Culture of immigrant community has always been a topic of contention that we try to grapple with. We can fill in the "X" with "Japanese", "Jewish", "Polish", or anything else, and the question is still there.
The Intro of Becoming Mexican American tackles the difficult question of what made up the Mexican American culture through a historiographical study. In some historians' eyes, it was the "negation of assimilation", a fight between the "traditional" and the "modern", or something "contested, temporal, and emergent". Culture is certainly contingent to a social context and such contingency in terms shapes culture into a frequently changed phenomenon.
For that reason, this X-American or transnationalist culture should not and cannot be generalized with "gradual assimilation". Rise of nationalism of the home country can "de-assmilate" and reverse the progress. The Anglo Western European immigrants might be more willing to give up the ties to their national origins in exchange for the white privileges. On the other hand, Mexican Americans sometimes preferred mobility and familial connections over citizenship, while such transnationalism cannot be implemented by Asian immigrants, who had no geographical proximity to the West Coast. Even within the greater Mexican American community, the social context made Californios and 20th Century Mexican immigrants two very distinct groups cultural-wee.
We should not see culture of immigrant community as a simple binary structure that resembles the fight between two national identities. Oftentimes, the two already shaped each other well before, similar to how American modernization had impacted the Mexican nationalism or how American Southwest still ironically retains remnants of Mexican culture with name of cities like Los Angeles, El Paso, or San Antonio. Once again, we are going to need to further apply intersectionality to subdivide these immigrant cultures and examine each of them much more closely.
The Intro of Becoming Mexican American tackles the difficult question of what made up the Mexican American culture through a historiographical study. In some historians' eyes, it was the "negation of assimilation", a fight between the "traditional" and the "modern", or something "contested, temporal, and emergent". Culture is certainly contingent to a social context and such contingency in terms shapes culture into a frequently changed phenomenon.
For that reason, this X-American or transnationalist culture should not and cannot be generalized with "gradual assimilation". Rise of nationalism of the home country can "de-assmilate" and reverse the progress. The Anglo Western European immigrants might be more willing to give up the ties to their national origins in exchange for the white privileges. On the other hand, Mexican Americans sometimes preferred mobility and familial connections over citizenship, while such transnationalism cannot be implemented by Asian immigrants, who had no geographical proximity to the West Coast. Even within the greater Mexican American community, the social context made Californios and 20th Century Mexican immigrants two very distinct groups cultural-wee.
We should not see culture of immigrant community as a simple binary structure that resembles the fight between two national identities. Oftentimes, the two already shaped each other well before, similar to how American modernization had impacted the Mexican nationalism or how American Southwest still ironically retains remnants of Mexican culture with name of cities like Los Angeles, El Paso, or San Antonio. Once again, we are going to need to further apply intersectionality to subdivide these immigrant cultures and examine each of them much more closely.