CHAPTER 5

The Territory of Culture: Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Arts

In her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, journalist Jennifer 8. Lee tells the story of a White American foreign service officer stationed in Iraq in the early 2000s who explained the popularity of the two improvised Chinese restaurants in the Baghdad Green Zone. “It’s a taste of home,” he said. “What could be more American than take-out Chinese?”¹

Lee’s story makes two points about American culture. First, it shows just how significantly immigration changes the way we live. As of 2015, Chinese restaurants in the United States outnumbered all the McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and Kentucky Fried Chickens combined, and they are spread nearly everywhere across the country. Our benchmark for Americanness, Lee notes, is apple pie, but how frequently, she asks, “do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?”²

The second point is that the customs immigrants bring with them change when they get here. And here, too, Chinese food is an example—because the “Chinese” food most Americans eat is not the same as what was eaten in China. Many cultural elements from the home country—be they foods, music, or festivals—become “Americanized” in some ways. Often they turn into things that, like chop suey, are neither fully American nor fully Chinese. They turn into mixtures, blending aspects of immigrant and American cultures. Indeed, what is conspicuous about the cultural changes that immigration creates is that they are frequently new, often different, and sometimes wonderfully unique.

There is hardly any part of American popular culture and the arts that hasn’t been influenced by immigration. Immigrants along with their children have had an impact on the foods we eat, altered the music we listen and dance to, and shaped the novels we read. Films and television programs reflect the country’s greater ethnic diversity. In cities and towns around the country, new ethnic celebrations have become part of public life. These cultural shifts and innovations are an inherent part of how immigration has been remaking and in many ways revitalizing the United States today. It is an age-old American pattern. The very culture we now think of as uniquely American reflects numerous innovations by earlier immigrants, and the changes immigrants are introducing today build on their predecessors’ achievements.

We Are What We Eat

The phrase “we are what we eat” generally refers to how food affects our health, but it also relates to immigrant influences on American diets. Immigration has transformed Americans’ palates and reconfigured the culinary canon.³ This pattern is as old as the country itself. Hot dogs and Cracker Jacks may seem quintessentially American, but they were introduced by German immigrants in the nineteenth century; those same immigrants also gave us lager beer. The impact of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Italian immigrants is legendary. They brought pasta and marinara sauce with them, and, so it is said, invented the spaghetti and meatballs dish in this country; the American staple, pizza, also owes its origins to Italian arrivals over a century ago. By 2014, the United States had over seventy-two thousand pizza restaurants (including four major pizza chains). On any given day, an estimated one in eight Americans had eaten pizza.

When it comes to food, becoming American in the modern era, as historian Donna Gabaccia has argued, has required mass production and mass marketing—go corporate and become American, as she puts it.⁴ As foods associated with particular ethnic groups have become mass market products, they have sometimes lost their ethnic identities and along the way become “Americanized” to adapt to popular tastes, and in some versions, added other ethnic or regional ingredients and flavors.

Consider the bagel, a classic immigrant food from the past that has become a standard American product. Eastern European Jews brought bagels to the United States from Poland in the late nineteenth century, although these “humble, hard rolls purchased from the immigrant baker” were not a central culinary icon for Jewish immigrants at the time. The original New York bagels a hundred years ago were smaller than they are today—two to three ounces, and almost always plain, with no sesame seeds or onions. They got their crust from being boiled in water, and then were baked in a gas oven until their chewy interiors were cooked through.⁵ By the 1940s and 1950s, the bagel had become a symbol of Jewishness among second-generation Jews even while they were leaving many other aspects of their parents’ homeland cultures behind. Joan Nathan, a cookbook author, relates how when her family moved to the New York City suburb of Larchmont in 1946, her father devised a plan to discover whether his new neighbors were, like him, Jewish: he went to the Bronx and brought back some bagels, figuring that if the neighbors knew what the rolls were, they were Jewish. (They were; as soon as the neighbors saw the bagels, they recognized them.) Nathan also describes the Jewish Sunday morning ritual of lox, bagels, and cream cheese with her parents—something that I too, as a third-generation New Yorker, recall from my childhood in the 1950s, although I did not know at the time that cream cheese was not a Jewish product but rather introduced and developed by English Quakers in eighteenth-century America.⁶

Bagels did not make it to the national market until the 1960s, when the Lender family in New Haven, Connecticut, reorganized their bagel business, buying new machines that could produce more bagels more quickly, eliminating hand rolling and substituting steaming for boiling, and adding flash freezing and plastic bag packaging for distribution around the country. Two decades later Lender’s was purchased by Kraft, which produced a softer bagel that was now, like most American breads, sweetened with sugar. The new standardized mass-produced bagel also now came in a variety of flavors, including cinnamon and blueberry.⁷ Other food conglomerates got into the act as well, with corporate food giants like Thomas, Pepperidge Farm, and Sara Lee producing bagels. No longer a specifically Jewish food, bagels have truly become mainstream, going from the Jewish bun to the American breakfast bread.⁸ Nearly two out of three Americans—a whopping 205 million people—consumed bagels in 2019.⁹

Chinese and Mexican foods have also become ubiquitous, although interestingly, unlike bagels and spaghetti, they are often still seen as foreign, despite the long history of many Chinese and Mexican dishes in the United States.¹⁰ No doubt one reason for this perception is that a high proportion of Chinese and Mexican Americans are of recent immigrant origin, in the first or second generation, whereas by now Jews and Italians are overwhelmingly in the third and higher generations. Moreover, Jews and Italians are seen as White, while in the popular imagination the Chinese and Mexicans are generally viewed as non-White and outside the dominant racial majority population.

