This Land Is Our Land The Challenge of Diversity in Massachusetts

Ilan Stavans: Mass-a-chu-setts … I remember being infatuated by the word after I immigrated to New York City in 1985. Its connotation to me was one of intellectual stamina. In my mind Massachusetts was connected to Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, that lucid period in the 1850s when America became whole by making a national literature, proof that the young country finally had a soul.

Massachusetts was also the home of Robert Frost, the poet of the American heritage. Plus, the state was the site of institutions of the highest learning–in Hebrew yeshivot–where Nobel Prizes in physics and biotechnology, literature and peace dispensed knowledge. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University featured annually a world-class humanist invited to pontificate on the world of ideas. That luminaries from the region of the world I came from, such as Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Jorge Luis Borges, and my fellow Mexican Octavio Paz, were selected, somehow communicated to me that the only way to reach such geographical pinnacle was through the use–and abuse–of the brains.

Only years later did I find out that Massachusetts means “at or about the Great Hill” in the Algonquin language.

Dr. Ilan Stavans

I was in my late twenties when I first visited the state. It was a cold spring day as Route 84 led to I-91, bringing me to the Mass Pike. From afar the Boston skyline looked like a small replica of Manhattan. I was immediately taken by the splendid landscape that insinuated itself in a quiet, relaxed manner. Europe is supposedly about the many tentacles of the past, whereas the United States is about denying that past and contantly reinventing the present–or else, the future. But history was everywhere I looked. The once-wooden houses had given place to post-card brick buildings. I spent hours–and, as it turned out, the next few days–wandering around the city, visiting Trinity Church in Copley Square, looking for The Ames Building, once the only sky-scraper, hypnotized by the hoopla on Newberry Street, inspired by the Boston Public Library, and struck by the myth-nesting Fenway Park.

I stayed over-night in a two-bedroom owned by a Jewish couple in Brookline. An insomniac, my English still clumsy, I remember reading, distractedly, in the death of night, Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” I was not known as a lover of poetry but somehow this poem–which I had discovered a few days prior–stroke a cord:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts…

I then went to other Massachusetts towns. I was obsessed by the Transcendentalists and wanted to recognize the milieu that had given Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and Cotton Matter, along with the authors of Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter to us. Emerson once said that New England was “appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.”

But the capital was my main stop. I had been forewarned the metropolis suffers from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis New York City. Yet Boston, I saw it immediately, was far more civil and meditative, less portentous. E.L. Godkin, editor of The Nation, believed that “Boston is the one place in America where wealth and knowledge of how to use it are apt to coincide.”

Yet from time immemorial this has been a place of conflict. The Algonquians, whose descendants encountered the Norsemen and the English, inhabited woods and meadows, favoring fertile soil near rivers in the eastern and central regions. There were also the Nausets of Cape Cod, the Wampanoags in the south coastal plain, the Massachuset tribe to the north, and the Nipmuc and the Berkshires. Their liaisons were not without hostility.

Then came the first modern immigrants: the Puritans. They were separatists running away from a corrupt religious and political system. The wilderness was their magnet. William Bradford, in his book Of the Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, portrays the departure of the Puritans from Leyden this way: “So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes up to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.” Their mission was to build a home in New England on the principle of tolerance, a place where a devout person would not need to apologize for being different. They knew what it means to be persecuted.

The Oxford English Dictionary, by the way, defines tolerance as “the action or practice of enduring or sustaining pain or hardship.”

A “New Canaan” is what Massachusetts was in the 17 th century. The Puritans founded Harvard College in 1636, which they meant as a “nursery of learning.” Almost four centuries later, there are more colleges and universities per square foot in Massachusetts than anywhere else on earth. Our roster of revolutionaries and innovators is also admirable, ranging from John Hancock to Horace Mann to Doctor Seuss. The state was the stage for the first basketball and volleyball games, and the first planned industrial city. This is also where the birth control pill was invented.

