The Courage to Crack Open the Melting Pot: Turning a Bland Potage into a Spicy Stew
by Patty Christiena Willis
Many times I have heard people say, “The United States is a melting pot.” Those words have always been spoken with a positive facial expression. What do they mean? Why would I want to consider cracking such a pot open?
Emma Lazarus, the author of the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty, was born in 1847. Her family were Sephardic Jews, originally from Spain. In 1492, the same year that Columbus sailed to this continent, there was an expulsion order that sent all Jews and Muslims either out of Spain or they had to convert to Catholicism: a high price to pay to enter the Spanish melting pot. Many Jews, such as Emma Lazarus’s ancestors, fled persecution to Dutch territory in South America which was then captured by the Portuguese and became current-day Brazil. The Inquisition once again targeted Jews, and her ancestors were among the original 23 Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1642, fleeing from persecution in Recife, Brazil. During her lifetime, wave after wave of migration to our shores inspired her to write:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
Emma was born during the years when one million Irish migrated to this country, fleeing the devastation of the potato famine. At the same time, large numbers of Germans were also fleeing political and economic unrest. Rapid settlement of the West began with the passing of the Homestead Act in 1862. Attracted by the opportunity to own land, more Europeans began to immigrate. Chinese came to the other coast, attracted by the Gold Rush; in the1860s, it was the Chinese immigrants who helped build the Transcontinental Railroad, after which some settled in mining towns of Wyoming, such as Rock Springs, where my own ancestors opened a bakery at the turn of the century. The Chinese immigrants lived separately and were treated separately, with less pay for more work. The other miners feared that they were taking their jobs. A familiar story? The gates closed to Chinese immigration with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an act which separated the people who had migrated earlier from their families. In 1885, more fear led to the Rock Springs Massacre, where white miners killed 28 Chinese workers and burned their homes. The Chinese were excluded from the melting pot—or could it be that the melting pot also acted as an instrument of cruelty and even murder?
I became interested in the phenomenon of the melting pot when I read the book “Convictions” by Marcus Borg. When his parents, one Swedish and one Norwegian, were married in the early 1920s, their families wondered how their relationship would survive coming from such different cultures. I wonder what they disagreed on? It is hard for us now to consider how different Norwegian customs would be from Swedish ones. But they were. They are. What happened to all those customs? Did those differences in culture and language between Marcus Borg’s mother and father melt away?
My own family background doesn’t help us understand the melting away of cultures because, being English-speaking from the British Isles, they arrived already blending in. Their big work was simply getting themselves out of poverty.
My wife, Mary Lou Prince’s beloved grandmother Rubye, has a different story. Her parents, both born in Denmark, met and fell in love on the boat to the United States, married and had children. They lived in the same city as my Scottish and English ancestors, but they resided on the other side of the tracks, while mine were given land on the eastern side by the mountains, closer to the center in a higher rent area. When Rubye arrived at school, she had to speak English. The language of her parents was only for home. In Rubye’s neighborhood, she was surrounded by other Danish -speaking immigrants, and in the grammar school, Italian and German-speaking students joined her class, as well as African Americans. By the time Rubye was an adult, she didn’t speak Danish, except for some swear words. She didn’t really know anything about Denmark. To become an American, she gave up her culture.
Indigenous languages were forbidden by the teachers of the Indian Schools set up all over this country to, in Captain Richard Pratt’s words,“kill the Indian and save the man.” When they lost their languages, it was different from Rubye’s experience. They did not choose to lose them: their languages were forbidden. They were robbed of their languages. The Abenaki, the indigenous people who lived around my ancestors who migrated from England to the east coast, were subject to eugenics. Many Abenaki women were sterilized so that they would not have children. This tragic past has given birth to ground-breaking truth and reconciliation work in Maine that could be a model for other parts of our country.
My image of the melting pot comes from my father. When I was a junior high and high school student, and my mother was going to arrive home too late to prepare dinner, she said to me, “Patty, please start cooking something or you know what your father will do.” If I arrived too late, my father would have started preparations, emptying out the contents of the Tupperware containers full of leftovers. Each of the dishes now existing as a leftover had been carefully prepared. There was chicken curry, spicy chili, steamed green beans, Spanish rice, taco fixings, and baked acorn squash that had once been dripping with butter hot from the oven for Sunday dinner, but, in the space of a few seconds, my father would have them all in one pot, steaming on the stove. Cooked long enough, the stew took on a gray color, the contents unrecognizable. When we sat and stared forlornly at our plates knowing we would have to eat the contents, my father would remind us of our Wyoming cowboy ancestors and how they could eat anything they could find.
I wonder if we need to re-think how we see ourselves and each other. Could we begin to seek out our differences and the ways that we might surprise each other instead of the ways we are the same or “like-minded?” I think that we are different, and if we really listened to each other about a variety of topics I believe that we would find diversity. What if we cherished that diversity? I remember the first time I talked with someone who smiled in a friendly way at what I was saying, said, “I don’t feel that way,” and then explained her ideas in a way not intended to change mine. Wow! I was accustomed to the face/the look/the disapproval. It can be liberating to value differences.
Instead of opening the melting pot that has been closed to or been a place of torture for Native Americans, African Americans, Asians, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Latin-x and many other people, I suggest that together we get out that mallet and break it into pieces. That pot that never served everyone anyway deserves to let go of its present form. Could we take those shards, as do ceramic artisans in Japan, and piece them together in a new way, using gold to show, not hide, the cracks, to express our passion for a new nation that is truly for all? Could we fill in those cracks with stories about the different ways we think and feel, and about what we love and what we dream? Together we could make a spicy stew!