Chinese restaurants date back to the mid-nineteenth century when the large numbers of male sojourners created both a high demand for eating places and willingness to work in them.¹¹ It was earlier Chinese immigrants who first invented made-in-America Chinese food, with Chinese-origin dishes in Americanized forms, like chop suey and chow mein becoming standard fare in Chinese restaurants. It may be surprising to learn that in 1942, chop suey and chow mein were added to the US Army cookbook—an indication of how widespread these foods had become by that time.¹² Since the 1970s, Chinese cuisine has been redefined to include dishes from a much broader array of regions in China. Before 1975, Chinese restaurants in the United States were almost always Cantonese, but immigrants in the past few decades have brought a wide variety of cuisines with them, including Sichuan, Hunan, and Shanghai.¹³ And there are new American-style dishes. General Tso’s chicken, a popular Chinese chef’s special in America, was inspired by a dish created in Taipei in the 1950s and named for a Qing dynasty military leader to whom there is no recorded connection; the American version, developed in New York in the 1970s, not only features broccoli, but to the shock of its original Taiwanese inventor, tastes sweet. Interestingly, American Chinese food has developed its own identity “so much so that it is sold in Korea, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic as its own distinct cuisine.”¹⁴

Whereas Chinese restaurants were once associated with Chinatowns or gateway cities with large Chinese populations, in recent decades they have spread all over the country, including to towns far from a sizable Chinese immigrant community, and that may have hardly any Chinese or Asian American residents. Arriving in large numbers in recent years, Chinese immigrants from Fujian Province are key figures behind this dispersion, creating new restaurants or converting older ones into all-you-can-eat-buffets in the South and Midwest.¹⁵ Most of the roughly forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century were small-scale operations, but there are also a number of fast-food chains. The biggest is Panda Express, a Chinese restaurant chain established in the 1980s by an immigrant couple from Taiwan and Hong Kong.¹⁶ By 2019, it had roughly two thousand eateries around the country that, in the words of one newspaper account, dish up a “stir-fry empire.”¹⁷And while many Americans find comfort in old Chinese American classics like chop suey or sweet and sour chicken, and many others savor Hunan and Sichuan dishes tweaked to suit American tastes, new inventions have come on the scene that merge food customs like Panda Express’s cream cheese rangoons, wonton wrappers filled with cream cheese and served with sweet and sour sauce. Or to the delight of cosmopolitan foodies, there are such creations as the chili fried chicken conceived by Eric Huang, the “impressively pedigreed Taiwanese American chef” described in the New Yorker’s review of Pecking House, a takeout and delivery operation he opened in New York City in 2020. “Inspired as much by the American South as it is by his heritage,” the New Yorker’s food critic Hannah Goldfield wrote, “the finishing seasoning” for the brined and battered chicken is “a tantalizing medley of crushed Tianjin chilies, Szechuan peppercorn, salt, and sugar.”¹⁸

The Hispanic impact on the American diet and menu is even more pronounced than that of Chinese Americans, which is not surprising given that Hispanics are nearly a fifth of the country’s population, with Mexican Americans the largest group. Tex-Mex is an old regional cuisine of the Southwest, but Mexican food was invisible to many, probably most, Americans until the 1970s; it has gone, as one journalist puts it, from Mexican curio to regional American treat, to assimilation into the country as a whole—from barrios to restaurants to supermarkets to school cafeterias.¹⁹

Salsa has overtaken ketchup in sales since the 1990s, and sales of corn snacks and tortilla chips, a Mexican American variant of fried tortillas born in Texas, were not far behind those of potato chips at last count.²⁰ It could be argued that salsa as well as tortilla chips have become so popular in recent decades that many or perhaps even most Americans no longer consider them “ethnic.” Burritos and tacos (tortillas wrapped around a stuffing), however, are still identified with Mexicans even as they have become pervasive in fast-food restaurants and the frozen food aisles of supermarkets throughout the country.

