Missions Resources - Bibliography
Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States
Authors: Héctor Tobar
ISBN: 1594481768
Publisher: Riverhead
Number of pages: 368
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
reviewed by Paul Grant
Many
years after the war that destroyed the African homelands she had known,
Alexandra Fuller took a road trip through in the lands of her memories.
“How you see a country,” she writes in Scribbling the Cat, her account of that trip, “depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”
Alexandra Fuller, like countless others through the centuries who have lost their homelands, now lives in the United States. Most rich countries receive immigrants; Western Europe, with little natural growth, depends on immigration to keep the economy alive. But Canada and the United States are in a class of their own. Immigrants we are, more than any other large countries. Immigration is still growing – even accelerating. The US Census bureau estimates the foreign-born population at 33 million souls, or 12% of the total population.
But that’s just economics and politics. What makes immigration truly interesting is what happens when people start to live with each other. Immigration changes us, all of us, natives and immigrants alike. Culture, identity and home: these are close to the heart. Jumping a barbed-wire fence is less consequential than buying a home, speaking a different language with one’s children, or helping reshape the national ethos. Physical relocation into a country is one thing. Social entry is the real deal.
Translation Nation is a refreshing revival of the older genre of assimilation stories. Tocqueville started it all in 1835 with Democracy in America. Garrison Keillor wrote the most recent classic, Lake Wobegon Days, in 1985. Most studies of Latino immigration begin at the border and end a few years later. Héctor Tobar, a Californian-born journalist of Guatemalan extraction, takes the story into the third and fourth generations and beyond. This is the story of Latino radio stations, soccer leagues, town hall meetings and more. It is the story of who we are as Americans, and what we are becoming.
Tobar starts at the border, interviewing people through the wall in San Diego. Without much discussion of immigration law, he moves into the workplace, looking at life in machine shops and dairy farms. Going incognito as a peasant in Laredo, he connects with a recruiter for a factory in Alabama. After two days of travel he finds himself in a trailer park far from town, working as a meat cutter, until he gets tired of it, checks into a hotel, and flies back to Los Angeles to be with wife and kids once again.
But he discovered something else in the heartland: the real story only begins at the slaughterhouse. To rephrase Alexandra Fuller, how you live in a country depends on whether you plan to leave again. Those who stay are now in the millions, and they are busy starting businesses and settling in.
But there is a next step: starting, and joining, social organizations – storefront churches, newspapers, clubs, PTAs and more. This is an amazing transformation, amazing for how closely it fits the pattern begun centuries ago. In most cases without a handbook to survival in the United States, immigrants from across Latin America have begun the story of assimilation. Tocqueville identified it nearly two hundred years ago, and it remains true: when immigrants are ready to make America their home, they found voluntary associations.
Assimilation has a bad name in today’s ivory tower, because people think assimilation is treason to one’s culture. But what about relationships? Must we always stay the way we once were? Assimilation is not only the story of throwing away the past. It is also the story of becoming something new, and bringing your old ways into the new country. To cap off the story, Tobar takes us to San Antonio, Texas, what he identifies as the spiritual heart of Mexican United States. While Los Angeles is the most numerically significant Mexican city in North America, San Antonio is the cultural center, the town where the new identity is emerging. San Antonio is the city where assimilation is the healthiest, where natives and immigrants and the generations in between are together becoming a new people.
Case in point is San Antonio’s new and grand public library (pictured above). Tobar writes:
In the early 1990s, the city fathers took one especially brave step to embrace a Latin-American identity in the city's public space. They hired a Mexican architect, Richard Legorreta, to design the city's new library. Legorreta gave them a modernist cube, then painted it a blindingly bright red that readers of the San Antonio Express-News described, variously, as "truly repulsive red," "bleeding heart liberal red" and "enchilada red." … Now all of San Antonio - American, Mexican, Chicano and so on - had to live with [this] daring every time they drove through downtown.
As transformative as this story may be, it’s not a new story. Tobar would do well to visit Polish Chicago, Swedish Minneapolis and Italian Providence. Others have walked this road before, and felt many of the same feelings. The journey from immigrant to native is never easy, but we would all do well to listen to those who’ve gone before us. When we look at the establishments in North America, and assume our own immigrant experience has nothing in common with theirs, we make our own journey longer and harder than it need be.
Garrison Keillor writes of old Norwegian immigrants in Lake Wobegon Days:
America was the land where they were old and sick, Norway where they were young and full of hopes - and much smarter, for you are never so smart again in a language learned in middle age nor so romantic or brave or kind. All the best of you is in the old tongue, but when you speak your best in America you become a yokel, a dumb Norskie, and when you speak English, an idiot.
This is the trauma of immigration. It is true across time and space, and it is substantially the same today as a hundred years ago. It is substantially the same regardless of color. Immigration is perhaps the most significant event in the American and Canadian memory, more significant than any founding myths. Translation Nation is the latest episode in this story, and it is one of the best.
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