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America these days - Immigrants celebrating unique differences as minority group

By: John Mulaa

[ Posted On: 2006-12-05 ]

Immigrants tend to flock together for a whole host of reasons: the need to connect with those like them, to relive moments of things they experienced back home, and a natural desire to recreate, to some degree, the society they left behind.

America is a nation of immigrants. You are likely to hear that phrase daily if you happen to live around here. Nevertheless, at any one time there is a pecking order. Immigrants who arrived earlier assume the mantle of nativity and ownership of the place that comes with time.

Later immigrants are expected to adapt to what has been established as marking the new society. The United States is a classic example of this. Waves upon waves of immigrants have at different times washed up on its shores and over time, they have been absorbed into the mainstream by dominant Anglo-Saxon culture.

This model has changed somewhat with the acceptance of the alternative multicultural vision.

It is now considered perfectly all right for immigrants to cling onto aspects of their culture that they consider a definitional necessity for them as a separate people even as they adopt and adapt to the dominant culture.

The change in perspective was in part a rejection of the assumption that one could not culturally multi-task, that is, be comfortable in two or more cultures at the same time without experiencing acute tensions between them.

Hence, the emergence of the rather overused term minorities when speaking of groups that have distinguishing characteristics, which mark them apart from the dominant culture in which they live and work.

Immigrant Kenyans to the US have become part of the mÈlange other immigrants who are considered minorities.

They are a free to integrate with the rest of society as much as they wish and are able to, but they also qualify for the special minority status. They are free, if they wish to express their uniqueness and differences from the wider society, be it in music art, fashion, the rest.

There is a sizable Kenyan American community in the Washington DC area. I am told the largest community in the US is in Texas. There is also a large Kenyan community in New Jersey.

You know that a community has reached a critical mass when it begins to establish its own churches with imported pastors and priests or well-patronised entertainment spots complete with the latest hits from the mother country.

By these criteria, Kenyans in the US form a critical mass in several regions.

The Kenyan community in and around DC celebrated the wedding of two Kenyans, Dr Raymond Muhula, a policy wonk with an international development institution and an emerging politico and Laetitia Mulumula, a chemical engineer. They are not from the same ethnic community.

And that was the other dimension of the celebration. The wedding guests represented nearly all major ethnic groups in Kenya, and different races in the United States, friends of this couple. There was not a hint of friction. Good-natured ribbing was taken for what it was and not as an expression of some dark animosity. The revelry was truly Kenyan. Sam Mapangala was there, too.

He revisited his old hits and the sizeable crowd roared in appreciation as it scrambled to the floor to partake of the action. All demonstrably enjoyed the ethnic music that was played. The display of ‘Kenyanness’ was impressive, spontaneous, and totally unprompted.

I did some crude demographic survey that confirmed my hunch that the group was mostly made of young Kenyans, yuppies to be exact and they talked and behaved in a truly national if not international.

There, I told myself maybe lies the future of Kenya even if it is currently in the Diaspora. It is an outlook that is informed by cosmopolitanism, yet it anchored in and appreciates things Kenyan.

Having lived in America for varying lengths of time, the many relatively young people present that evening seemed to be saying that it is fine to cross little or large lines than separate.

To be part of a wider society and at the same time to celebrate unique differences without turning them into markers for claims on all sorts of unrelated things. There is plenty of hope for Kenya.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

John Mulaa is a Researcher and Consultant (World Bank) based in Washington DC. He is also a columnist with the East African Standard. Earlier in his Journalism career, he worked with the Weekly Review (defunct) and the Daily Nation publications in Kenya, as a foreign correspondent.

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