Fall/Winter 2003-04
We are the world: Minnesota goes international
"It is part of our education to learn about the issues of the world and especially of our own backyard. After all, ordinary people make extraordinary history." -History professor Erika Lee, Minnesota Daily, September 22, 2003
CLA faculty scholars take their knowledge to Minnesota, and to the whole wide world...
Helga Leitner: Creating world citizens
Abdi Samatar: Unlocking the system
Elizabeth Heger Boyle: Ends of the Earth
Jigna Desai: Reaching beyond the stars
Robert McCaa: The negotiator
When I came to the University of Minnesota as a freshman in 1963, John F. Kennedy was still U.S. president—November 22 was still two months away. The world my friends and I inhabited was tidy and simple: It comprised the monolithic "us" (the U.S.-dominated "free world" of prosperous Western capitalist democracies and their allies), and the inchoate "them" (the Soviet Union, Iron Curtain countries, and "underdeveloped" nations that needed our protection from the Red Menace).
In my suburban high school, the world beyond Minnesota rarely showed its face. When it did, it was the face of an exchange student, who usually looked a lot like the rest of us and spoke impeccable, if slightly accented, English. Or it was TV coverage of a standoff at the Berlin Wall, of our seemingly invincible president addressing the nation, or of Castro or Khruschev brandishing a fist. Closer to home, it was a number seared into the flesh of a Jewish classmate's mother's arm.
My classmates and I were the "new generation" to whom our president in his inaugural address had famously passed the leadership torch. We were exhorted to shine that torch on the darkest, least "developed," regions of the world—and make them more like us. Little did we know how little we knew.
My closed world
In my Minneapolis suburb, local immigrant communities were all but invisible, as were the Twin Cities' small and isolated urban black and Indian communities.
When new arrivals (nearly all from Europe) crossed the threshold to America, they were expected to scrape from their psyches the accumulated cultural grit of the homes they had left behind, and to send underground their values, their languages, their rich and cherished family and cultural histories. Without much ado, they completed the requisite crash course in American life, then melted imperceptibly into the cultural stewpot. At least that's how we saw it.
My suburban classmates and I were all immigrants, or the children, grandchildren, or great-great grandchildren of immigrants; but we generally thought of ourselves simply as "Americans." We looked, talked, dressed, and acted "American." We drove American cars. We learned "American values" of free speech and free enterprise. If we thought about our ancestors at all, they were as old ghosts whose stiff black-and-white images cast only the faintest shadow on our techni-color but oddly monochromatic world.
Some of us were more than a little embarrassed by the vestigial accents and "old ways" of our Polish, German, or Scandinavian grandparents. We had little sense of or interest in our own cultural heritage and wanted only to live the American Dream. If we saw people on the streets who didn't look like us, we thought of them as "foreigners."
We were, in short, pretty provincial.
Enter the University of Minnesota
For those of us who had viewed the world "out there" only through (mid)Western cultural lenses, the world of the University was a revelation. I was awed in 1963 by many things on this campus—the sheer size of the grounds, the beauty of the historic buildings and the landscape, the felt presence of history and of Big Ideas. But most of all, I was struck by how international it was. Only a few miles from home, I had entered a new world. The University was Minnesota's first truly international community, about the only place in Minnesota where French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Farsi were spoken alongside English. It offered a sneak preview of a 21st century global community that many of us could then have barely imagined.
Fast forward to 2003
Today, Minnesota looks more and more like the rest of the world. Its cultural landscape is richly veined with international ore. The "inner ring" suburb I grew up in is home to growing communities of new immigrants and people of color.
The aromas, flavors, customs, and languages of many lands and cultures mingle and intersect on street corners and in neighborhoods, stores and restaurants, religious congregations, theaters, boardrooms, and classrooms throughout the Twin Cities. The campus, too, is more international than ever.
New immigrants no longer leave their ethnic identities on the doorstep. Their cultural practices and values are a visible part of a more multicultural, and more multiculturally challenged, Minnesota. Even people whose families have been "American" for many generations have begun digging beneath American soil to find the tangled roots of the hybrid family trees from which they sprouted. And our language reflects these changes by affirming the many different ways of being American—Asian American, African American, Italian American, Mexican American, Native American...
"Globalization" has brought to our doorsteps, our neighborhoods, and our schools the world beyond this nation's borders. The world "out there" has come home.
And that, in a nutshell, is what this issue is about.