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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Family by Carmen Vazquez

Family
Speech Delivered at Sarah Lawrence College, 2006
by Carmen Vazquez

Thank you for the invitation to share my thoughts with you. Nine years ago I gave a speech entitled “Wounded Attachments” at the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force annual conference, Creating Change. That speech centered on a critique of the opening skirmishes of the national dialogue and fight with the Conservative Christian Right that the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Movement (LGBT) and our allies have been engaged in this last decade over the right to marry. I delivered the speech in the presence of my lover at the time, Marcia Gallo, and her bothers and sisters in law and my own biological brother Eric who was hearing me speak in my capacity as an out dyke and LGBT activist for the first time. I was also making the presentation in front of the woman I had fallen in love with, Carlie Steen - about a month before that presentation and whom I would eventually come to know and love as family every bit as much as the people I had been creating family with for a decade before. We walked through much grief in that short time – the death by suicide of her best friend, two miscarriages in four years of trying to have a child, the death of her dog Tret and the death of her grandmother who was also the woman that raised Carlie. This year we decided that our relationship as lovers was over and so had to walk through that grief as well. Bur Carlie remains my family as does Marcie.

I share my loves with you because when heterosexuals who have been married for ten, twelve or twenty years decide to end their relationships but retain their commitments to each other as family, they are celebrated for their maturity. When we do exactly the same thing without benefit of marriage or divorce proceedings, we are called unstable, too emotionally insecure to sustain relationships. Well, piss on that shit. I won’t have it. The family I choose to create with past and present lovers and friends is as sacred and worthy of celebration as any other.

I share my loves with you because family is what I came to talk about tonight. I will address the question of marriage again, but with much more of a focus on family than marriage because I believe our relationship to family both personally and politically is much more complex and much more the cause of our past and present struggle to win equality and justice that the matter of civil marriage itself.

Family is where the heart starts beating, where it heals and where it is first broken. Mother brings you home, her bundle of joy. Mother strokes you and sings to you, kisses the scrape on your knee, makes you rice soup, swings you in the cradle of her heart. Mother leaves you with a key in your hand and your heart pounding against your chest, your throat dry, and fear creeping through your belly. Will she ever come back? Daddy throws you in the air and catches you and your glee every time. Daddy rides you on his shoulders and teaches you how to play beisbol like the little men on TV called the Yankees. Daddy’s beard tickles your cheek and he crushes your skinny bones to him, calls you baby doll. Daddy beats you with the belt, long thick welts on your back, but you shed no tears. Big girls don’t cry.

Except at fifty- plus years of age, I cry all the time. I want to cry now from remembering the joy and innocence, the fear and the pain of my own family and growing up. Being queer, I think, doesn’t make it worse or better. Everyone first gets wounded in the very place they expect to find comfort and safety. It’s just that most of us queer ones don’t get to go back. We get to walk around in broad daylight with our hearts broken, looking for that rainbow, looking for daddy, looking for mom, dissing the breeders, drowning at tea dances on ecstasy pills, crystal meth and loneliness, looking for love anywhere.

The myth and lure of the idealized American family and community is difficult enough for most people to grapple with as they grow into adulthood, but for most queers it’s close to impossible. We’re not even supposed to be here, much less create family.

It is our relationship to family, however, and our ability to define and politically defend our families that will ultimately give us the winning message we need to attain equality under the law and the right to participate fully in the evolving democracy of the United States. But defending our family and kinship inventions will be much harder than defending ourselves as individuals, particularly in light of the American cultural schizophrenia in relation to family. As Americans, we pine for the warmth of hearth and family and a sheltering community, but our idealized hero, our cultural historical character has not been “communal.” The heroic individual, the rugged individualist, the loner, and the cowboy who chooses prairie and the lure of the wild to wife and family, the anti-hero, brooding and self-destructive – these are the faces of our national character. You can also paint the face of that character white and he most decidedly is not queer.

I don’t suggest there is anything wrong with independence. But close to independence is isolation. On the edge of isolation is despair. The cure for despair, of course, is a transforming experience such as that experienced by George Bailey, the hero of director Franz Kapra’s film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In this classic Christmas tale, George Bailey is a man who, contemplating suicide after losing twenty thousand dollars his little independent savings and loan needs to stay open, is saved by an angel and given the opportunity to see what his community would have looked like had he never been born. What he sees is a horror of gloom, a triumph of greed and destruction of community so horrible that he begs to live out his life after all – money or no money. Lo and behold, the townspeople gather around George and his family, come up with the money and Christmas bells ring joyfully.

The almost universal appeal of the film among Americans speaks to the longing we have for the comfort of family and a community within which to root that family. The reality is that most of us come from messy families, families created by necessity, families separated by thousands and thousands of miles and our deepest roots are at the strip mall. We make up family as we go along.

I drag George Bailey into this because we need to understand the historical context from which gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people are excluded. Our isolation is not the result of individual pathology. It is a cultural, social and political isolation that allows us to be neither the individual hero/anti hero nor the transformed individual basking in the bosom of family and community. There is no context for us unless we do the work of discovering ourselves in history and building queer kinship, family and community in the present.
Some of our people are working on uncovering our history; some of us are feverishly trying to create communities. The community building efforts, however, are doomed to fail if we don’t begin to develop some consensus among ourselves about how to secure legal, cultural and political recognition of our families, however we define them. Conservatives argue that we are destroying family, but the truth is that among ourselves, family is a big empty thought balloon in someone’s cartoon. When we do think about it, some of us eschew family as antithetical to queerness, while others of us are trying to have George Bailey’s family.

Which is it? It is both and neither. Our movement and our individual coming out stories reflect most people’s coming of age. But we don’t seem to get beyond the prom. Stonewall was followed by the euphoria of the sexual liberation ethos of the seventies – for gay men and lesbians, let us not forget, since feminism and its call for sexual liberation was also the time when the joyous sexual abandon of gay men was at it’s epoxy. But then came AIDS and the feminist backlash and we haven’t found our way clear since. Much has been chronicled about the gay male seventies to eighties to AIDS experience. Very little has been written of what lesbians were experiencing at virtually the same time. This is not surprising, given the little importance paid to women’s sexuality or to our contributions to any particular era. We have yet to engage, however, in any serious dialogue about what this cultural phenomenon of coming out but not really coming of age has meant for us as individuals and as a movement. Or rather, what passes for dialogue is stagnant commentary from Gay conservatives who espouse supposedly new ideas (they’re actually very old ideas and well known to straight conservatives) about gay male nihilism or lesbian political correctness, about the virtues of monogamous marriage and the dangers of promiscuity and equally stagnant rebuttals from queer leftists who have forgotten that Marx, Foucault and most left intellectuals have asked us to examine the material conditions of our society and create social change based on those conditions, not invent them.

Most sexologists, historians and anthropologists agree that queers, or at least homosexual behavior, have been with us from the dawn of civilization. I’m certain cave men and women had less judgment about it than we do, given their limited understanding of the precious character of that white stuff squirting from the ones who peed standing up or the existence in the ones who squatted of a place where humans could be created. Somewhere in time we came to understand that what we call sex between the male and female of the species led to making babies. That knowledge did not stop humans from continuing to engage in sexual acts with members of their own sex, but it did lead to judgments that would ultimately be enshrined in religious cannons and codes of law. Despite the homoerotic culture of Athens and even the early Christian acceptance of same sex couples, western civilization has seen at least three thousand years of religious, social and political persecution of homosexuals and homosexual behavior. The names assigned to us vary from descriptive to vulgar, but no matter what we are called, we continue to be seen and treated as deviants, people outside the framework of what most humans understand to be good and necessary for the survival of the species.

Still, we are here. Of course, we don’t like calling ourselves deviants since the term has been itself perverted to mean demon, but, in scientific fact, that’s what we are: deviants from the norm. For most of recorded history we hid ourselves so well that it takes a great deal of talent and hard work to uncover us. We had to become experts at camouflages because discovery meant great suffering or even death. In some parts of the world that reality still keeps us hidden.

The scientific and industrial revolution that transformed most of the western world, however, would ultimately lead to a different reality for same gender loving people. The nascent science of sexology, revolutionary advances in reproductive technology (infertility treatments, in vitro fertilization, sperm banks to name a few,) global wars and the impact of the industrial revolution on the economy, job opportunities and the actual structure of families all converged to create conditions in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century that allowed us to start coming out of our caves and closets and to walk and love in the warmth of the sun.

Shifting the locus of economic production to large urban areas created more jobs and greater opportunity for people once bound to their families for survival to strike out on their own, to travel far and wide; to even go to war. Queers found each other and centuries of isolation began to shed away. We could begin to whisper if not yet speak out loud the name of our love. The underground communities we created in large urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, London and Berlin after the first and second world wars were the incubators for Stonewall and what we now call the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) movement in the western world. We were able for the first time in history to name ourselves, to chronicle our lives and community events, to develop our own iconography and archetypes, to fine tune our gaydar, to invent camp and give it to the world, to identify our writers and playwrights and actors and visual artists, to let queer culture seep into one generation and then another and another. The “spontaneous” riots that pitched drag queens, queer people of color and plain, run of the mill lesbians and gay men against the police in the streets outside a small bar named Stonewall in Greenwich Village took one hundred and fifty or more years to germinate.
Those riots, in 1969, also took place in the midst of both the Civil Rights, Peace and Women’s movements, a period that marked the most political and social unrest in the United States since the labor movement upheavals of the thirties and the Civil War.

