Lori Wheeler

5 July 2014

Immigrant Literature: A Problem That Needs to Be Fixed?

            In my first essay for the final exam of this course, I turned my attention to the commonality of poverty.  All ethnic groups fall prey to it, and so do minorities and immigrants.  In that essay, I suggest that it would be beneficial for us to develop literature of poverty so that we can get a better glimpse into the life of poverty so we can better understand it.  When the best literature we have to define the life of poverty are immigrant and minority stories, it becomes difficult to separate the life of poverty from the immigrant or minority experience.  For so many readers, the impulse is to "fix it."  Fixing the poverty problem then becomes enmeshed with "fixing" the immigrant or minority problem.  This is clearly the wrong way to approach the situation.  Being an immigrant or a minority is not a problem that needs to be "fixed."  Instead, it is an experience and a culture that should be embraced. 

            Unfortunately for many New World immigrants, American society sees them as a problem that needs to be solved.  Politicians are giving sound bites in the news daily right now as the president makes plans to put his own immigration policy in effect.  For these immigrants crossing the border, they are not asking for anything more than Andrew Carnegie's family did when they came to America: a chance at a better future.  The situation gets complicated, though, for these New World immigrants who feel, like Sonia Guevara described, "ni de qui, ne de alla," neither belonging here nor there.  This juxtaposition of belonging is echoed in "The Last of the Menu Girls" by Denise Chavez.  In the story, Rocio is torn between two worlds: home where the ghost of her Aunt Eutilia haunts her and work where she tries to live out the American Dream by moving up in her job and getting an education.  We see Rocio living out the struggle between two worlds throughout the piece when she stops and sits at the bench that is the "quiet place," an in between place from home and work, when she works in healthcare even though she never wanted to take care of people, and how she rarely show her anger, "but inside, [she is] always angry."  These struggles Rocio experiences are the struggles that many New World immigrants face as they make their way in America.  On one hand they want to assimilate and make the US their home, but on the other, they resist the dominant culture much like minorities.  Rocio's feelings about assimilation are divided.  For Anzia Yezierska in "Soap and Water," it was easy to choose to assimilate because home was so far away.  As well, it seemed that she easily understood what to do to find acceptance and assimilation in America: all she had to do was get and education, get a good job, and apparently, clean herself up. 

            With New World immigrants, who come from a mestizo culture where racial lines are crossed and cultures blended, it is difficult to understand why one must assimilate so completely.  Junot Diaz shows this chameleon quality in "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie."  His alter ego Junior is ready for any girl who wants to go out with him by understanding their cultures and traditions.  He is even willing to put aside some of his preferences if it will make the girl happy.  While that sentiment is shared by many adolescent males, not all of them are in the position to do so comfortably, as Junior is.  His comfort comes from being a New World immigrant, living between two worlds and proud of the fact that he can traverse both.  Like Rocio, Diaz's Junior wants to respect his old culture and still adapt to the dominant culture of the US.  This is not the case with minority groups.  Minorities, as a whole, rarely struggle between assimilation and resistance.  As demonstrated in "Elethia" by Alice Walker, many African Americans resist assimilation because the dominant culture is not one in which they would choose to participate.  Like the real Albert Porter and Elethia and her friends, minorities have seen the dominant culture exploit and dehumanize others so hypocritically that it is difficult for some to look upon the dominant culture with anything but scorn, especially if you lived through the exploitation and dehumanization of your race as Albert did.  This is why Albert would never serve in the big house, and it is the same reason Elethia wanted to give American Indians who were stuffed the same way Albert was a proper ending.  For Elethia, cremating Albert and carrying his ashes was her way of resisting the dominant culture and resisting becoming as abhorrent as it had been.  Numbers of other minorities have found their own ways to resist the dominant culture like Elethia does.

            Somehow, even when the discrimination and prejudice of the dominant culture is identified, people are able to overcome it and surprise everyone.  Paule Marshall's Da-Duh is shocked to see how the dominant culture of the US differed from that of her once-colonized island.  Her daughter and grandchildren live in a place that is more accepting than she imagined it would be.  It was incredible to her in "To Da-Duh, In Memoriam" that the narrator would have had a conflict with a white girl and was able to get physical with her without any serious repercussions for herself or her family.  Further, Da-Duh was amazed and defeated by this culture that gave her granddaughter incredible sights and experiences that rivaled that of Barbados.  New World immigrants certainly face the same difficulties as every other immigrant throughout history, but they are more able now to return to the Old World like Marshall's narrator and tell of how much better things have gotten.  In many ways, life for immigrants has improved and their transition has become easier.  A greater number of self-identified immigrants live in the US than ever before, and non-immigrants are more easily understanding and connecting with immigrants through the voice that stories like the ones read in this course give them.

            Certainly the literary quality of immigrant and minority stories elevate the reader's experience, but I think that may not be the most important aspect of multicultural writing.  While I think "Romero's Shirt" by Dagoberto Gilb may have been the most literary of the New World immigrant pieces we read, replete with colorful imagery and rich symbols, I was still moved by all the other stories.  In fact, some of them touched my heart in ways that "Romero's Shirt" never did.  A story's ability to connect you with an experience or an emotion is not completely dependent upon its use of literary devices like hyperbole, metaphor, and motif.  In order to give immigrants and minorities a voice, we must let them tell their stories on their own terms, and we cannot discriminate based on literary merit.  If we mandated that multicultural texts live up to a certain quality determined by intellectuals, we deny certain aspects of multiculturalism of which those intellectuals may not be aware.  Again, in multicultural literature, we face a problem, but this is a different kind of problem: a literature that must be "fixed" to fit the standards of literary excellence.  The texts produced by immigrants and minorities give voice to a people who are not always given access to the traditions of literary excellence; some would not recognize it if they saw it, and they would certainly find more difficulty employing it in their own writing.  What the literary world needs is a set of texts that acknowledges what might be lacking because of its people's disadvantages and chooses quality of connection over quality of convention.  The difficulty of finding a voice and connecting to the dominant culture is not limited, however, to immigrants and ethnic minorities.  I believe the greatest factor separating the dominant culture from everyone else in America is money. 

            What if we could define a literature of poverty, so that it openly acknowledged that its purpose was to connect and not to impress? What if there was a canon that all people living in poverty could look to for encouragement instead of a canon that categorized them into either immigrant or minority, but never both at the same time? And what if this new group of texts gave readers insight into a real problem that needs real solutions? How much better would our world be—our country—our neighborhoods?  Now just imagine what would happen if that literature led to real solutions.  I want that literature for my students.  I want it for my neighbors.  I want it for my children.