Immigrant Minds, American Identities

Was Christopher Columbus a brave Jewish Marrano fleeing the Inquisition or a proud Italian Catholic serving Catholic Spain? In the South Bronx streets of my youth, the correct answer depended upon your neighborhood. The wrong answer got you a bloody nose. But why did Columbus's ethnic identity matter so much to first- and second-generation working-class Jewish and Italian newcomers over four hundred years after Columbus came ashore? Orm øverland, who teaches American literature at the University of Bergen, Norway, offers a compelling explanation. According to øverland, “home-making myths” were essential ingredients of ethnic incorporation. Immigrants and their descendants sought to weave themselves into the great American tapestry by identifying themselves with America's critical historical moments or cherished values. Each ethnic group's writers, artists, politicians, and clergymen disseminated myths designed to foster their group's acceptance via books, newspapers, magazines, speeches, and sermons. Popular entertainments such as parades, rallies, and banquets were also occasions for spreading mythologies exalting the accomplishments or ideas of one group or another as truly American. Home-making myths were articulated by groups regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or class. African Americans, often competing with Euro-ethnics for jobs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evolved myths that emphasized “common ground” and an appreciation of “past performance.” As told by leaders such as Booker T. Washington, blacks would stand by whites in freedom as they had in slavery with “a devotion no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives...in defense of yours.”

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Identity (music · Immigration · Judaism · Media studies · Mythology · Newspaper · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society