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1 Chapter 1 Constructing Immigrant Identity M any Americans view assimilation as a one-way street whereby immigrants arrive in the United States with distinctive languages and cultures and over time steadily adopt American values, acquire American tastes and habits, make American acquaintances , move into American neighborhoods, and eventually come to think and act more like “Americans.” Those born and reared abroad, of course, can never entirely shed the markers of a foreign upbringing, but second-generation immigrants born and raised in the United States experience its language, culture, and values firsthand and internalize its sensibilities as they grow up; American customs and values thus become a natural part of their identity. Eventually natives come to perceive the descendants of immigrants as “like us” and allow them to enter the intimate domains of American life, where not only schools and neighborhoods are shared but also friendship and ultimately kinship through marriage and parenthood, thereby creating the proverbial “melting pot.” This is a common idealization of assimilation, at any rate, and one that continues to hold sway among many Americans. According to a 2004 poll, 62 percent of Americans agreed that “the U.S. should be a country with a basic American culture and values that immigrants take on when they come here” (Kennedy School of Government 2009). In their eyes, no one forced immigrants to come to this country. Immigrants decided to come because they saw some benefit to living in the United States. By choosing to emigrate, they necessarily broke with their homeland and entered into an implicit agreement to accept the United States as they found it and to make the best of the life they encountered there. If any adjustments or adaptations were to be made, they were to be made by immigrants, not Americans or their institutions. For many Americans , it is the responsibility of immigrants to adapt to U.S. society as unobtrusively as possible, without imposing costs or inconveniences on 2 Brokered Boundaries natives and without changing American life as it existed before their arrival . In short, immigrants are a “they” who need to become more like “us,” not vice versa. Unfortunately, as we shall see, immigrant assimilation is more complex than many Americans realize, and the process is shaped by the actions of natives as much as by immigrants’ own actions. Assimilation is very much a two-way street. Welcoming attitudes and behaviors on the part of natives facilitate integration and serve to blur boundaries between groups, whereas hostile attitudes and actions retard integration and brighten intergroup boundaries. We argue that the emergence of an increasingly harsh context of reception in the United States in recent years has erected needless and counterproductive barriers to immigrant assimilation. Although Latin American immigrants arrive with high aspirations and an abiding faith in the American Dream, the longer they remain the more likely they are to experience exploitation and exclusion on the part of natives and, as a result, the less likely they are to see themselves as Americans. In today’s hostile context of reception, in other words, we observe a negative process of assimilation in which the accumulation of discriminatory experiences over time steadily reinforces an emergent pan-ethnic “Latino” identity while promoting the formation of a new, reactive identity that explicitly rejects self-identification as “American.” assimilation and its discontents The canonical statement of immigration as a one-way street was set forth by Milton Gordon in his classic Assimilation in American Life (1964). He argued that assimilation involves an orderly passage through a series of three basic stages: acculturation, in which immigrants adopt the language and values of the host society; structural assimilation, wherein immigrants and their children enter into personal networks and social organizations dominated by natives; and finally marital assimilation, wherein the descendants of immigrants intermarry freely with nativeborn members of the host society. This scenario sees assimilation as an orderly, linear process, and for this reason it has sometimes been referred to as “straight-line assimilation.” The process of assimilation may be faster in some groups than others, but in the end it is inevitable and always follows the same linear progression. When Gordon was writing in the early 1960s, the United States was not really an immigrant society anymore. Although Americans may have self-consciously described themselves as a “nation of immigrants,” by the middle of the twentieth century the United States was more accurately a “nation of the descendants of immigrants.” Whereas millions of immigrants arrived in the...

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