Ethnic Studies 2 - Circulations of Differences

Reflection on the Creation of the ZINE Project

This project allowed me the opportunity to explore my family’s heritage and connect with my grandparents. I have always been interested in the unique struggles of immigrants in this country, but I never realized how many members of my own family have experienced those struggles. Learning more about where my family comes from and everything that they’ve been through in their lives was a very moving experience for me, and it made this project that much more personal and meaningful. 

 IMMIGRATION: The Promise of a Better Life Meets the Harsh Reality of An American Immigrant

What is Immigration and why do people choose to immigrate?

We are all born citizens of the country of our birth. We are raised in the customs and culture of that country and its people our whole lives, and it molds who we are at the most fundamental level.

I am American, and having been born and raised in this country has had a tremendous impact on the way in which I see the world. My grandmother was born Portuguese, and she lived in her home country until she was eighteen years old. That being the case, even though she has lived in the United States for over fifty years now, she still sees the world around her from a very different perspective than I do, or even the way her friends her age who were born here do.

Where we come from is an immeasurably strong part of who we are and where we might go in life, and for most people, leaving our home country seems daunting, or even counterproductive to our life goals.

Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, this cultural identity and lifestyle becomes incongruous with a person’s needs and aspirations. Some citizens find themselves unable to support themselves or their families financially because of their home country’s economic state. Others are persecuted for their religious beliefs or political opinions and as such no longer feel safe in their country of birth. Many find themselves driven from their home countries by the destructions wrought by war or disease. Others still, simply are unsatisfied with the atmosphere or opportunities available to them where they are and seek out a new path.

No matter the reason, when a person chooses the leave their birth country behind and start again in a foreign country, they are taking the first step towards immigration. The path to gaining citizenship and residency in their new chosen country is often long and unforgiving, but in the end they are presented with the promise of a new home that will hopefully be the solution to the problems which drove them from their old home.

Why do so many immigrants choose to come to the United States?

There are certainly a great many advantages socially and economically to American living when compared to the countries most of our immigrants come from, but the same could be said when comparing most third world countries to anywhere in Europe. So why do they so often choose to come here rather than settle in France or Britain?

Historically, large waves of immigration coming from Europe to the US have been promoted by war, and in those times of turmoil America seemed to be safely enough removed to be seen as a safe haven. However, those fleeing Europe during either of the World Wars would have been even further removed from the fighting if they had settled in South America somewhere, so why did they choose to come here?

The answer is simpler than most people think. Propaganda. For centuries, the United States has been promoting the idea of The American Dream, and its allure is more than enough to bring most immigrants straight to our doorstep.

What is the American Dream?

The United States was founded on ideals of freedom. Freedom of religion. Freedom of thought and expression. Freedom from tyranny and oppression. These ideals still play a huge role in how our society functions, but for the purpose of immigration propaganda, it is thoroughly overhyped.

The most common factor which drives an immigrant to choose America is the belief that by coming here they can have and do anything their heart desires. Education is of the highest possible standard, and job training is readily available. If you are coming from an impoverished country with little or no means to provide for yourself or your loved ones, America might seem like the perfect place to build a new life. And it many ways, it is a huge step up from the places immigrants often leave behind, but things aren’t nearly as perfect as the world would like to believe.

If the American Dream is to be believed, every American, no matter their race, class, or heritage, should be able to achieve stability, wealth, success and happiness. Everyone should someday have a beautiful two-story home with a yard, a white-picket fence, and a dog. Every family should have two perfect children who get to go to a good school and grow up in a good neighborhood. It’s called the American DREAM for a reason; that is every parent’s dream for their child.

Unfortunately, what the US doesn’t go out of their way to share with potential immigrants is that the Capitalistic society on which this country is built lends itself to a lot of hard work and a majority of citizens that never reach that ideal ending. There is still poverty, violence and racism in this country, just like in every other country in the world, regardless of the perfect picture the American Dream would like to portray.

Immigration is only the beginning.

What challenges come with Assimilating afterwards?

The process to become accepted first as a temporary immigrant with one of a variable of visa statuses, and then hopefully, eventually, as an American citizen, is long, complicated, and difficult to navigate, but it is only the beginning. Even after an immigrant is granted a status allowing them to legally live and work here, they still have to find a way to belong here. Assimilating to a new culture and integrating one’s self into that culture can be just as challenging as earning citizenship.

Today, most legal immigration to the United States comes from Mexico and Central America. The first, and in many areas from this region only, language spoken by these immigrants is Spanish. The United States of America does place some positive emphasis on language skills in the workplace, but for the most part, we are a country that only fluently speaks English. For immigrants trying to truly build a life here, learning and mastering the nuances of English, easily one of the most complicated languages on the planet, is a massive hurdle to their long term success here.

ZINE Title: Immigration: The Promise of a Better Life Meets the Harsh Reality of an Immigrant

ZINE Summary: Thus far, my notebook assignments for this project have been at least somewhat anecdotal in nature, and have focused primarily on my family’s experiences and perspectives on immigration, assimilation, and cultural identity. For my final ZINE, I want to take these anecdotal and theoretical discussions and make them more universal. The project will discuss the fluctuations in immigration to the US over the last century and their likely causes. It will work to illustrate briefly the process by which an immigrant gains residency and citizenship, and the struggles that new immigrants face once they’ve arrived in the country, especially those originally from non-English speaking countries. The secondary challenges of assimilating into US culture will also be addressed, along with the inherent difficulty most immigrants have succeeding while still holding onto their own cultural identity and history.

