Does America Still Exist?xc2xa0Richard Rodriguezxc2xa0For the children of immigrant parents the knowledge comes easier. America exists everywhere in the cityxc2x97on billboards, frankly in the smell of French fr’

nDoes America Still Exist?Richard RodriguezFor the children of immigrant parents the knowledge comes easier. America exists everywhere in the cityxe2x80x94on billboards, frankly in the smell of French fries and popcorn. It exists in the pace: traffic lights, the assertions of neon, the mysterious bong-bong-bong through the atriums of department stores. America exists as the voice of the crowd, a menacing soundxe2x80x94the high nasal accent of American English.When I was a boy in Sacramento (California, the fifties), people would ask me, xe2x80x9cWhere you from?xe2x80x9d I was born in this country, but I knew the question meant to decipher my darkness, my looks.xc2xa0My mother once instructed me to say, xe2x80x9cI am an American of Mexican descent.xe2x80x9d By the time I was nine or ten, I wanted to say, but dared not reply, xe2x80x9cI am an American.xe2x80x9dImmigrants come to America and, against hostility or mere loneliness, they recreate a homeland in the parlor, tacking up postcards or calendars of some impossible bluexe2x80x94lake or sea or sky. Children of immigrant parents are supposed to perch on a hyphen between two countries. Relatives assume the achievement as much as anyone. Relatives are, in any case, surprised when the child begins losing old ways. One day at the family picnic the boy wanders away from their spiced food and faceless stories to watch other boys play baseball in the distance.There is sorrow in the American memory, guilty sorrow for having left something behindxe2x80x94Portugal, China, Norway. The American story is the story of immigrant children and of their childrenxe2x80x94children no longer able to speak to grandparents. The memory of exile becomes inarticulate as it passes from generation to generation, along with wedding rings and pocket watchesxe2x80x94like some mute stone in a wad of old lace. Europe. Asia. Eden.But, it needs to be said, if this is a country where one stops being Vietnamese or Italian, this is a country where one begins to be an American. America exists as a culture and a grin, a faith and a shrug. It is clasped in a handshake, called by a first name.As much as the country is joined in a common culture, however, Americans are reluctant to celebrate the process of assimilation. We pledge allegiance to diversity. America was born Protestant and bred Puritan, and the notion of community we share is derived from a seventeenth-century faith. Presidents and the pages of ninth-grade civics readers yet proclaim the orthodoxy: We are gathered togetherxe2x80x94but as individuals, with separate pasts, distinct destinies. Our society is as paradoxical as a Puritan congregation: We stand together, alone.Americans have traditionally defined themselves by what they refused to include. As often, however, Americans have struggled, turned in good conscience at last to assert the great Protestant virtue of tolerance. Despite outbreaks of nativist frenzy, America has remained an immigrant country, open and true to itself.Against pious emblems of rural Americaxe2x80x94soda fountain, Elks hall, Protestant church, and now shopping mallxe2x80x94stands the cold-hearted city, crowded with races and ambitions, curious laughter, much that is odd. Nevertheless, it is the city that has most truly represented America. In the city, however, the millions of singular lives have had no richer notion of wholeness to describe them than the idea of pluralism.xe2x80x9cWhere you fromxe2x80x9d The American asks the immigrant child. xe2x80x9cMexico,xe2x80x9d the boy learns to say.xc2xa0Mexico, the country of my blood ancestors, offers formal contrast to the American achievement. If the United States was formed by Protestant individualism, Mexico was shaped by a medieval Catholic dream of one world. The Spanish journeyed to Mexico to plunder, and they may have gone, in Godxe2x80x99s name, with an arrogance peculiar to those who intend to convert. But through the conversion, the Indian converted the Spaniard. A new race was born, the mestizo, wedding European to Indian. Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican philosopher, has celebrated this New World creation, proclaiming it the xe2x80x9ccosmic race.xe2x80x9dCenturies later, in a San Francisco restaurant, a Mexican-American lawyer of my acquaintance says, in English, over salade nixc3xa7oise, that he does not intend to assimilate into gringo society. His claim is echoed by a chorus of others (Italian-Americans, Greeks, Asians) in this era of ethnic pride. The melting pot has been retired, clanking, into the museum of quaint disgrace, alongside Aunt Jemima and the Katzenjammer Kids. But resistance to assimilation is characteristically American. It only makes clear how inevitable the process of assimilation actually is.For generations, this has been the pattern. Immigrant parents have sent their children o school (simply, they thought) to acquire the xe2x80x9cskillsxe2x80x9d to survive in the city. The child returned home with a voice his parents barely recognized or understood, couldnxe2x80x99t trust, and didnxe2x80x99t like.In eastern citiesxe2x80x94Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimorexe2x80x94class after class gathered immigrant children