Fast-food chains have popularized Mexican-origin dishes all across the United States, with Taco Bell the largest chain of all. Taco Bell may have been started by an Anglo named Glen Bell, but the chain took advantage of a growing taste for Mexican food, selling it “fast and cheap” in Americanized versions, and as food historian Jeffrey Pilcher observes, allowing Americans in other racial and ethnic groups to sample it without actually going into Mexican neighborhoods.²¹ Beginning with a single location in southern California in 1962, by 2021 Taco Bell had expanded to around seven thousand US branches under the ownership of the global fast-food corporation Yum! Brands. Chipotle, founded in 1993 by a non-Mexican in Colorado, had more than twenty-five hundred restaurants in the United States by 2020, and according to one food writer, set off an American love affair for Mission-style burritos (large sized, and filled with extra rice and other ingredients), which reportedly first became popular among Mexicans in California in the 1960s.²² The author of a book on the history of Mexican food in the United States (subtitled How Mexican Food Conquered America) puts it well when he writes that today, “Mexican food is … in our school cafeterias [and] … in convenience stores heating on rolling racks.… [It] fills our grocery aisles, feeds underclassmen, becomes tween trends or front-page news—and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask your kid about spaghetti tacos.” On space missions, NASA has even used flour tortillas for astronauts’ sustenance.²³

In general, American supermarkets have become sites of multicultural mixing. Walk into virtually any large supermarket in America and the impact of recent immigration is striking. The popular frozen TV dinners of the post–World War II period, with their roast turkey or fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and soft vegetables, are still with us, but they have been joined by an array of new products, including many that owe their origin to immigrants of the post-1965 period. In our era of mass production of ethnic foods by large corporations and in today’s fast-food nation, Mexican origin foods as well as those from a wide range of other countries are now part of everyday eating. Tacos, tortilla wraps, pita bread, wantons, and sushi—you name it, immigrants have been a source of innovation in modern American cuisine.²⁴

In many ways of course it’s a case of business as usual, as entrepreneurs and big companies seek to capitalize on new ethnic products, although it has been easier for new ethnic foods and ethnic-inspired dishes to gain acceptance in contemporary America than in earlier eras now that ordinary Americans, as Gabaccia comments, “are much more eager than in 1900 to entertain themselves with the cultural gifts of new immigrants,” and when new foods are picked up and produced by corporate giants, and promoted by modern mass marketing and communications.²⁵ Also, the growing number of well-off, young, highly educated professionals in major metropolitan areas are an enthusiastic clientele for high-end restaurants whose immigrant-origin owners and chefs offer new tastes along with intricate inventions that draw on home-country cuisines. Of the ten chefs on Food & Wine magazine’s list of the best new chefs in 2020, six were immigrants or children of immigrants. Among them were Niven Patel, a Gujarati American who supplied his farm-to-table Miami restaurants with produce from his small farm south of the city, including ingredients for “bowls of Rancho Patel eggplant and potatoes simmered in a spiced tomato gravy … a riff on a staple found in most Gujarati kitchens.” Tavel Bristol-Joseph, a Guyanese immigrant pastry chef in Austin, Texas, created a sophisticated bread pudding made from a monthslong fermenting process. In an expensive Manhattan restaurant, Korean-born Eunjo Park served up panfried rice cakes dunked in chili jam made with “plenty of raw garlic, mirin, and gochujang, and topped with a translucent layer of Benton’s ham with a flourish of rice pearls for crunch.”²⁶

Whether Americans are dining at a pricey restaurant, getting a bite at a fast-food chain, or buying groceries at the supermarket, the fact is that the immigration of recent decades has been one of the prime movers in changing American tastes and food-consumption patterns. Eating the cuisines of different ethnic groups, indeed a multiethnic mix of foods, has become the American way.²⁷ Many highly popular and widely consumed foods that immigrants brought with them or created here still retain strong ethnic associations, but some connected with recent immigrant groups that are mass produced for a national market, like salsa and tortilla chips, seem to be in the process of losing their ethnic ties, and may have lost them already for many Americans.²⁸ Either way, what Americans eat is not the same today as it was before the 1960s, and to no small degree, the massive immigration of the last half century is responsible.

The Arts and Popular Culture: New Faces in Old Places

If, as some scholars say, immigration is about new faces in old places, then this is part of the story in the arts. A growing number of post-1965 immigrants and their US-born children are making a mark in a range of established arenas, from films and television to symphony orchestras and literature. To name just a few leading popular actresses and actors, Hispanics include Salma Hayek, who began her career starring in telenovelas (television soap operas) in her native Mexico and whose US breakthrough role was in the film Frida as the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; Cuban-born Andy Garcia, whose many starring roles include the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven; and Edward James Olmos, a second-generation Mexican star of the hit television series Miami Vice and Academy Award nominee for his portrayal of a Los Angeles math teacher in the film Stand and Deliver. Among the Asian American stars who stand out are Aziz Ansari, the son of Indian immigrants and first Asian American man to win a Golden Globe for acting in television, in the comedy series Masters of None, which he also co-created; Lucy Liu, a second-generation Chinese American, perhaps best known for her award-winning acting in the television comedy Ally McBeal and two Charlie’s Angels films; and Filipina immigrant Lea Salonga, who broke into American musical theater at the age of nineteen when she originated the lead role in Broadway’s Miss Saigon, becoming the first Asian woman to win a Tony award.

