单选题
Discussion of the assimilation of Puerto Ricans in
the United States has focused on two factors: social standing and the loss of
national culture. In general, excessive stress is placed on one factor or the
other, depending on whether the commentator is North American or Puerto Rican.
Many North American social scientists, such as Oscar Handlin, Joseph
Fitzpatrick, and Oscar Lewis, consider Puerto Ricans as the most recent in a
long line of ethnic entrants to occupy the lowest rung on the social
ladder. Such a "sociodemographic" approach tends to regard assimilation as
a benign process, taking for granted increased economic advantage and inevitable
cultural-integration, in a supposedly egalitarian context. However, this
approach fails to take into account the colonial nature of the Puerto Rican
case, with this group, unlike their European predecessors, coming from a nation
politically subordinated to the United States. Even the "radical"
critiques of this mainstream research model, such as the critique developed in
Divided Society, attach the issue of ethnic assimilation too mechanically to
factors of economic and social mobility and are thus unable to illuminate the
cultural subordination of Puerto Ricans as a colonial minority.
In contrast, the "colonialist" approach of island-based writers, such as Eduardo
Seda Bonilla, Manuel Maldonado Denis, and Luis Nieves Falcon, tends to view
assimilation as the forced loss of national culture in an unequal contest with
imposed foreign values. There is, of course, a strong tradition of cultural
accommodation among other Puerto Rican thinkers. The writings of Eugenio
Fernandez Mendez clearly exemplify this tradition, and many supporters of Puerto
Rico's commonwealth status share the same universalizing orientation. But the
Puerto Rican intellectuals who have written most about the assimilation process
in the United States all advance cultural nationalist views, advocating the
preservation of minority cultural distinctions and rejecting what they see as
the subjugation of colonial nationalities. This cultural and
political emphasis is appropriate, but the colonialist thinkers misdirect it,
overlooking the class relations at work in both Puerto Rican and North American
history. They pose the clash of national cultures as an absolute polarity, with
each culture uuderstood as static and undifferentiated. Yet both the Puerto
Rican and North American traditions have been subject to constant challenge from
cultural forces within their own societies, forces that may move toward each
other in ways that cannot be written off as mere "assimilation". Consider,
for example, the indigenous and Mro-Caribbean traditions in Puerto Rican culture
and how they influence and are influenced by other Caribbean cultures and Black
cultures in the United States. The elements of coercion and inequality, so
central to cultural contact according to the colonialist framework, play no role
in this kind of convergence of racially and ethnically different elements of the
same social class.
单选题
According to the passage, cultural accommodation is promoted by ______.
A. Manuel Maldonado Denis
B. the author of Divided Society
C. the majority of social scientists writing on immigration
D. many supporters of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status