The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
by Mae Ngai

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.

Ngai is a professor and immigration historian at Columbia University. She spent 10 years researching one family, the Tapes, and their lives as “in-betweens and go-betweens” who “found in their bilingualism and biculturalism opportunities for economic and social advancement.” She explores the family using public and private records, filling in the blanks with what is known about Chinese Americans’ lives at the turn of the century.

The trials of the Tapes’ lives provide a compelling backdrop for the problems of immigration today. The Tape family begins with Jeu Dip, a houseboy turned wealthy self-made businessman, and Mary McGladery, a Chinese slave girl rescued, raised and renamed by Protestant missionaries in San Francisco. The couple met in 1875, had a six-month courtship – trading endearments in English – got married and renamed themselves Joseph and Mary Tape.

Their daughter, Mamie Tape, was the plaintiff in a well-known civil rights lawsuit which won Chinese Americans access to public schools. The case for inclusion was two-fold: Mamie’s lawyer argued for civil rights for Chinese Americans, but also argued that Mamie was assimilated enough, “white” enough, that she should be admitted to school. The Tapes lived on the edges of Chinese society and the San Francisco middle class, never truly accepted or comfortable in either world.

As the family move around San Francisco and ultimately to Berkeley – with forays around the country – Ngai offers captivating settings, particularly for readers who are familiar with the Bay Area. We travel with the Tapes and their extended family, visiting Sonoma and Oakland, witnessing a Chinatown quarantine and the devastation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires. At one point the Tapes own five homes on Russell Street in Berkeley, and we imagine their neighborhood, seeing it echo in the Berkeley we know today. We observe, too, the Chinese Village at the St. Louis World’s Fair, an exhibit created by Chinese Americans that sold an exoticized vision of China, where Joseph and Mary’s son Frank Tape finds opportunity as an interpreter and informant for U.S. Immigration Services.

The most compelling theme in The Lucky Ones is the irony of the Tapes’ lives. They both ascend and are held back because of Chinese exclusion laws. They gain access to middle class life by capitalizing on the laws that that render them second-class. It’s son Frank who most dramatically occupies this strange middle ground. His story takes on an almost cinematic quality as he strives to achieve social status as a Chinese American. In his career as an interpreter-informant, he is widely accused of blackmailing Chinese immigrants to gain income and respect from his white supervisors.

While the struggles and accomplishments of The Tapes are the products of injustices long ago, they resonate with immigrant experiences today, still marked by confusion and clashes over identity, assimilation, and acceptance.

Buy the Book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon, Borders.

Excerpt: “He didn’t wear a badge, like a sheriff or marshal, but he acted as though he did. Frank also may have had an uneasy relationship with Chinese people, a result of his sense of estrangement from the social world of Chinatown. Frank, as we’ve seen, barley spoke Cantonese and had been raised by his mother to be the ‘same as other Caucasians, except in features.’ But of course, he was never fully accepted by either whites or Chinese. The only way he could be accepted by his white colleagues was to be a Chinese-hating Chinese. Rounding up illegal immigrants would have shown people in Chinatown his power.”

Further Reading: Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae Ngai, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by Ronald Tataki, and Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland by Stephan Salisbury

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo of San Francisco’s Chinatown courtesy Adam Arseneau.

The post How One Family Created Chinese America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland
by Stephan Salisbury

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

The introduction to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Stephan Salisbury’s investigative memoir Mohamed’s Ghosts is titled “How to Take Down A Mosque.” It’s an eye-grabber for anyone who is watching closely the controversy around the Park51 Islamic community center and mosque slated to be built in Lower Manhattan.

But Salisbury’s book takes us to another mosque in a rundown neighborhood in Philadelphia. Ansaarullah was created in January 2002 and closed in 2008 after years of FBI surveillance and deportation, forced or self-imposed, of the mosque’s top leaders. Salisbury forces us to question our values as Americans, our national security and cherished freedoms. His is a book about the nature of fear – what it gives us license to do and say, how it colors our understanding of entire groups of people. In Mohamed’s Ghosts, we also find an answer to the question on many minds today: why are so many people so uncomfortable with the idea of Muslims worshipping two blocks from Ground Zero?