In classical music, Asian Americans have become an important presence. Between 2002 and 2014, the proportion of Asian American musicians in American orchestras went from 5 to 9 percent, and at some top orchestras the figure was even higher, such as around 20 percent at the New York Philharmonic, whose past music director (2009–17) was the mixed-race native New Yorker Alan Gilbert, the son of a Japanese American mother and White father.²⁹

In literature, too, there has been some changing of the guard. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow brought the angst and aspirations of the Jewish immigrant and second generation to a wider public in books like Goodbye, Columbus and The Adventures of Augie March, now a host of award-winning first- and second-generation novelists have been writing of the struggles of children of immigrants with roots in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America to become American, from Gish Jen’s Typical American (Chinese American), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Dominican American) to Jhumpa Lahiri’s (Indian American) The Namesake.³⁰

It is important of course not to exaggerate the ease of ethnic succession as contemporary immigrants and their children follow in the footsteps of those who came before in the arts; the process is not as seamless or simple as it may at first appear. Although Latinos, Asian Americans, and Blacks of immigrant origin are a growing presence in Hollywood, on Broadway, and in television, they are still underrepresented relative to their proportion of the US population, especially in prominent roles. In 2017, for example, Latinos had 5.2 percent of top film roles and Asian Americans had 3.4 percent, while Whites, with 77 percent, remained overrepresented.³¹ The way ethnic and racial characters are portrayed in movies and on television is also, unhappily, in many cases reminiscent of the past, reinforcing views of immigrant-origin ethnic or racial groups as low in status, and bolstering negative stereotypes such as Latino drug dealers and sexpots as well as Asian nerds and exoticized women.³² Indeed, a hundred years after the mass immigration from Italy ended and when most Italian Americans have become solidly middle class, they are still often stereotyped in television and film as criminals and violent mobsters.³³

Nor should we overlook tensions or at least ambivalence that may result from another kind of cultural change that has taken place. The calendar of parades and ethnic festivals in traditional gateway cities all around the country has been updated as Caribbean, Latino, and Asian American celebrations have joined old staples like the Irish American Saint Patrick’s Day and Italian American Columbus Day parades. On the one hand, many places have been welcoming or accepting of these additions. New York City, for example, has had no trouble integrating more than two dozen new ethnic festivals into the city’s event calendar; the Hispanic Day parade, to mention one, now marches up Fifth Avenue on the Sunday before or after Columbus Day. The West Indian American Day parade, another made-in-the-US innovation, is the city’s largest ethnic festival of all, attracting hundreds of thousands on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, and has become a mandatory campaign stop for politicians seeking citywide office. While modeled after Trinidad’s Carnival, it has undergone significant changes in New York, as it has turned into, among other things, a pan–West Indian event drawing West Indians from nations without Carnival traditions and takes place on a US holiday in September, Labor Day, rather than right before Lent.³⁴ On the West Coast, in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose, California, which boasts a large Cinco de Mayo celebration and Chinese New Year parade as well as a Tet (Vietnamese New Year) festival, residents have grown accustomed to the ethnic celebrations, and see them as part of the regular array of public events in their city and region.³⁵ On the other hand, research conducted in Kennett Square, a town about thirty miles from Philadelphia, indicates that the welcome, at least initially, may be less warm. In the space of just a decade, this affluent White English-speaking community had by 2000 become home to a significant Latino, mainly Mexican, population drawn to work in the mushroom industry. After three years of celebrating Cinco de Mayo, the festival had been moved in 2004 from the main street to back alleys and parking lots, reflecting, as folklorist Debra Lattanzi Shutika observes, the growing ambivalence of the English-speaking residents toward their Mexican neighbors. By 2015, however, the festival was back on the main street, suggesting that the Mexican community had by then gained enough clout to return it to the town center, although how much discomfort with the celebration remained among White residents is unclear.³⁶ In Silicon Valley cities, even when long-established residents became used to the growing number of ethnically themed events, some remained ambivalent, complaining in interviews that these events had come at the expense of “American” celebrations.³⁷

New Themes, Forms, Styles, and Sounds

Changes in popular culture and the arts are not only about the addition of new celebrations to the existing event roster or immigrants in new groups succeeding those in earlier cohorts. Contemporary newcomers and their second-generation children have also been injecting energy and vitality into popular culture and public rituals. In the process, they have brought new (or in some cases dormant) themes to a wider public and often created new cultural forms that are becoming, or already have become, important parts of mainstream culture. The bottom line is that the changes are evidence of genuine transformations and a significant way that immigrants and their children have been redefining America.

If the Irish gave us Saint Patrick’s Day parades and Italians Columbus Day celebrations, Mexicans are already leaving a mark through the institutionalization of Cinco de Mayo festivities. Cinco de Mayo festivals are in truth a made-in-the-US creation, morphing from a Mexican holiday commemorating the victory of Mexican forces over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862, into a public celebration emphasizing Mexican cuisine, culture, and music, replete with commercial tie-ins for food and drinks. Cinco de Mayo events have been held all around the country, from San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, and Phoenix, to Boston and New York City; one of the largest is in Los Angeles, where about half the population is Hispanic, mostly of Mexican origin. The White House, too, officially began celebrating Cinco de Mayo in 2001 under George W. Bush, inviting Mexican dignitaries, artists, politicians, and prominent figures in the Mexican community to festivities on the White House lawn. The tradition was continued by President Obama who, in his last year in office, hosted an elaborate party in the East Room complete with a celebrity chef and Latin Grammy–winning band.