Since Stonewall, we have made unprecedented inroads into the cultural/entertainment and political worlds. Elton John, Melissa Ethridge, kd Lang, Ellen Degenerous, Michael Boatswain, Cherry Jones, and countless others have declared their queerness and survived; some have actually thrived post disclosure. We have passed non-discrimination laws. The Boy Scouts have to go to the Courts to keep us out. We have elected out queers to Congress and to dozens of state seats. Some of the most powerful donors to the Democratic and Republican parties are gay. Right, left and Center all court our votes and our money. We have community Centers in more that100 cities. We got culture and we got clout. But we don’t got family – not legally. It behooves us to understand why and to understand that the step beyond Stonewall centers on winning cultural acceptance and legal recognition of our families; it centers on being the people who, whether we choose it or not, represent a kind of historic town crier, forever shattering the link between reproduction and sexuality and the legal and cultural definitions of family that link has created.

The right knows this fully well. They draw direct lines between us, abortion, reproductive choice, and the stem cell research made possible by reproductive technologies. We need to draw our own lines and stop being confused. It’s not the sex, folks. It’s the family that has the rifles of our enemies pointing at our hearts.

Marriage may be the political football and wedge of the day, but family is what we are embattled over.

This is not theory only. It is the truth of my own life. Growing up on welfare in the projects of Harlem as the eldest of seven with an alcoholic dad and a mother who worked feverishly to keep us together and whole and healthy, frame much of who I am today. Having to leave that family so I could find the room to become a dyke and love myself and the almost twenty years it took to come back to that family also frames and shapes who I am and what my life has been about, as I have gone about trying to create and sustain love and family in my life as a queer. For twelve years, I created family with Marcie in the midst of the AIDS pandemic. Among the people we called family and brother was Doug Warner. Doug was every bit the sassy, high living gay man of the early eighties. Short of stature, yes, but chiseled like a Greed warrior, blue eyes blazing and camp wit flaring. He was also the center of the civil rights work everyone else was throwing overboard because AIDS had become the locus of our every day, of our activism, of our fears. Not Doug. He was bent on making the fledging Gay Rights chapter of the Northern Cal ACLU flourish with the same passion he poured on his bougainvilleas. They would grow by the sheer force of his will and they did. AIDS claimed him in the end, but for two years, Marcie and I and Doug’s much extended biological and queer family fed him and his dream with every last ounce of our energy. And so the Gay Rights Chapter – now a project of the National ACLU - lives on.

What happened to his story, to our story? What happened to the heroism of Doug’s mom? One B grade movie made for television called “Early Frost” movie and that’s it? We’re still fighting this war, still building fortresses of love and compassion around our brothers and sisters – as we always have – from as long ago as the caves, through the inquisitions that claimed Joan of Arc and into today in some lonely hospital ward where yet another of us succumbs and is claimed by the arms of his lover. Where’s that story? Are Will and Grace all we get?

Yes it is, because we can be funny but we can’t be heroic. That would require recognition of our tribe, of our ability and determination to create circles of kinship and caring that look very much like those Doug and you and me and everyone else came from. To tell that story would be to legitimize our family, our tribe. Conservatives won’t have it and we are loath to poke that hornet’s nest of lost dreams, unattainable as the clouds floating above us, frightening as nightmares of falling from the sky. We have inured ourselves to heterosexual smugness by disdaining that, any resemblance to heterosexual life that might implicate us in their conspiracy of hatred. No strollers in my neighborhood say the boys in Hollywood and the girls in the District, please. It’s unseemly.

Nonetheless, we need family and we’re going about creating them in ways that are inventive, interesting, sometimes heroic and sometimes heartbreaking. We always have. What those families look like and how we continue to shift our relationships to accommodate our need for family is what is interesting and even revolutionary. We have the couples that have been together forty or more years and built into their lives discreet relationships with other couples – queer or straight – that accept our lovers as part of family because, if for no other reason, they’ve always been there. We have single men and single women raising children from failed heterosexual marriages. We have transgender men and women choosing to stay in relationships with partners who were once of a different gender. We have lesbians and gay men choosing to have and raise children together. We have lesbian or gay male couples with offspring through adoption or alternative insemination cropping up in every suburban mall in America; we have gay men creating queer kin of friends and former and present lovers who share homes on Fire Island. We have very similar arrangements among lesbians living on more or less communal lands in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon and Florida.

And - we’re not the only ones driven by changing desire, economic status, the need to care for children, the elderly or dying partners, or sheer loneliness that find themselves rearranging faces on the old family portrait. Nor are we the only ones being excoriated by the right as unfit to bear children or keep them. The forced sterilization of poor women has gone on for decades and when that doesn’t work, conservative and “centrist” legislators make welfare reform so punitive, it virtually prohibits poor women from reproducing by making them choose between survival and bringing a pregnancy to term. As far as conservatives are concerned, Queers and the poor share the same province. In it, we have no choice and we should have no family.

The reality of Katrina and what it has left in its wake in Mississippi and Louisiana and most especially in New Orleans overtakes my senses and my heart and my soul.
It isn’t just that a great American city, a sultry, sexy, extraordinarily diverse city in culture and history lies in ruins. It isn’t just that we have seen days and days of images depicting the poorest and least empowered among us – the black people, the poor white people, children, the elderly, the disabled - left to die. It isn’t that we couldn’t fight back a hurricane of biblical proportions.

It is that the people we entrust with our survival knew it was coming and they didn’t prepare and they didn’t prevent what they knew to be inevitable because they didn’t care.

Never have I been more ashamed of being an American. Never has my belief in the capacity of our democracy to survive and reach for justice been more shaken than it is now. As I talk with you about family tonight, I need you to understand that Katrina and what happened in New Orleans, the mean spirited and very deliberate policies of our government to suck the life out of any policies or programs meant to support the poor and what we talk about tonight are all of a piece. Queer people died in New Orleans at the hands of Katrina and at the hands of our government’s lack of preparation and neglect afterwards. But those queer people who died, who tried to survive in putrid waters or on their rooftops waiting for help that never came, those people who witnessed the terror of anarchy in shelters or tried to protect their homes and businesses were, like most people who died in this tragedy, poor people. They were poor or black or both. As we reflect on the tragedy we need to ask ourselves not what happened to the “queer people” but instead ask what happened to the poor people?

I reflect on Katrina and economic injustice and the assault on vulnerable American families including the ones we are creating because despite the reality of marriage for same sex couples in Canada and Spain and Massachusetts and almost in California but for Mr. Shwertrzeneger, we don’t have a groundswell of grassroots support for marriage equality in this country. Many would blame the queer left for this lack of fervor, but I think that’s giving us far too much credit for influence we don’t have over Joe and Susie Queer, much les the general population.

It is more likely that Joe and Susie Queer equate family and marriage with heterosexuality and their own families of birth, with the very source of most of their pain and alienation and who needs to go there again? It is also more likely that we have grown up in a queer culture so besotted with middle and upper class images of the queers at leisure on cruises and beaches, clad in Versace and DKNY wear, Gucci bags slung over their shoulders that our image of ourselves and what we might become simply doesn’t extend beyond the confines of the beautiful people market or we are repulsed by them. Gay men contemptuous of breeders and lesbians who think it bad enough to have one mother and one father, let alone two moms or two dads are not a figment of my imagination. They exist and their resistance to that which resembles their past or fundamentally contradicts their values is not inconsequential or to be arrogantly dismissed. We’re not moving much beyond Stonewall until we can speak to and listen to each other in a manner that reflects and values how we really live and the ways in which we quietly and tenderly go about our lives taking care of each other. For some of us and for a slice of America, that way may look very much like George Bailey’s family, but it doesn’t for most of us. When we start thinking about ways of protecting and defending the two gay men and one lesbian sharing a household and two kids; when we include single parents in our conversation; when we understand that reproductive choice is as intrinsically queer an issue as is our sexuality; when we start talking about equal benefits for lovers who don’t share a household, when we hold up the rainbow mirror of our diversity and not just the glitter of the privileged or yesterday’s sorrow, we will have the audience we need to move beyond Stonewall.

We will also have the language we need to talk outside our own communities about what is fundamental to our oppression. Family and love are a very different conversation than one about civil rights or the abstraction of democracy.

What would the work look like? There would be research that we could call “Focus On Our Families.” There would be coordinated legal and policy work at state and national levels with an emphasis on equal benefits, non-harassment in schools, eliminating economic and legal barriers to adoption and reproduction, reform of social security, health care and all forms of insurance regulations as they relate to the designation of family members. If it is true that there are over 1,800 federal and state benefits that come with marriage for heterosexuals, then there are at least 1,800 legal and policy changes to be made, in addition to winning the right to marry.

