Immigrant Acts and Assimilation

Reading Kurup’s monologue on immigration made me think of examples from my own experiences that deal with assimilation and immigrant stereotypes, and surprised me with how prevalent they are, despite having grown up in a relatively ethnic and tolerant community.  The instance in which one of the men in Tina’s Food Mart initially introduced himself as Art, rather than Arteef, reminded me of classmates I’ve known throughout the years who have names in their native language, and thus are often mispronounced by their peers and teacher.  Most times, the people with these names would brush off the mispronunciation and correct the speaker before saying, “But that’s okay, you can call me (insert American name here)”.  I always wondered about how much thought was put into these American names and if, by this seemingly innocuous process of assimilation, they ever felt distant from their culture.  Yet, as discussed in Lisa Lowe’s chapter on heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, culture is a mutable concept—especially when one considers generational differences in upbringing and the community that you grew up in; consequently, identity is not an absolute, unchanging concept either.  Therefore, because of hybridity, it can also be argued, at least in the example of choosing an American name to be called by amongst a certain group of peers, your sense of identity doesn’t get diminished—rather, it simply gains another facet.  Still, I feel that there’s a fine line between hybridity and assimilation because America prides itself in being a melting pot of different cultures, however in considering itself a melting pot, instead of emphasizing difference, it blends all these differences together until they become indistinguishable.