Yet the casualties of progress have been many among us too, perhaps because broadmindedness and bigotry are siblings. Alongside our roster of revolutionaries is our list of so-called heretics. It includes the Reverend Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard, an improbable double of our own doomed Larry Summer, who was forced to resign his post for his Baptist beliefs. Also sacrificed at the stake were the Antinomian thinker Anne Hutchinson, a large number of Quakers, and the so-called “witches of Salem.” They would be followed by the likes of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Tolerance and prejudice… During the Civil War, investors and textile merchants from Massachusetts sought to maintain good relations with cotton producers in the South and expressed their anti-abolitionist feelings, yet anti-slavery figures from the Bay State, such as William Lloyd Garrison, were instrumental in spreading the ante-bellum gospel of American equality. The “Underground Railway” allowed slaves to escape to Canada through the state. Escaping the potato famine, Irish Catholic immigrants arrived to the state, shifting quickly the balance of power.

It was at the end of the 19 th century and the first half of the 20 th that a gamut of newcomers from Italy, Germany, French Canada, Portugal, Poland, and shtetlakh in the Pale of Settlement were added to the mix. Was Massachusetts ready for them? Not right away. It took time to incorporate them to society. It was thanks to the effort of policy makers, urban planers, and educators that a catastrophe was averted. The immigrants benefited from an economic expansion. Textile, shoe, and metal factories sought cheap labor. Inexpensive houses, schools, and hospitals were needed. In response, the municipal landscape changed dramatically.

The so-called Age of Urbanization, as this period is known, lasted in Massachusetts until the thirties. It was a thorny period. Legislative and school reforms by visionaries like Henry Cabot Lodge were implemented. The confusion of languages was an issue. So was the threat of disease. But tolerance carried the day. Of course, the collective effort had one thing in its favor: the newcomers were all rooted in Europe. And Europe is the cradle of civilization, is it not?

During and after World War II, Massachusetts was again blessed with domestic growth. The defense industry blossomed, after which the engine became the service, education, tourism, and technology industries. Through all these changes, which took place over a period of about one hundred and fifty years, Massachusetts retained its passionate commitment to civil liberties and liberal politics. It is said that Ronald Reagan, still governor of California, was once asked if he had ever visited a Communist country. “No,” he answered swiftly, “but I’ve been to Massachusetts.” The same rhetoric was present in the last presidential election, as George W. Bush hammered the point that Senator John Kerry was from a “red state.”

We’re now at once witnesses and participants in another radical immigrant renewal. In the last few decades waves of immigrants have come from elsewhere: Latinos from Mexico, Central and South America; blacks from Africa and the Caribbean; and Asians from East and Southeast Asia. Have we learned the lessons from the past? Is Massachusetts capable of integrating these dwellers to our common project: the New Canaan?

My response is marked by frustration. The job opportunities these immigrants have are troublesome, their higher-education prospects are limited, and their chance for a better life is in question. The newcomers in the Age of Urbanization found unskilled jobs awaiting them. Today these jobs have been downsized and exported. The result in an impossible situation: the immigrants from the misnamed “Third World” come to Massachusetts looking for the American Dream, but the dream has been relocated overseas.

More perplexing is the fact that the current wave has a decidedly different ethnic complexion: they are from countries traditionally stereotyped as “uncivilized.” In other words, they don’t look like WASPs. I think of Frost’s words:

But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

These newcomers were not England’s at any point, not even figuratively. They are colonials, yes, but shaped by a different value system. Is this land theirs too?

The United States has a population of roughly 290,810,000. Massachusetts has approximately 6,450,000. The percentage of whites in the state is 84.5, noticeably higher than the overall national median. Interestingly, the number of blacks has always been minuscule. It isn’t by accident that the Boston Red Sox were one of the last teams to sign a black major league player. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2000, one out of every twenty people in Massachusetts was black, whereas in the rest of the country the ratio was closer to 12.3%. This means that the total number of blacks that year was 343,454. (The number of Native Americans, the originals dwellers of the land, is far smaller: around 15,000.) And yet, here is where black intellectuals like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. made their most important contribution to the understanding of race in America. Is it out of symbolism –and guilt–that almost every college and university in the state has a department devoted to African-American studies?