As Salisbury argues through the case of Ansaarullah, America’s fear of terrorism has morphed into a general distrust of Islam. Probable cause has been replaced with a policy of domestic preemptive strikes. Ansaarullah’s imam Mohamed Ghorab was arrested in high drama while his daughter looked on from the front of her school. His mosque was raided with dogs and weapons in tow. The media coverage and the FBI’s informant strategy destroyed trust within the community that once benefited greatly from the mosque. Even as investigations into alleged tax fraud and terrorism training turned up no leads, at least six members of the mosque were arrested for immigration violations, six were detained and released, and more were questioned and blackmailed to provide information about terrorist activity that never actually happened. “My sense is that once a suspect is identified, authorities are reluctant to let go, no matter what,” Salisbury explains.

Salisbury narrates the broader picture of domestic counterterrorism around the country after 9/11. He explains how the FBI monitored Middle Easterners, South Asians and Muslim groups, and drew information from within their ranks. In one devastating chapter, he lists hate crimes – murders, beatings, arson – committed in the name of 9/11 against immigrants and Americans, many of whom saw little to no justice. He draws parallels with the FBI’s infiltration of the Communist Party during the Red Scare, when informants were used not against a specific criminal activity but against a set of beliefs. Salisbury also gives voice to prosecutors and law enforcement, who say they have to pursue leads and suspects with whatever tools they have, while keeping information about them confidential for national security.

It becomes difficult to justify the human cost of our domestic war on terror, however, when, thanks to Salisbury, we get to know the people affected. What does it mean to be interrogated or held in solitary confinement, or put on a confidential watchlist that cannot be altered? The costs are much greater, it turns out, than just time. The individuals profiled in Mohamed’s Ghosts are ruined; they lose their homes, their families, their health. They suffer severe psychological effects, untenable damage to livelihoods and relationships, sometimes by a mistaken keystroke or minor error in a visa application. One mosque member who lost his family after he was imprisoned and deported says at one point, on the phone from Jordan, that torture or death would have been better than the personal destruction he endured.

This is not a typical arms-length work of journalism. Salisbury chronicles his own journey as an American watching his country make choices he does not agree with. “It was a shock of familiarity that finally awakened me to the cultural continuity represented by the war on terror,” he writes. “Freedom threatened leads defenders to threaten freedom.” In truth, Salisbury is haunted by the stories of the Muslims he reported on in Philadelphia. The import of this book is clear: before we rush to judge, we should allow ourselves to be haunted as well.

Excerpt: “I was drawn to this spot, the corner of Wakeling Street and Aramingo Avenue in Philadelphia’s old working-class community of Frankford Valley, by an easily overlooked whitewashed cinderblock building across from the Baptist Center — a one-time auto body and repair shop, in recent years converted to a mosque. There were no worshippers on this day, however. The central bay door was pulled shut. A chain-link fence, tangles of weeds growing up through its interlacing loops, surrounded by buildings and parking lot. A dirty yellow Abco Auto Body Sign teetered over the barbed wire atop the fence, and a metal gate stood chained and padlocked shut. The windows were boarded up… Emptiness soread now like a durable stain down Wakeling, but for a moment, an instant in the life of Frankfurt Valley, this spot had been one the dramatic focal points of the Global War on Terror.”

Further Reading: A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson and Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves by John R. Bowen.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy Angela Rutherford.

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The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
by Tyche Hendricks

—Reviewed by Erica E Phillips

Beyond its physical demarcation, the border between the United States and Mexico is, above all, a region – and one rich with humanity. In her first book, veteran immigration reporter Tyche Hendricks has compiled many of the stories she came across during her travels through the region, characterizing it as “defined by its proximity to the border and to the country on the other side.”

