Blackwell Reference Online

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Our IndependenceDay Parade …Five Nations: Dutch, French, Englishmen,Indians, and we …(“Fouth of July in Maine,” Lowell 1967: 27)Rising, rising, risingwe migrants,mosquitoes,malcontents,do hereby defy the Ching emperor …Indentured to dreamswe imagine America,the soft green breast of an islandalmost a mirage beyond our eyes.(Leong 1993: 24)MéxicoWhen I'm that far south, the old wordsMolt off my skin, the feathersOf all my nervousness.My own words somersault naturally as my name,joyous among all those meadows: Michoacán,Vera Cruz, Tenochtitlán, Oaxaca …I don't want to pretend I know moreAnd can speak all the names, I can't.My sense of this land can only ripple through my veinsLike the chant of an epic corrido.I come from a long line of eloquent illiteratesWhose history reveals more than words can say …WashingtonI don't belong this far north …I come northTo gather my feathersfor quills(“Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington,” Cervantes 1981: 45–7)Standard writ has long held that, from the Anglo-Puritan landfall through to postmodern California, the United States has been nothing if not an immigrant nation, an ongoing process of arrival. Not only New England, but Nueva España and Nouvelle France, bequeath their shaping European passage and geographies. Gum Sahn, Gold Mountain in English, reflects the West Coast as America's parallel beckoning, the ... log in or subscribe to read full text