Ten Routes to the American Dream

By Guy D. Garcia

ROBERTO

Goizueta

Scion of an aristocratic Cuban family, he studied chemical engineering at Yale and, after returning to his homeland in 1954, took a job with the Coca- Cola Co. Goizueta came to the U.S. permanently in 1961 to escape the Castro regime and counts himself one of the lucky Cuban refugees: "I had an education and a job." He became a citizen in 1969. Named president of Coca- Cola in 1980 and chairman of the board a year later, Goizueta, 53, now runs one of the most multinational of multinational corporations; other top officers are from Argentina, Germany, Italy and Mexico. "I have always believed in being in the big pond. This is very non-Latin. I am not of the Cuban culture. I am not of the American culture. I suppose I am of the Coca- Cola culture."

PAULINA

Porizkova

Her father, she remembers, was

anti-Communist, really "just a young brat writing graffiti on the walls." But in Czechoslovakia, that meant he was frequently jailed. So in 1975, when she was ten, Porizkova moved to Sweden with her parents, and by 18 she had dazzled much of Europe as a top Paris model. Then she came to New York City where she now earns $300,000 a year with the Elite modeling agency. She is here on a working visa and has not yet decided to seek citizenship. "What I love and hate about the U.S. are the same things. I hate that there is so little culture here. This is such a young country that it seems nouveau riche. But what is also so great about the U.S. is that because it is so young, it does not have any of the skepticism of Europe. Here you cannot fall backward. You can only go forward."

DOUGLAS

Fraser

His father, a Glasgow theater electrician and distillery worker, came to the U.S. in 1923, when Doug was seven, and eventually took a job at Chrysler's now defunct De Soto plant in Detroit. Fraser, who became a citizen with his parents in the late 1920s, followed his father into the factory and became active in the fledgling United Auto Workers union during the organizing drives that preceded World War II. He rose through the ranks to serve as U.A.W. president for six years, beginning in 1977, and earned a reputation as one of the nation's most respected labor leaders and a champion of liberal causes. He is now a professor of labor studies at Wayne State University. "My father loved this country from the moment he set foot on this land. He loved the sense of freedom. I remember being completely frustrated by trying to hit a baseball. My memories of Scotland are dim, but in the past 15 years I reached the conclusion that their society is more civil than ours. I think we're less caring about each other than we once were."

ARNOLD

Schwarzenegger

As naturally as he wanted to improve muscle tone or increase the weights he lifted, he wanted to come to the U.S., particularly California, the mecca of body building. Son of a policeman in Braz, Austria, Schwarzenegger moved to Los Angeles at 21, one year after winning his first Mr. Universe title in 1967. He was Mr. Universe again from 1968 to 1970 and took seven Mr. Olympia titles (1970-75, 1980). He has given up professional body building to pursue his interests in video and real estate (he holds a B.A. in business administration from the University of Wisconsin) and to press on in his career as an actor (Pumping Iron, Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator). He became a U.S. citizen in 1983. "I went back home and realized that I liked my country, but for me America was the better place to be. Everybody thought big in comparison to European thinking. Everyone had great hopes, a positive outlook. There was no limit to whatever you wanted to do. I educated myself to be an American."

W. MICHAEL

Blumenthal

His family fled from Oranienburg, Germany, to Shanghai in 1939 to escape the Nazis' persecution of Jews. Interned by the Japanese during the war, Blumenthal was 21 when he came to the U.S. in 1947 as a "displaced person." Within a week he had found a job as a shipping clerk for the National Biscuit Co. and nine years later had earned a bachelor's degree in business from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton. In a career mixing business and Government service, he became a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (1961-63, during which time he sought out and thanked the official who had cleared his entry), was Jimmy Carter's Secretary of the Treasury (1977-79) and is now chief executive officer of the Detroit- , based Burroughs Corp. He became a U.S. citizen in 1952. "One of the unique things about this country is that it's just as much or more of an honor to say, 'My father came steerage from Sicily,' as to say, 'My father's family has been here for twelve generations.' "

LAURA

Herring

Four years after her parents divorced in 1971, she moved from Guadalajara to Texas with her Mexican mother. Taking advantage of her father's U.S. nationality, Laura became a naturalized citizen in 1979, when she was 14. Bilingual in Spanish and English, she added French during a year of school in Switzerland and did a stint as a social worker in India. Two years ago, a friend in El Paso encouraged Herring to enter a beauty contest. Chosen Miss El Paso in 1984, she became Miss Texas this year and finally Miss U.S.A., the first Hispanic and the first foreign-born contestant to win the title, which brings with it $175,000 in cash and prizes, as well as a screen test. This summer she will compete in the Miss Universe contest in Florida. "I feel like an equal combination of Mexican and American. When the Spanish went into Mexico, they went to conquer. But when the immigrants came to the U.S., they came to work together to build a great country. We are all immigrants here. Americans have no limitations. We put limitations on ourselves."