Through vivid storytelling, Hendricks illuminates not only the unique history of the borderlands, but its people, culture, and politics. Beginning at the East end of the border, the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, and journeying as far as Tijuana at the western end, Hendricks visits many of the unknown outposts of the borderlands – some divided by a muddy river, others by tall metal fences.

The human stories in The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport originate on either side of the line, but more often they exist on both sides – the business manager of a Mexican maquiladora, who lives on the U.S. side and commutes through customs every day; the schoolchildren living on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, which straddles the border between Arizona and Sonora, who catch the school bus at an opening in the barbed wire border fence each morning. The line is an everyday reality for them, a “permeable membrane where commerce and culture, air and water, workers and students, pollution and disease flow back and forth daily.” Were it not for this very real line, much of the region’s industry – and thus many of its thriving cities – would not be here.

Perhaps most poignant is Hendricks’s careful alignment of many parallel narratives on either side of the border. In McAllen, Texas, a wealthy housewife struggles with her social position. She moved from rural Kansas into a suburban subdivision, where her comfortable home has a pool and air conditioning. A mother on the other side of the border in Reynosa, Tamaulipas emerges from a shack, breaks down a wooden crate to build a fire, and de-feathers a chicken for her husband’s supper. Both of the women’s husbands commute to the same Mexican factory for work each day – one as a manager and the other as a laborer.

Hendricks uses the border region as a way of addressing the core of several continent-wide issues: the bi-cultural existence of two peoples with distinct histories; the monumental economic disparity; land-use; illegal immigration; health care; energy and pollution regulation; and the narcotics and firearms trades.

She visits hospitals and health care facilities on both sides of the border in Nogales. When undocumented immigrants suffer injury or dehydration as a result of a dangerous border crossing, they arrive at facilities on the U.S. side. Meanwhile, many U.S. citizens pass through customs every day, seeking out affordable medical and dental services on the Mexican side. The facilities exchange equipment, patients, coordinate transfers and share supplies, just as any number of hospitals existing in the same city would do.

In one of the more provocative chapters, Hendricks looks into the co-dependent energy relationship between Mexico and the United States. Peering through the fences surrounding a power plant development in Mexicali, watching for endangered birds in the marshes of the Colorado River delta, or listening to the pounding wind’s energy potential atop the cliffs in La Rumorosa, Hendricks paints a complex picture of the water and air pollution crises along the border. In Baja California, power plants are harvesting energy using harmful processes unregulated by the Mexican government-processes that have been outlawed in the United States. But the majority of the energy produced is transferred back to the United States for consumption. As the blowing wind and flowing rivers carry pollution between the two nations, one environmental sciences professor comments to Hendricks: “They say the wind doesn’t need a passport or a visa.”

Further Reading: Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone by Terry Greene Sterling and Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail by Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks

*Photo courtesy Tom Peck.

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Gary Fine thinks rumors deserve a better reputation. “The people who spread them shouldn’t be insulted or denigrated,” he said. “We all spread rumors of various kinds, and the rumors we spread tell us what we believe, what we feel we can’t talk about directly.” Fine began studying rumors at a crucial time, in the 1960s, when gossip abounded about the Kennedy assassination and race riots. He continued studying rumor and race in his book Whispers on the Color Line, discovering that gossip contributed to making “racialized pools of knowledge.” In his latest book, The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter co-authored with Bill Ellis, Fine explains how rumors start – from conspiracy theories about 9/11 to the hygienic habits of immigrants – why they matter, and why they could make a society more healthy.

Q. You’ve examined rumors about race and government conspiracy. Global Grapevine takes up rumors about terrorism, among others. What inspired this particular study?

