Instead, community organizations focus on culture, arranging concerts by visiting troupes of singers and dancers on the Toronto--New York--Los Angeles circuit, where most North America-based Sri Lankans live. The community is too new and too small to count for much yet, says Buddhi Abeyasekara, a former president of the Sri Lanka Association. Efforts at political organizing may also be impeded by the steady flow of people who, like Leslie Gunaratne, move away to settle in other parts of the country.
But that churning is simply the way ethnic enclaves launch immigrants into mainstream American life, says Phil Kasnitz, professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. “Part of the mythic journey into assuming an American identity involves leaving the ethnic neighborhood,” he says. “The services that are available in the ethnic neighborhood, while they maintain an ethnic identity, also facilitate the transition into the American mainstream.” The very shops and institutions that make new immigrant neighborhoods so noticeable are also stepping stones to assimilation, how the trappings of home get translated into a new idiom.
Leslie Gunaratne decided to move on to Florida in 1979, and he now lives in Houston. He jokes that he’d had enough bitter New York winters. But he also thought he’d find more opportunities away from Staten Island. “When I return to visit my family on the island, it feels like home,” he says. “But there’s a whole country beyond New York.”
Of course, not everyone believes they have to leave Staten Island to become a real American. Hector Gunaratne, for one, gets a daily glimpse of the American dream when he looks across the water from his office window at the Statue of Liberty. “I’m reminded that this is a country of immigrants,” he says. “It makes me feel that this is my home.”
N.F.P. Fernandes is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.