The opposite applies to Latinos. In 2000 the percentage of Hispanics in Massachusetts was 6.8, in comparison with a national average of 12.5. The majority of Latinos are Puerto Ricans living in cities like Springfield, Holyoke, Worcester, Lowell, and Lawrence, although the number of Mexicans has been growing steadily–it was more than 22,000 at the turn of the millennium–and, just as in New York, threatens the Puerto Rican supremacy. It is also significant that there are over 199,000 Puerto Ricans in Massachusetts and approximately 198,000 so-called “other Hispanics,” people from elsewhere in the Americas: Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Panama, among other places.

The US Census Bureau states that approximately 110,000 families in Massachusetts earn less that $40,000. Latino families make 52% of that number. Think of the paradigm: in California since 2001 Latino babies are counted for more than half of all newborns. By the year 2040 the population in the Golden State will be predominantly Hispanic. Names like José and María will be ubiquitous then. Other states such as Texas, New York, and Florida are following a similar demographic revolution. Massachusetts is behind in this trend, but, as fertility rates go, it might not be for too long. Yet our state appears to have all but forgotten its Latino population. The size of our Hispanic community is bigger than that of blacks. Thirty percent of non-US-born residents in the state point at Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as their place of origin. In the political arena, on the other hand, the presence of this community is ridiculously absent. The number of prominent Latinos outside baseball and music is so small I myself have trouble invoking enough names to count with one hand. So why is it that almost every college and university in Massachusetts doesn’t have a department devoted to Latino studies? Do we need to find guilt somewhere in order to build them?

Spanish is the most important language in the state after English. Visit Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex Counties and you’ll be exposed to Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations. But Anglos don’t visit those places because they’ve been branded as “ghettos.” This means that these media outlets fall outside the nation’s radar. Talking about the cultural radar, some months ago, I happened to listen to a Sunday evening show in Spanish, Tertulia, on WFCR, my local public radio station, known for its diverse, informative, and balanced news and cultural programs. But the quality of this program en español, when it came to Middle Eastern politics especially, was embarrassingly single-sided. I called the station producer. He acknowledged that because of the language barrier, nobody in WFCR monitored the content of Tertulia. Is tokenism the only way to approach those unlike us?

The picture of Asians is only slightly better. Approximately 230,000 people in the state describe themselves as Asian, predominately Chinese, although also from India and Vietnam. This amounts to 3.8% of the state population. Their economic status is better than that of blacks and Latinos. At the level of education the group is more solidly represented through middle-and high-school diplomas and undergraduate college degrees. More than 200,000 non-US-born residents of Massachusetts point to Asia as their place of origin. But again, the representation of Asians in state politics and the academic realm is dreadful. Asian-American studies in our academic institutions? They are harder to find than a penny on the beach.

The crowd shows their appreciation for Dr. Stavans

Interestingly, Asian and Pacific Island languages are only spoken in 2.9% of households in the state, which suggests that Asians are more ready to give up their immigrant language in favor of English than Latinos are. This is not to say–I ought to be clear on this issue–that Hispanics in Massachusetts aren’t learning English as fast or as well. The opposite is true. As in California and Arizona, Latinos voted against Bilingual Education in a recent state-wide referendum. They are indeed embracing Shakespeare’s tongue. Unlike Asians, though, Hispanics are not doing it at the expense of Spanish. In other words, they voted against Bilingual Education not because they reject Cervantes’s language but because they want to be fluent in two languages. Or better, in three, since Spanglish, the hybrid juxtaposition of Shakespeare and Cervantes is immensely popular.

What does all this information amount to? What does it mean? That diversity in Massachusetts is a challenge in urgent need of addressing. The number of people older that 65 is above the national average but only among whites; Latinos and Asians tend to be substantially younger. Also, look at the amount of minority-owned businesses. Only around 7.3% of all business is in minority hands. This is disheartening. Massachusetts is fostering an alienated, disenfranchised underclass.