Immigration as a Response to Social Perception

An immigrant chooses to leave their country of residence, and often their home country of birth, for many variations of the same primary reason. There is something wrong in their country significant enough for them to want to leave, and the country they plan to immigrate to promises to be the solution to that problem. 

For some that means escaping a war zone to somewhere that promises peace. For others that means leaving behind a home with little or no financial prospects in favor of a new home with a promising economic future.

During World War 2, the US saw a drastic uptake in foreign immigration from European and Asian countries affected by the violence and persecution of the Nazis, even before the US became directly involved in the Ally’s war effort. America was far enough removed from the war to be presented as a safe haven for those seeking to flee the wave of death overtaking Europe. Of course, the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent Japanese Internment were proof that the US was not necessarily any safer for immigrants and refugees than any other Western country at the time, but the image of a possible safe haven wasn’t marred and people continued to flood in anyway.

This concept of the outsider’s perception dictating fluctuations in immigration holds true in peace times just as surely as war times. In the 1960s, America underwent a massive Civil Rights Movement which drew global attention. Though it was truly a very tumultuous time for the country, the image of a country undergoing massive social improvements, for the benefit of racial minorities primarily, was what most of the world saw. America was presented as progressive and accepting, even as racially motivated violence continued within our borders.

In 1965, following the passing of the Voting Rights Act, which marked a significant turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, this outside perception was further magnified. In addition, many legislative measures preventing mass immigration were simultaneously lifted. This began the largest scale immigration to American since WW2.

My great grandparents, my great aunt, and my grandmother

Language as a Circulation of Cultural Identity

  The language that we speak is a reflection of the nation from which we hail. It allows us to communicate with those who share our nationality, while also demonstrating to foreigners where it is that we come from. However, through a history of global intermingling, the significance of language has expanded beyond these more basic origins. Immigration, colonization, and forced servitude have all contributed to the blurring of lines between peoples, and the sharing of language through these mediums has altered their significance.

  Prior to the era of New World exploration, indigenous peoples all throughout the Americas spoke the languages of their individual tribes. Thousands of different languages for thousands of tiny sovereign nations, built on thousands of years of history and culture, completely independent from that of the European nations. Then came Columbus and the Spaniards. Along with the guns, germs, and steel, these militant explorers also brought their language with them. Forcing generations of native peoples under Spanish colonial rule to learn the language of their captors was a show of power and dominance on behalf of the Spanish crown that effectively snuffed out the unique languages of hundreds of native tribes.

  This replacement of a native language with that of the colonial powers was not unique to Spanish controlled Central and South America. The French imposed their language on modern day Canada, and the British did the same in what became the first American colonies. The Portuguese carved out a large portion of the South American continent that is now Brazil. And nearly every Western power claimed some part of the African continent when the time came.

In fact, even in Europe peoples considered “less civilized” were colonized and oppressed. The British made it illegal to speak the Gaelic language aloud when the Scottish people under their colonial control attempted to reclaim their lands. This oppression of their native language was the beginning of the end of traditional Highlander culture and all recognizable practices of the clans quickly followed.

Today, many native tribes work diligently to revitalize the old cultural practices of their peoples from before the times of colonization, and some tribes have been able to relearn and reclaim at least some of their native languages. But still many more tribes have lost that piece of themselves to history forever.

My mother’s family is Portuguese, but they come from the Azores, a chain of islands that have been under the control of Portugal for centuries. Only a handful of her family members still speak Portuguese, and most of them have such a thick accent, either from the islands or from the Massachusetts communities that they immigrated to, that their words are unrecognizable to mainland Portuguese citizens. My mother’s entire generation of the family learned to speak English first, and most of them are not fluent in Portuguese at all. No one in our family alive today speaks the indigenous language of the Sao Miguel native peoples.

My father’s family is Irish, and not unlike the Scottish Highlands, the regions from which they hail have been under British control for centuries. Every single one of them speaks English and English alone. Gaelic has been completely lost despite our Irish heritage because of the heavy-handed ruling tactics of the British monarchy.

My maternal grandmother, Margarida, immigrated to the United States when she was eighteen years old. Our family comes from a chain of Portuguese controlled islands in the Atlantic, called the Azores, specifically the island of Sao Miguel, commonly referred to by our people as A Ilha Verde, or the green island.

Grandmother was raised in a small port city on the island called Ponta Delgada. It has grown considerably since then, but when she was a child, Ponta Delgada’s tiny port was the only source of significant trade on the island. Our family was far from wealthy, but the few items of luxury Grandmother can remember having growing up, came from the port.

One such item was a beautiful, gold-plated rose necklace.

Margarida’s father, my great-grandfather, vovu, bought the necklace for my great-grandmother, vovo, when she fell pregnant for the first time. It was brought to Sao Miguel by a trader from mainland Portugal, and in that way vovu believed it represented his own origins, as they build their new life together.

When vovu passed away and Grandmother decided to leave the island and start over in America, vovo gave her the necklace to remember her family by.

She always kept vovo’s necklace with her, and when I left home, the first woman in our family to go away to college, Grandmother passed the necklace on to me.

This necklace was forged in Europe, in a small jeweler’s shop in mainland Portugal. It was brought by a Portuguese trader by ship to the Azores, a small Portuguese territory. My grandmother brought it to a Portuguese immigrant community in Fall River, Massachusetts, and later, when she learned English, married my grandfather, an American by birth, and started her own family, it came with her.

The necklace has been in my family for nearly eighty years, passed from one generation to the next, and for us, it’s a beautiful, golden reminder of where we come from and where we’re going. But it is also a tiny piece of our heritage, which has witnessed the alterations to our language and culture over time, first through colonialism, then through immigration, and finally through assimilation.