We know what the work needs to be. What we don’t know as well is how to do it. I am here to say, again, that we do it through coalitions and alliances. To those who protest and say, “Oh, we’ve done that,” I say, no we have not. We’ve stayed in our own damn room and asked everyone to come to us. Come to our national march, come to our parade, come to our center, come to our house that we’ve already built and furnished and don’t mess with it, don’t talk too loudly in it, don’t get upset in it, don’t bring your issues in here. It doesn’t work that way.

We need a new house. We need a new way of organizing. We need allies. We need to come out as people in families.

At dinner with friends a while back in Provincetown, soothed by the soft brine in the breeze and sipping Rioja, we talked about family and as in any gathering between lesbian feminists, we had various takes on my talk of a queer movement and what family means to it. They pooh-poohed the notion of a movement, which I found a curious thing since we were talking about it and what would all these strikes and counterstrikes on non-discrimination laws in Colorado and Oregon and Florida and so many state constitutional amendments on marriage be about? Why is the right trying to introduce something so monumental as an amendment to the constitution of the United States defining marriage once and for all as the province of a man and a woman and biological ones, I’m sure. What, for that matter, were we doing in Provincetown facing the bay calm as you please with the certain knowledge that our queerness was routine and even celebrated on Commercial Street – without a movement?

I think their discomfort with acknowledging the existence of a movement has more to do with their repudiation of the political character of that movement, which is decidedly not of the left, no matter what Andrew Sullivan says. It is, and always has been, a centrist reform movement, led by largely middle class men and women who are uncomfortable with perceived extremes of the left or right, much like the country we live in. That is neither good nor bad; it just is. Most social change in the western world has been achieved through the alliance of progressive ideals and values with middle and upper class resources. I don’t see why we would be different. We have our radicals and left thinkers and activists and thank God for us, but we are a minority within a minority. We are not the thing itself. Rather than deny the existence of a movement, we need to examine it and find ways of using the resources and spontaneous tendencies for progressive ideas of that movement to create radical change that will have broad social impact not just on us but on all the other families our Government and the right wing are assaulting daily. Re-defining family and the State’s relationship to the most fundamental and necessary of social units gives us that opportunity.

We need to seize it and bring that conversation to our families of origin, to our neighbors, to the people we worship with, to the people we work with, to communities of color, to poor women, to activists in other movements for social justice. Winning the right to marry and achieving all the other policy changes necessary for the protection of all those who won’t or can’t marry is not up to us. The struggle is not just about us and neither will the solution be just about us.

We need allies and the only way I know to create allies is to tell the truth. To tell them what I need. To be willing to engage in alliance with them. To be generous and open and humble. To speak from the heart and not just about constitutional law, civil rights, equality and justice, non-discrimination, etc. People don’t walk with us or struggle shoulder to shoulder with us because they share an idea with us. They come when they are allowed to see our hearts.

Now, more than ever, is the time to rededicate ourselves to coalition and alliance with those who, like us, suffer the violence that is a deprivation of their rights. It is now more imperative than ever that we have the courage to envision a just world and act in defense of that vision. We need Planned Parenthood. We need the NAACP. We need the Palestinian and Islamic communities. We need the American Civil Liberties Union. We need the trade Unions. We need welfare moms and soccer moms. We need the people defending abortion clinics. We need all of them to understand and support the families we are and the families we dream of creating. We need them to say yes, we will support your legal, cultural and political struggle to define and protect your families. And we need to protect and defend their families.

For the sake of cold, clean air in our lungs, for the sake of melon moons, for the grown ups, children and puppies we love, for the sake of music and laughter, for the sake of our spirits, for the sake of grand adventures and inexplicable mysteries that a re the essence of life, I beg us to heed the call of our time. That call is not just to come out, to say I’m here and queer. It is not just a call to win the right to marry. It is a call to be bigger than our individual selves, to learn genuine compassion. It is a call to take the hand of those who have been beaten down and ask them to walk with us. It is a call to leave white only organizing forever behind because it wrong, unnecessary and not in our interest. It is a call to create and celebrate queer family and queer kinship, to celebrate that which we create not with blood but with trust and respect, with humor, with great sex, with courage, with honor, with love.


© Carmen Vazquez
Sarah Lawrence College
October 5, 2005

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Border

border
by Dulani


the British left India in nine-teen-fourty-seven

broke
us
in
two
and called it:

freedom.


violence gave birth to separate nations
people turned on their neighbors as if WAR was GOD’s creation
homes and trains were set on fire -
religion was the torch
lit by fear
and power
women were raped
their bellies cut open
fetuses
torn out of their wombs
whole families burned alive,
while millions of others changed tongues
and faith
to survive.

seems to be the s t o r y of so many

shedding away
parts
of
identity
being uprooted
for a better life.

seems why we are in constant search of wholeness –
like putting a mirror back together;
the cracks show how we’re broken inside,

reflecting the borders we’ve internalized.

yeah, in constant search of wholeness –
like putting a mirror back together
sharp edges that meet each other
so perfectly,
smoothing out the roughness that makes us incomplete

in-com-plete -

I don’t know my history. I thought it was a simple “point a to point b” immigration story.

didn’t realize that there are more points in the journey than I can count
didn’t realize warriors run in the family
cuz amongst all that violence and chaos
there was a brave little girl
who was my mother
and a brave little boy
who was my father.

how is it that so much doesn’t get passed down?
generation after generation,
our stories of survival fading

but we remain haunted
inheriting
the pain without the healing
the numbness without the feeling
our MOTHERS and FATHERS trying to protect us -
but we are the SONS and DAUGHTERS of resistance and sacrifice,
and protection from the truth makes for
ignorance is not bliss and
I feel lost and scared
- I need to not only land on my feet
but have strong roots
to sustain me there.

for years as a poet, I was a storyteller
who didn’t know how
to tell
her own story

why did it take me so long to ask my parents these questions?
of where did you grow up and what was that like
and who are you?

not just you don’t understand me -- but I don’t understand you -
and when we say
I love you
we really mean
I miss you,
I think
its time I got to know you

from a small village in Pakistan to a refugee camp in India
from New Delhi to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
my mother
has crossed many borders

always having to decide what to take with her and what to leave behind

belongings, language, culture,

memories of another home, another time -

seems like a past life

so that dreams be the only spot different worlds merge together
people and places from different continents in one subconscious forever
reminding us we are not ghosts,
we are real and living,
even when there is no reflection,
no compassion to our being
we build community
knowing we are neither here nor there but somewhere in-between
living at the borderlands,
raising strangers who don’t understand,

why
the house
is always full

of suitcases

why are we afraid to live?

constantly pushed out or pushed in
physically emotionally manipulated

They say home is where the heart is –
my heart has been stretched across borders and shattered

broken pieces and stolen pieces

brought back together by truth.
brought back together
by love.

Monday, May 29, 2006

Hiroshima: The Myth of “Military Necessity”

Hiroshima: The Myth of "Military Necessity"
by Ronald Takaki

Posted with permission from Ronald Takaki

During the days before that fateful August 6, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a surrender. “We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender daily,” one of his staff members recalled. When he was notified that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the general was “livid.” MacArthur declared that the atomic attack on Hiroshima was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view.”

Why then did the president make the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

Harry S. Truman was an accidental president. He had been sworn into office only months earlier, when Franklin D. Roosevelt suddenly died on April 12. Truman admitted to his wife that he had little knowledge of foreign policy. Feeling inadequate to fill the shoes of the great F.D.R., he had to face indignities and sarcasm. In the streets, people asked, “Harry who?” and mocked him as “the little man in the White House.” But Truman hid his insecurity behind a façade of toughness. Publicly, he presented himself as a man of the frontier. He blustered: “The buck stops here.”

Like many Americans, the president was also swept into a rage for revenge for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. This rage had been racialized. Truman repeatedly blasted the enemy as the “Japs.” This racist term identified the enemy as the Japanese people, a contrast to the term “Nazis” or only the followers of Hitler. Truman also dehumanized the enemy in the Pacific war. Disturbed by Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march, Truman argued: “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”

These dynamics drove Truman to rigidly insist on unconditional surrender, a demand he had inherited from Roosevelt. But for Roosevelt, it had been only a slogan to help rally the war effort.

Truman made the demand a policy. In July, he refused to heed the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that the president negotiate a peace by allowing Japan to continue the emperor system. News of the successful test of the atomic bomb boosted Truman’s confidence that he could bully Japan. In the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, Truman issued a fierce ultimatum: Japan must accept “unconditional surrender”or face “utter devastation.”

Japan refused, and Truman ordered the atomic attack. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. It was 8:15 in the morning, and Naoko Masuoka was on a school trip. She and her friends were singing about the cherry blossoms when she heard someone cry out: “A B-29!” “Even as this shout rang out in our ears,” she recalled, “there was a blinding flash and I lost consciousness.” Some 70,000 people were instantly incinerated to death. Most of them were women and children. Three days later, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

But the Japanese government still refused to surrender unconditionally. At that point, Truman decided to allow Japan to keep the emperor. Had he made such an offer earlier, he might have been able to end the war before dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The atomic bombings was met with fearful misgivings. Time magazine wrote that “the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience.” The New York Times issued a sobering message: “We have been the first to introduce a new weapon of unknowable effects which may bring us victory quickly but which will sow the seeds of hate more widely than ever. We may yet reap the whirlwind.”

