After driving down Interstates 87 and 95 from the Lacolle border crossing to Miami, Florida a week ago, my visit here is just about over today. My daughter has already initiated her search for work and a good conversational Spanish program.
My family here now consists of my brother and his wife; their son, his wife (originally from Bolivia) and their two-year-old daughter; and now (for the next four months at least) my eldest daughter. Previously, before they died of old age (and after lives well spent here in Florida and on midwest farms), the Floridians included my maternal grandparents, a few great aunts and uncles, shirt-tail relatives who were very close and an uncle and aunt who gave up their little Cuban motel when Castro came to power some 90 miles to the south..
Our family's connection to Florida, with my daughter now staying at my brother's place, is now permanently transformed from a semi-tropical locale to which one might retire after a long life spent working the northern soils, into a permanent locus for much of an active family with several younger family members now making their mark in the world in more permanent homes. The great irony, though, is that my brother's youngest son now lives in central-eastern Iowa (his wife teaches at a university there) not so far from where our forebears settled a century and a half ago. If you go back to the 18th century though, one branch of the family settled in the Gaspé Peninsula in Québec. It just shows that, living in Québec, I am also retracing, at least on the maternal side, the steps of my relatives who left Ireland in 1793.
Of all the connections with locale though, with my sister in the Pacific Northwest and our clan in Québec, it is Iowa that retains a privileged place -- even greater than Scotland and Ireland left us -- in our family's lore and treasure trove of memories and associations.
What is indelible about Iowa for us? Just picture it as a memory handed down: Life on the frontier and the experiences of settlement and clearing the land, relying on only horse power to accomplish more than you could with your own hands. There were intertwined and interdependent families. One branch that settled in 19th century Markham (northeast of Toronto), Ontario walked all the way down to homestead in eastern Iowa in the second half of the 19th century. Growing up, I played with the great-grandchildren of the same family that had walked with our relatives from Canada.
Now, and it is not just a good or a bad thing, you have to keep an open mind and being willing to learn along new cultural and linguistic dimensions to keep up with contemporary Iowa, Upper and Lower Canada, and the South Florida scene. We now have family members functioning in three languages.
It would not surprise me to see the next generation speaking Chinese, Arabic or Urdu as a second language to work effectively and democratically in their chosen zone -- in North America or abroad. Adapt or perish could become the family moto.
But this doesn't mean that Anglo_American culture is on the brink of destruction. It merely signifies that our supposedly hegemonic culture is less and less the monolithic model it is often touted to be. Though English may be capable of killing off the vestiges of immigrant linguistic life as the newly arrived became integrated in the past, the future patterns are less certain as immigrants are less dazzled by America compared to their homeland.
French American culture has absorbed my children. Hispanic American culture is absorbing my nephew's children. Who can say that some other culture will not absorb an upcoming generation -- and on the very same soil where other founding European immigrant communities melted?
On a more mundane plane, I better start adapting to snow, ice and plummeting temperatures. I went swimming in Biscayne Bay yesterday and tomorrow I will be shovelling Québec snow.
