Acculturation

“Cultural assimilation, or acculturation, is likely to be the first of the types of assimilation to occur when a minority group arrives on the scene; and (2) cultural assimilation, or acculturation, of the minority group may take place even when none of the other types of assimilation [structural, marital, identificational, attitude receptional, behavior receptional, and civic] occurs simultaneously or later, and this condition of ‘acculturation only’ may continue indefinitely.”

- Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (1964)

Our Lady of Guadalupe and Juan Diego, Melissa Cavaliere

The U.S. -Mexican border es uno herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture.

- Gloria Anzaldúa,
Borderlands/LaFrontera

At every turn, folklore of Africans and their descendants in the Americas was crucially fashioned not simply by an African past, but by the complex ways African cultures interacted with European and American peoples and cultures in the New World. This was, perhaps, most obvious in language. Phrases, words, and patterns of speech, lived on from African vernacular. In time, however, descendants of African slaves came to speak the local variants of English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. Similarly, the folklore which evolved, normally in the adopted language of the Americas, was itself shaped by contact with other, non-African peoples of the Americas.

- Slavery and Remembrance,
African Diaspora Culture

“Scholars of immigration have long considered identity to be a key measure of immigrant incorporation. Chicago School sociologist Robert Park argued that assimilation was an “inevitable” stage of the race relations cycle, an endpoint at which immigrants and their children would acculturate seamlessly with native-born whites.9 His contemporaries further asserted that the rate of assimilation depended largely on whether immigrant groups distanced themselves from their ethnic culture.10 While such arguments adequately characterize the experiences of early twentieth-century European-descent immigrants, they cannot necessarily be applied to the identity experiences of contemporary immigrants and their children, who overwhelmingly hail from societies in Latin America and Asia and lack the white racial privilege necessary to identify as “unhyphenated” Americans.”

- Anthony C. Ocampo,
“Am I Really Asian?”: Educational Experiences and Panethnic Identification among Second–Generation Filipino Americans