Main Argument and Thesis The main point of the article is that while many groups of Indians might have assimilated to the modern world, there are still Indians who have been living the way that their ancestors have for thousands of years, desperately avoiding assimilation. Supporting Evidence The author, Joshua Hummer, supports the main idea through providing details of an expedition to find suspected isolated tribes within the Amazon, and then offering more background to the reader.…
Culture is What Matters Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans,” reveals race should not matter on how you identify yourself but instead it is culture what matters. Throughout, the essay Rodriguez highlights how when people were coming into neighborhoods “They were being welcomed within a new community for reasons of culture”(90). This suggest how it did not matter which race they were. Race does not matter because people might identify themselves as the culture they believe in. Not everyone is going to chose the race they belong too but instead choose what they believe they belong in.…
In elementary school, my classmates and I would treat each other equally despite our different ethnic backgrounds. We distinguish each other by personalities as a whole rather than the color of our skin or ethnicity. In fact, according to studies by the Huffington Post, by 2042 the racial minorities will become the majorities of the United States population. In Richard Rodriguez’s article, “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans”, he states how immigrants aren’t getting the credit for what they deserve. In addition, he describes how the younger generations are changing and forming the cultures in America. I agree with Rodriguez’s claim that assimilation happens slowly because it’s only natural to gradually assimilate the cultures in life.…
One nation being universalistic, the other particularistic. Lipset’s facts regarding total melting pot versus mosaic has gotten very mixed in todays’ societies. The concept of the American Dream is one that many, including non-Americans are familiar with, as it is seen in movies, magazines and other media outlets. The idea that success and prosperity will be achieved through hard work within a functioning society with few barriers is one that immigrants quickly and willingly have adapted to. They begin to identify as an American first and put their original nationality second. This ultimately leads to a concept called assimilation, the process of immigrants integrating themselves into a new community and also losing some, if not all aspects of their own heritage as well. Ruben Rumbaut explains assimilation on different levels: “At the group level, assimilation may involve the absorption of one or many minority groups into the mainstream, or the merging of minority groups —e.g., second-generation West Indians “becoming black Americans.” At the individual level, assimilation denotes the cumulative changes that make individuals of one ethnic group more acculturated, integrated and identified with the members of another” (Smelser and Baltes, 82). This is a process…
The melting pot, a concept evolved from Israel Zangwill’s play in 1908 whereby people from different ethnic origins are fused into one nation, presents the struggle for the American Government to assimilate the huge number of immigrants travelling to America, each coming from an array of different countries speaking various languages and owning a variety of different cultures. From 1865 to 1970, assimilation was forced upon the Native Americans yet was extremely hard for the American Government to achieve as the Native Americans demonstrated large efforts to resist any attempt at integration and continued to claim their right to be separate from other migrants in the ‘melting pot’.…
In this essay, Anzaldua reveals her thoughts about the issues of racism, identity, and low self-esteem faced by Mexican immigrants living in the United States. Anzaldua states that a person’s identity is linked to the way they speak. Anzaldua begins her essay with a metaphor demonstrating how immigrants are suppressed in society. She uses ethos to establish her credibility throughout this essay such as in paragraph 35 (“Until I can take pride in my language…”). Today there are still issues where immigrants are judged by the way they speak and made to feel ashamed of their own language and culture.…
The article “Why the U.S. Is So Good at Turning Immigrant Into Americans” gives us a glimpse of a small town exploding from the new diversification. People in the small town are new to opening their minds to new things, but some still have more to learn, since in the high school there are student from “more than 50 countries”. It may seem overwhelming at first to those who seek limitations, but to the people finding new homes for themselves and their family, while still able to express their culture is priceless. If more people continue learning about different cultures around the world, the United States will continue to grow in its goal for its people to be more open to individuality (Source F). The fight for individuality has been a long fought battle, and “Conflicts of American Immigrants: Assimilate of Retain Ethnic Identity” gives us a view of the initial fight of individuality.…
She also vividly recounts the damage that can be done by the dominant culture through its attempts at copying and the centralizing the language to this process. She discusses the pain she has experienced because of being prohibited from, or ridiculed for, using her own language. She says, “if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language” (27). What…
American values are frequently forced upon students or workers. There are few times, where people look down on people who do not accept the American Way of Life. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Anzaldúa wrote, “So if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language” (Anzaldúa 445). Linguistic identity can be difficult for a bilingual person, being somewhere in-between two different culture is confusing and sometimes uncomfortable. A person can’t simply identify with one or the other because each culture has impacted an individual’s life. Being a bilingual also creates boundaries and limitations because the feeling of being disconnected from the language and culture a person is…
|Assimilation |The process whereby a minority group gradually adopts the customs attitude of the prevailing |…
Some Americans argue that immigrants refuse to assimilate into U.S. culture, but according to Cole, “our society exerts tremendous pressure to conform, and cultural separatism rarely survives a generation” (559). Little by little, immigrants newly living in the U.S. pick up on our language, behaviors, customs and so on, all through exposure alone. Over time, immigrants adapt to our culture and in return, they also enrich our culture by adding more diversity. It is this diversity that enhances environments within our country such workplaces, neighborhoods, and also schools. After all, being a diverse country shows that we are a country that openly accepts the differences of others and embraces their freedom to be different as well. Pressuring immigrants to completely leave behind their previous culture and conform to “American Culture” is not only seen as controlling and unjust, it also assumes America has one single culture when in fact, American culture is composed from various individual cultures. Although sometimes it can be rather difficult to work with different cultures and some cultures negatively interact with others, that should not be an excuse for anyone to fear immigrants nor immorally prohibit them from making a home where ever they please to do so. America is a melting pot of cultures, which helps portray itself as a beautifully diverse country where anyone is accepted with open arms. Immigrants choose this country for a reason; America is one of the most opportunity-filled countries that is rich in culture and diversity. Not only does immigration enrich our culture, but it also enriches the lives of…
For a long time, assimilation was the dominant ideology, where immigrants and minorities socially integrated into American society. However, contemporarily America has become an multicultural society, where the minority group has outweigh the majority group in number. Therefore, assimilation is no longer seen as a completely inevitable and desirable process, and is even criticized for it's nature of culture eradication. In the reading written by Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Alba and Nee suggested that despite the deficiencies of traditional assimilation, it is still being the best way to understand and describe the integration into the mainstream experienced across generations by many individual and ethnic groups. Thus, they proposed a reformulation of assimilation which the definition is very different. In their version of assimilation, it is no longer a process which minorities loses their cultural traits and merges into the majority host society. It became a process where reduction of ethnic differences takes place between two…
- Assimilation - The policy of trying to make people change their culture or way of life and adapt to a new culture.…
In order to feel comfortable, included and accepted, many immigrants and people of ethnic upbringings are forced to assimilate. What is referred to as the WASP gentry (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) is the standard of how to be. Assimilation is a complex social issue, in the words of Liu, times have changed and America has gone many…
References: Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. 1997. “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration.”…