Every language is a way of life based on patterns of communal experience. Those who know its songs and stories only in translation are, at best, sympathetic outsiders, not participants.

While you state that there are deeper and more substantial ways to carry forward a culture, you’re basically speaking in abstractions. What specifically are these “good and true” pieces of other cultures that we have brought into our country? What are the “mistakes” and “inconsistencies” that we filtered out?

There are clear benefits to our culture in the United States. There are devastating drawbacks to the cultural situation in South America. This does not change the fact that the general pattern of immigration into the United States is one of assimilating into the culture within two generations and leaving your cultural traditions of language, art, and lifestyle behind. To state this is not to disrespect our history, but to acknowledge our history for what it is.

Understanding several languages including of language of one’s ancestors is of course valuable and good. An acquaintance with the cuisine of other nations and peoples including that of one’s ancestry is enriching.

The point I hope to make is: There is a deeper, more substantial way, to preserve a culture – a way that does not necessarily entail knowing the customs or even the language. It is rather one that carries forward all that was good and true in that culture while attempting to eliminate the mistakes, the inconsistencies, the deformations.

This is what in my opinion many of the people of good will who came to the United States had in mind. We did not succeed. No human enterprise ever does; not completely. But progress was made. And it was good. Just as good as any progress made in South America and other parts of the world.

This “new cloth” of the United States had and has the same possibilities as those of South America (or any other land for that matter) for good and evil. It is in my opinion a mistake to need to denigrate one in order to uplift the other.

Our history is deserving of respect for the great good things that have been accomplished here for the peoples of the world. It stands of course in needs of constant, sometime severe, correction, as do other political entities in the world, as they have since time began.

Human diversity is found in each person’s inner self. It does not require any particular language or customs.

All of Eastern South America has a heavy German and Italian influence on its culture, Argentina especially, but also Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. Much of this immigration occurred at the same time as immigration to the United States of the same peoples.

Western South America, particularly Peru, has a heavy Chinese and Japanese influence on its culture from immigrants who arrived from those countries at about the same time that they arrived in the Western United States. A recent Peruvian president was of Japanese descent.

I know it’s jingoistic for the United States to pride itself on being a nation of immigrants, but we are not the only multicultural nation in the world. And, in some ways, South American countries have done a better job of acknowledging the importance of maintaining the uniqueness of these cultures rather than forcing assimilation into a more vanilla, generalized culture as we do in the United States.