I was really struck by your chapter in Becoming Mexican American on the Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant. It appears implicit in your rhetoric that to assimilate to American culture means to assimilate to white culture. In fact, you write very specifically about the ways in which European immigrants and Mexican immigrants tried to assimilate one another to the industrial order of the U.S. "Yet even Anglo Americans new to the region took it as their mission to integrate foreigners into southern California." What is that industrial order you speak of? Where are the blacks? You even talk about black migration to Los Angeles, why were these blacks not part of the assimilation programs?
As you may know about me, I believe the immigrant in the United States as consistently allied with the white man at the expense of blacks, as if the black man is the common enemy, further subjugating blacks to inferior treatment, despite being even native to the United States.
I know you are not to blame for any of these phenomena, but you should consider them more in your analysis of the Americanization of Mexicans, because blacks are also a part of what it means to be American.
Sincerely,
Toni Morrison
Questions:
1. Is there a parallel between the ways rich whites and poor whites allied themselves during the early slave period to find a common enemy in blacks to the way Morrison writes about how European immigrants try to find a common enemy in blacks with American whites. (That is really poorly written I hope it makes sense).
2. In what ways did the formation of ethnic-specific communities (whether by choice or by force) compare to the ways blacks and whites have self-segregated (and forcibly segregated)?
No comments:
Post a Comment