In film and television, the immigrant impact is about more than the number of ethnic minorities in leading roles, important as this is. Interestingly, ethnic minorities are more visible than they were in an earlier era when movie stars with Jewish and Italian immigrant origins typically changed their names to hide their ethnicity, and the themes of the films they starred in rarely had anything to do with their ethnic roots. Think, for example, of Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske), Tony Curtis (Bernard Schwartz), or Kirk Douglas (Issur Danielovitch Demsky), and Dean Martin (Dino Paul Crocetti) and Anne Bancroft (Anna Maria Louisa Italiano). Bancroft actually changed her name twice; initially she appeared in a number of live television dramas as Anne Marno, but was later told to change her surname as it was too ethnic for movies. It was “all right in those days [in 1952] for an Italian [actress] to be called Anna Magnani but not for an Italian American.”³⁸ This pattern of name changing has not altogether disappeared; Natalie Portman was born Natalie Hershlag, Charlie Sheen was Carlos Irwin Estévez, and Nicolas Cage was Nicolas Coppola.³⁹ But the practice is certainly less common today, when American audiences are well aware of, and have become accustomed to, Hispanic, Asian American, and increasingly African stars on-screen along with hearing names that indicate their ethnicity.

And while Latino and Asian American actors and actresses are still often typecast in “ethnic roles” that reinforce demeaning stereotypical images, this is not always case. Even when they star in ethnic roles on the big and small screen, these roles are in a growing number of mainstream productions that frequently present the problems confronting immigrants and people of color in a realistic and fresh way. This development is partly a product of the greater sensitivity in contemporary America to how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed on-screen, but also other factors: the large and expanding Latino, Asian American, and African American market; efforts by Latinos, Asians Americans, and Blacks themselves to carve out a larger role in the entertainment industry; and a sincere desire by those of immigrant origin in the industry as well as, it must be added, by others to highlight themes that are close to the heart of and reflect concerns in immigrant communities. A number of recent films and television productions have drawn attention to the prejudice and discrimination experienced by immigrants and their children, reviving a concern depicted in some films of earlier eras, although with a modern sensibility. Topics of specific importance to today’s immigrant groups have been featured in the mainstream entertainment industry, such as undocumented immigration and, especially among South Asians, arranged or semi-arranged marriages. A major theme of the 2017 romantic comedy The Big Sick, to mention one film, is about pressure from the male lead’s Pakistani immigrant parents to marry one of the Pakistani American women they introduce him to, while secretly he is involved with a White American graduate student, whom he ultimately marries. The film was inspired by the real-life love story of the male star and cowriter, Pakistani-born Kumail Nanjiani, who has spoken of how he “really thought I would get disowned by my parents” for marrying someone from outside the culture “because that is the narrative that you’re sort of raised with.… But … now they’ve been in America a little more than a decade I see them changing as people.” The film’s lesson for other cultures, according to Nanjiani, is that “when two representatives from two different cultures come together, it can be beautiful, but it is also quite challenging.”⁴⁰

Or consider two award-winning situation comedies that occupied prime-time slots and were cited by critics for adding freshness to network television. Ugly Betty, which won, among others, two Golden Globe and three Emmy awards, broke new ground in that it was produced by Latinos, had a Latino cast with a Latino story line, and was adapted from a Latin American telenovela. America Ferrara, herself the daughter of Honduran immigrants, played a Mexican American assistant from Queens who, despite sorely lacking in fashion sense, was determined to make it in fashion-magazine publishing. Running for four seasons on ABC, from 2006 to 2010, Ugly Betty, one reviewer noted, was one of the rare network shows to tackle such controversial issues as undocumented immigration, gay teens, and body image—doing so as part of the story lines, with humor and without adopting a didactic tone.⁴¹

Fresh Off the Boat, inspired by the memoir of chef and food personality Eddie Huang (the son of immigrants from Taiwan), ran for six seasons on ABC beginning in 2015. Its focus was a Taiwanese American family that moves from Washington, DC’s Chinatown to a mostly White neighborhood in Orlando, Florida, to open a cowboy-themed steak restaurant; the children struggle with adjusting to and fitting in at school, the mother wrestles with the cultural clash between her Taiwanese heritage and the Florida community where the family now lives, and the father embraces all things American. As the New Yorker’s television critic put it reviewing the first season, “The show has a radical quality, simply because it arrives in a television landscape with few Asian characters, almost none of them protagonists.… Simply watching people of color having a private conversation, one that’s not primarily about white people, is a huge deal. It changes who the joke is on.”⁴² Among innovations in later seasons, about half of one episode in 2018 was in Mandarin. A writer on the show explained, “I never thought there would be a primetime network sitcom centered on an Asian family. The fact that I get to work on it and pull so directly from my childhood, being a half-Chinese kid raised in a Mandarin-speaking household, is still hard to wrap my head around.… Why did we do an episode that features an entire storyline spoken in Mandarin? Because on a TV show about a Chinese family, we can. And hopefully people will enjoy it.”⁴³