A. After Whispers on the Color Line was published in 2001 I wanted to continue my rumor research. The issues of terrorism were front and center. In some ways, it went back to my earliest interest, which was beliefs about the Kennedy assassination. Here you had this event of enormous national trauma, but it was an event that was at least somewhat ambiguous. It was open to different kinds of understanding. Were the 9/11 attacks caused by a large scale Arab or Arab American conspiracy? Some people believed that. Others believed it was the Israelis, the Mossad, or Jewish Americans who were behind the attack. In both of those cases, people suggested, incorrectly, that on 9/11 there were no Arab Americans in the area, or that there were no Jewish Americans in the area. The rumors were in some sense like the race rumors – they were the flip image of each other. Whatever one believed beforehand made it possible to believe these rumors afterwards.

Now the third set of rumors related to these other two was that the U.S. government was in some way either behind the attacks or knew about the attacks. This gave rise to what’s sometimes called the 9/11 truth movement – the truthers. In all of these cases, one of the things about rumor that is important, particularly conspiracy rumors, is that there is so much information available. Facts are promiscuous. Whatever belief you find plausible, there is material that will support it.

I go back to the Kennedy assassination. If you thought it was communists, there was evidence. If you thought it was oil men, there was evidence. If you thought it was Lyndon Johnson, the mafia, you name it, there was evidence. There were facts you can bring to bear. And so it is with 9/11 conspiracy theories. The question is, what do you do with those facts? When do you say these facts make enough of a case that I am prepared to entertain seriously the idea that these attacks were caused by a large Arab, Israeli, or U.S. government conspiracy.

What we do not do is to judge who is truly correct. As we write about rumors of terrorism, immigration, and trade, Bill and I have our opinions. But the book is not a debunking of rumor. It is a book that works through and helps us understand rumor.

Q. How does a rumor start, and how does it spread?

A. That has been a traditional problem in rumor scholarship. It is very difficult of course to be there at that first moment. But we have a number of models for how a rumor starts. One model, and one that is popular among the public, is that there is someone who is a liar and is deliberately fabricating false information. It’s the model of propaganda, in which you have spies deliberately spreading information. It is certainly possible that, particularly in wartime, you will find some of this deliberate spreading of rumors.

A second model simply says that rumors happen when people are in situations of ambiguity. They’re trying to understand what happened, why it happened. People in general feel very uncomfortable until they have an understanding of how this particular traumatic event occurred. They are gathering information and trying to make sense of it. As a result, they say, these facts taken together suggest this claim. And they begin talking about that claim. As it spreads, it solidifies. It changes from being speculation to being truth.

A third model is that of misunderstanding or misinterpretation. As in the children’s game of telephone, someone will make a statement – perhaps true – and the person passing it on will change it a little, and the next person will change it a little more. You move from something that might have been true to something that is false as it is retold. To give you an example, there is the story of Arab Americans celebrating after 9/11. It’s hard to know exactly where that came from. It might have been a lie. It might have been an attempt to make sense of things. Perhaps one person did celebrate or cheer or say something positive – something like “America got what it deserves” – and someone heard it, spread it, and suddenly it becomes several people, a group, a crowd celebrating.

In terms of rumors spreading, we talk about the politics of plausibility and the politics of credibility. The politics of plausibility refers to the rumor itself. How plausible does it seem? Does it fit in with those other things that we know and believe about our society? Does it make sense to us that Arab Americans might celebrate 9/11? For some people it is implausible; for others, it is plausible. So this latter group is ready to spread that story.

The politics of credibility has to do with whom we heard the rumor from. If we’re going to pass on a story, we are likely to say the person we heard it from is in a position of knowing about the rumor. If we hear something from Jon Stewart, we might think, “This isn’t true, it’s a joke,” so we wouldn’t spread it. We always make these judgments. It can vary person to person. For some people, hearing something from Keith Olbermann is credible, for others, hearing it from Sean Hannity is. Each of us has our judgments based on our belief and experiences.

