Global Cities, Local Life

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Lipsitz' Local Life, Global Cities

Prolific Americana Professor George Lipsitz believes that cities like Los Angeles and Miami, bastions of immigrant culture and cultural melting pot are transformative in that they make cultural variegation non-inclusive, translating dimensions of ethnic culture into mainstream by making them part and parcel of said cities' identities where residents take pride and find membership in the practice, promulgation and sharing of their multicultural heritage. This point to an acceptance as well as a celebration of cultural diversity. Americana or the American culture for Lipsitz is not limited to one particular culture, it is an amalgamation of many, particularly the cultural practices and traditions that had been brought over by the many immigrants that have made America their home ever since the colonial days. America for Lipsitz is not one culture; it is a dynamic culture, affected by agency and the many peoples that have come to contribute towards the building of the American nation. He observed this personally as a child of immigrants and he shares this in an interview with the 'Americana' journal (2002):

"My parents grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. As children of working class immigrant parents, they viewed education, ideas, and culture with reverence...The celebratory "America" of the New Deal "cultural front" turned immigrants and their children from unwanted aliens into redemptive insiders. Like millions of other ethnic Americans, my parents secured a measure of cultural and political inclusion for themselves through the populism and celebrations of regional and ethnic specificity that fuelled the New Deal "culture of unity."

Sociologically speaking, elements of culture, whether minor or popular are practiced and shared within a particular social grouping (in this instance, a city) and when people are exposed to certain elements they react to or are transformed in some way by it and vice-versa; being social agents, just as they are affected, they affect said elements of culture too. Take for instance music. As Miami's ...