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Assimilation Myths

Assimilation Myths . Contemporary Stories about Becoming “American”. Turn-of-the-century immigration. Eastern & Southern European Catholics & Jews Unskilled labor Urbanization Resistance from native-born Americans. Myths of Assimilation. The promise of the American dream

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Assimilation Myths

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  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 Ethnicity”Werner 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. “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.” How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

  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 don’t 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 who’s 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 “We’re never going to be Jewish, see, even if we grow our nose like Miss Mona here is planning to do. . . . And nobody is forgetting we’re a minority, and if we don’t mind our manners, we’re like as not to end up doing time in a concrete hotel. We’re black, see. We’re 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

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