Q. What makes a rumor stick?

A. It is largely a function of whether they are plausible and whether they serve needs – whether they make sense out of a world that would otherwise be ambiguous. We talk about beliefs about immigrants, either documented or undocumented. For over 100 years in the U.S. there has been a belief that immigrants bring disease with them. About thirty years ago, when the AIDS epidemic was just starting, the rumor was that a large part of the spread of AIDS was due to Haitians. They were one of the so-called “4H groups.” Today, we see that as being implausible. At the time, we saw the connection. Similarly, H1N1 was originally called the Mexican flu. And earlier, leprosy was seen as being brought to the U.S. by immigrants, as was typhoid.

Q. How do rumors translate to real world – whether the violence of the 1960s or the anti-immigrant laws of today?

A. In looking at rumors that deal with immigration, we need to look at rumors that occur in various communities. One of the examples we use are rumors in Latino communities. Very often we’re able to trace rumors that suggest immigration agents are going to swoop down on a particular day and round up all the undocumented workers to deport them. On those days, people don’t show up for work. Suddenly, and usually to the surprise of the employers, half of their workforce isn’t there. Likewise, in white communities, there is this belief, a strong belief, about Latinos in violent gangs – particularly Mexican, Salvadoran, or Dominican gangs.

One of the things about rumor that makes it important is that it provides an opportunity for people to talk about beliefs, but to do it in such a way that they don’t have to defend their beliefs. Consider someone who mistrusts Central American immigrants. To say “I don’t like these people” is dangerous. It could easily be considered racist. But to talk about a particular crime that a particular Central American gang engaged in, well, that’s just talking about the news. That separates you from the charge of racism. And so rumors work very effectively to separate individuals from the implications of their belief.

Q. Is there a chance that rumors could spur violence today, as they did in earlier decades?

A. For a number of reasons, we have less civil disorder than we used to. It’s not that we have none – there are always aggrieved communities that are potentially a tinderbox. In 1992 in Los Angeles, after the Rodney King arrest and convictions, there were riots, as there were in Miami about 20 years ago. At the moment, we don’t see either the left or the right engaging in violent action, but you certainly see anger in many communities. At this point, partly because there are new tools of policing and more cameras, and because people are able to buy into the system more than before, there’s less chance of civil disorder than would have been true in the 1960s.

Q. What are the rumors we spread about trade?

A. This has to do with American fears about our economic dominance. These are rumors that claim that products we get overseas are dangerous in one way or another. We point to a number of different stories. About a decade ago, Barry Glassner published a very influential book, The Culture of Fear. What Glassner argues in the book is that often we are afraid of the wrong things – those rumors that we believe direct our attention from things that are more important. In terms of trade rumors, we will pick on a particular product that was manufactured overseas, and we will say there was a snake in the lining of that coat or blanket. It will be our means of talking indirectly about our fear of Asian economic competition. Rather than thinking about what we need to do to increase the quality of American products, increasing American manufacturing, or developing a world system economy in which nations play different roles, we create these stories that suggest that outsiders are dangerous. Rumors about trade are entirely consistent with rumors of immigration – those people and those things beyond our border cannot be trusted.

Q. Can rumors ever be helpful, say, when it’s about consumer safety or crime?

A. Rumors can serve positive functions in a number of different ways. One of the arguments Patricia Turner and I made in Whispers on the Color Line is that they provide us an opportunity to talk with each other about those things that we didn’t know the other believed. It provides a moment of education. I think that is true in terms of our argument in Global Grapevine as well, particularly with regard to immigration. Here are the fears – fears that may not be legitimate, but fears that are genuine – that whites have and that Hispanics have or Asians have. We can use these rumors as a starting point.

Rumors are also valuable in that they are attempts to deal with ambiguity. They warn us. That’s why we wrote the book-to get people to pay attention to rumors. They’re something like a canary in a coal mine. The rumors we hear tell us about the fears and concerns we have. And of course, rumors are not necessarily nasty things, such as rumors about one’s company giving bonuses this year. There is a study of gossip, for instance, that finds that more gossip is positive than negative. If you define gossip as any communication about an absent third person – Jane is pregnant, Karen might be getting a promotion – a lot of it is positive. In our book, we’re looking at social problems, so we tend to focus on those rumors that deal with conspiracies, violence, and economic concerns.

