Assimilation Myths

1
Assimilation Myths

• Contemporary Stories about Becoming American

2
Turn-of-the-century immigration

• Eastern Southern European
• Catholics Jews
• Unskilled labor
• Urbanization
• Resistance from native-born Americans

3
Myths of Assimilation

• The promise of the American dream
• Stories of personal progress
• Creation of a new hybrid identity Americans
  with accents

4
Changes in immigration
Percentage of immigrants to the US from other
regions
5
The Invention of EthnicityWerner Sollors, 1989

• Americans increasingly perceive themselves as
  undergoing cultural homogenization, and . . .
  they are constantly looking for new ways to
  establish their differences from each other.
• Herbert Gans, Symbolic Ethnicity The Future
  of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America (1979)

6
New stories from new immigrants

• Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their
  Accents (1992)
• Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (1989)
• Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (1996)

7
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

• I saw what a cold, lonely life awaited me in
  this country. I would never find someone who
  would understanding my peculiar mix of
  Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and
  American styles.

8
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

• This is what she has been missing all these
  years without really knowing that she has been
  missing it. Standing here in the quiet, she
  believes she has never felt at home in the
  States, never.

9
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

• Yolanda sees herself as they will, shabby in a
  black cotton skirt and jersey top, sandals on her
  feet, her wild black hair held back with a
  hairband. Like a missionary, her cousins will
  say, like one of those Peace Corps girls who have
  let themselves go so as to do dubious good in the
  world

10
Jasmine

• Bud calls me Jane. . . . Jane as in Jane
  Russell, not Jane as in Plain Jane. But Plain
  Jane iswhat I want to be. Plain Jane is a role,
  like any other. My genuine foreignness frightens
  him. I dont hold that against him. It
  frightens me, too.
• In Baden, I am Jane. Almost.

11
Mona in the Promised Land

• American means being whatever you want, and I
  happened to pick being Jewish.

12
Mona in the Promised Land

• Everybody whos born here is American, and also
  some people who convert from what they were
  before. You could become American.
• . . . You only have to learn some rules and
  speeches.

13
Mona in the Promised Land

• Were never going to be Jewish, see, even if we
  grow our nose like Miss Mona here is planning to
  do. . . . And nobody is forgetting were a
  minority, and if we dont mind our manners, were
  like as not to end up doing time in a concrete
  hotel. Were black, see. Were Negroes.

14
New assimilation myths

• Assimilation is neither truly possible nor truly
  desirable
• Identity is changeable, fragmented, multifacted
• Identity is invented, but we invent within
  boundaries of class and race