The day after the devastation of Nagasaki, Truman privately told a cabinet member that “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” and that he did not like “the idea of killing all those kids.” His anguish revealed a conflicted self. The Japanese were not simply an enemy race; they were human beings. Beneath Truman’s toughness was also a thoughtful and sensitive individual who saw the world hurtling toward an uncertain and fearful future. On July 16, while waiting for the news of the atomic test, he reflected in his diary on the “absolute ruin” of Berlin and the long history of warfare, including Carthage and Rome. Turning to the war before him, he ruminated: “I hope for some sort of peace – but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll [be] a reckoning – who knows?”

Takaki, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb.


Wednesday, April 12, 2006

An Open Letter to the LGBT Community

April 10, 2006

An Open Letter to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community:

We are a group of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people of color who work in the LGBT movement. We are writing to you in response to Jasmyne Cannick’s article "Gays First, Then Illegals”, which ran in The Advocate, in which she, a black lesbian, argues that she cannot support the current battle for immigrant rights because LGBT people have not yet won the right to marry. We are writing to express our profound disagreement with her, and to offer alternative LGBT perspectives to the current immigration battles happening across the country.

To begin with, Cannick fails to realize an obvious fact – the LGBT community and the immigrant community are not mutually exclusive. There are thousands of LGBT immigrants in this country. There are thousands of black immigrants. And there are thousands of black LGBT immigrants. To put forward an argument that says "we should get ours first" makes us question who exactly is the "we" in that analysis. In addition, we recognize the historically interconnected nature of the immigrant and LGBT struggles — such as the ban on “homosexual immigrants” that extended into the 1990’s, and the present HIV ban, which disproportionately impacts LGBT people — and we believe that only by understanding these connections and building coalition can we ensure real social change for all.

And we ask those who share the destructive views of this article to remember the immortal words of Audre Lorde when she said that “There is no hierarchy of oppression”. We reject any attempts to pit the struggle of multiple communities against each other and firmly believe that "Rights" are not in limited supply. We condemn the “scarcity of rights” perspective espoused by Cannick and other members of the LGBT movement, and are surprised to see members of our community trafficking in such ugliness. But then, one reason why it has always been so hard to shift power in this country is because the ruling class has successfully made us believe that there are only a few deserving groups to whom rights can be given. This strategy has always been used to divide oppressed groups from coming together to work in coalition.

We are painfully aware that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities still lack many basic protections under the law in this country, including the right to care for and support all of our families, in the various ways in which we construct family and kinship. Nevertheless, supporting immigrant rights, while we continue to work for LGBT liberation, does nothing to hurt our cause. In fact, we believe the opposite to be true, and want to work towards building powerful coalitions between immigrant and LGBT movements to work together for social justice.

We are also aware that many immigrant right advocates have (intentionally or not) used anti-black rhetoric to move their agenda forward. Arguments such as “Don’t treat us like ‘criminals’” or “We are doing work that ‘other’ Americans won’t do” have the effect of positioning immigrant narratives as subtly juxtaposed with American stereotypes of non-immigrant black communities. They leave native-born black Americans as among the only people who do not have access to the immigrant narrative, and so are in a permanent position of subordination, as the state consistently negotiates and redefines citizenship and “American-ness” for almost everyone but blacks. Nevertheless, the solution to this problem is not to abandon support for the struggle of immigrant communities. Rather, we call on immigrant movements and (non-immigrant) black organizations to work together for real racial and economic justice in this country. Together these movements can work to end the exploitation and targeting of both communities, and to ensure that black folks and immigrants do not end up having to choose between competing for low-paying jobs, or being targeted for detainment or imprisonment.

As lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of color, we support the current immigrant rights marches and rallies happening across the country this month, and we march too. We march because immigrants are among the most politically vulnerable, underpaid and exploited communities in the country, and are asking for basic human rights, including the right to live free from torture and exploitation, and the right to work. We march because we recognize the connections between the state attacks on immigrant and LGBT communities, and that LGBT immigrants in particular are disproportionately affected by much anti-immigrant legislation. We march because we oppose the heightened policing and criminalization of immigrant communities, including the increased militarization of the border, as mandated by HR 4437 and Senate bills. We march because we oppose indefinite and mandatory detention of noncitizens—as well as the mass incarceration of people-of-color-communities in the U.S. more broadly—and envision a society that ensures the safety and self-determination of all people, regardless of national origin, race, class, gender or sexuality. We march because we oppose the guestworker proposals, which would continue the exploitation of many low-wage workers. We march because we demand the repeal of the HIV ban. We march because our sexualities have been historically criminalized by this country, and we understand that “law” and “justice” are not the same thing.

It is our understanding that Jasmyne Cannick was writing as an individual, and not as a representative of either the National Black Justice Coalition (on whose Board of Directors she serves) or The Stonewall Democrats (for whose Black Caucus she serves as Co-Chair). As LGBT people of color, we call upon both of those organizations to publicly clarify their own positions in this ongoing civil rights discussion.

We also call upon our community to imagine how much more progress we could make if we all stopped thinking of social justice as a zero-sum game.


Sincerely,

Katherine Acey
Executive Director, the Astraea Lesbian Action Fund

Faisal Alam
Founder & Former Director, Al-Fatiha Foundation for LGBTIQ Muslims

Samiya Bashir
Board Member, National Black Justice Coalition
Communications Director, Freedom to Marry
Board Member, Fire & Ink

Noemi Calonje
Immigration Project Director, National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR)

Noran J. CampOffice Administrator, Freedom to Marry

Chris Chen
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
immigrant from Taiwan 1997

Alain Dang
Policy Analyst, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Debanuj Dasgupta
Board of Directors, Queer Immigrant Rights Project

Carlos Ulises Decena, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Joseph N. DeFilippis
Executive Director, Queers for Economic Justice

Marta Donayre
Co-Founder, Love Sees No Borders

Andres Duque
Coordinator, Mano A Mano

Monroe France
Educational Training Manager, Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network
Board of Directors, Queers for Economic Justice

Eddie Gutierrez
Rep. for Christine Chavez, granddaughter of labor and civil rights leader Cesar Chavez

Priscilla A. Hale, LMSW
Executive Director, ALLGO

Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano
Director of Arts and Community Building, ALLGO

Kemi Ilesanmi

Surina Khan
Interim Vice President of Programs, The Women's Foundation of California
former Executive Director, International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission

Lee Che Leong
Director of Teen Health Initiative, New York Civil Liberties Union

Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins
Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology,
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center
Board of Directors, Queers for Economic Justice

Yoseñio Vicente Lewis
Board Member, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
Latino, Trans Social Justice Activist, first generation U.S. Citizen

Glenn Magpantay
Steering Committee Member, Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York

Rickke Mananzala
Campaign Coordinator, FIERCE!

Gloria Nieto
National Latino Justice Coalition

Doyin Ola
Welfare Organizer, Queers for Economic Justice

Jesús Ortega-Weffe
Director of Community Organizing, ALLGO

Emiko Otsubo
former Board member, Queers for Economic Justice

Clarence Patton
Executive Director, NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project

Donna Payne
Senior Diversity Organizer, Human Rights Campaign

Earl L. Plante
Development Director, National Minority AIDS Council
President-Elect, Board of Directors, National Black Justice Coalition

Achebe Powell
Betty Powell Associates

Lorraine Ramirez
Public Policy Committee, Queers for Economic Justice

Lisbeth Meléndez RiveraConvener, the National Latino Coalition for Justice

Ignacio Gilberto Rivera
Founder, Poly Patao Productions
Board of Directors, Queers for Economic Justice

Russell D. Roybal
Director of Movement Building, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Shay Sellars
Major Gifts and Events Administrator, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Pedro Julio SerranoCommunications Associate,
Freedom to MarryPresident, Puerto Rico Para Tod@s

Sarah Sohn
New Voices Legal Fellow, Immigration Equality
Board of Directors, Queers for Economic Justice

Lisa Thomas-Adeyemo
Co-Coordinator, National People of Color Organizing Institute, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
Director of Counseling, San Francisco Women Against Rape

Carmen Vazquez
Deputy Executive Director, Empire State Pride Agenda

Robert Vazquez-Pacheco
former Program Manager, Funders for Gay and Lesbian Issues

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz
Capacity Building Project Director, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Andy Shie Kee Wong,
Coalition Manager, Asian Equality

Lancy Woo and Cristy Chung
lead Plaintiffs in the Woo vs Lockyer, marriage rights case

Miriam Yeung
Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, the LGBT Community Center


-- Organizational affiliation listed for identification purposes only --

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

A Different Mirror, Chapter 1 - by Ronald Takaki

A Different Mirror
Chapter 1
by Ronald Takaki*


I had flown from San Francisco to Norfolk and was riding in a taxi to my hotel to attend a conference on multiculturalism. Hundreds of educators from across the country were meeting to discuss the need for greater cultural diversity in the curriculum. My driver and I chatted about the weather and the tourists. The sky was cloudy, and Virginia Beach was twenty minutes away. The rearview mirror reflected a white man in his forties. "How long have you been in this country?" he asked. "All my life," I replied, wincing. "I was born in the United States." With a strong Southern drawl, he remarked: "I was wondering because your English is excellent!" Then, as I had many times before, I explained: "My grandfather came here from Japan in the 1880s. My family has been here, in America, for over a hundred years." He glanced at me in the mirror. Somehow I did not look "American" to him; my eyes and complexion looked foreign.