Q. What is the strangest rumor you have ever encountered?

A. We talk about rumors in the book about various groups eating fetuses – that in some cultures fetuses are considered a delicacy, according to the rumor. These are rumors about defining insiders and outsiders. To go that far, though, is startling. There are more widespread rumors about, say, Vietnamese people stealing cats and dogs and eating them. But these rumors about fetuses take it a step further and enter a pretty bizarre world.

The post Why Rumors Matter appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Cod and Salt, spent several years covering the Caribbean for the Chicago Tribune in the 1980s, when he first came to the town to which he devotes his latest book, The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris. “If you spend any time there, you know baseball is there. You see it everywhere,” he said. Below, he chats with Zócalo about how baseball arrived on the island along with sugar cane, how Dominicans came to love baseball, and how Dominican players in the U.S. affected American notions of race, immigration, identity and the game.

Q. How did baseball get to San Pedro?

A. It has to do with sugar cane. San Pedro was originally a fishing port, and I’m always drawn to fishing ports. Then it became a center for the sugar industry in the second half of the 19th century. There was a big sugar boom the sugar companies – about eight of them – established themselves in San Pedro. They were all run by either Americans or Cubans. This was in the 1870s and 1880s, a time when baseball was a real craze in both the U.S. and Cuba. Sugar mills only operate for about half the year, and that’s a good year. So you have this work force with nothing to do the rest of the time. There was always a labor shortage in the Dominican Republic. The soil is pretty rich, and most Dominicans would rather ply a little plot of their own than have an underpaying job at the sugar mill, so they could never get enough Dominicans to work these sugar operations. They brought in cane workers from what was then the British West Indies – sugar was failing in the British islands, and they had never adjusted to the end of slavery. These people came over and didn’t have work for much of the year, so they’d play cricket. And there were all of these sugar executives – Americans and Cubans – obsessed with baseball, and this idle workforce standing around swinging bats. So they gave them baseball bats. All the mills had teams, and they all played each other in the off-season for sugar. It was very high quality baseball.

Q. Was sugar a big industry elsewhere, and if so, did baseball follow?

A. No, except for La Romana, the next town over, where baseball did catch on. Sugar was centered in San Pedro, and it spread to La Romana. The other centers were baseball caught on were the two major cities, which weren’t sugar cane places but had Cubans and Americans for other reasons.

Q. Does baseball – as it does, or at least did, for the U.S. – shape the Dominican identity?

A. In San Pedro and in a lot of other places, all of the poor parts of the Dominican Republic, baseball is it. San Pedro is poor but there are poorer parts. The southwestern corner is desert – it’s really poor, and at least in San Pedro you can produce food easily, you can have your own garden. They’re starting to produce baseball players too in places like Barahona and Azua.

That’s what baseball is in the Dominican Republic – a way to be saved. If you have a son who can play baseball, if he can get a good signing bonus, $100,000 or so, that will change the life of an entire family. If he goes on to make it in the Major Leagues, the average salary is $3 million a year. Only about three percent of players who are signed get there, but it’s certainly worth the shot. So this is very serious stuff. When you watch kids playing in San Pedro, they don’t look like they’re playing. They’re very serious about it. I always found it funny that there are a lot of baseball players around in San Pedro, and they’re easy to recognize because they tend to be larger than other people. They’ve been American fed. They’re athletic and speak some English, usually. Now I’m a fairly large guy who speaks English, so people in San Pedro would ask me if I ever played baseball. When I would say, yes, I did, like all American kids, the next question is where did you sign, what team did you sign for? That’s why you play. It’s not to get together with your friends and have fun. It’s a serious commercial activity that you start on when you’re two or three years old. That’s why they produce so many good baseball players. They know the game the way Americans used to know the game, but don’t so much anymore. When I was a kid – I grew up in the 1950s – all the kids played baseball and it was the sport, and everything else was unimportant. San Pedro reminds me of that.

