeemed America the way Jayanti found snow in "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs."  Why did they come to the US?  What did they find so appealing about the American Dream?  And after so much struggle and hardship, did they think the US was worth it all?  How would Eugene O'Neill have judged the decisions his grandparents made to come to America? Certainly, O'Neill successfully attained the American Dream, but at what cost?  Like Amy L. Sasser states in her essay "From Nothing to Knowledge: My Journey Through the Multicultural Mélange," there is so much to learn and understand about immigrants and the stages of immigration.”

            Last semester in Dr. McNamara's class on the literature of Los Angeles, we read several novels that discussed the American Dream including DJ Waldie's Holy Land, and I researched quite a bit on how the American Dream had been shaped and by whom in post-WWII America.  Initially, I was very interested in how my own idea of success had been shaped by the business ventures of a few men sixty years before.  At the end of the research process, I was disillusioned by the American Dream; it was a manufactured idea that allowed the dominant culture to maintain its power and exclude others in America.  This class on immigrant literature has helped me question that disillusionment.  If Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart, three Jewish men who became developers of Lakewood, California, could understand and work within the power structures of the dominant culture to better their own situations, who can say that other individuals do not come to the US to do the same?  In fact, I even began to question my own negative characterization of the dominant culture when I read stories that showed immigrants choosing to assimilate to the American ideal.  In "The English Lesson" and in "Soap and Water," immigrants are shown to be hard-working people who want to find a place within the dominant culture and be accepted by learning the language, dressing in a manner that does not set them apart, and learning the unspoken rules of society.  Of course, my negative emotions about the dominant culture has more to do with its treatment of minorities and historical truth than it does with its treatment of immigrants. 

            Minority groups in the US have seen greater social mobility in the last three decades than any other time in American history.  It seems that the conscience of the American public will not be satisfied until we have paid our debt to those we have systematically and hypocritically exploited.  Between paying reparations, initiating Affirmative Action, and naming minority groups as protected classes in the No Child Left Behind Act, the US government is doing its best to acknowledge the danger of bastardizing entire ethnic groups.  Sheila Morris's essay "Why Immigrant Literature should be taught in High School" resonated with me in the way that she was honest about the prejudices with which she had grown up, albeit unrealized for some time.  Like Morris, it took me until I was an adult to recognize and move past the unintentional prejudice I harbored.  Upon further examination, however, I realize that so much of our prejudices come from our ideas of economic class distinction.  In Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" and in Louise Erdrich's "American Horse," we see minorities living in poverty.  Bambara's African American narrator, Sylvia, and her friends have so little money, they are astounded by the amounts of money people are willing to pay for toys at F.A.O. Schwartz.  And Erdrich's American Indian Buddy, Albertine, and Uncle Lawrence live such conditions that the social worker Vicki Koob takes notes on the undesirable living conditions they were forced to live in because of their implied poverty.  So many minorities live in poverty because of the historic oppression by the dominant culture, and immigrants face the same poverty due to the conditions they leave behind in the old country and the exploitation they face in the new country.  While I agree with Morris that we should expand the content of what high school students read, I believe that the literature should not be limited to immigrant literature, but instead should include dissonant voices in the American canon.  High school literature studies should include voices of poverty. 

            In both of my research posts, it seems as if I came to the same bottom line whether I was investigating remittances to Guatemala or the hardships of being an English Language Learner (ELL): socio-economic status.  Money.  And the one thing that all of these groups have in common, for however short a time, is poverty.  As far back as Crevecoeur, who lost his family and his farm, immigrants and minorities have faced economic strife.  Throughout American history, minorities and immigrants alike have had to adjust to a new economic system based on money, an idea some ethnic groups had never encountered before.  While immigrants had some opportunity to learn about the world they were coming to, most minority groups had little choice choosing what was being thrust upon them.  Then there are the New World immigrants, who seem to be defined both by the immigrant and minority narratives.  Many Central Americans see parts of the southern United States as territory that should belong to their people, and so they reject the idea of assimilating to the dominant culture.  However, like immigrants, they come to the US for their own version of the American Dream: to find success through hard work and educational opportunities.  Unlike immigrants from earlier eras, for whom returning home included a long journey and another fortune, this new wave of immigrants is torn between their Old World and their new home.  In fact, many New World immigrants travel back and forth to maintain family ties and business connections, and some prefer to identify themselves as migrants, implying that the US is perhaps not their final destination.  When studying New World immigrants and their reasons for coming to the US, it is primarily either to escape the dangers of their old country, or more often than not, to escape the poverty they were living in.  Again, even for New World immigrants, poverty is a factor in the immigration experience. 

            Through this course, I have gained a better understanding of what it means to leave your home and risk your future for a better experience even though I may not have lived it.  I understand that the experience is not a static one; that you do not just have one experience, but that being an immigrant means to be in the eye of the storm that changes and mutates while you are suspended in the middle of it.  Sadly, it seems there is no easy way to understand the life of poverty in America. We rely on immigrant and minority texts to allow us into the story of poverty because there is no collection of text that primarily represents the experience of poverty-stricken Americans, but it is impossible to separate poverty from the other struggles these groups face.  And so this course has allowed me entrance into so many more experiences than I ever imagined.  I have examined what it is to be new to a place, to a culture; I have analyzed the effects of being poor and uneducated in a way I never was able to do before; and I have gained greater sympathy for those who cannot easily assimilate or choose not to do so.