Can Houston move past the 'melting pot'?

Houston is the most ethnically diverse city in the United States, according to the 2017 Kinder Houston Area Survey. What's more is that its three major ethnic groups — Anglo, African American and Hispanic — are generally positive about their relationships.

During and after Hurricane Harvey, local and national media stories tended to reinforce this image of Houston as a city where neighborliness prevails across ethnic and racial boundaries.

No city has perfectly amiable relations among its citizens all the time, of course, and Houston faces challenges, such as economic segregation and income inequality.

But Houston stands out as a place where people from a variety of backgrounds live and work together in relative harmony. As the Kinder Houston Area Survey shows over the last 40 years, Houstonians have become more welcoming toward newcomers and have come to see immigration as a positive good.

Can Houston become a model for the rest of the country as its demographics continue to change and embody an ideal of immigration?

This ideal has been called "transnationalism," and it arose during the great, late 19th- and early-20th-century waves of immigration to the U.S. from central and southern Europe. American social commentators applied the term to relations among the many different immigrant groups. Transnational America, for them, described a new social reality, which they called "a world-federation in miniature."

It's much more than the "melting pot," a metaphor popularized by Israel Zangwill in his 1908 Broadway play. (But the idea is older even than that: In 1782, J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur noted that in America "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race.") Critics of the "melting pot" metaphor, though, have disliked its disregard for the value of sustaining immigrants' own ethnic, racial and cultural traditions.

Why does becoming American require abandoning one's heritage?

CHANGING COMMUNITY: Why Houston is becoming more accepting of immigration

Instead, the transnationalist view of immigration rejects the assimilationist overtones of the melting pot and any position that leaves cultural and ethnic enclaves isolated on the margins of American society. It celebrates an America in which different ethnic and racial groups live side by side with their characters preserved.

Multiculturalists have since preferred the term "salad bowl" or "cultural mosaic." But transnationalism goes beyond these metaphors, too. It sees immigration and diversity as interlaced with the flourishing of two other American ideals: freedom and democracy.

Transnationalists resist settling for a conception of freedom that is merely the right to do as one pleases so long as one does not harm others. They call Americans to a higher notion of freedom by inviting all to engage energetically in shaping the ideals and institutions of a democratic civil society, irrespective of when one arrived in America.

As Randolph Boune wrote in a famous essay, "Transnational America," immigration added dynamism to American life and presented an opportunity for continually reshaping it. "America," wrote Bourne, "shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it."

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The link between transnationalism and a flourishing civil society offers a particularly promising line of development for Houston. Civil society is an ecosystem of independent voluntary associations, churches and other community groups existing between individuals and families and the layers of government. A richly and diversely textured civil society creates the conditions for a manageable scale of social life, which is especially important for recent arrivals to America.

According to the Kinder Institute, much of the U.S. will look like the greater Houston metropolitan area by 2040. As a laboratory for things to come, Houston has a chance to become a model as the city of the future.

Can we extend the spirit of neighborliness, so evident during Harvey, to ongoing efforts toward better understanding the historical memories of our city's ethnic and racial communities?

And can we come to know ourselves better and together understand what is compatible with a democratic constitutional government and what is not? This is the way to build a thriving civil society and develop what Bourne called "the Beloved Community."

Dr. Dominic A. Aquila is Provost and Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas. He has held faculty and administrative positions at a number of private and public universities across the U.S.

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