Some Americans worry that too many non-European minorities are immigrating to the United States and that those immigrants are changing the fabric of the country. The reality is that American culture is so prominent that most of the world is adapting American characteristics, and that most "minorities" quickly assimilate.
I myself only have to think of the thoughts and beliefs I had as a child and to how I am now to realize how much I have assimilated over the years. A case in point is my third grade lesson on the pilgrims where I learned about the English colonies. Jamestown, Va., was as different as you could get from the rural setting in Rio Arriba County in New Mexico where I grew up. My friend Ruby and I were so impressed with the differences that we vowed to one-day visit Jamestown when we grew up. Jamestown seemed as foreign to me then as the moon does to me now.
Ruby and I shared an hour-long bus ride that transported us from home to school. We shared many secrets and dreams in our first language, Spanish, as we bumped along in a county road that had no gravel much less pavement. Both our dads raised cattle on land that had once belonged to their grandfathers and worked seasonal jobs to make the money that ranching did not bring in.
Neither of us had phone service in our houses because the phone company did not have lines in extremely rural places, so the bus ride was the only time to chat. Our moms were first cousins so that made us more than just friends, and we came to share a lot that went beyond our third grade promise to visit the pilgrim's settlement.
Years later, our vow forgotten, we sat in a hip restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. She was working for the Department of Transportation as an auditor. I was there for a summer internship and had contacted her so we could catch up on each other's lives. I remember commenting that she had completely lost her accent as we sat there talking in English and not Spanish. Her voice was unrecognizable. We ordered food that 15 years earlier was not part of our normal diet - deep fried cheese sticks never made it into our New Mexico homes. We laughed at how her last name was always mispronounced.
At that moment she and I shared that bond of knowing where we came from and knowing that we were farther from "home" than just by the miles. We had both changed so much since we went off to college, yet I had not realized how my college education had hastened the assimilation process. I just knew that at that moment, I was comfortable in the Washington, D.C., environment that was loud, busy and anonymous - where people were rude and only dignitaries commanded respect. This was an environment so strange compared to the one I grew up in.
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I had already felt like a stranger in my hometown only 10 years after leaving because I felt some of the quiet, respectful ways of our tradition would get me nowhere in the professional world. My friend was one of the few people that understood what it meant to move away from our customs. Going back home served to rejuvenate us before jumping into the shark tank again. An aggressive city life does feel like swimming among starving sharks.
When lunch was over we went our respective ways back to work, I, knowing that I was loosing my link to home. It wasn't until years later that I realized that Ruby and I were so close to Jamestown yet we didn't think to tour the old pilgrim site. I understood that we didn't need to visit Jamestown because Washington, D.C., was a product of the English settlers. The pilgrims of the American colonies that we learned of 15 years earlier were no longer a foreign concept to us because we had already become "American" in our pursuit of success.
by Laura Valdez
Daily Lobo Columnist