Opinion: Jindal’s ‘American’ call vs. the nostalgic residue of homeland.
By Niharika Mookerjee
NEW YORK: Time and again we hear exhortations from Indian American politicians and leaders urging the immigrant community to “become Americans.” Recently, the Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, joined the pipe-tune declaring: “We live in the age of hyphenated Americans: Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans… Here’s an idea: How about just ‘Americans?’”
Jindal’s words carry distinctive echoes of those spoken by a President from another time-period, Theodore Roosevelt, who broadcasted in 1915, “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.”
And, frankly, the call for Americanization need not always come from a distant politician. It could very well be the uncle who landed in the United States, decades back, and whose advice to younger generations, fresh from the boat, is precisely that: forget “the roots thing” and be well enmeshed in the country of your choice.
Excuse me, but what does it mean to “become an American”? Perhaps, until the beginning of the twentieth century, it meant assimilation into the culture of people from Anglo-Saxon descent, which formed the very grounds of national identity.
However, the subsequent waves of immigrants from Europe and also Asia, Africa, West Indies, Latin America brought about the invention of ethnicity as a category in itself within American society. Thus, the so-called American way of life was blurred, altered and changed by the masses of immigrants, wherein, despite their cultural differences, the nation’s integrity remained.
Additionally, memory that cleaves to the consciousness is not a piece of handwriting that can be erased at one’s will. Scholars define it as “living here” and simultaneously “remembering there.” Likewise, technological advancements have aided in the process of migrants remaining engaged in long-distance nationalism.
Research studies on diaspora also expose characteristic traits that have defined immigrant behavior since the late nineteenth century and are not particularly confined to any distinctive group or race. In other words, Norwegians, who came to the US in the turn of the twentieth century, exhibited the same symptoms as do technocrat Indians now.
They either show a typical disdain towards their home country in order to quickly assimilate into mainstream or nurture a “homing” desire to return to motherland. In the movie I Remember Mama the recurring theme is to adapt to the ways of the new city, San Francisco, and to forget Norway, the country of the parents and grandparents.
This inclination embodies the old model of assimilation as described in Oscar Handlin’s publication of the book, Uprooted where older immigrants tended to make a clean break with the past country and assumed a new life and identity in their adopted land.
For these immigrants, the case was apparently simple from the outside, although tensions simmered deep down. The route to a quick transition was often fraught with heart-breaks as exemplified in Frank Capra’s movie, “The Younger Generation.” As the young Jewish boy, played by Ricardo Cortez, climbs up his way to social acceptance, he grows to reject his Lower East Side family which he perceives as an obstacle and an embarrassment to his social advancement. Eventually time plays a dirty trick on him: his father dies, he is abandoned by his family, and all that he is left with, is a large, brooding mansion that leaves him with no peace.
The movie is knitted closely with Capra’s own feelings of alienation in a foreign land. Born of an Italian peasant in Sicily, he experienced, first-hand, the poverty and prejudices of being an Italian in an Anglo dominated America. As such, “The Younger Generation” serves as a strong statement against the materialism of the American Dream that alienates human beings from the fine web of meaningful relationships.
In the long history of immigration, the word “diaspora” is derived from the Greek verb “speiro”, (to sow) and the preposition “dia” means ‘over’. In other words it translates as “to sow over”, that is scattering of something or someone over different locations. When it refers to a people, it suggests a relocation or displacement of people from their original homeland.
Originally, it was used to refer to the experience of the Jewish people, who were forced out of their homeland and compelled into exile in countries around the world. Examples of such “victim diaspora”, people who were traumatized and persecuted to leave their homeland, included the Armenians, the Irish, the Africans, the Palestinians, and recently the Bosnians.
However, over time, there grew a variety in diaspora communities that included people who were not historically victimized, but had the active agency to influence international support for both the hostland and the homeland.
This movement was spurred by the capitalist market economy which led to accentuated differences between the capital rich, technologically advanced nations and others that were not. Consequently, there grew the need for cheap labor from India, China, Mexico and South America that changed immigration patterns in North America.
These immigrants were now defined by a strong collective memory of their homeland combined with an active sense of engagement with the native land, culturally, politically and economically. They had, what is commonly known as, a ‘global’ or ‘multiple identities’ that transcended any need to belong to a single nation.
Try as much they would like, they could not give up wanting to give back to their homeland or help family members who were back there. This was as true for Non Resident Indians as it was for other migrant communities.
Their narrative consisted in carrying the identity of their cultural homeland within them, a sense of nostalgia of what it would be like to return home and the imagined benefits it would afford them. Moreover, the overriding sense of common fate and history bound them together and strengthened ties among the members of the diaspora. Obligation to their home-country inspired them to send monetary remittances and make necessary investments to enhance economic welfare. For example, NRI businessmen, such as Vinod Khosla, Lakshmi Mittal and others are renowned for making significant changes in corporate India.
Nevertheless, a point to remember is that the diaspora is not a homogeneous group. It has its own fragmented identities, interests, conflicts and class divides that run across the entire swathe.
But, overall, immigrants are inevitably faced with choices about how much of their old ways they should retain and how much of the new they should acquire.
A study, conducted by Namita N. Manohar, Mothering for Class and Ethnicity: The Case of Indian Professional Immigrants in the United States, uncovers tensions amongst upwardly-mobile, professionally-qualified mothers, who have little personal leisure time but are extra-ordinarily ambitious for their children. They live in upscale neighborhoods to provide the best education to their children, and yet, because of their ingrained sense of ethnicity, their children remain either misfits in society or at odds with their families.
Hence, despite their enviable social status, the separation from mainstream arises from their “foreignness” which constitutes differences in racial, religion, food norms and other modes of life. Accordingly, the feeling of being disenfranchised is habitual among them.
Therefore, despite the clarion-call to “become American”, there really is no clear-cut solution.
The New York Times best seller, Quiet, by Susan Cain, plugs in to a study that reveals Chinese high school students prefer friends who are “humble, altruistic, honest and hardworking”, while American high school kids seek out the “cheerful, enthusiastic and sociable.” The contrast, according to the psychologist Michael Harris Bond, is striking as it shows Americans emphasize “sociability which makes for easy association” while the Chinese dwell more on “deeper attributes, focusing on moral virtues and achievement.”
This is equally relevant for Indian kids growing up in the US who are caught between cross-cultures of Eastern tradition of deference and relationship-honoring, and the Western push for self-expression and individuality.
As a dad of two grown children, both doctors, ruefully told me, “The biggest loss of coming to the US, is our children, for whom we move here in the first place. They have the life-style which we wanted for them, but when they grow up they have no need for their dad, unless it is to ask for money. They use me only as their ATM machine.”
To the world outside, we may have moved up the social scale, with our houses, our iPads and kids educated in Ivy League Schools, but they do not come without a price. In our hearts, the “diasporic” feeling, of having never left homeland, stays on as a nostalgic residue.