Approximately 1.5 million people in the state identify themselves as Irish. 725,000 identify themselves as English. That brings us to 2.25 million. The byproduct of the Age of Urbanization makes roughly another three million. So what about the other million plus? Is the so-called “Melting Pot” not melting for it?

The metaphor of the Melting Pot was popularized by a British Jew, Israel Zangwill, in a 1908 play about America as a land of additions. It suggests a stew in which different ingredients loose their individual flavor. The metaphor stresses assimilation as a one-way street. An alternative set of metaphors–the mosaic and the quilt–have come to the fore. They imply that each ingredient coexists in the stew with the rest, but their individual flavor remains untouched. Some theorists believe America went from being a Melting Pot in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, in the Age of Urbanization, to becoming a quilt in the early nineties. This was the decade when multiculturalism ruled.

Ours is a global universe. Instant mobility is a pattern. Nations are porous. Cultures affect one another constantly. Polyglotism is the norm in Europe and Asia, where knowing only one language is the equivalent of being partially deaf. The elasticity that surrounds us is delightful: it allows us to be many things and in many places at once. But is also dangerous. Massachusetts is far more ethnically diverse than ever before, more connected to the rest of the world through technology, its economy more attached to international markets. Yet the state is also more fractured, particularly in urban centers. Slavery might have been eradicated a century ago but segregation is alive and well.

What lies ahead? I see forking paths: one path leads to a growing isolation of people of different ethnicities, the other to greater integration. The first path requires from us a single ingredient: inertia. Leave things as they are and nothing will change. Or better, it will get worse, for immigrants keep on coming.

The second alternative is far more taxing. How do I know, you may ask? After all, I’m not a politician? But I’m an immigrant, one grateful to Massachusetts for the opportunities it has offered me, which have enabled me to mature as a thinker. Not everyone has been so lucky, though.

What prompted me to leave Mexico? The search for tolerance. I wanted to be in a place where ideas matter, where I could read, write, and reflect in the company of people for whom the mind was at least as important as body. I often wonder what would have happened to me had I stayed put. In my autobiography On Borrowed Words I actually imagine a scene in which the current Ilan Stavans meets his double, the Ilan Stavans who never moved north. What do they say to each other? Not much… Resentment runs deep between them.

I’m an American now, thankful for the chance to grow but also committed to allowing others similar possibilities. I know the fears and uncertainties immigrants go through. We feel impoverished by the journey, awkward by our incapacity to say a simple “Hello!” We feel trapped, anxious, disoriented… Why in a land of first-rate thinkers and policy makers aren’t we able to do better by the current wave of immigrants?

What worries me the most is the gap between the haves and have-nots in terms of access to knowledge and technology. Walk around M.I.T. and what do you see? Cutting-edge companies studying the potentials of DNA, redefining the human genome, and investing in stem-cell research. Their achievements–whose logistics I cannot begin to decipher–are in the process of reinventing not only America but the entire world. How many are likely to benefit from that reinvention? Can Massachusetts lead the country not only in progressive politics but in the general well-being of its inhabitants?

DuBois once defined the problem of the 20 th century as the problem of the color line. The 21 st century, as I see it, is about ethnic miscegenation and cross-pollination. To limit power to those “in-the-know” is to remain attached to archaic models of development.

I’m only an essayist and a teacher. The business of humanists is to concoct and ponder ideas, whereas politicians are the ones endowed with making things happen. I often ask myself: what on earth can be achieved in the classroom or by a piece of writing? Do words have an edge? Can they change things? At times I’m pessimistic: too much is needed to make a difference, I tell myself. Our society is obsessed with fame and money. No matter how much concentration and perseverance one preaches to our readers or students, they are likely to forget the message once the class is over and the book is finished. But more often than not I remember what the Talmud says: a single line in book is mightier than a well-equipped army.

The humanities play a decisive role in shaping the moral texture of society.

And so, I come to you with a modest proposal. The people of Massachusetts need to be invited to a state-wide conversation on diversity and the future, one focusing on the new immigrants in our midst. Who are they? What are their aspirations? How do they perceive us? And how do we see them? What are our similarities and differences? Classrooms, public libraries, along with TV, radio, and printed media, need to serve as forums and conduits. The conversation should also be nonpartisan. Funding should come from public and private sources.

