Assimilation

Today they would learn about drawing, Russian Orthodox saints and God. The 7-year-olds sat straight at their desks, sun pouring through lace curtains and cherry trees blooming in the fields beyond. The teacher set a birch branch before the children and told them it was fragile and unique, just like their souls. "If you think you can't draw properly, who will help you?" she asked. "God will help us," a boy called out. "Yes, God will guide your hand, so be confident, have faith."

The teenagers and young adults struggled as they rehearsed an ancient Korean song, a kind of lamentation to leaving home. "Uno, dos, tres," began Fermin Kim, 48, a chaperon for the group. Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo. . . . The words burbled out in a discordant drone, tentatively and unsteadily -- sounding very much like, well, Mexicans suddenly asked to sing in Korean.

California's immigrants are more assimilated, with greater proportions reporting last year that they became U.S. citizens and the majority of Spanish speakers now saying they speak English very well, a sharp rise from 2000, according to U.S. census data released today. Data from the bureau's 2007 American Community Survey showed that California continued to diversify, with whites declining to 42.5% and Latinos, Asians and blacks increasing to 54.4% of the state's population.

When George Cole moved to southeast Los Angeles County looking for factory work in the early 1970s, the mostly white and working-class area was being transformed by waves of Latino immigration. Cole applied for an apartment and the landlady bestowed her approval. "It will be nice to rent to a good white boy," he recalled her saying. "We've been doing a good job of keeping the blacks out, but the Mexicans are like cockroaches. They're hard to keep out."

Enjoying chili rice, Asian hip-hop and traditional martial arts, Japanese Americans threw a daylong party in Little Tokyo on Saturday to reassert their cultural identity and rebuild cohesion amid the powerful forces of assimilation and gentrification. In demographic trends familiar to other established ethnic groups, Japanese Americans, known as Nikkei, are increasingly intermarrying, moving to the suburbs and loosening their ethnic affiliations.

If the Senate debate over immigration has achieved little else, it has turned up the heat under the American melting pot. The chamber seems poised to pass by the end of this week a bill that would toughen border security, establish a guest worker program and provide citizenship opportunities to most illegal immigrants. Because of disagreements with the House, whether such legislation ultimately emerges from Congress remains highly uncertain.

Australia apologized today to its indigenous people for past suffering in a watershed Parliament vote broadcast on giant TVs in cities, at school assemblies and at breakfast barbecues in Aboriginal communities in the outback. Lawmakers unanimously adopted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's motion on behalf of all Australians. The apology was directed especially at the tens of thousands of Aborigines who were forcibly taken from their families as children under now-abandoned assimilation policies.

Mohsin Zulfiqar has a shock of white hair, a white bushy mustache and an intellectual air that bring to mind an Indian Einstein -- though not as absent-minded, he jokes. His wife, Khawar, small and aristocratic in her bearing, is the image of her grandmother, whose full-length portrait hangs in the Zulfiqars' sitting room. But instead of a sari, Khawar is found in thoroughly modern slacks and sweaters on workdays.

In a small oak-studded spot in Riverside County -- surrounded by a vast sea of homes, a few elderberry trees and native plants -- sits a tiny, near-forgotten cemetery, an island of consecrated tranquillity less than half an acre in size. There, 67 Native American children were buried between 1904 and 1955. The cemetery is part of the more than century-old heritage of the Sherman Indian High School, about five miles away in Riverside.

They were never slaves. That is something Garifuna parents always tell their children about their shipwrecked African ancestors, whose intermarriage with indigenous Caribbeans created a fiercely independent New World ethnicity the European colonialists called the "Black Caribs." For hundreds of years on the Central American coast, the Garifuna people kept alive their Arawakan language and Afro-Caribbean music and religion.