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CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS, CHILDREN OF AMERICA Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1963 classic Beyond the Melting Pot marked a paradigm shift in the study of assimilation. They argued that the Jews, Italians, Irish, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans of New York City had not and would not melt into a homogeneous mass but rather had become distinct ethnic groups—different from their immigrant parents, but still self-consciously organized as distinct interest groups with strong ethnic identities. In so doing, these ethnic groups altered previous expectations about the later stages of assimilation. Glazer and Moynihan challenged the inevitability, advisability, and even possibility that ethnic distinctions would totally disappear, even while outlining a story of New York City and America as a greenhouse for stimulating the growth of the ethnic politics and identities created in the welter of New York politics and street life. What Glazer and Moynihan did not fully appreciate in 1963 was that New York and the nation were poised on the edge of a profound political, social, and demographic transformation. The civil rights revolution and the reopening of America as a destination for immigrants from around the globe were just on the horizon. Within a few years these events would alter our understandings of New York’s ethnic scene in two fundamental ways. In a new preface to the second edition of the book published in 1970, Glazer and Moynihan pondered the first of these changes: the meaning of the explosion of racial conflict in the 1960s for their analysis of New York’s African American population . Clearly shaken by the riots, calls for a black separatist politics, and scholarly arguments that nonwhites should be considered internally colonized peoples rather than ethnics, Glazer and Moynihan (1963/1970, viii) wrote that “race has exploded to swallow up all other distinctions, or so it would appear at the moment.” The importance of immigration was less clear in 1970. Glazer and Moynihan mentioned the city’s growing Chinese and Cuban populations but did not see that the “new immigration” would transform the system of racial and ethnic distinctions in the city. They wondered about whether then-resurgent workingclass Irish and Italian ethnic identities would become more prominent—a phe393 nomenon that in retrospect seems more a last gasp than a future trend—and they debated whether African Americans and Puerto Ricans would choose ethnic group status or racial separatism, ruling out assimilation as an option for them. From a twenty-first-century vantage point, their discussion of Puerto Ricans seems particularly dated, since they predicted that this group would be absorbed into the larger “Catholic group” of Italians and Irish and did not foresee the development of a “Hispanic” or “Latino” category that by the mid-1970s would be seen as a virtual “race.” With the clarity of hindsight, we now know that those with Europeanborn grandparents or even more distant European ancestors did assimilate, even as they reshaped that mainstream and created new meanings for their ethnic ancestries (Gans 1979; Waters 1990; Alba and Nee 2003). For them, ethnicity became optional, voluntary, enjoyable, and ultimately less about social distinction than about individual identities, lifestyle choices, family histories , and group rituals. The same cannot yet be said for the nonwhite groups. The confluence of rising immigration from non-European sources and the persistence of racial difference in urban America has again prompted scholars to focus on the question of how the new Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean immigrant groups will fit into the supposedly alternative choices of assimilation into the (white) mainstream, ethnicization as distinct groups among many others, and racialization as a subordinate category. The possibility (and hope) that many of the new groups will avoid the last fate has once more raised the notion of assimilation to a higher level even than when Glazer and Moynihan published the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot. As Rogers Brubaker (2001) and others have noted, assimilation has been revived in a new form. Brubaker distinguishes between a general increase in similarity, which does not imply only one direction of change and sees outcomes as a matter of degree, and a more specific meaning of “to make similar ” that implies that the majority will coerce a minority toward an all-ornothing outcome. Critics have discredited only this latter meaning, while Richard Alba and Victor Nee have rehabilitated the former in their major new book, Remaking the American Mainstream (2003). Yet both uses of the term posit...

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