To mention one more example, Ramy Youssef, the New York–born son of Egyptian immigrants, won a 2020 Golden Globe award for his role in the semi-autobiographical Hulu series Ramy, the first scripted television comedy about the Muslim American experience, drawing its humor from Ramy’s being caught between the world of his Egyptian Muslim parents and that of the American millennial generation. “You sit in contradiction,” Youssef said, “and that has been the space that I’m trying to navigate. And that’s the kind of space that I bring to the work.”⁴⁴

In the world of television, another change stimulated by immigration is the striking success of two Spanish-language television networks, Univision and Telemundo, catering to the huge Latino market, with more than 37 million Latinos in the United States speaking Spanish at home. Launched in the 1980s, the two networks have become media powerhouses, frequently beating their English counterparts in television ratings and featuring programs imported from Latin America as well as made in the United States, including news and talk shows as well as soap operas. Univision proclaimed itself the undisputed leader in Spanish-language news in the United States in 2019, when it was home to the number one evening news program on broadcast television with a Hispanic audience, Noticiero Univision, which averaged some 1.6 million viewers. The program’s ten-time Emmy-winning coanchor, Mexican-born and Miami-based Jorge Ramos, was listed by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential Hispanics in the United States.⁴⁵

Fewer Americans may read novels than watch television news shows or situation comedies, but they are an important part of American culture—and today’s immigrants have had a profound impact on them. The early twentieth-century immigration stands out for giving rise to many first- and second-generation Jewish American writers who shaped the development of the American novel, won important awards, and sold hundreds of thousands, or often millions, of copies of their books. Among the most notable are, as already mentioned, Bellow and Roth along with Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, all considered American literary “greats.” Indeed, Bellow and Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature (as did Eugene O’Neill, the son of an Irish immigrant), and many think that Roth should have received that honor as well.⁴⁶

Today, American literature is once again being influenced, and enriched, by a spate of recent immigrant and second-generation novelists, this time with origins in countries all over the world—Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean as well as Europe. As before, these writers are garnering major awards and authoring books that reach a wide readership. Between 2000 and 2020, three immigrant novelists (Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, and Viet Thanh Nguyen) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah) as well as Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) won the National Book Circle Critics Award; books by all four authors have been New York Times best sellers.⁴⁷ Noteworthy, too, is the second-generation Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang, best known for his Tony Award–winning and Pulitzer Prize–finalist play M. Butterfly, based on the true story of a French diplomat who had a long affair with a singer in the Beijing opera who turned out to be a man and a spy. Hwang’s work was honored by New York’s Signature Theater, which devoted an entire season (2012–13) to mounting plays from his more than thirty-year career.⁴⁸

Although many contemporary immigrant and second-generation novelists draw on perennial immigrant themes—ethnic and racial prejudice, for example, and adjusting to new cultural values and norms, and in many cases, low-paid and demeaning jobs—they do so with new interpretations and concerns that reflect the particular cultures and regions they come from as well as late twentieth- and early twentieth-century American realities. Indeed, one way they are having an impact on the literary landscape is through accounts of migrants’ lives both before and after the move to the United States. American readers are being exposed to gripping accounts of experiences in the countries immigrants left behind, including war-ravaged African and Asian countries, and China under Communist rule.⁴⁹ Once in the United States, a new theme in a number of recent novels is the all-too-common contemporary problem of undocumented status. To mention just three examples, there is Reyna Grande’s Across a Hundred Mountains, a tale of a Mexican girl’s journey across the border to California in search of her father; Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, on the struggles of a Cameroonian family without papers in New York; and Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, about a US-born boy’s loss of and eventual reconciliation with his undocumented Chinese immigrant mother.⁵⁰

While most fictional narratives dealing with race in the United States are about African Americans, immigrant novels are adding a new dimension to the literature, giving a deep, personal sense of what it means for the growing number of Africans and West Indians to be Black in America.⁵¹ In this regard, it is interesting that Paule Marshall’s critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story of the daughter of Barbadian immigrants growing up in Brooklyn with her parents during the Depression and World War II, was out of print for years. Originally published in 1959, it did not attract much attention until after 1981, when it was reissued by the Feminist Press in post–civil rights America at a time when massive immigration was again underway, including from the West Indies. With growing interest in the Black diaspora in the academy, the book was now recognized in many newly established Black and African American studies programs as a pioneering novel in contemporary African American women’s writing, and became a staple of many college courses.⁵²

Contemporary immigrant novels (about and by those of recent immigrant origin) are enriching American literary culture in additional ways. Because the leading characters in many of them are the US-born or US-raised children of immigrants, the novels often focus on the struggles to become American while maintaining an ethnic identity in an era when ethnic affiliations are more accepted than they were in earlier times. Many of the novels also capture the nuances of relations with immigrant parents today—including conflicts over dating and sexual relations as well as career and marriage choices—in an America that has experienced radically changed attitudes about gender, sexuality, and women’s roles in recent decades.⁵³

In another domain in the arts, contemporary immigrants and the second generation have been pioneers in transforming popular music and musical theater. In some ways this is a reprise from the past, although as sociologist Philip Kasinitz observes, some of the best-known immigrant-origin popular music innovators in mid-twentieth-century America drew self-consciously on American themes at a time when the second generation felt intense pressure from mainstream institutions to reject old country ways and show that they were truly “American.” Irving Berlin (born Israel Beilin in Russia and emigrated as a child) gave us the now-classic songs “God Bless America” and “Easter Parade,” George Gershwin (born Jacob Gershowitz to Russian Jewish immigrants) wrote the folk opera Porgy and Bess, and composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (grandsons of European Jewish immigrants) portrayed an imaginary rural American heartland in their Broadway musicals Oklahoma and Carousel.⁵⁴ Today’s immigrant and second-generation musical pioneers, living in a climate in which they are frequently encouraged to retain and indeed celebrate their cultural roots, often fuse sounds and styles from their countries or regions of origin with those they encounter in the United States. In some notable cases, they have created remarkably successful innovations.

