© 2006, UrbisMedia
I discovered a new restaurant recently. Not much of a restaurant, really, but closer to an Asian deli. Vietnamese fast-food. They are wonderful Vietnamese fillings in freshly-baked French baguettes. Fillings like barbequed meats with spring roll vegetables, and exotic flavors. I bring this up because it’s fusion food—we probably never would have had it had not the French ruled Indo-China at one time, and there had been Vietnamese immigration to France (and more recently, Vietnamese immigration to America).
But it is also an illustration of the subtle balances that are involved in immigration. Most cultures—not all, mind you—welcome a little spice from abroad; but no culture welcomes the prospect of their culture becoming dominated by an invading foreign culture. Yet, while we can give some degree of definition to most cultures, admittedly often in stereotype, we can’t quite do that with our own. What is “American culture”?
I had occasion to bend my mind on that question When I was lecturing in Beijing a couple years back. I was looking for a way to make the point that the Chinese should not think they can extrapolate American public administration practices the way they have been able to easily copy American products and manufacturing techniques. The approach I took to raising this issue was to ask my Chinese audiences “What is it that makes you a Chinese?” Someone would volunteer “to be born in China,” or “to be of the Chinese race,” or to “have the culture of a Chinese”. Then I would ask them (rhetorically, of course) what they think it makes me an American. I would pull out my passport, hold it up, and say “this, this is the only thing that makes me American–citizenship. There is no race, definitive culture, or even having to be born there, just citizenship.” I would tell them that I can never become Chinese in they way that they think of themselves as Chinese, but they could become American in the way that I am American. To achieve that I would have to be an American Indian, which, as I gave it more thought, but did not express, is racially closer to being a Chinese.
America is sui generis as regards culture. It’s as much an idea, maybe more so, than it is a specific place or people, or customs and traditions. That, it seems, is both our attraction and our noble purpose—that idea that “all men are created equal.” The idea that we are a self-created social ecology where any plant can take root and grow and prosper is something we wear on our sleeve and are forever tripping over. Living up to it isn’t nearly as easy as expressing it; something like democracy in that regard. There are bioth advantages and disadvantages to being a cultural “work in progress.”
This is, of course, a “take” on our “culture” that has been historically divisive in terms of political philosophy—liberals holding the door open and conservatives holding to the status quo , if not the status quo ante . But where the normative rubber meets the road of reality is over perennial issues related to the (interrelated) issues of race and immigration. Indeed, a good part of what we might consider to be “American culture,” at least in terms of its internal struggle with its own principles, is forged on the anvil of assimilation. From Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Huckleberry Finn , and Birth of a Nation , to the most pervasive themes of contemporary literature and films like The Border , and Crash , our struggle with race and immigration perhaps gives us our most pronounced “cultural” definition.
Prior to 1820, before which we have no accurate records, it is not known how many people immigrated America. Records were not kept. Since then some 50 million have come, most were running away from something: potato famines for Irish; poor soil in the mezzogiorno for Italians; religious persecution for Jews; wars, revolutions etc., for other ethnic groups. Most were poor. Italians had a saying: Chi sta bene non si muove (the well-off don’t emmigrate).
There are two colloquial points of view about those who migrate: they are the dregs of their societies; or that they were the hardier, more ambitious stock who were willing to take a chance to improve themselves. Considering the perils of migration and the difficulties of getting assimilated, it took considerable courage to be an immigrant in the 19 th century. Ships arrived after long voyages in which immigrants sailed in “steerage” with many passengers dead from disease, or sick from bad food and sanitation.
There’s a story, apocryphal or not, was repeated by nearly every immigrant group. “I came to America,” an Irishman, Italian or a Pole, might say, “because in the old country I had heard that the streets of America were ‘paved with gold’”. And then, often with an ironic shrug, “But I learned three things after I arrived: One, the streets were not paved with gold; two, the streets were not paved at all, and; three, it was I who was going to have to pave those streets.”
Fortunate for the immigrants, it might be argued. During the heyday of American immigration the American city was being built, rising out of the mythical compost of the founders that America was destined to be a nation primarily of yeoman farmers America’s urban adolescence had all the raw and raucous energy and assertiveness of youth. America’s cities grew fast, and without benefit of the “parental oversight and example” of a previous American urban age, without especially an American “golden age of cities.” So it was their very building, the buildings, the physical and social infrastructure, the unpaved streets, that provided the gold. Building cities generates a lot of jobs.
America might be the only nation in the world with a “welcome sign” on its front door. In 1883 the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, designed by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, was erected in New York Harbor. Even before the statue went up Emma Lazarus wrote a poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) to raise funds for the pedestal on which the Miss Liberty would stand. That poem’s oft-quoted lines were an unqualified call to America’s shores that gave voice to the country’s values of freedom and democracy.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from
land to land
Here at our sea-washed sunset gates
shall stand
A Mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes
command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”
cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me
I lift up my lamp beside the golden door.
Despite the Statue of Liberty, and a poem welcoming the “wretched refuse of the earth” and the “huddled masses” there was a strong “Nativist” movement that regarded immigrants with suspicion, with bigotry, and even as an unwelcome pollution. Countering Lazarus nearly point for point is the poem of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, submitted to a government commission on restricting immigration. Titled “The Unguarded Gates,” is warned:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them press a wild, a motley throng—
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Fearless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Sythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav,
Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are these,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white goddess, is it well
To leave the gate unguarded? On thy breast
Fold sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of fate,
Lift the downtrodden, but with the hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the fight of freedom. Have a care
Lest from they brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,
And where the temples of the Caesars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.
These days, making their ways around the internet are polemical prognostications with titles like “Mexifornia,” jeremiads calling for legislative remedies to a Great Wall of the Southwest manned by overweight NRA types with Alamo mentality so that our “American culture” is not “overrun” with foreign spawn. It’s doubtful they would even be able to define the “culture” they are claiming to protect from adulteration. What these guys really need is a taste of one of those Vietnamese baguette sandwiches.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 4.30.2006)