Suddenly, we both became uncomfortably conscious of a racial divide separating us. An awkward silence turned my gaze from the mirror to the passing landscape, the shore where the English and the Powhatan Indians first encountered each other. Our highway was on land that Sir Walter Raleigh had re-named "Virginia" in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. In the English cultural appropriation of America, the indigeneous peoples themselves would become outsiders in their native land. Here, at the eastern edge of the continent, I mused, was the site of the beginning of multicultural America. Jamestown, the English settlement founded in 1607, was nearby: the first twenty Africans were brought here a year before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock. Several hundred miles off shore was Bermuda, the "Bermoothes" where William Shakespeare's Prospero had landed and met the native Caliban in The Tempest. Earlier, another voyager had made an Atlantic crossing and unexpectedly bumped into some islands to the south. Thinking he had reached Asia, Christopher Columbus mistakenly identified one of the islands as "Cipango" (Japan). In the wake of the Admiral, many peoples would come to America from different shores, not only from Europe but also Africa and Asia. One of them would be my grandfather. My mental wandering across terrain and time ended abruptly as we arrived at my destination. I said goodbye to my driver and went into the hotel, carrying a vivid reminder of why I was attending this conference.

Questions like the one my taxi driver asked me are always jarring, but I can understand why he could not see me as American. He had a narrow but widely shared sense of the past -- a history that has viewed American as European in ancestry. "Race," Toni Morrison explained, has functioned as a "metaphor" necessary to the "construction of Americanness": in the creation of our national identity, "American" has been defined as "white."1

But America has been racially diverse since our very beginning on the Virginia shore, and this reality is increasingly becoming visible and ubiquitous. Currently, one third of the American people do not trace their origins to Europe; in California, minorities are fast becoming a majority. They already predominate in major cities across the country -- New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

This emerging demographic diversity has raised fundamental questions about America's identity and culture. In 1990, Time published a cover story on "America's Changing Colors." "Someday soon," the magazine announced, "white Americans will become a minority group." How soon? By 2056, most Americans will trace their descent to "Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific Islands, Arabia -- almost anywhere but white Europe." This dramatic change in our nation's ethnic composition is altering the way we think about ourselves. "The deeper significance of America's becoming a majority nonwhite society is what it means to the national psyche, to individuals' sense of themselves and their nation -- their idea of what it is to be American."2
Indeed, more than ever before, as we approach the time when whites become a minority, many of us are perplexed about our national identity and our future as one people. This uncertainty has provoked Allan Bloom to reaffirm the preeminence of western civilization. Author of The Closing of the American Mind, he has emerged as a leader of an intellectual backlash against cultural diversity. In his view, students entering the university are "uncivilized," and the university has the responsibility to "civilize" them. Bloom claims he knows what their "hungers" are and "what they can digest." Eating is one of his favorite metaphors. Noting the "large black presence" in major universities, he laments the "one failure" in race relations -- black students have proven to be "indigestible." They do not "melt as have all other groups." The problem, he contends, is that "blacks have become blacks": they have become "ethnic." This separatism has been reinforced by an academic permissiveness that has befouled the curriculum with "Black Studies" along with "Learn Another Culture." The only solution, Bloom insists, is "the good old Great Books approach."3

Similarly, E. D. Hirsch worries that America is becoming a "tower of Babel," and that this multiplicity of cultures is threatening to rend our social fabric. He, too, longs for a more cohesive culture and a more homogeneous America: "If we had to make a choice between the one and the many, most Americans would choose the principle of unity, since we cannot function as a nation without it." The way to correct this fragmentization, Hirsch argues, is to acculturate "disadvantaged children." What do they need to know? "Only by accumulating shared symbols, and the shared information that symbols represent," Hirsch answers, "can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national community." Though he concedes the value of multicultural education, he quickly dismisses it by insisting that it "should not be allowed to supplant or interfere with our schools' responsibility to ensure our children's mastery of American literate culture." In Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Hirsch offers a long list of terms that excludes much of the history of minority groups.4
While Bloom and Hirsch are reacting defensively to what they regard as a vexatious balkanization of America, many other educators are responding to our diversity as an opportunity to open American minds. In 1990, the Task Force on Minorities for New York stressed the importance of a culturally diverse education. "Essentially," the New York Times commented, "the issue is how to deal with both dimensions of the nation's motto: 'E pluribus unum' -- 'Out of many, one.'" Universities from New Hampshire to Berkeley have established American cultural diversity graduation requirements. "Every student needs to know," explained University of Wisconsin's chancellor Donna Shalala, "much more about the origins and history of the particular cultures which, as Americans, we will encounter during our lives." Even the University of Minnesota, located in a state that is 98 percent white, requires its students to take ethnic studies courses. Asked why multiculturalism is so important, Dean Fred Lukermann answered: As a national university, Minnesota has to offer a national curriculum -- one that includes all of the peoples of America. He added that after graduation many students move to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and thus need to know about racial diversity. Moreover, many educators stress, multiculturalism has an intellectual purpose. By allowing us to see events from the viewpoints of different groups, a multicultural curriculum enables us to reach toward a more comprehensive understanding of American history.5

What is fueling this debate over our national identity and the content of our curriculum is America's intensifying racial crisis. The alarming signs and symptoms seem to be everywhere -- the killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit, the black boycott of a Korean grocery store in Flatbush, the hysteria in Boston over the Carol Stuart murder, the battle between white sportsmen and Indians over tribal fishing rights in Wisconsin, the Jewish-black clashes in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, the black-Hispanic competition for jobs and educational resources in Dallas which Newsweek described as "a conflict of the have-nots," and the Willie Horton campaign commercials, which widened the divide between the suburbs and the inner cities.6

This reality of racial tension rudely woke America like a firebell in the night on April 29, 1992. Immediately after four Los Angeles police officers were found not guilty of brutality against Rodney King, rage exploded in Los Angeles. Race relations reached a new nadir. During the nightmarish rampage, scores of people were killed, over two thousand injured, twelve thousand arrested, and almost a billion dollars of property destroyed. The live televised images mesmerized America. The rioting and the murderous melee on the streets resembled the fighting in Beirut and the West Bank. The thousands of fires burning out of control and the dark smoke filling the skies brought back images of the burning oil fields of Kuwait during Desert Storm. Entire sections of Los Angeles looked like a bombed city. "Is this America?" many shocked viewers asked. "Please, we can get along here," pleaded Rodney King, calling for calm. "We all can get along. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's try to work it out."7
But how should "we" be defined? Who are the people "stuck here" in America? One of the lessons of the Los Angeles explosion is the recognition of the fact that we are a multiracial society and that race can no longer be defined in the binary terms of white and black. "We" will have to include Hispanics and Asians. While blacks currently constitute 13 percent of the Los Angeles population, Hispanics represent 40 percent. The 1990 Census revealed that South Central Los Angeles, which was predominantly black in 1965 when the Watts rebellion occurred, is now 45 percent Hispanic. A majority of the first 5,438 people arrested were Hispanic, while 37 percent were black. Of the 58 people who died in the riot, more than a third were Hispanic, and about forty percent of the businesses destroyed were Hispanic-owned. Most of the other shops and stores were Korean-owned. The dreams of many Korean immigrants went up in smoke during the riot: two thousand Korean-owned businesses were damaged or demolished, totaling about $400 million in losses. There is evidence indicating they were targeted. "After all," explained a black gang member, "we didn't burn our community, just their stores."8

"I don't feel like I'm in America anymore," said Denisse Bustamente as she watched the police protecting the firefighters. "I feel like I am far away." Indeed, Americans have been witnessing ethnic strife erupting around the world -- the rise of Neo-Nazism and the murder of Turks in Germany, the ugly "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, the terrible and bloody clashes between Muslims and Hindus in India. Is the situation here different, we have been nervously wondering, or do ethnic conflicts elsewhere represent a prologue for America? What is the nature of malevolence? Is there a deep, perhaps primordial, need for group identity rooted in hatred for the other? Is ethnic pluralism possible for America? But answers have been limited. Television reports have been little more than thirty-second sound bites. Newspaper articles have been mostly superficial descriptions of racial antagonisms and the current urban malaise. What is lacking is historical context; consequently, we are left feeling bewildered.9

How did we get to this point, Americans everywhere are anxiously asking. What does our diversity mean, and where is it leading us? How do we work it out in the post-Rodney King era?
Certainly one crucial way is for our society's various ethnic groups to develop a greater understanding of each other. For example, how can African Americans and Korean Americans work it out unless they learn about each other's cultures, histories, and also economic situations? This need to share knowledge about our ethnic diversity has acquired new importance and has given new urgency to the pursuit for a more accurate history.

