Along with everyone else, I’m leaning towards the salad bowl idea of America. It’s actually a really interesting idea. Think of a salad…of how many parts there are in it. The lettuce, the cucumbers, the carrots, the tomatoes, the onions, the croutons, the dressing. Sounds like a good salad right? Well it’s a balance. Like most things. Ask anyone you meet what they are, and I bet not one of them will say “I’m American.” Instead you’ll get a long list of nationalities and backgrounds. Everyone thinks of America as one large salad bowl, but in reality, the people are the salads. Each one a different type, with different ingredients. The United States may be a bowl, but the people are the salads.
The hyphen between two cultures such as Italian-American or Irish-American…it’s just like the salad bowl. The first part of the hyphen, as Walzer points out in his article, is the deeper-rooted, more dominant part of who people are (the salad). The right side of the hyphen signifies the later addition of something foreign, something new, that enhances the first part and makes it different (the dressing). Many people find it hard to separate from their culture, and rather than discard it, they merely pile another on top and add to it.
This idea of adding dressing to a salad can be different for different people. Some people like the dressing on the side, others like their salad drenched. Still, others prefer dry salad and don’t touch the dressing at all. This can be related to the amount of influence people allow the new American culture to have in their life.
The different articles discuss different amounts of dressing added to the original salad. Kasinitz speaks of the immigrants who enjoy the dressing very much and come into highly metropolitan areas such as NYC and LA in order to drown their salads in dressing. These people gain a larger sense of “being an American” than most other immigrants do.
In Walzer’s article, he introduces the idea of co-existance, or many-in-one. This is similar to the idea previously presented of the dressing on the side. These immigrants have the liberty to and make sure that they only add as much of the culture as they deem fit, and no more. They are in control, and most of the times, prefer to keep their native cultural salad more dominant in the mix. In this way, they never need or want to be fully committed to American nationality.
Finally, Gerstle introduces the idea of plain salad with no dressing at all. He argues that the majority of immigrants have no interest in moving to the United States with the intent of becoming an “American,” but instead, they merely come looking for work in order to make money. This idea is “the land of separated man,” the salad and the dressing never touch because there is no reason for them to.
Like Greg mentions in his post, a lot of immigrants were always taught to cover up and hide their original nationalities. But the United States…America, is supposed to be a land of opportunities and of freedom and of acceptane. If we were to force every immigrant to become an “American,” there would be no identity for anyone. Every immigrant, every child of an immigrant would have no sense of self-identity. Also as Greg mentions, only 18% of New Yorkers can be considered natives. What would America be without the immigrants? We’d be very small, and very meaningless. America would be pure lettuce, with no flavor to our salad at all.
