Where I Stand on the Cultural Adjustment Spectrum

I finished the last blog by saying that I would express where I stand within the Cultural Adjustment Spectrum (assimilation - acculturation without assimilation - ambivalence - opposition/rejection) in this one.  However, given that this is a topic my own life experience has led me to think about in-depth, this is still only an initial overview of my thoughts.  

Intuitively, due to my own cross-cultural experience living as an American in Brazil for 16 years, and as a semi-Brazilian in the US for 11, I tend toward the second option (acculturation without assimilation), while recognizing that a certain amount of ambivalence may be inevitable for those who move between worlds.  I believe there is great richness lost in mere assimilation, even if it is easiest for the receiving country.  On the other extreme, the terms "opposition" and "rejection" do not sit easily with me.  This does not mean, however, that I am always opposed to immigrant or minority groups bringing social change.  

I deeply admire, among others, people like the Settlement House workers, the women suffragists, and peaceful participants in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  I admire their refusal to use violence, despite the intense frustration of their causes.  Instead of bringing destruction, they helped us to live more fully into the ideals on which this nation was founded.  Those ideals - of justice, liberty, equality, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on - are, to this day, part of the reason immigrants want to come to the United States.  I think immigrant populations have and can continue to help us live out those ideals more fully.  

Unlike many, I do not think that change in and of itself is a bad thing - be it change in culture, in social systems, or in the political forces at work in our country.  We have always been a nation of immigrants, and every new wave has brought its own set of changes.  The realities that some conservative groups now so vocally seek to defend are not the realities that existed here a few decades ago, but the realities that were created by interactions between our culture and the groups of immigrants of each time period.  We are a continually changing nation, and hopefully an ever improving one.