-----Original Message----- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx> Sent: May 4, 2004 11:09 PM To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Long Live the Evolution On 2004/05/05, at 11:05, andy amago wrote: > Torgeir: Did the Europeans "assimilate" to the prevalent lifestyle > when they > arrived in America? > > A.A. : Absolutely. That's the whole point, that they became Americans > in their > new home in which they planned to stay, rather than fantasizing about > returning > to the old country. > > RP: That is why they still hunt buffalo on the plains, build pueblos > in the > Southwest, fish for salmon ifrom the banks of the rivers in the > Northwest, go to > sea in whaling canoes along the coast, and hold potlatches to > establish social > standing. (Well, maybe they do do that last bit.) The social anthropologist in me comments--Thank you RP! The bulk of this thread has provided us with yet another example of conversation cramped into a free market moralizing model that allocates praise or blame to individual choices while paying no attention whatsoever to historical context or sociological realities. Consider, for example, all those remarkably sloppy references to "Europeans" as if it mattered not a whit that 17th century immigrants to North America, spoke English, Dutch, French, and Spanish and represented a wide variety of aspirations and ambitions--Puritans, Pilgrims, Planters, Pirates, Missionaries, Conquistadores, to list just a few common types--virtually all of whom saw themselves as hacking out new lives in a space populated by "savages" (the aborigines whose fate would be captured in Ambrose Bierce's famous definition, "Aborigine: Persons found cumbering the soil of newly conquered countries. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.") Flash forward to 19th-century European immigrants, who formed ethnic enclaves in cities and, if left to their own devices in rural settings, clung to their own ways well into the 20th century, despite the best efforts of WASP-ish do-gooders to promote the melting pot. (I think, for example, of the area around Fort Wayne, Indiana, in which my wife grew up, where German was the language of instruction in public schools until 1948.) By the second half of the 19th century there were all sorts of movements that argued either for assimilation or, alternatively, radical segregation, as ways to preserve what they saw as America, a nation that had, through the fires of the Revolution, the writing of the Constitution, and then the Civil War become (as both sides saw it) the very model for what a modern nation should be. Immigrants to this America, who played an important part in its further transformation from a largely rural and agricultural to a largely industrial and urban society, faced choices and opportunities quite different from those who landed at Plymouth Rock or settled at Jamestown or even those who migrated in the 18th century to places with names like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, or St. Augustine. Having said all this, am I asserting that andy amago has no reason for special concern, that Hispanic or other immigrants will naturally muddle their way through the usual two or three generations that assimilation requires? Not a bit. There are two key factors to consider: neither of which has been mentioned so far. The first is birth rates, the second modern transportation and communication technology. The one central and apparently inevitable fact about every modern industrialized nation (or at least the members of the OECD) is that the base populations are not reproducing themselves. There is, for example, a front page story in today's Asahi Shimbun headlined "Proportion of Children 13.9%, Continuing 30-year Decline." It contrasts Japan with Italy (14.3%), Germany (15.0%), France, the UK, and Canada (all around 18%), and the USA (21%). What the USA figure conceals is that high proportion of children born in the USA whose parents are first-generation and especially Hispanic immigrants. California is already the first state in the nation in which the White population has become a minority. Less noted but equally telling, it is also a state in which the Black population is smaller than the Hispanic population and growing less rapidly. But this is only half the story. What modern transportation and communication technology have done is create a world in which it is easy for immigrants to stay in touch with friends and family in their homelands, which is also a world in which enterprising business people are able to offer immigrants products and services that provide "a taste of home" while living somewhere else. (There is now a substantial literature on the impact of this factor--Googling "diaspora" will lead you to tons of it.) The consequences are visible even in New Haven, Indiana, the suburb of Fort Wayne in which my wife grew up, a place as Midwestern as Middle America can be. It was, as indicated above, a solidly German Lutheran community well into the 1950s. When we last visited a year ago, the language on a billboard on Main Street was Spanish--entirely Spanish. The grocery stores stocked six-foot shelves of salsa and the vegetables on offer included a big selection of varieties indigenous to Latin America. A big item in local news was the successful effort of the Spanish-speaking community of Fort Wayne to keep open the big Catholic Church downtown. It had been slated for closure, with its congregation dispersed to other, suburban churches. There is no question about it. America's Hispanic immigrants do, in fact, challenge the traditional "Melting Pot" model in way that it has never been challenged before. What the result will be is still very hard to discern. But one thing is for sure--classic white bread America, the America in which I grew up, is not a plausible option. A.A. : Thank you for this well crafted piece. You are right, earlier Europeans did what contemporary Hispanics are doing, which is, inevitably, cling to the Old World, probably because change is difficult for anyone and everyone. Centuries later, these early Europeans aren't even a memory, and in the long run, the playing field leveled out. However, the hazards of segregation are real, as is demonstrated by today's racial troubles. Any foundation on the lowest of the low jobs may persist for generations to come. America is in fact changing, but, for better or for worse, our heterogenous nature builds change into the system. There is no way to avoid it. I think Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine makes clear that the fundamental issue in any case is not race, since in Canada race is not a problem, but rather an out of control terrorist organization called the American media that pumps chronic fear into our daily lives. Andy John L. McCreery The Word Works, Ltd. 55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku Yokohama, Japan 220-0006 Tel 81-45-314-9324 Email mccreery@xxxxxxx "Making Symbols is Our Business" ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html