Gold: The California Dream

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The California Dream Ever since the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, began for over a span of 7 years the California Gold Rush. Those seeking freedom from the Midwest and East coast packed up their belongings and brought with them their families to California. Considered as a land wild and raw, California offered to thrill-seekers excitement, adrenaline and the promise that California could and would bring to one the wealth, success, and fortune one wished and sought. Though with more and more migrants and immigrants alike coming to California, the accessibility to one’s own “California dream” became more difficult to achieve. Even though the success rates in California are no longer booming nowadays as it was during the turn of…show more content…
As determined by Rawls, the paradox of expectations means that the person who comes to California hopes that their lives here will be better than what they left behind back home, where ever home may be (25). Rawls goes as far saying that the “gold rush experience itself was forged on this paradox of expectations” (26). That assumption is backed up by the numerous accounts of miners complaining about California and its lack of gold. One miner is so upset, he writes a letter advising everyone to not come to California. He claims that Northern California is “inferior” to New England and the southern portion of California is just a “baked and burned” territory (Notes of… 37). California simply did not live up to the expectations that miner, and countless miners had of California. Since the life they expected did not come to be in California, it left countless people bitter rejecting everything the California dream…show more content…
All what it had to offer seemed limitless, because it seemed so big and never-ending that it could never fill up with people. The expectation of growth people had of California actually did fit reality during an era, but that is no longer the case of California now. Now it is an over-populated state, which is more concerned about building houses for the ever-expanding populace. At the same time though, the expectations have not changed drastically. One of California’s major problems is illegal immigration. If the reality people have of California has truly changed, immigrants would not feel the need to come and risk their lives to try and live a better life out here. The main motive for an immigrant to come to America is to seek work to help financially maintain their families wherever they may be from. They will work at any level for any pay, because being a gardener in America is better than being poor with nothing in one’s native country. At the end of Richard Rodriguez’s Proofs, the last line of the excerpts ends with, “I will send for you or I will come home rich” (71). The exact expectation of becoming wealthy in California still has not changed. Even with account after account of stories of immigrants who have died along the way to cross the border, or how countless coyotes who claim to help immigrants cross the border end up fooling and robbing immigrants of their money by leaving them in the middle
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