Quotes About Assimilation

How not to sound like a upper class man. It had been mostly a matter, I'd found, of speaking not far back in the throat but up behind the teeth, a reversal of the way I'd just painstakingly learned to speak French like a Frenchman

I guess that makes me as white as you now, boy. I got your spit inside me.

Again, the Latinos who became Americans in 1848 were not hurt; they were helped.

Think about this: while black culture is a vibrant presence in America today, Indian culture is ignored, forgotten, virtually nonexistent. Even after the Holocaust, Jewish culture thrives, in Israel, America, and around the world. By contrast, American Indians seem still to bear the original shock of their displacement and virtual obliteration as a people.

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it's a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We're all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Germans found American (by which they often meant Irish) bars and their drinking customs both peculiar and unhealthy.

Quizá la buena suerte se parecía a la mala suerte en que tardabas un tiempo en asimilarla.

America didn't want any of us, and you haven't felt unwanted until America doesn't want you.

The principles and strategies are the same. And if you learn them, assimilate them, and apply them with discipline every day, they will transform your life beyond your wildest dreams.

True learning only occurs when you assimilate and apply the new information—when there is a change in your behavior.

Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.

She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white.

Gringos! They have copied us again

No way of knowing how language re-created a family. His own children didn't want to learn Spanish, when he had given everything to learn English.

Every Mexican was a diluted Indian, invaded by milk like the coffee in Cayetana's cup.

Being American was like getting a good shellacking--whatever that meant. He'd heard it, and it sounded right for how he was feeling. These people did things all day long. They were frantic. They ate lunch in their cars and never had a siesta. They even went to church in their cars. Or on their TVs.

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

Civilization has been thrust upon me... and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.

It was easy to rise up in faith and heroism when we faced a clear-cut enemy. Its much harder to resist the enemy of gradualism and assimilation, much harder to maintain a passion for God when we are bogged down in the daily routine of life

It was easy to rise up in faith and heroism when we faced a clear-cut enemy. It's much harder to resist the enemy of gradualism and assimilation, much harder to maintain a passion for God when we're bogged down in the daily routine of life.

If we generic gay and lesbian whitefolks set as our movement's goal being assimilated into American culture, getting 'our piece of the pie,' we ignore or deny the reality that gay and lesbian people of color will never be assimilated in the same way within this system because it was constituted to exclude them.

Like most people who live on the edge, she spoke with two accents, neither authentic.

becoming French." Meanwhile, as the birth rate of Europe's indigenous population remains stagnant, the newcomers are fruitful and multiplying. Over time, resentment toward them has grown, along with