CULTURE: A HETEROGENEOUS SOCIETY

Lina Rodríguez, Leonardo Solórzano y Julián Jaimes

Publicado en Capital Letter No. 2

Octubre de 2002

Getting an answer to the question what is an American? can be difficult since Americans do not think of them­selves as a whole due to the fact that the United States is the most heterogeneous society of the world because of immigrants and their ideas.

The French J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur raised this question as early as 1782 when he realized the mixture of blood and races in the country. Since its beginning, it had been settled, built and developed by generations of im­migrants searching for a better future and a fresh start. This mixture has not let Americans have a common pa­ternity. From then many people have tried to answer that query but it has not been suitably answered yet. The most common answer has been "the American is the product of the Melting pot", namely, the mixture of races caused by intermarriage, what has brought up to a com­bination of religions, cultures, origins and lifestyles. 

Al­though this answer has been widely accepted, it ignores the persistence of immigrants' ethnicity, which makes them consider themselves from a single ancestry group. Therefore, this theory cannot be applied to everybody. However, this does not mean that Melting pot has not happened really, on the contrary, there are at the present over 100 different ethnic groups living across the United States. What is more the United States continues taking in more immigrants than any other country. This constant immigration has been taken as something uncomfortable for some people in the United States. 

This has made them become xenophobic because immigrants take jobs, housing and health care, and because if present levels of immigration continue, by the year 2.050 Ameri­can population will increase by 50% to 383 millions. One example of this American xenophobia is that for a long time big mainstream circles have largely ignored immi­grant poets, novelists and critics. And although nowadays this prejudice has lost strength, Americans do not let them feel at home yet. As the Latino-writer Helena Maria Villamontes says, there are people who have been in the United States for seven generations and people still make them feel like immigrants.

To conclude, it is important to say that the search for an answer to what an American is can be a little diffi­cult but not impossible. A good example of an answer is what Douglas argued in his book American Life and Institution, "An American is any person born in the United States, someone who meets the legal require­ments of citizenship, who has embraced a set of values and living habits and who considers himself or herself to be an American".