Immigrants from the Caribbean have had an outsized influence on American popular music, from introducing the sounds of Jamaican reggae to Cuban salsa and Dominican merengue. Hip-hop, created out of a blend of cultural influences, is a genre that revolutionized the American music scene and includes (and sometimes is used synonymously with) rap, in which rhythmic or rhyming speech is performed or chanted, usually over a backing beat or musical accompaniment. According to one statistical analysis, hip-hop/rap was the defining genre on the US Billboard Hot 100 charts from 1991 and for the next two decades.⁵⁵ Although hip-hop is commonly thought to be an African American invention, it was originally as much a creation of Afro-Caribbean and Latino youths in New York City as an African American form. In fact, “toasting,” a form of reggae in which artists speak words over a soundtrack, helped set the stage in the Bronx of the 1970s for a format that became hip-hop. Many of the early stars of that genre had Caribbean origins, including Biggie Smalls (born Christopher Wallace in Brooklyn to Jamaican immigrant parents), rapper Wyclef Jean (whose work celebrates his Haitian origins while also mixing African American, Latin American, and other elements), and DJ Kool Herc (born Clive Campbell in Jamaica and moving to the Bronx at the age of twelve).⁵⁶ Among more recent rap celebrities are two immigrant young women from the West Indies: Nicki Minaj (born Onika Tanya Miraj in Trinidad), said to be the best-selling female rapper of all time, and Rihanna (born Robyn Rihanna Fenty in Barbados), who incorporated a wide range of genres, among them hip-hop, pop, and rhythm and blues, into her many hits, including thirty-one top-ten singles in the United States.

A host of other superstars with roots in Latin America as well as the Caribbean have had a transformative effect on popular music. One of the best known is Cuban-born and Miami-based Gloria Estefan, a multiple Grammy Award winner listed on Billboard’s Top 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and recipient of Kennedy Center Honors in 2017 for her contributions to American culture. Called one of the most successful crossover artists in Latin music history, she brought Latin rhythms, fused with American popular music, to a mainstream American audience. At the beginning of her career she was told that her sound was “too American for the Latins, too Latin for the Americans.” She ignored the advice to change her name and lose her band’s percussion and horns: “We were trying to do music that we felt could do something new, and was fresh and different.”⁵⁷ Ricky Martin (born Enrique Martin Morales in Puerto Rico) is perhaps most famous for his hit and signature song “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” which drew on the tradition of a swing song, but with horns and rhythms giving it a Latin base; Martin was at the forefront of what is called the Latin pop explosion of 1999, injecting Latin sounds and Spanish into mainstream popular music hits, and making it easier for other Latino performers to cross into the English-language market.⁵⁸ A ten-time Grammy Award winner and Kennedy Center honoree, Mexican-born and US-raised Carlos Santana pioneered a fusion of rock, blues, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean and Latin influences with his band Santana. Rising to fame in the late 1960s and 1970s, he became a guitar legend in popular music, and was known for his distinctive tone that has been described as crystalline, clean, and recognizable in just one note.⁵⁹

Migration has also been transforming musical theater. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, it has been said, is as radical and innovative as Oklahoma was in its day.⁶⁰ To go back some eighty years, Oklahoma was first performed in 1943. Written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, it revolutionized musical theater: “It seamlessly blended story, song, and dance in the service of realistic character development, in ways that made the typical froth of 1940s Broadway musical comedy seem puny by comparison. The American musical theater would never be the same, and neither would Rodgers and Hammerstein, who would go on to resounding successes with ‘Carousel,’ ‘South Pacific,’ ‘The King and I’ and ‘The Sound of Music.’ ”⁶¹

Miranda’s Hamilton is taking musical theater in new directions. A native New Yorker and son of Puerto Rican migrants, Miranda had already broken new ground in 2008 with his first Tony Award–winning musical, In the Heights, which was about immigrants and their children in an upper Manhattan Dominican neighborhood, and drew on hip-hop, Latin music, and Broadway show tunes.⁶² In the Heights was a hit, but Hamilton’s impact on the theater scene was nothing short of revolutionary. A largely hip-hop-based retelling of the story of Alexander Hamilton, it seamlessly integrates rap and storytelling, although as Kasinitz notes, “The rapping founding fathers never come across as a gimmick, nor does the multi-racial cast.”⁶³ Most of the major parts have been played by people of color from diverse ethnic backgrounds and have included Miranda himself, who was the lead in the original production—and also wrote the book, music, and lyrics. Hamilton stands out as one of the biggest critical and commercial hits in Broadway history, garnering eleven Tony Awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama and a Grammy Award for best musical theater album.⁶⁴ “I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show,” a New York Times theater critic wrote when the show opened in 2015. “But Hamilton … might just about be worth it—at least to anyone who wants proof that the American musical is not only surviving but also evolving in ways that should allow it to thrive and transmogrify in years to come.”⁶⁵ That is, if you were able to get a ticket. The Broadway show set all-time box office records, with an average ticket price in 2017 of over $300, and a top premium price of over $1,000 for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