More than ever before, there is a growing realization that the established scholarship has tended to define America too narrowly. For example, in his prize-winning study, The Uprooted, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin presented -- to use the book's subtitle -- "the Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People." But Handlin's "epic story" excluded the "uprooted" from Africa, Asia, and Latin America -- the other "Great Migrations" that also helped to make "the American People." Similarly, in The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., left out blacks and Indians. There is not even a mention of two marker events -- the Nat Turner insurrection and Indian Removal, which Andrew Jackson himself would have been surprised to find omitted from a history of his era.10

Still, Schlesinger and Handlin offered us a refreshing revisionism, paving the way for the study of common people rather than princes and presidents. They inspired the next generation of historians to examine groups such as the artisan laborers of Philadelphia and the Irish immigrants of Boston. "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America," Handlin confided in his introduction to The Uprooted. "I discovered that the immigrants were American history." This door, once opened, led to the flowering of a more inclusive scholarship as we began to recognize that ethnic history was American history. Suddenly, there was a proliferation of seminal works such as Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America, Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Albert Camarillo's Chicanos in a Changing Society, Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Yuji Ichioka's The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, and Kerby Miller's Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America.11

But even this new scholarship, while it has given us a more expanded understanding of the mosaic called America, does not address our needs in the post-Rodney King era. These books and others like them fragment American society, studying each group separately in isolation from the other groups and the whole. While scrutinizing our specific pieces, we have to step back in order to see the rich and complex portrait they compose. What is needed is a fresh angle, a study of the American past from a comparative perspective.

While all of America's many groups cannot be covered in one book, the English immigrants and their descendents require attention, for they possessed inordinate power to define American culture and make public policy. What men like John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson thought as well as did mattered greatly to all of us and was consequential for everyone. A broad range of groups has been selected: African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, Irish, Jews, and Indians. While together they help to explain general patterns in our society, each has contributed to the making of the United States.

African Americans have been the central minority throughout our country's history. They were initially brought here on a slave ship in 1619. Actually, these first twenty Africans might not have been slaves; rather, like most of the white laborers, they were probably indentured servants. The transformation of Africans into slaves is the story of the "hidden" origins of slavery. How and when was it decided to institute a system of bonded black labor? What happened, while freighted with racial significance, was actually conditioned by class conflicts within white society. Once established, the "peculiar institution" would have consequences for centuries to come. During the nineteenth century, the political storm over slavery almost destroyed the nation. Since the Civil War and emancipation, race has continued to be largely defined in relation to African Americans -- segregation, civil rights, the underclass, and affirmative action. Constituting the largest minority group in our society, they have been at the cutting edge of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, their struggle has been a constant reminder of America's moral vision as a country committed to the principle of liberty. Martin Luther King clearly understood this truth when he wrote from a jail cell: "We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny."12

Asian Americans have been here for over one hundred and fifty years, before many European immigrant groups. But as "strangers" coming from a "different shore," they have been stereotyped as "heathen," exotic, and unassimilable. Seeking "Gold Mountain," the Chinese arrived first, and what happened to them influenced the reception of the Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Asian Indians as well as the Southeast Asian refugees like the Vietnamese and the Hmong. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law that prohibited the entry of immigrants on the basis of nationality. The Chinese condemned this restriction as racist and tyrannical. "They call us 'Chink,'" complained a Chinese immigrant, cursing the "white demons." "They think we no good! America cut us off. No more come now, too bad!" This precedent later provided a basis for the restriction of European immigrant groups such as Italians, Russians, Poles, and Greeks. The Japanese painfully discovered that their accomplishments in America did not lead to acceptance, for during World War II, unlike Italian Americans and German Americans, they were placed in internment camps. Two thirds of them were citizens by birth. "How could I as a 6-month-old child born in this country," asked Congressman Robert Matsui years later, "be declared by my own Government to be an enemy alien?" Today, Asian Americans represent the fastest growing ethnic group. They have also become the focus of much mass media attention as "the Model Minority" not only for blacks and Chicanos, but also for whites on welfare and even middle-class whites experiencing economic difficulties.13
Chicanos represent the largest group among the Hispanic population, which is projected to outnumber African Americans. They have been in the United States for a long time, initially incorporated by the war against Mexico. The treaty had moved the border between the two countries, and the people of "occupied" Mexico suddenly found themselves "foreigners" in their "native land." As historian Albert Camarillo pointed out, the Chicano past is an integral part of America's westward expansion, also known as "manifest destiny." But while the early Chicanos were a colonized people, most of them today have immigrant roots. Many began the trek to El Norte in the early twentieth century. "As I had heard a lot about the United States," Jesus Garza recalled, "it was my dream to come here." "We came to know families from Chihuahua, Sonora, Jalisco, and Durango," stated Ernesto Galarza. "Like ourselves, our Mexican neighbors had come this far moving step by step, working and waiting, as if they were feeling their way up a ladder." Nevertheless, the Chicano experience has been unique, for most of them have lived close to their homeland -- a proximity that has helped reinforce their language, identity, and culture. This migration to El Norte has continued to the present. Los Angeles has more people of Mexican origin than any other city in the world, except Mexico City. A mostly mestizo people of Spanish and Indian ancestries, Chicanos currently represent the largest minority group in the Southwest, where they have been visibly transforming culture and society.14

The Irish came here in greater numbers than most immigrant groups. Their history has been tied to America's past from the very beginning. Ireland represented the earliest English frontier: the conquest of Ireland occurred before the colonization of America, and the Irish were the first group that the English called "savages." In this context, the Irish past foreshadowed the Indian future. During the nineteenth century, the Irish, like the Chinese, were victims of British colonialism. While the Chinese fled from the ravages of the Opium Wars, the Irish were pushed from their homeland by "English tyranny." Here they became construction workers and factory operatives as well as the "maids" of America. Representing a Catholic group seeking to settle in a fiercely Protestant society, the Irish immigrants were targets of American nativist hostility. They were also what historian Lawrence J. McCaffrey called "the pioneers of the American urban ghetto," "previewing" experiences that would later be shared by the Italians, Polish, and other groups from southern and eastern Europe. Furthermore, they offer contrast to the immigrants from Asia. The Irish came about the same time as the Chinese, but they had a distinct advantage: the Naturalization Law of 1790 had reserved citizenship for "whites" only. Their compatible complexion allowed them to assimilate by blending into American society. In making their journey successfully into the mainstream, however, these immigrants from Erin pursued an Irish "ethnic" strategy: they promoted "Irish" solidarity in order to gain political power and also to dominate the skilled blue collar occupations, often at the expense of the Chinese and blacks.15

Fleeing pogroms and religious persecution in Russia, the Jews were driven from what John Cuddihy described as the "Middle Ages into the Anglo-American world of the goyim 'beyond the pale.'" To them, America represented the "Promised Land." This vision led Jews to struggle not only for themselves but also for other oppressed groups, especially blacks. After the 1917 East St. Louis race riot, the Yiddish Forward of New York compared the anti-black violence to a 1903 pogrom in Russia: "Kishinev and St. Louis -- the same soil, the same people." Jews cheered when Jackie Robinson broke into the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. "He was adopted as the surrogate hero by many of us growing up at the time," recalled Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "He was the way we saw ourselves triumphing against the forces of bigotry and ignorance." Jews stood shoulder to shoulder with blacks in the Civil Rights Movement: two-thirds of the white volunteers who went South during the 1964 Freedom Summer were Jewish. Today Jews are considered a highly successful "ethnic" group. How did they make such great socio-economic strides? This question is often reframed by neoconservative intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer to read: if Jewish immigrants were able to lift themselves from poverty into the mainstream through self-help and education without welfare and affirmative action, why can't blacks? But what this thinking overlooks is the unique history of Jewish immigrants, especially the initial advantages of many of them as literate and skilled. Moreover, it minimizes the virulence of racial prejudice rooted in American slavery.16

Indians represent a critical contrast, for theirs was not an immigrant experience. The Wampanoags were on the shore as the first English strangers arrived in what would be called "New England." The encounters between Indians and whites not only shaped the course of race relations, but also influenced the very culture and identity of the general society. The architect of Indian removal, President Andrew Jackson told Congress: "Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to the national character." Frederick Jackson Turner understood the meaning of this observation when he identified the frontier as our transforming crucible. At first, the European newcomers had to wear Indian moccasins and shout the war cry. "Little by little," as they subdued the wilderness, the pioneers became "a new product" that was "American." But Indians have had a different view of this entire process. "The white man," Luther Standing Bear of the Sioux explained, "does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America." Continued to be "troubled with primitive fears," he has "in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent. . . . The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent." Indians questioned what Jackson and Turner trumpeted as "progress." For them, the frontier had a different "significance": their history was how the West was lost. But their story has also been one of resistance. As Vine Deloria declared, "Custer died for your sins."17

By looking at these groups from a multicultural perspective, we can comparatively analyze their experiences in order to develop an understanding of their differences and similarities. Race, we will be able to see, has been a social construction that has historically set apart racial minorities from European immigrant groups. Contrary to the notions of scholars like Nathan Glazer and Thomas Sowell, race in America has not been the same as ethnicity. A broad comparative focus also allows us to see how the varied experiences of different racial and ethnic groups occurred within shared contexts.

