I see not America only, not only Liberty’s nation but other
nations preparing, I see tremendous entrances and exits, new
combination, the solidarity of races.
~
”
Years of the Modern
”
Walt Whitman
I see not America only, not only Liberty’s nation but other nations preparing, I see tremendous entrances and exits, new
combination, the solidarity of races.
~ “Years of the Modern”
Walt Whitman
America is a rainbow. It’s not just red, white, and blue; it’s black, yellow, brown, sun-tanned, beige, cream, ecru, buff, bronze, golden, olive, khaki, chestnut, copper, mahogany, chocolate, cinnamon, terra-cotta, brick, ginger, midnight, raven, dusky, jet, and sable.
American is a rainbow, and Gilroy is a reflection of that rainbow. Sometimes when we are caught up in our everyday lives, we miss the diversity that exists all around us. There are people from all over the world living together with us right here in Gilroy. Do you notice the Japanese woman selling fresh-grown flowers on Tenth Street each holiday? Do you see the people from Sudan working at Gilroy Foods and Home Depot? Have you met the hardest working fieldworkers, the Mixtecas? Do you notice the man from Sierra Leone whose son is graduating from high school? Do you know the Austrian Gilroyan who escaped the concentration camps of the Nazis? Even “white” people aren’t just white. They are so many different shades and hues, from so many different parts of the world.
There are many challenges in coming to America.
Sometimes being another color of the rainbow is a negative experience. When you are experiencing culture shock, loneliness, grief, and confusion in the new life you are attempting to create, there are dark nights of great despair, especially if you have come from a country like Angola, where the fighting has lasted so long that children have forgotten how to play and only know how to act like soldiers.
As I give driving lessons to a friend from Africa, he decides to try the drive-through window at Jack in the Box. It is a new challenge; as he gingerly maneuvers the car closer to the loud speaker and peers toward it, he expects to hear, “Can I help you?” Instead, nothing happens … no voice comes out of the loudspeaker. As we wait, finally my friend turns to me and asks, “Where’s the magic?”
They come here with hope; they come filled with dreams, just as our ancestors did. They come here to find the magic. Whether the story has a happy ending or ends in tragedy still remains to be seen for many immigrants. In a country where many have had to fight for every kind of right, the ideals upon which our country was founded remain what makes it great. It is the strength found in the combination of so unique and diverse a group of people as have joined together to form this nation, a nation with more inventions and innovations to its credit than any other in the history of the world.
Tomorrow when many of us are celebrating by shooting off fireworks, there will be people from Africa here in Gilroy sharing in a feast of freshly roasted goat. Not exactly an American tradition, but what more perfect way to recognize Independence Day than with such a celebration of the freedom we enjoy here?
Where’s the magic? It is the dream for which we strive:
France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter – it was the graves at Shiloh, and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
