The American Dream as el Sueño Americano: Lost in Translation?

Year 2004, Issue: 19, 89 - 105, 01.04.2004

Tomasz M. Lebiecki

Abstract

If there has ever been a Promised Land on this Earth then for many, undoubtedly, it has been America. For the dozens of millions of settlers, refugees, and immigrants who since the foundation of the first colonies have been storming its shores regardless of the often formidable obstacles and hardships they were to face – from the sheer costs and life-hazards of the journey to the permanent loss of family ties – the land must have always been, apparently, a promise worthy of such sacrifices. And a promise it was – of a life in a society that always prided itself on being the very embodiment of meritocracy, in which people could feel free from the fear of political and religious persecutions and unbound by the constraints of aristocratic and caste systems. A promise of economic opportunities offered to them freely by a scarcely inhabited continent where lands were cheap and the soils fertile. A promise of a dream-come-true waiting for all those who would only venture and dare to reach for it; or so the popular myth has it. A myth, because now, at the dawn of the 21st century, much of what used to constitute the context in which the American Dream could proliferate already belongs in the museum.

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