During the nineteenth century, for example, the Market Revolution employed Irish immigrant laborers in New England factories as it expanded cotton fields worked by enslaved blacks across Indian lands towards Mexico. Like blacks, the Irish newcomers were stereotyped as "savages," ruled by passions rather than "civilized" virtues such as self control and hard work. The Irish saw themselves as the "slaves" of British oppressors, and during a visit to Ireland in the 1840s, Frederick Douglass found that the "wailing notes" of the Irish ballads reminded him of the "wild notes" of slave songs. The United States annexation of California, while incorporating Mexicans, led to trade with Asia and the migration of "strangers" from Pacific shores. In 1870, Chinese immigrant laborers were transported to Massachusetts as scabs to break an Irish immigrant strike; in response, the Irish recognized the need for interethnic working class solidarity and tried to organize a Chinese lodge of the Knights of St. Crispin. After the Civil War, Mississippi planters recruited Chinese immigrants to discipline the newly freed blacks. During the debate over an immigration exclusion bill in 1882, a senator asked: if Indians could be located on reservations, why not the Chinese?18

Other instances of our connectedness abound. In 1903, Mexican and Japanese farm laborers went on strike together in California: their union officers had names like Yamaguchi and Lizarras, and strike meetings were conducted in Spanish and Japanese. The Mexican strikers declared that they were standing in solidarity with their "Japanese brothers" because the two groups had toiled together in the fields and were now fighting together for a fair wage. Speaking in impassioned Yiddish during the 1909 "uprising of twenty-thousand" strikers in New York, the charismatic Clara Lemlich compared the abuse of Jewish female garment workers to the experience of blacks: "[The bosses] yell at the girls and 'call them down' even worse than I imagine the Negro slaves were in the South." During the 1920s, elite universities like Harvard worried about the increasing numbers of Jewish students, and new admissions criteria were instituted to curb their enrollment. Jewish students were scorned for their studiousness and criticized for their "clannishness." Recently, Asian-American students have been the targets of similar complaints: they have been called "nerds" and told there are "too many" of them on campus.19

Indians were already here, while blacks were forcibly transported to America, and Mexicans were initially enclosed by America's expanding border. The other groups came here as immigrants: for them, America represented liminality -- a new world where they could pursue extravagant urges and do things they had thought beyond their capabilities. Like the land itself, they found themselves "betwixt and between all fixed points of classification." No longer fastened as fiercely to their old countries, they felt a stirring to become new people in a society still being defined and formed.20

These immigrants made bold and dangerous crossings, pushed by political events and economic hardships in their homelands and pulled by America's demand for labor as well as by their own dreams for a better life. "By all means let me go to America," a young man in Japan begged his parents. He had calculated that in one year as a laborer here he could save almost a thousand yen -- an amount equal to the income of a governor in Japan. "My dear Father," wrote an immigrant Irish girl living in New York, "Any man or woman without a family are fools that would not venture and come to this plentyful Country where no man or woman ever hungered." In the shtetls of Russia, the cry "To America!" roared like "wild-fire." "America was in everybody's mouth," a Jewish immigrant recalled. "Businessmen talked [about] it over their accounts; the market women made up their quarrels that they might discuss it from stall to stall; people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters." Similarly, for Mexican immigrants crossing the border in the early twentieth century, El Norte became the stuff of overblown hopes. "If only you could see how nice the United States is," they said, "that is why the Mexicans are crazy about it."21

The signs of America's ethnic diversity can be discerned across the continent -- Ellis Island, Angel Island, Chinatown, Harlem, South Boston, the Lower East Side, places with Spanish names like Los Angeles and San Antonio or Indian names like Massachusetts and Iowa. Much of what is familiar in America's cultural landscape actually has ethnic origins. The Bing cherry was developed by an early Chinese immigrant named Ah Bing. American Indians were cultivating corn, tomatoes, and tobacco long before the arrival of Columbus. The term "okay" was derived from the Choctaw word, "oke," meaning "it is so." There is evidence indicating that the name "Yankee" came from Indian terms for the English -- from "eankke" in Cherokee and "Yankwis" in Delaware. Jazz and blues as well as rock and roll have African American origins. The "Forty-Niners" of the Gold Rush learned mining techniques from the Mexicans; American cowboys acquired herding skills from Mexican "vaqueros" and adopted their range terms -- such as lariat from "la reata," lasso from "lazo," and stampede from "estampida." Songs like "God Bless America," "Easter Parade," and "White Christmas" were written by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Israel Baline, more popularly known as Irving Berlin.22

Furthermore, many diverse ethnic groups have contributed to the building of the American economy, forming what Walt Whitman saluted as "a vast, surging, hopeful army of workers." They worked in the South's cotton fields, New England's textile mills, Hawaii's canefields, New York's garment factories, California's orchards, Washington's salmon canneries, and Arizona's copper mines. They built the railroad, the great symbol of America's industrial triumph. Laying railroad ties, black laborers sang:
Down the railroad, um-huh
Well, raise the iron, um-huh
Raise the iron, um-huh.
Irish railroad workers shouted as they stretched an iron ribbon across the continent:
Then drill, my Paddies, drill --
Drill, my heroes, drill,
Drill all day, no sugar in your tay
Workin' on the U. P. railway.

Japanese laborers in the Northwest chorused as their bodies fought the fickle weather:
A railroad worker --
That's me!
I am great.
Yes, I am a railroad worker.
Complaining:
"It is too hot!"
"It is too cold!"
"It rains too often!"
"It snows too much!"
They all ran off.
I alone remained.
I am a railroad worker!

Chicano workers in the Southwest joined in as they swore at the punishing work:
Some unloaded rails
Others unloaded ties,
And others of my companions
Threw out thousands of curses.23

Moreover, our diversity was tied to America's most serious crisis: the Civil War was fought over a racial issue -- slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, presented on March 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln declared: "One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended." Southern secession, he argued, would be anarchy. Lincoln sternly warned the South that he had a solemn oath to defend and preserve the union. Americans were one people, he explained, bound together by "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land." The struggle and sacrifices of the War for Independence had enabled Americans to create a new nation out of thirteen separate colonies. But Lincoln's appeal for unity fell on deaf ears in the South. And the war came. Two and a half years later, at Gettysburg, President Lincoln declared that "brave men" had fought and "consecrated" the ground of this battlefield in order to preserve the Union. Among the brave were black men. Shortly after this bloody battle, Lincoln acknowledged the military contributions of blacks. "There will be some black men," he wrote in a letter to an old friend, James C. Conkling, "who can remember that with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation. . . ." Indeed, 186,000 blacks served in the Union Army, and one third of them were listed as missing or dead. Black men in blue, Frederick Douglass pointed out, were "on the battlefield mingling their blood with that of white men in one common effort to save the country." Now the mystic chords of memory stretched across the new battlefields of the Civil War, and black soldiers were buried in "patriot graves." They, too, had given their lives to ensure that the "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."24

Like these black soldiers, the people in our study have been actors in history, not merely victims of discrimination and exploitation. They are entitled to be viewed as subjects -- as men and women with minds, wills, and voices.

In the telling and retelling
of their stories,
They create communities
of memory.

They also re-vision history. "It is very natural that the history written by the victim," said a Mexican in 1874, "does not altogether chime with the story of the victor." Sometimes they are hesitant to speak, thinking they are only "little people." "I don't know why anybody wants to hear my history," an Irish maid said apologetically in 1900. "Nothing ever happened to me worth the tellin'."25

But their stories are worthy. Through their stories, the people who have lived America's history can help all of us, including my taxi driver, understand that Americans originated from many shores, and that all of us are entitled to dignity. "I hope this survey do a lot of good for Chinese people," an immigrant told an interviewer from Stanford University in the 1920s. "Make American people realize that Chinese people are humans. I think very few American people really know anything about Chinese." But the remembering is also for the sake of the children. "This story is dedicated to the descendants of Lazar and Goldie Glauberman," Jewish immigrant Minnie Miller wrote in her autobiography. "My history is bound up in their history and the generations that follow should know where they came from to know better who they are." Similarly, Tomo Shoji, an elderly Nisei woman, urged Asian Americans to learn more about their roots: "We got such good, fantastic stories to tell. All our stories are different." Seeking to know how they fit into America, many young people have become listeners; they are eager to learn about the hardships and humiliations experienced by their parents and grandparents. They want to hear their stories, unwilling to remain ignorant or ashamed of their identity and past.26
The telling of stories liberates. By writing about the people on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros explained, "the ghost does not ache so much." The place no longer holds her with "both arms. She sets me free." Indeed, stories may not be as innocent or simple as they seem to be. Native-American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko cautioned:

"I will tell you something about stories. . .
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled."

