New York Times columnist David Brooks recently attempted to map the best route for an immigrant community to succeed in America. He did this by juxtaposing the pre-1960s Jewish and post-1960s Puerto Rican experiences in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on Chicago’s near northwest side. To represent the Jewish experience, he taps Saul Bellow’s Augie March, a fictional character whom Brooks applauds because he “never settles for the near at hand.” To represent the Puerto Rican experience, he looks to Jose E. Lopez, a community organizer who heads the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriqueño (or MLN), the public face of the FALN, a group devoted to ending Puerto Rico’s U.S. commonwealth status. “The biggest difference between the neighborhood in Bellow’s day and now,” concludes Brooks, “is that then, the path to success was through assimilation, whereas now it is through ethnic self-determination.” Brooks votes decidedly in favor of the former. “Instead of encouraging people to spend their lives around the same few streets,” he argues, assimilation “opens up the wide possibilities of America.”

As evidence of the pitfalls of resisting assimilation, Brooks recounts the story of “Paseo Boricua,” a mile-long stretch of Humboldt Parks’ Division Street, which was re-invented in the 1990s as a space that would be “permanently Puerto Rican,” a barricade to the tides of gentrification that had already forced the Puerto Rican community west for decades. Chicago already had its Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, and La Villata (Mexican), so why not a “Little Puerto Rico?”

Today Paseo Boricua is a reality. Just west of the trendy new Division Street shopping strip the scene changes abruptly. As you pass under a giant Puerto Rican flag forged into a gateway of steel, the high-end restaurants and hipster boutiques give way to the Puerto Rican “walk of stars,” salsa music, and cement tables for playing checkers. While Brooks concedes that the street is now “clean and safe,” he goes on to report that “stubborn problems remain,” such as gangs and poor school performance. The reason for this failure, he argues, is that “few venture out.” Downtown Chicago is only 10 minutes away, he laments, “but is also a foreign country.”

On the surface this may seem like a pragmatic argument in favor of the American Dream — go to the big city, kid, and make something of yourself. Indeed, Brooks credits Bellow with nothing short of “Redefining American heroism.” But beneath the patriotic mythologizing (remember, Brooks uses a fictional character as his poster child), he seems to say that organizing around community and identity is a path to stagnancy. The key to success, rather, is to shed your community bonds, or better yet, to physically move away from those “same few streets.”

As it turns out, however, Brooks’ advice may in fact be a recipe for failure. Those community bonds, those traits that set groups apart, may in fact be intrinsic to a community’s ascent. “Immigration is a network-driven phenomenon,” explains UCLA Sociologist Roger Waldinger, “with newcomers naturally attracted to the places where they have contacts….” The power of ethnic networks cannot be underestimated. To varying degrees they form the bank, realtor, employment agency, school and social club for new arrivals. Yet, it is just such networks that Brooks ignores when he presents Augie Marsh’s supposedly steady march of assimilation. The problem is that he looks at Bellows’ character in isolation, while treating the Puerto Rican community as a whole. Only by glossing over the vital role of Jewish social networks in the success of that community and by downplaying the very real successes of the Puerto Rican community, is Brooks able to argue for assimilation.

What he misses in his heavy-handed polarization are the manifold ways in which differences (ethnic, religious, national origin, race) actually produce and support successful communities. He presents the story of the Jews of Humboldt Park as if they all caught a bus downtown and then sublimated into a colorless, creedless America. What he neglects to say is that the Jews of Chicago still largely reside in a handful of enclaves and still maintain an impressive array of cultural, religious, and political institutions. It’s just that they’ve shifted from the west side to the far north suburbs.      

Benjamin Helphand