Oral space and exchanges : what is the american dream ?

Space and exchanges

I am going to talk about the notion space and exchanges. First of all, what is space and exchanges ? Space is a place, somexhere ; and exchanges can be defined by meeting people and learning from their culture. I will talk about this notion with the theme : The American Dream. And what is the American Dream ? It is the idea of emigration to America to get a better life, provided you work hard. We can now ask ourselves, how far have space and exchanges helped shape the American Dream ?

I. Space

In the first place, we will see how space helped shaping the American Dream. First of all, in the 19th century, the european started to emigrate to America because America is a vast country with a lot of free space at the time. People thought they could start a new life there by buying hudge plots of land and starting agriculture on it.

Going to America, emigrating there, is moving grom a space to an other. In fact, I worked in class on a graph showing that the overall number of immigrants in America has slightly increased over the last century. Most of the immigrants used to come from Europe, but the number of them dropped because of the two world wars. Nowadays, America is still a country of immigration, people are coming from Asia and Latin America for the most part, with Mexicans being by far the largest group.

At some point, to start living the American Dream, immigrants need to stop moving through space and start to integrate with the locals. In class, we read a text from an autobiographical novel writing by a man with Asian origins. This novel gives us the keys to a successful integration. Those keys are to stay in the same place for a long time, the narrator of the novel has been living in the same place for over thirty years now, to adopt locals habits. Regularly, the narrator goes shopping, he buys his newspapper and gets the same turkey sandwich at the deli. It conveys an impression of stability and shows that he is well integrated and that he has adopted the American way of life. Wherever you go, you have to be open-minded to integrate. For example, when the narrator goes out, people recognize him and salute him in a friendly way. He became familiar to the people of the town and they appreciate him.

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