Americanization

Americanization is often conflated with globalization, although it is a multifaceted term applied to both domestic and international contexts, and encompasses political, linguistic, cultural, and economic dimensions. Historically, it has had both positive and negative connotations, depending on the time, place, context, and positionality of the speaker. Americanization refers to both a process and a result, the merits of which have been passionately supported, advocated, rejected, [Page 63]and resisted by governmental, nongovernmental, community, industry, and individual actors in the United States and abroad for more than the past two centuries.

In a domestic context, Americanization has referred to the process of becoming American or the making into an American of an individual or group of people. (In this context, the term American refers to “of the United States” and not the Americas more generally.) The blending of ideas of citizenship and cultural identity that accrue to this concept take on meaning because of national ideologies asserting that the United States is, above all, a nation of immigrants. Such a commitment to pluralism brings with it tensions of how to create a national identity out of such diverse cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic origins of those immigrants.

A specifically problematic aspect of this national ideology is that it implicitly dismisses the presence of indigenous Native American peoples, masks the histories of enslaved African peoples who migrated against their will, and ignores the history of residents of Mexico who were forced to become part of the U.S. territories in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Americanization has its limits, though, and those have shifted during specific historical periods as beliefs about who was considered “assimilable” changed. For example, there was a “Nativist” backlash against increasing numbers of southern and eastern European and Asian immigrants who arrived in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries. Northern European Protestant settlers from earlier eras were now joined by Irish Catholics, central European and Russian Jews, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Polish immigrants, among others. From mid-1800s to 1920, approximately 25 million new immigrants entered the country. Philosophies of social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism provided apparent intellectual justification for discriminatory treatment of many of these groups. At the same time, violence against African Americans and Asian immigrants rose, culminating for the latter in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Native Americans were taken from their homes and sent to government boarding schools where speaking their own language was forbidden as part of the effort to “Americanize” them.

Among those immigrants deemed assimilable, special schools and public pageants helped promote the transition from foreigner to American. This symbolic Americanization, often involving a literal marching in and out of a giant cauldron, or “melting pot,” on stage, applied only to those who could conceivably be understood as “White,” linking the ideas of racialization, eugenics, and normativity with Americanization.

At the same time, the United States was expanding its reach beyond the territories of the continental United States. During the 1898 imperial expansion of the Spanish-American War, debates about who could become “American” were extended to overseas territories like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Publications linked current racialist thinking to populations outside the United States, assessing their potential for Americanization.

...