> But that's not really the way things have historically worked in the US.
> Here, people assimilate - and I doubt that that's really changed much
> from the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Maybe the first generation
> doesn't, but the second certainly does, and by the third, the traces of
> the original culture have vanished except for a residue of kitsch. (And
> then there are ancestries like mine - product of an intermarriage of
> Irish and Italian, both of the first native-born generation.) I've been
> struck on visiting Toronto how homogenous the immigrant neighborhoods
> are - a stark contrast with New York, where they get more mixed up. This
> was explained to me as demonstrating the absence of any process of
> Canadianization that's comparable to the process of Americanization.
Speaking of Canadianization, an academic from Canada who was at the L.A. anarchist conference, talked about his research on how Canada used the McKinley assassination to develop a more homogenous Canadian identity.
I can provide more details offlist if anybody is interested.
Chuck