Quotes About Assimilation

This is not an issue of geography. He IS of two worlds wherever he goes.

An exchange student from Afghanistan "finds himself in the midst of America's circus of self-invention" as he experiences Halloween for the first time. His hosts bauble, "It's the greatest of holidays when you can become anything you want.

They drew their water from sloughs or tiny springs, lighted their homes with kerosene. Yet here they were, each person, presenting themselves in worn immaculate clothing. As Indians had for generation after generation, they were attempting to understand a white man reading endlessly from a sheaf of papers.

But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire. "No," he said gently, "you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.

They haven't got to you. They'll come around yet. It's in their religion to change Indians into whites." "I thought that was a government job." "It's in their holy book. The more we pray, the lighter we get." "I could stand to drop a few pounds." "Not that kind of lighter," Martin laughed. "They think if you follow their ways your skin will bleach out. They call it lightsome and gladsome.

His generation would have to define themselves. Who was an Indian? What? Who, who, who? And how? How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?

Bernadette thought she could trust young Nector Kashpaw because he'd been exposed to the withering light of the government school.

English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes. Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer's gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast.

No, you have to look like everyone else, then you'll get by and no one will suspect you.

Spanish! His family didn't even like speaking Spanish to him. He tried, and they insisted on answering him in English. Though they knew perfectly well that he spoke Spanish as well as they did and better than their children did. Each side had something to prove, and none of them knew what it was.

The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images.

On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems. You know that, don't you, dear sister?

On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems. You

They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy

Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went

fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the precise southern

all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us — over-the-counter-ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.

Whatever success I've had so far has been assimilated into my body and mind.

Sometimes if you want to stand out, you at first have to blend in.

One pretends to do something, or copy someone or some teacher, until it can be done confidently and easily in what becomes one's own style

Knowledge is a free good. The biggest cost in its transmission is not in the production or distribution of knowledge, but in its assimilation. This is something that all teachers know.

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.