Generations and Ethnic Diversity

From the colonial era through the present, the immigrant has been a defining figure in one of the great national narratives about U.S. history and identity. According to this narrative, although the nation's ethnically diverse populations often share an immigrant past, the ethnic identities of the immigrant generation have, over a span of two or three generations, been supplanted by “American identity.” This process of acculturation, according to the narrative, involves not only cultural assimilation into the European American “melting pot” but economic uplift as well, for example, into the arc of achievement, associated with the American Dream, from impoverished or working-class immigrant to the middle- or upper-class occupational success of later generations.

This narrative of achievement includes educational uplift as well, for example, in the case of immigrants and their descendants, from the non-English speaking outsider status of the newly arrived immigrant to the English-speaking and well-educated members of the second or third generations. Education here becomes synonymous not only with acculturation but also with professional success in the world of work.

On the one hand, today, as in the past, the myriad forces of acculturation seek to construct an American national cultural collective based on citizenship as well as other related factors, such as language (English). On the other hand, the immigrant past forms a foundational and cherished element of American national identity, as one sees, for example, in the wide variety of celebrations of ethnic cultures across the country, from Irish, Italian, and German to Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban, as well as Asian, Middle Eastern, eastern [Page 942]European, and many others. Perhaps more significant than these homages to a distant immigrant past have been the complex processes by which the ethnic identities of immigrants have persisted within American families through several generations and after. Despite, and in some cases because of, the forces of acculturation—which seek cultural uniformity and homogeneity—ethnic identities born of an ancestor from the “old country” may profoundly influence later generations of the foreign-born immigrant's descendants.

Describing the intergenerational family histories of his characters, the American novelist William Faulkner famously said, “There is no such thing as ‘was’—only is. If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow.” Within families descended from immigrants, and especially for the second and third generations, Faulkner's truism about how the remote past persists into the present applies in ways that Faulkner, given his generational distance from his European ancestors, could and did not explore.

But Faulkner's distance from his immigrant ancestors, and his (white) European racial background, offer circumstances that underscore the important distinction between (white) European immigrant ethnicities and those many other non-European (nonwhite) immigrant ethnicities that, from the colonial period through the present, have contributed to U.S. history and culture. Although most European immigrant groups, such as the Germans, Irish, and Italians, faced discrimination upon arriving in the colony—or, later, in the United States—those of non-European origin, such as Asians and nonwhite Hispanics, who were identifiable as racially different due to their non-European physical appearance, faced a much greater burden of prejudice, often lasting generations.

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