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  3. Discussion of the assimilation of Puerto Ricans in the United States has focused

Discussion of the assimilation of Puerto Ricans in the United States has focused

游客2024-12-30  11
问题 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 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 illustrate the cultural subordination if Puerto Ricans as a colonial minority.
   In contrast, the "colonialist" approach of island-based writers such as Eduardo SedaBonilla, 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 culture as an absolute polarity, with each culture understood 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 AfroCaribbean 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.  [br] It can be inferred from the passage that the "colonialist" approach is so called because its practitioners
选项 A、support Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status
B、have a strong tradition of cultural accommodation
C、emphasize the class relations at work in both Puerto Rican and North American history
D、regard the political relation of Puerto Rico to the United States as a significant factor in the experience of Puerto Ricans
答案 D
解析 此题为推理题。题干问的是从本文所称的“殖民主义”的方法，可以推断出因为它的实务工作者什么样的一种态度。A支持波多黎各的联邦地位，显然不是；B有浓厚的文化适应传统，原文有提及，但不是本题所解；C强调波多黎各和北美的历史工作的阶级关系，也不对，所以只要D才比较符合，认为在波多黎各人的历史进程中，波多黎各政治关系在美国占有很重要的因素。
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