Summer Most Heat Moon
As the fourth of July spreads around us like Adirondack chairs scattered on a vast green lawn and the coming night brings the promise of fireworks, Andover has that casual, up at the lake feel. Motorcyclists went by on Harley’s earlier, flags whipping behind them. Here and there bicyclists go for a daytime ride. It’s America.
Octavio Paz tried to find the Mexican identity in his “Labyrinth of Solitude.” The land we now call Mexico was already inhabited by complex civilizations like the Mexica and the Maya as well as numerous smaller groups of indigenous peoples. In Oaxaca state alone there are 250 languages. When the conquistadors came, they began a process of suppression and assimilation that, in Paz’s view, obscured and/or erased indigenous identity and conquistador identity alike. Given that the stock of both had given way in the mix, what was a Mexican? Who was a Mexican?
In the United States the process has been different. The land was bigger, the native population smaller and the clash between native and colonist much more about suppression than assimilation. Too, continuing waves of immigration, including the importation of enslaved Africans, caused assimilation to occur more among groups of immigrants, rather than between colonists and indigenous peoples. The numbers of immigrants, as well as the size of the United States, led, also, to large enough immigrant communities where assimilation could be staved off for a long time, and perhaps avoided altogether, at least in the Mexican sense.
So, we now have a country not based so much on the melting of one group into another, Mexico is a much better instance of the so-called melting pot, but of different peoples from many lands living under the same political and legal roof. In Chinatowns throughout the country thousands of American citizens, maybe millions, live their daily life speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, working in Chinese restaurants, retail establishments and in general conducting their lives within a cultural context more Chinese than Western. Yet they are Americans as much as I am. The same with the Hmong. African-Americans, though stripped away from their original cultures long ago, have created a strong sub-culture of their own and many if not most of them live within it totally. Yet, they too are as American as I am.
Then there is the strong stream, ironically, of Latin immigrants, most from Mexico, who not only live their lives here speaking Spanish, shopping in bodegas, celebrating quinceaneras and attending Mass or visiting botanicas, but have begun to assimilate us, reshaping certain cities toward a more Latinized culture. This is a process that will continue. Up here in white, Scandinavian and German Minnesota, all of this can seem quaint, even a touch exotic, but Minnesota too is being transformed, now by waves of immigrants from the Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Thousands of these Africans, not enslaved, never enslaved, come here with their culture’s intact, but when they raise their hand and pledge allegiance to the United States of America, at that point they, too, are as American as I am.
We are unusual in our commitment to integrating many races, many ethnic origins, many religious beliefs under one flag. Even though there are certainly countries with more internal diversity than we have, India for example, we are the one country committed to making ourselves a nation of others. Even though we go through waves of nativism-badly mistaken as we are all boat people except for the natives-we do take in people in large numbers and often they are as Emma Lazarus wrote:
“…your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…”
I’m not a flag-waver, not hardly, but I have come to appreciate the unique and precious nature of this experiment we call the U.S.A. I’m proud to be an American.
