So Senator, So Janitor

Abstract

Through an interrogation of institutional and iconical Dominican symbols, themes of transformation are explored within the American identity. In visualizing the assimilation that progresses in immigrant families, a portrait of what it is to be American is put forward through collaging and abstracting material culture across the Dominican Diaspora and the United States. The way that dreams become magnetized to the poles of institutional structures reveals the framework of what we define to be freedom. This pragmatic freedom, one that is largely accepted in definition by governing bodies, is what we experience, separate from ideological freedom. Our assigned freedoms are tools that are meant to unify more favorable groups of people, supporting structures of social stratification. Freedom as an entity of the post colonial body grounds the literal concept of freedom as restrictive. What becomes within pragmatic American freedom is natured through the distance that starts to grow between the spirit of soil an ocean away and the dirt we track here in the states. To "modernize" means to change. Modernization is no longer an overarching idea based in the future. Instead, the idea of the future within the west falls back on the legs that push innovation, casting images of covetous attitudes. The modern becomes a repository of the colonial, in complete continuity with our past, therefore, modernization describes the metamorphosis of immigrants in becoming American.