PATRICK

Ewing

1971 his mother came from Kingston, Jamaica, to Cambridge, Mass., where she worked in the dietary department at Massachusetts General Hospital. Four years later, at the age of twelve, he followed with his father and six siblings. Seven feet tall by the time he was a senior at Rindge & Latin High School in Cambridge, Ewing became a citizen at 18, was a three-time collegiate All- America and led the Georgetown Hoyas to the N.C.A.A. basketball championship in 1984. An aspiring artist who received his B.A. in fine arts this spring, Ewing has also worked as a page for the Senate Finance Committee and for Senator Robert Dole. He played on the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic basketball team last summer, and this year the dominating center was the No. 1 pick in the National Basketball Association draft. The New York Knicks will probably pay him more than $1 million a season, the most ever for a rookie. "My coming to America fulfilled a lifelong dream of my mother's. She told us America is the land of opportunity. I enjoy being an American, but I still miss the natural beauty, the waterfalls and the landscapes of Jamaica."

SALVADOR EDWARD

Luria

Born in 1912 into a distinguished 500-year-old family of Northern Italian Jews, he determined to exercise vigorously the intellectual freedom of his new (1947) American citizenship. After fleeing Fascism in Italy in 1938, he left Paris for the U.S. two years later and applied his genius for molecular biology to the genetics of bacteria. In 1942, while at Vanderbilt University on a Guggenheim fellowship, Luria met and began collaborating with Max Delbruck and Alfred Hershey, the two scientists with whom he would share the 1969 Nobel Prize for Medicine. A convinced socialist, Dr. Luria lost his passport for a time in the 1950s. A decade later he was a vociferous protester against the Viet Nam War and, more recently, has spoken out against American intervention in Central America. "I made up my mind that as a citizen I would be an active participant in American politics, taking advantage of the democratic opportunities that were not available to me in Italy. What scientific achievement I have reached is due to the freedom provided in this wealthy country to all aspects of intellectual enterprise."

I.M.

Pei

The renowned architect has designed some of America's most acclaimed structures, among them the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington and the John Hancock Building in Boston. But he had no intention of staying when he came to the U.S. in 1935 at 18 to study engineering at M.I.T. After switching to architecture, he got his degree in 1940 and soon enrolled in the Harvard School of Design. Meanwhile, back in Canton, his father, a member of a wealthy banking family, suggested he not return "until things settle down." They never did, since the war was followed by the Communist takeover. Although Pei's success in the U.S. was growing, he "had trouble cutting the ties" to China. In 1954, one year before he started his own firm, he became a citizen, along with his wife. "We had mixed feelings. On the one hand, feelings of sorrow at having to abandon our culture, our roots and our ancestral home. On the other hand, feelings of gratitude -- more than happiness. Those mixed feelings disappeared ten years later when President Lyndon Johnson invited me to participate in a ceremony on Ellis Island. It was then that I felt very much like an American. My buildings are thoroughly American and reflect my understanding, my first acceptance and eventually my love for this country."

MADELEINE MAY

Kunin

| At seven, the Governor of Vermont remembers, she wore little American and Swiss flags in her lapels so that the new neighbors in Queens, N.Y., would know, in 1940, that the Swiss Jewish family was not German. Her widowed mother had brought "Mady" and her brother to the U.S. out of fear that the Germans might violate Swiss neutrality. They lived with cousins, first in New York, then in Massachusetts, and became citizens in 1947. Nine years later Kunin graduated with honors from the University of Massachusetts, having worked as a waitress to pay her way. After earning a master's from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1957, she worked as a reporter in Burlington, Vt., for the Free Press. She married and while rearing four children got interested in politics. Kunin started by lobbying in favor of Medicare and went on to serve three terms in the Vermont house of representatives and two terms as Lieutenant Governor before being elected Governor on her second try in 1984. "My mother lived the American dream for her children. My political views, my whole inspiration to be in politics, was strongly affected by that experience. When your life is influenced by war, once you have the knowledge that political decisions can be a matter of life and death, then you don't want to accept those decisions passively. You want to have control and influence over them."