to women (usually women) who stood in front of rooms full of children, changing children. So also for me in the 1950s. Irish-Catholic nuns. California. The old story. The hyphen tipped to the right, away from Mexico and toward a confusing but true American identity.I speak now in the chromium American accent of my grammar school classmatesxe2x80x94Billy Reckers, Mike Bradley, Carol Schmidt, Kathy Oxe2x80x99Grady . . . I believe I became like my classmates, became German, Polish, and (like my teachers) Irish. And because assimilation is always reciprocal, my classmates got something of me. (I mean sad eyes; belief in the Indian Virgin; a taste for sugar skulls on the Feast of the Dead.) In the blending, we became what our parents could never have been, and we carried America one revolution further.xe2x80x9cDoes America still exist?xe2x80x9d Americans have been asking the question for so long that to ask it again only proves our continuous link. But perhaps the question deserves to be asked with urgency now. Since the black civil rights movement of the 1960s, our tenuous notion of a shared public life has deteriorated notably.The struggle of black men and women did not eradicate racism, but it became the great moment in the life of Americaxe2x80x99s conscience. Water hoses, bulldogs, bloodxe2x80x94the images, rendered black, white, rectangular, passed into living roomsIt is hard to look at a photograph of a crowd taken, say in 1890 or in 1930 and not notice the absence of blacks. (It becomes an impertinence to wonder if America still exists.)In the sixties, other groups of Americans learned to champion their rights by analogy to the black civil rights movement. But the heroic vision faded. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had spoken with Pauline eloquence of a nation that would unite Christian and Jew, old and young, rich and poor. Within a decade, the struggles of the 1960s were reduced to a bureaucratic competition for little more than pieces of a representational pie. The quest for a portion of power became an end in itself. The metaphor for the American city of the 1970s was a committee: one black, one woman, one person under thirtyxe2x80xa6If the small town had sinned against America by too neatly defining who could be an American, the cityxe2x80x99s sin was a romantic secession. One noticed the romanticism in the antiwar movementxe2x80x94certain demonstrators who demonstrated a lack of tact or desire to persuade and seemed content to play secular protestants. One noticed the romanticism in the competition among members of xe2x80x9cminority groupsxe2x80x9d to claim the status of Primary Victim. To Americans unconfident of their common identity, minority standing became a way of asserting individuality. Middle-class Americansxe2x80x94men and women clearly not the primary victims of social oppressionxe2x80x94brandished their suffering with exuberance.The dream of a single society probably died with The Ed Sullivan Show. The reality of America persists. Teenagers pass through big-city high schools banded in racial groups, their collars turned up to a uniform shrug. But then they graduate to jobs at the phone company or in banks, where they end up working alongside people unlike themselves. Typists and tellers walk out together at lunchtime.It is easier for us Americans to believe the obvious fact of our separatenessxe2x80x94easier to imagine the black and white Americans prophesied by the Kerner report (broken glass, street fires)xe2x80x94than to recognize the reality of a city street at lunchtime. Americans are wedded by proximity to a common culture. The panhandler at one corner is related to the pamphleteer at the next who is related to the banker who is kin to the Chinese old man wearing an MIT sweatshirt. In any true national history, Thomas Jefferson begets Martin Luther King Jr., who begets the Gray Panthers. It is because we lack a vision of ourselves entirexe2x80x94the city street is crowded and we are each preoccupied with finding our own way homexe2x80x94that we lack an appropriate hymn.Under my window now passes a little white girl softly rehearsing to herself a Motown obbligato.THIS IS THE QUESTIONHaving read both essays, please respond to the following:”Where Are You From?”-In her essay Park uses the terms “otherized” and “hyphenated Americans” what does she mean by this?-Not to get into politics (but this is topical and current)–in a recent speech presumptive Republican candidate for president made the statement the judge presiding over the current lawsuits regarding Trump University cannot be fair and unbiased because of his Mexican heritage (it should be mentioned that this judge IS an American–born in Indiana). xc2xa0How does this comment relate to what Park states in her essay?xc2xa0-“Does America Still Exist?”-In his essay Rodriguez states: xc2xa0″We stand together alone.” xc2xa0What does he mean by this? xc2xa0-Rodriguez discusses the concept of “assimilation” xc2xa0What is assimilation and what is RR saying about the reciprocal nature of assimilation. xc2xa0Also, at the end of the essay RR states: xc2xa0″Centuries later, in a San Francisco restaurant, a Mexican-American lawyer of my acquaintance says, in English, overxc2xa0salade nixc3xa7oise, that he does not intend to assimilate into gringo society.” xc2xa0What does he mean by this and how is it ironic with regard to the concept of assimilation.xc2xa0 ‘