Here is an editorial by David Brooks in The NY Times and an answer by David Carrasco who takes Huntington in the Harvard dialogue which is included on this blog as SEVEN in this immigration series.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Americano Dream
By DAVID BROOKS
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amuel Huntington is one of the most eminent political scientists in the world. His essay "The Clash of Civilizations" set off an international debate, and now Huntington sees another clash of civilizations, this time within the United States.
"In this new era," he writes in his forthcoming book, "Who Are We," "the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico."
These new immigrants, he argues, are not like earlier immigrants. Many have little interest in assimilating. "As their numbers increase, Mexican-Americans feel increasingly comfortable with their own culture and often contemptuous of American culture," Huntington argues.
Instead of climbing the ladder of success, he says, Mexican and other Latino immigrants are slow to learn English. They remain in overwhelmingly Hispanic neighborhoods and regions and tend not to disperse, as other groups have. Their education levels, even into the fourth generation, are far below that of other groups. They are less likely to start companies or work their way up into managerial and professional jobs.
Most important, Huntington concludes, they tend not to buy into the basic American creed, which is the bedrock of our national identity and our political culture. "There is no Americano dream," Huntington writes, "There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English."
Obviously, Huntington is not pulling his punches. You can read an excerpt from the book in the new issue of Foreign Policy magazine at www.foreignpolicy.com. You'll find that Huntington marshals a body of evidence to support his claims. But the most persuasive evidence is against him. Mexican-American assimilation is a complicated topic because Mexican-Americans are such a diverse group. The educated assimilate readily; those who come from peasant villages take longer. But they are assimilating.
It's easy to find evidence that suggests this is so. In their book, "Remaking the American Mainstream," Richard Alba of SUNY-Albany and Victor Nee of Cornell point out that though there are some border neighborhoods where immigrants are slow to learn English, Mexicans nationwide know they must learn it to get ahead. By the third generation, 60 percent of Mexican-American children speak only English at home.
Nor is it true that Mexican immigrants are scuttling along the bottom of the economic ladder. An analysis of 2000 census data by the USC urban planner Dowell Myers suggests that Latinos are quite adept at climbing out of poverty. Sixty-eight percent of those who have been in this country 30 years own their own homes.
Mexican immigrants are in fact dispersing around the nation. When they have children, they tend to lose touch with their Mexican villages and sink roots here. If you look at consumer data, you find that while they may spend more money on children's clothes and less on electronics than native-born Americans, there are no significant differences between Mexican-American lifestyles and other American lifestyles. They serve in the military — and die for this nation — at comparable rates.
Frankly, something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term "Anglo-Protestant" to describe American culture. There is no question that we have all been shaped by the legacies of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. But the mentality that binds us is not well described by the words "Anglo" or "Protestant."
We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see.
Huntington is right that Mexican-Americans lag at school. But that's in part because we've failed them. Our integration machinery is broken. But if we close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss goodbye the new energy, new tastes and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.
That's the real threat to the American creed.
David Carrasco's response:
Dear David,
I've enjoyed and learned from your many editorials and discussions on evening t.v. I'm a third generation Mexican American who works as an historian of religions at Harvard working on Mesoamerican and Latino history and religions and I appreciated your response to Sam Huntington's book on the threat to national identity caused by Latinos (Feb. 24th). Several of us here at Harvard associated with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and many Latinos around the hemisiphere have been studying these issues and see the patterns of adjustment, assimilation, and what anthropologists call transculturation very differently than Huntington and even from the ways you were responding to him.
Its remarkable, and I think you were suggesting, bad social science that decades after Will Herberg wrote his classic study "Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay on American Religious Sociology" which has been followed by scores of studies showing the richer and more complex histories of the people who dreamed and redreamed the "American dream" and the "American nightmare", that Huntington can write and think like this. He gets broad attention for what promises to be a retrograde study designed more to provoke and I think to hurt, than to inform or illuminate while a book like Latinos: Remaking America edited by Marcelo Suarez Orozco and Mariela Paez is more worthy of study and critique, more helpful in understanding the huge immmigration process from Latin America the US is experiencing. Its alarming to read about Huntington's work which ignores the facts that Latinos are also making creative contributions to US society in the areas of labor, culture (music, sports, fashion, film, art, political discourse) education, family values and literature.
You were right to criticize his puny notion of "Anglo-Protestant Society" as the core of the American experience. But I wondered why you did not invoke the African American experience in the United States and the Americas as a fundamental critique to his "Who Are We"? As a scholar of the history of religions in American cities like New Orleans, El Paso, Texas, Chicago, and New York, the evidence is that these cities have been, to varying degrees more multiracial, multireligious, multiethnic, and multidreaming than the author of Who are We? knows. The evidence shows that these cities were never only "Anglo-Protestant".
One short personal note. My family worked hard to 'assimilate'. My father set up the Job Corps center in El Paso, Texas that is today named after him. My experience at assimilation-including dreaming in both Spanish and English-led me to a painful awareness when I was a teenager growing up in Maryland which I witnessed in many Mexican Americans. It was this. Regardless of how hard we tried, we came to crossroads where someone in the dominant society, a local Sam Huntington, would take a 'difference' AND our efforts to minimize our difference and draw the line between us in ways that degraded our efforts (to particiipate in democracy) and our families. The "contemptuousness" more often came from Anglos. "We notice something about you, even though you try to be one of us-we notice hand gestures and body language, or skin color, or inflections or social affiliations or rhythms that devalue our neighborhood property, our privilege and 'who we are." I heard this from neighbors, from school teachers, from public officials. The awareness was, in spite of individual Anglos who did try to empower us, that there existed a pervasive attitude and practice that said, "You can't be who you are and be who we are and who we are will always be superior to who you are. Go home. This is not your home."
Too bad that Sam can't finish the sentence and look at the fuller stories and lives of Americanos, as you challenge him to do. Who Are We is- We the People!
Finally, you may find it enjoyable to see the film "Americanos: Latino Life in the U.S." produced by Edward James Olmos and the Smithsonian Institution, a project that included a traveling photo exhibit, a book and a music CD.
Davíd Carrasco
Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of Latin American Studies
Harvard Divinity School and Department of Anthropology
Harvard University
