Using diverse texts to critically examine America's melting pot ideal supports basic writing students' successful matriculation through rhetorically and socially challenging locations. This paper is a pedagogical study of a basic writing (BW) classroom in which students grappled with America's "melting pot" metaphor. The theme of the course required students to think about the "ingredients" involved in the "melting pot" and the ways in which cultural identity, language, difference, their own social locations, and "border spaces" between themselves and others may affect the individuals--and their subsequent "ingredients"--involved in this melting pot. Students were challenged to recognize, analyze, own, or perhaps deny the multitudinous cultural and rhetorical and social aspects of American society.