Mexican Immigration and American Identity - Case Study Example

Mexican Immigration and American Identity Aryna Da Silva Academia Research February 26, Mexican Immigration and American Identity In ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ (2004), Samuel P. Huntington argues that the American national identity was formed and shaped according to values and institutions introduced by the first settlers from the 17th and 18th century. Such settlers were predominantly white, British, and Protestant and the basic elements of their Anglo-Protestant culture include ‘[…] the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth […]’. According to the author, even though other values and principles of non-Protestant immigrants have helped to shape and modified this concept, most Americans accept these basic elements of an Anglo-Protestant culture as the key defining elements of their national identity. Yet, the author states that in the last decades of the 20th century, this culture has been challenged by a context of globalization and ideas of multiculturalism and diversity. The rise of groups that focus on race, ethnicity, and gender over a more general national identity are regarded as a threat to ‘the country’s cultural and political integrity’. Huntington views immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, as the single largest threat to the American identity. This due to a combination of six unique characteristics that differentiate contemporary Mexican immigration from past immigrant flows, being contiguity (boarder proximity), scale (steadily increasing numbers), illegality (illegal entry and permanence into the country), regional concentration (particularly concentrated in California and the Southwest), persistence (no signs of decline over the years), and historical presence (historical claim to the US territory). The boarder proximity with Mexico in the Southwest region encourages immigration and illegal entry into the U.S., which results in the steady increase of Mexican immigration throughout the 20th century. Similarly, it increases the concentration of Mexican immigrants in that area of the country and the illegal characteristics of the flow. Since the conditions creating such immigration (economic conditions of Mexico, boarder proximity, etc) are unlikely to change, the flow is expected to persist. These factors, the author argues, differentiate the Mexican contingent from previous immigrant groups and are likely to hinder the assimilation of Mexicans into the United States culture. One of the author’s main arguments defending the poor assimilation of Mexican immigrants into the U.S. society is the persistent use of their native language through successive generations. Huntington admits that statistics on English proficiency and Spanish preservation are limited and ambiguous. Nevertheless, the author insists that particular characteristics of the flow – scale, persistence and concentration – are likely to encourage the perpetuation of Spanish among successive generations of immigrants. Huntington considers that Spanish retention has a negative impact on the assimilation of the new culture even when proficiency in English is achieved. In addition, bilingualism would affect earnings and put English-only families in disadvantage within the job market. Finally, the concentration of Mexicans in certain areas transform portions of the country into bilingual and bicultural areas, reinforcing Mexican values over the traditional Anglo-Protestant values, which, according to the author, threatens the integrity of the nation, possibly dividing the nation ‘into a country of two languages and two cultures’. From my point of view, Huntington’s concept of the American identity is limited and excludes a great portion of the nation’s cultural and ethnic background. The author’s definition of identity as ‘the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers’ may be identified with what Ronald Takaki (1993: 4) calls ‘Master Narrative of American History’. According to Takaki, the concept that white Europeans settled the U.S. is an inaccurate but powerful, popular, and common story amongst preeminent scholars, used to create the traditional view of the national identity. This story, however, excludes the African population enslaved and brought to the country since the 17th century; it excludes the Chinese immigrants, whom Takaki affirms to have arrived in the U.S. before many Europeans (1993:7); it also excludes the Irish immigrants, a Catholic group arriving in the country as early as the 17th century (1993:8); it excludes the Native Americans, the Jewish, the Japanese, the Mexicans, to name a few. In fact, one can question if Huntington’s concept of American identity is based on exclusion rather than inclusion. The Mexicans, for instance, were in the Southwest since before the first white settlers arrived given that large sections of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California were part of the Mexican territory before they were lost in the Mexican-American wars of the 19th century. According to Takaki, thousands of Mexicans were permitted to remain in the United States after the war and were used as workers in ranching, agriculture, railroad construction and in the mining industry. While Anglo workers were employed as managers, foremen, and other skilled white-collar occupations, the Mexicans were mainly employed in blue-collar, manual and dangerous type of work. However, as the Great Depression reduced the need for labor and Mexicans were increasing in numbers by continuously entering the country and by birth rate, Takaki notes that Mexicans began being blamed for Anglo unemployment. There was thus an increasing public debate regarding a threat to the Anglo cultural homogeneity. Although employers insisted on the need for Mexican unskilled labor, repatriation programs were put in place to return such laborers to their homeland once their work was no longer needed. The Mexican threat to the American identity and cultural integrity discussed by Huntington is therefore not a new debate as it can be traced back to the early decades of the 20th century. It is however, a threat to an inaccurate concept of identity, a concept based on the exclusion of America’s diversity and multicultural roots. In ‘Brown: The Last Discovery of America’ (2002), Richard Rodriguez uses the colour ‘brown’ to illustrate the future of America’s ethnicity and the origin and mixing of generations that makes up what America is today. According to Rodriguez, ‘black’, ‘white’, and ‘yellow’ are incomplete or incorrect racial representations. However, ‘brown’ represents the ‘blood that is blended’ (xi), ‘the meeting of the Indian, the African, and the European in colonial America’ (xii). Similar to Takaki, Rodriguez suggests a more inclusive concept of American identity, a concept that takes into account the mixture and multicultural traces of America’s origins. Rather than a debate in regards to the advantages or disadvantages of bilingual education, Rodriguez focuses on the continuous evolution of the English language, its transformation throughout the centuries to incorporate the unique history and experiences of its people. ‘Americans do not speak English […]’, he argues, ‘[…] we speak American’ […] (111), a language that is full of its own dialects, nouns and verbs, proverbs and phrases; a language that has been evolving according to the diversity and mixture of its people. Furthermore, Rodriguez argues that a growing sector of America’s white middle class is not only favourable to bilingual education but are in fact encouraging their own children to be bilingual. In an increasing globalised world, it is only natural that the knowledge of a second language will be rewarded in the job market. As noted by Samuel P. Huntington (2004), immigration from Mexico into the U.S. has its particular characteristics and it is different from past immigration experiences. However, in my point of view, the challenge posed is not how to preserve the traditional concept of American identity, a concept that is inaccurate and based on exclusion. The real challenge is how to strengthen and encourage a new concept, a concept that supports the preservation of different cultures and languages within one nation; a concept that incorporates the mixtures, the blending, and the diversities of a truly multicultural society. References Huntington, Samuel, P. “The Hispanic Challenge.” Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster; 2004. Retrieved from http://www.foreignpolicy.com. Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little Brown, 1993. Rodriguez, Richard. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002. Read More