Indeed, the accounts given by the people in this study vibrantly re-create moments, capturing the complexities of human emotions and thoughts. They also provide the authenticity of experience. After she escaped from slavery, Harriet Jacobs wrote in her autobiography: "[My purpose] is not to tell you what I have heard but what I have seen -- and what I have suffered." In their sharing of memory, the people in this study offer us an opportunity to see ourselves reflected in a mirror called history.27

In his recent study of Spain and the New World, The Buried Mirror, Carlos Fuentes points out that mirrors have been found in the tombs of ancient Mexico, placed there to guide the dead through the underworld. He also tells us about the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent: when this god was given a mirror by the Toltec deity, Tezcatlipoca, he saw a man's face in the mirror and realized his own humanity. For us, the "mirror" of history can guide the living and also help us recognize who we have been and hence are. In A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman finds "phenomenal parallels" between the "calamitous 14th century" of European society and our own era. We can, she observes, have "greater fellow-feeling for a distraught age" as we painfully recognize the "similar disarray," "collapsing assumptions," and "unusual discomfort."28

But what is needed in our own perplexing times is not so much a "distant" mirror, as one that is "different." While the study of the past can provide collective self-knowledge, it often reflects the scholar's particular perspective or view of the world. What happens when historians leave out many of America's peoples? What happens, to borrow the words of Adrienne Rich, "when someone with the authority of a teacher" describes our society, and "you are not in it"? Such an experience can be disorienting -- "a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing."29

Through their narratives about their lives and circumstances, the people of America's diverse groups are able to see themselves and each other in our common past. They celebrate what Ishmael Reed has described as a society "unique" in the world because "the world is here" -- a place "where the cultures of the world crisscross." Much of America's past, they point out, has been riddled with racism. At the same time, these people offer hope, affirming the struggle for equality as a central theme in our country's history. At its conception, our nation was dedicated to the proposition of equality. What has given concreteness to this powerful national principle has been our coming together in the creation of a new society. "Stuck here" together, workers of different backgrounds have attempted to get along with each other.

"People harvesting
work together unaware
Of racial problems, "
wrote a Japanese immigrant describing a lesson learned by Mexican and Asian farm laborers in California.30

Finally, how do we see our prospects for "working out" America's racial crisis? Do we see it as through a glass darkly? Do the televised images of racial hatred and violence that riveted us in 1992 during the days of rage in Los Angeles frame a future of divisive race relations -- what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has fearfully denounced as the "disuniting of America"? Whatever happens, we can be certain that much of our society's future will be influenced by which "mirror" we choose to see ourselves. America does not belong to one race or one group, the people in this study remind us, and Americans have been constantly re-defining their national identity from the moment of first contact on the Virginia shore. By sharing their stories, they invite us to see ourselves in a different mirror.31

1 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Ma., 1992), p. 47.

2 William A. Henry, III, "Beyond the Melting Pot," in "America's Changing Colors," Time Magazine, vol. 135, no. 15 (April 9, 1990), pp. 28-31.

3 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987), pp. 19, 91-3, 340-1, 344.

4 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston, 1987), pp. xiii, xvii, 2, 18, 96. See also "The List," pp. 152-215.

5 Edward Fiske, "Lessons," in New York Times, February 7, 1990; "University of Wisconsin-Madison: The Madison Plan," February 9, 1988; interview with Dean Fred Lukermann, University of Minnesota, 1987.

6 "A Conflict of the Have-Nots," Newsweek, December 12, 1988, pp. 28-9.

7 Rodney King's statement to the press, in The New York Times, May 2, 1992, p. 6.

8 Tim Rutten, "A New Kind of Riot," New York Review of Books, June 11, 1992, pp. 52-3; Maria Newman, "Riots Bring Attention to Growing Hispanic Presence in South-Central Area," New York Times, May 11, 1992, p. A 10; Mike Davis, "In L. A. Burning All Illusions," The Nation, June 1, 1992, pp. 744-5; Jack Viets and Peter Fimrite, "S. F. Mayor Visits Riot-Torn Area to Buoy Businesses," San Francisco Chronicle, May 6, 1992, p. A 6.

9 Rick DelVecchio, Suzanne Espinosa, and Carl Nolte, "Bradley Ready to Lift Curfew," San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 1992, p. A 1.

10 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (New York, 1951); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945).

11 Handlin, The Uprooted, p. 3; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976); Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York, 1970); Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, Ma., 1979); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977); Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants (New York, 1988); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985).

12 Abraham Lincoln, "The Gettysburg Address," in The Annal of America, vol. 9, 1863-1865: The Crisis of the Union (Chicago, 1968), pp. 462-3; Martin Luther King, Why We Can't Wait (New York, 1964), pp. 92-3.

13 Interview with old laundryman, in "Interviews with Two Chinese," circa 1924, Box 326, folder 325, Survey of Race Relations, Stanford University, Hoover Institution Archives; Congressman Robert Matsui, speech in the House of Representatives on the 442 bill for redress and reparations, September 17, 1987, Congressional Record (Washington, D. C., 1987), p. 7584.

14 Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society, p. 2; Juan Nepomuceno Seguin, in David J. Weber (ed.), Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque, N. M., 1973), p. vi; Jesus Garza, in Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life Story (Chicago, 1931), p. 15; Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy's Acculturation (Notre Dame, 1986), p. 200.

15 Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Diaspora in America (Washington, D. C., 1984), pp. 6, 62.

16 John Murry Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston, 1987), p. 165; Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America (New York, 1989), pp. 28, 82, 83-4, 91, 93, 106.

17 Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1829, in James D. Richardson (ed.), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897 (Washington, D. C., 1897), vol. 2, p. 457; Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Madison, 1938), pp. 185 ff; Luther Standing Bear, "What the Indian Means to America," in Wayne Moquin (ed.), Great Documents in American Indian History (New York, 1973), p. 307; Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York, 1969).

18 Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality ane Public Policy (New York, 1978); Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York, 1981); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), pp. 134-6; Dan Caldwell, "The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California," Southern California Quarterly, vol. 33 (June 1971), pp. 123-31.

19 Tomas Almaguer, "Racial Domination and Class Conflict in Capitalist Agriculture: The Oxnard Sugar Beet Workers' Strike of 1903," Labor History, vol. 25, no. 3 (Summer 1984), p. 347; Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York, 1992), p. 183.

20 For the concept of liminality, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, New York, 1974), pp. 232, 237; and Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1960). What I try to do is to apply liminality to the land called America.

21 Ito, Issei, p. 33; Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850-1900 (New York, 1970), p. 24; Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York, 1960, originally published in 1917), pp. 59-61; Mary Antin, quoted in Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers, p. 27; Lawrence A. Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897-1931 (Tucson, 1981), p. 80.

22 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston, 1989), pp. 88-9, Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America (New York, 1991), pp. 210, 212; Carey McWilliams, North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (New York, 1968), p, 154; Stephan Thernstrom (ed.), Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Ma., 1980), p. 22; Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, p. 367.

23 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York, 1958), p. 284; Mathilde Bunton, "Negro Work Songs," (1940), 1 typescript in Box 91 ("Music"), Illinois Writers Project, U.S.W.P.A.," in James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Sojourners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), p. 192; Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (Baton Rouge, 1956), p. 39; Kazuo Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants (Seattle, 1973), p. 343; Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States (Chicago, 1930), pp. 84-85.

24 Abraham Lincoln, "First Inaugural Address," in The Annal of America, vol. 9, 1863-1865: The Crisis of the Union (Chicago, 1968), p. 255; Abraham Lincoln, "The Gettysburg Address," in ibid., pp. 462-3; Abraham Lincoln, letter to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863, in ibid., p. 439; Frederick Douglass, in Herbert Aptheker (ed.), A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York, 1951), vol. I, p. 496.

25 Weber (ed.), Foreigners in Their Native Land, p. vi; Hamilton Holt (ed.), The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans As Told by Themselves (New York, 1906), p. 143.

26 "Social Document of Pany Lowe, interviewed by C. H. Burnett, Seattle, July 5, 1924," p. 6, Survey of Race Relations, Stanford University, Hoover Institution Archives; Minnie Miller, "Autobiography," private manuscript, copy from Richard Balkin; Tomo Shoji, presentation, Ohana Cultural Center, Oakland, California, March 4, 1988.

27 Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (New York, 1991), pp. 109-110; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York, 1978), p. 2; Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cambridge, 1987, originally published in 1857), p. xiii.

28 Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (Boston, 1992), pp. 10, 11, 109; Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York, 1978), pp. xiii, xiv.

29 Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York, 1986), p. 199.

30 Ishmael Reed, "America: The Multinational Society," in Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.), Multi-cultural Literacy (St. Paul, 1988), p. 160; Ito, Issei, p. 497.

31 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tennessee, 1991); Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (Seattle, 1981), pp. 188-89.