American Notes (3)

Tributes to America are almost as old as America itself. I once remember stumbling across a sonnet by Goethe dedicated to the US, written in the early 1830s. (Not a particularly good piece of poetry, by the way.) They are numerous enough to constitute some kind of artistic genre. I don't know enough about the subject matter, but I have the vague impression that there are some predictable themes.

Early tributes, written by Europeans tended to see the nascent US as an exotic land where the best Enlightened notions of liberty and progress could have a fresh start free from the vices bequeathed by the Dark Ages. Goethe and, of course, De Tocqueville are good exponents. Even by the 1880s Dvorak could think of the US as a "New World" full of untapped sounds and melodies that would breathe new life into the romantic musical movement. In spite of the differences between these three names (just to pick a few) they had one thing in common: the US was something of a benign clean slate. It was not a place for high culture. It was a place to admire, sometimes to rather bizarre extents, but that could hardly be imitated; Europe could not learn much from the US even if it wanted to. The idea that the US would exert influence over the rest of the world was rather unthinkable.

Of course, Latin Americans had a different view. After all, the US was influencing events in the region. By any measure, seizing almost half of a country's territory (Mexico) counts as influence. By the 1860s it was clear to every thinking American that Cuba would become a state of the US, the question being not if but when. An American private citizen took over Nicaragua. The list goes on and on.

Going back to the topic of tributes to the US, what began as an abstract sense of opportunity in the minds of European intellectuals acquired a concrete shape in the form of mass migration. By the last decades of the XIXth Century, millions of Europeans, tens of millions when the dust settled, moved to the US in one of the largest human migrations in history. The "American Dream" became part of modern vocabulary.

So, I am on well-trod ground. But this creates some kind of challenge for me. I want to write a tribute to the US that does not draw on the concept of the "American Dream" because it does not form part of my own experience. Long before I was born, the world had stopped thinking about the US as "exotic." In fact, it was probably the country best visualized by people all over the world, although with lots of misperceptions. After World War II imitating the US was not only a possibility, but in some places even a necessity. By the 1950s, as Hirschman tells it, the French government appointed a commission of experts to study the US and learn from its success ("Comment font-ils?" was the title, unthinkable these days). The defeated Axis powers had American constitutions and institutional reforms foisted on them. In Spain, my next adoptive country, Franco sensed the futility of being cut off from American influence and finally bowed to it. (Of course, the US also realized it could use the Generalissimo as a bulwark against Communism in Southern Europe.)

Furthermore, my own experience of the US differs from that of the vast majority of Colombians (or other foreigners for that matter). I did not go to the US escaping economic want. In fact, it's very likely that I would have been financially better off had I stayed in Colombia. I did not follow the path of social mobility propelled by hard manual labor and entrepreneurship that characterizes the epitome of the "American Dream."

Incidentally, I have issues with the very notion of the "American Dream" although it is undeniable that the US has offered millions of people a better livelihood than they could have obtained had they stayed in their birthplaces. That is no small accomplishment. First, I'm not sure the American Dream is entirely American. As far as I know, Australia and Canada (and, in the early 20th Century, Argentina) have been every bit as open and beneficial to migrants as the US, just to name a few. Second, I doubt it works in practice as the myth would have it. The American jails host many children of Hispanic immigrants that instead of moving up the social ladder as their parents hoped, ended up trapped in urban poverty and crime. As you might imagine, I find myself often at political odds with the most representative believers and beneficiaries of the American Dream. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the highly successful Cuban-American community that produces some of the most hardline rightists in the US.

I belong to a different kind of migrant, one that is relatively recent in the history of the US: the type of migrant that comes in search of high culture and learning. No matter how much this segment has grown over time, it remains a tiny fraction of the total immigration the US receives. Even within the group of immigrants that arrive to the US in pursuit of higher education, people like me ought to be distinguished from those who obtain degrees in, say, IT and go on to join the American productive apparatus. (I'm a beneficiary of the confusion this generates. As a university professor of social sciences, I was eligible for a fast-track to permanent residence that was obviously designed to speed up the process for technologists.)

In short, my tribute to the US, for what it's worth, is the tribute of someone that arrived to it in rather unusual circumstances and spent all its time in unusual places (research universities). With any luck, I can pull off something here that, while straying from the well-known path, can still illuminate some aspects of American life.