Q. What is the economy like today? Is sugar still a major part of it, and where does baseball fit in?

A. The sugar industry is just a shadow of itself. There are still a few mills – three, basically. There is much smaller production than there used to be. The industry in general is way down, people don’t eat as much sugar as they used to. When the boom came in the 19th century, the working class was discovering sugar. There was this tremendous demand. Now people are trying to eat less sugar, and the bad sugar, like Coca Cola, isn’t made from sugar cane anymore. And that’s how most kids get their sugar – from soft drinks, from corn syrup. It’s a very depressed industry.

The port in San Pedro, which used to be a major commercial port, has very little activity. What the city does have, that it didn’t used to have, is tourism. There are nice resorts outside of town on the beach, and there is a very large duty free zone, where companies can bring in components duty free, have them assembled there and shipped out, and pay very low salaries. There is a small amount of foreign investment. Cemex – a huge Mexican cement company – has a plant there, which pollutes the water and is killing the fishing industry. There are a few large chain stores. One of the big economic activities is actually motor scooters that serve as taxis – you get a few pesos to give somebody a ride on the back. There is a university there, with a medical school – a lot of Americans go there because it’s cheap and you can get in. but even though its cheap, it’s more money than most Dominican families have.

There aren’t a lot of good options. None of this earns very much money. And sometimes in the Caribbean it seems like no matter what you do, you end up losing. Baseball is far and away the best option, even if you only have a three percent chance of making it, it’s worth the shot. If you imagine living in a family that has very meager housing and a very poor diet, and can’t afford medicine, and there’s an occupation that pays an average of $3 million a year, wouldn’t you work on your swing?

Q. How are relations between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic, and how has baseball influenced them?

A. They’ve always been complicated. Most Americans don’t know this, but there was a movement in the Dominican Republic to try to get annexed when Ulysses Grant was president. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner led the fight to stop the annexation, and is today kind of a hero in the Dominican Republic, but obviously wasn’t at the time. Relations between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic have been very strongly shaped by two invasions and occupations, one at the time of World War I and the other under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.

On the other hand, people have relatives in the U.S., and the U.S. is the source of baseball. It’s a complicated relationship. Dominican culture is very different from American culture. When San Pedro kids get to the U.S. to play baseball, they find it very difficult to adjust, and have all sorts of great stories about their struggles in America, especially some of the earlier players. They want to be Dominican, not American. It’s not really their dream to immigrate to the U.S. It is their dream to play baseball and come back very rich. But of course a lot who are released from their teams in the U.S. never go back to the Dominican Republic, even though they’re not legal in the U.S. if they come over to play baseball, they have legal status as a migrant worker. They lose the job, they have no status. But even as illegal aliens they feel they have more opportunities than they would in San Pedro. And nobody likes to come home a failure.

Q. Did Dominican players change the way Americans thought about race, whether in baseball or more broadly?

A. Originally, it’s a confusing thing for Dominicans. Their notion of black and our notion of black are completely different. Most of the Dominican population is not considered black in the Dominican Republic – the overwhelming majority are mixed, which is not black for them, but is black in the U.S. According to Americans, 85% of the Dominican population is black. The Dominican Republic is in some ways a very racist place, but it’s a different racism than American. It comes as quite a shock to a lot of these mixed, light-skinned Dominicans that they are treated as black in the U.S., especially in earlier years, when they were included in Jim Crow in the South. Dominicans were playing baseball for many years without the Major Leagues being available because they were considered black. A lot of the great players of the Negro League, which was Major League quality baseball, played in the Dominican Republic, like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, but they couldn’t play in the U.S. until after 1946.

The first Dominican to play in the Majors was a guy known as Ozzie Virgil. I went back and looked at the press clips from early in his career, and it was barely mentioned that he was Dominican, but it was constantly mentioned that he was black. There was a big fuss made of his race, but people barely noticed his nationality. This was very perplexing to Dominicans.