We need to focus on what has been accomplished in the past. What did the Age of Urbanization accomplish? How did we become a people? The essential question, though, is about the future. In what way should we respond to the challenge of an incessant migration from places other than Europe? How is our collective psyche likely to change in a world where borders are becoming mere abstractions?

Early in his first administration President Bill Clinton called for a “national dialogue on race,” and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities at that time, Sheldon Hackney, launched a major initiative he called a “National conversation on what it means to be an American.” Conversations took place all across the country, including here in Massachusetts. Hackney even came to the state to participate in a dialogue in Lowell, perhaps our most ethnically diverse community outside of Boston. The problem is that it was an endeavor coming from Washington. But the real reason it failed is because it insisted on seeing America as a country in black and white. That mistake has to be overcome as soon as possible. Traditionally Massachusetts has approached racial politics through the prism of slavery. But we no longer live in black-and-white. American society is in Technicolor. Again, look around: there are multiple shades of black and brown and green and yellow… and red, white, and blue.

In 1993 I relocated with my family to Amherst. The town mixes the agricultural and the esthetic, the pen and the plow. In the last decade, I’ve traveled from west to east, visiting–or returning to–almost every corner of the state, from Pittsfield, where white-collar workers are employed by General Electric, to Lowell, where Jack Kerouac was born, from Plymouth Harbor to Wellfleet, where one of my idols, Edmund Wilson, lies buried, and where my wife and I have built a house. Abandoning New York, I once thought, would be suicidal. It turned out to be easy. Not so leaving Massachusetts.

Dr. Stavans speaks with a guest after his speech

Shortly after my arrival to Amherst, I applied for U.S. citizenship. I went to downtown Boston for my official interview. By sheer coincidence an op-ed piece of mine was published in The Boston Globe on that precise day. The INS official, who, for a change, appeared to be overqualified, had noticed the piece. Most of the interview dealt not with American history but with the assassination of a Mexican politician a few days earlier. As the interview concluded, I managed to tell the official how interested I had become in the ins and outs of Massachusetts. I remember saying something about the Boston Tea Party, when, on December 16 th, 1773, ships containing tea arrived in Boston Harbor. People dressed up as Indians boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests into the water. To this day I’m struck by the fact that the insurgents passed for Indians. “Poor Indians!” I said to the INS official. “They’re only invited if it’s a costume party!” He smiled uncomfortably and then said: “You’ve learned fast how to look at American history with sarcasm!”

At first I felt remorse for what I had said. In retrospect, though, his statement struck a cord: to look at history sarcastically. Is that what we Americans do–turn minorities into last-minute guests?

Tolerance: “the action or practice of enduring or sustaining pain or hardship.”

What have I learned from my years in Massachusetts? That nature and the mind go hand in hand. That critical thinking is about bringing different parts of the brain and society together. That societies are never perfect. That the ordeals of yesteryear become challenges for tomorrow. That there is no human interaction that doesn’t involve, at some level, a sense of loss, yet every loss is also an opportunity. That the assimilation process an immigrant goes through is a two-way street: the individual is changed by society but society is also changed by the individual. I’ve learned that America is constantly being renewed by newcomers, who in turn renew America. I’ve learned that Massachusetts is a microcosm of the United States–probably the best one available–, a place with an envious amount of resources and an endless capacity to dream, where the maxim E pluribus unum should never be an impossibility.

I’ve also learned to come to terms with my own Mexicanness in a way I never suspected. In Massachusetts I’m at once an outsider and insider, a double role I thoroughly enjoy.

Finally, I’m happy to acknowledge that it is here where I’ve learned to love poetry. I teach it almost every day, I translate it, I memorize it. My 13-year-old Josh writes poems. I love reading what he gives me.

It took more than a single visit to Boston to understand Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” I’ve become particularly fond of its conclusion:

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Photos by: Mary Gaynor