The innovations in Hamilton are unlikely to raise the hackles of most Americans—though to be sure, the show’s stress on ethnic and racial diversity might concern some. To the extent that popular culture champions ethnic and racial diversity—and Asian Americans, Latinos, and Blacks are seen as making significant headway in various popular culture arenas—this may add to resentments among those, particularly less well-off Whites, who believe that people of color are gaining advantages at the expense of Whites and that the America they remember, of taken-for-granted White hegemony, is no more (see chapter 6).

And yet these same people generally are happy to eat Chinese or Mexican food; may eagerly watch movies or television programs that star Latinos or Asian Americans; and often delight in listening and dancing to melodies of Afro-Caribbean and Latin singers. Their college-educated children may enjoy novels by immigrant-origin authors. Few, I imagine, would have turned down a ticket to Hamilton.

By and large, the changes in popular culture and the arts I have discussed have not upset most Americans, or been points of bitter contention or conflict. In her analysis of food, Gabaccia puts forward one reason: the pursuit of pleasure with minimal obligation encourages Americans to cross cultural boundaries and incorporate parts of other cultures into their intimate lives. Americans, she observes, have not been as tolerant of and curious about their neighbors as they have about their neighbors’ foods: “Consumers need not convert to Judaism or have Jewish friends to relish lox and bagels; they don’t need to understand Islam or its faithful to enjoy babaganoush.”⁶⁶ Beyond food, long-established Americans don’t need to have Cuban American friends to enjoy the music of Estefan, African friends to be drawn to Adichie’s novel Americanah, or Pakistani friends to appreciate movies with a South Asian lead like The Big Sick. The same goes for attending a host of immigrant celebrations in cities all over the country, from Caribbean carnivals to Cinco de Mayo festivals.

The Cinco de Mayo festivals are a good example of an aspect of cultural change that has come up throughout this account: how customs from immigrants’ home countries become the basis for new mixtures in the American context. What was a relatively minor holiday in most of Mexico commemorating a military victory has become more important in this country among Mexican Americans as a celebration of their Mexican heritage—not only involving Mexican food and music, but in the American way of many public festivals, frequently carnival rides as well. In at least one city, Portland, Oregon, the celebration has included a naturalization ceremony for new citizens.⁶⁷

Popular music is full of new cultural combinations pioneered by immigrants and their offspring, from rap to Latin sounds and genres. Foods with origins in homeland cuisines, as they have developed in the United States, have often Americanized to some degree, in the case of General Tso’s chicken, sweetened and with added broccoli to appeal to American tastes, or to mention salsa, the addition of new types with different degrees of spiciness (or mildness) and sweet versions to serve with dessert. Many new mixtures bring together different ethnic flavors, from nacho bagel bites to the pastrami egg rolls I have sampled at the upscale Red Farm restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side.

There are two additional points. One concerns changes produced by immigrants whose culinary and artistic activities are, to a large degree, confined within their own communities. Even when many foods with origins in homeland cuisines are only or mainly eaten by immigrants and coethnics, and many ethnic festivals are just celebrated by those in immigrant communities, they often have an impact in expanding the cultural horizons of long-established Americans. Being an onlooker at an ethnic parade, or learning about it through a newspaper or television report—and becoming aware of foods in local markets or restaurants that mostly cater to coethnics—may make what initially seems strange more familiar and a normal part of the landscape. In this way, change is likely to take place as well.

Finally, there is the question of why immigrants and the second generation are frequently a source of innovation in a wide variety of the arts, introducing new forms and addressing new themes, or reviving old ones in light of their own cultural backgrounds and experiences. Being an immigrant or member of the second generation, it has been argued, is itself partly responsible for this talent for innovation. “Because immigrants have to work to learn the system,” sociologist Charles Hirschman writes, “they are intensely curious about American culture. For the most talented, this tendency leads to a rich and expansive creativity that has left its imprint on American music, theater, dance, film, and many other realms of artistic endeavor.”⁶⁸ Those in the US-born second-generation may have an advantage, too, in their ability to combine elements from their parents’ and the receiving society’s cultures in new and often original ways. And their position of being slightly outside the dominant culture may also spark creativity and insight.⁶⁹

Ultimately, I come back to my main theme: whether looking at what we see on the screen or in the theater, hear on streaming platforms, or eat at restaurants and at home, immigrants and their children have been adding vitality, dynamism, and new features to popular culture and the arts in this country. This is yet another and important way that they are transforming America.