Q. How do Americans regard Dominican players today?

A. One of the things that surprised me in working on this book was some of the reactions I received. When I first started working on it, I did a cover story for Parade about San Pedro. It got over 100 letters, most of them denouncing Dominican players and saying that there are too many foreigners in baseball. It never occurred to me that there would be such a sentiment, though, America being what it is I might have predicted it. You run into it all the time, you see it in press coverage. There’s tremendous interest in steroid use among Dominican players, as if this were a particularly Dominican thing, when in fact they were just imitating what goes on in the U.S. At this point, Major League Baseball has sent a special investigator to monitor the steroid scandals. They’re under this scrutiny that American players aren’t under.

There’s also the age scandal, because quite a few Dominican players lie about their age, and scouts have encouraged them to do so. This is seen in the U.S. as an attempt to exploit child labor – you’re not supposed to sign until you’re 16-and-a-half. A great deal of this lying about age is in the reverse, though. Nineteen and 20-years-old are saying they’re 16-and-a-half, which makes them worth more at signing.

I see a lot of prejudice against Dominican players in the scrutiny over these scandals, particularly as opposed to Cuban players. Cuban players are forced to defect if they want to play baseball, and Americans like that story. If Cubans could do what Dominicans can do – come over and play and go back in the winter – they probably would, and then Americans would have the same attitude towards Cuban players.

*Photo courtesy williamhartz.

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Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration

*Video produced by Laura Villalpando. Photo courtesy SEIU International.

The post How Coyote Capitalism Hurts Immigrants appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zócalo last chatted with Ha Jin about his collection of essays, The Writer as Migrant, and his own experience as  Chinese immigrant to the U.S. His latest story collection, A Good Fall, takes up similar themes. Below, “The Bane of the Internet,” the story that starts the collection of tales about the uneasy and long process of immigrating.

My sister Yuchin and I used to write each other letters. It took more than ten days for the mail to reach Sichuan, and usually I wrote her once a month. After Yuchin married, she was often in trouble, but I no longer thought about her every day. Five years ago her marriage began falling apart. Her husband started an affair with his female boss and sometimes came home reeling drunk. One night he beat and kicked Yuchin so hard she miscarried. At my suggestion, she filed for divorce. Afterward she lived alone and seemed content. I urged her to find another man, because she was only twenty-six, but she said she was done with men for this life. Capable and with a degree in graphic design, she has been doing well and even bought her own apartment four years ago. I sent her two thousand dollars to help her with the down payment.

Last fall she began e-mailing me. At first it was exciting to chat with her every night. We stopped writing letters. I even stopped writing to my parents, because she lives near them and can report to them. Recently she said she wanted to buy a car. I had misgivings about that, though she had already paid off her mortgage. Our hometown is small. You can cross by bicycle in half an hour; a car was not a necessity for her. It’s too expensive to keep an automobile there – the gas, the insurance, the registration, the maintenance, the toll fees cost a fortune. I told her I didn’t have a car even though I had to commute to work from Brooklyn to Flushing. But she got it into her head that she must have a car because most of her friends had cars. She wrote: “I want to let that man see how well I’m doing.” She was referring to her ex-husband. I urged her to wipe him out of her mind as if he had never existed. Indifference is the strongest contempt. For a few weeks she didn’t raise the topic again.

Then she told me that she had just passed the road test, bribing the officer with five hundred yuan in addition to the three thousand paid as the application and test fees. She e-mailed: “Sister, I must have a car. Yesterday Minmin, our little niece, came to town driving a brand-new Volkswagen. At the sight of that gorgeous machine, I felt as if a dozen awls were stabbing my heart. Everybody is doing better than me, and I don’t want to live anymore!”

I realized she didn’t simply want to impress her ex. She too had caught the national auto mania. I told her that was ridiculous, nuts. I knew she had some savings. She got a big bonus at the end of each year and freelanced at night. How had she become so vain and so unreasonable? I urged her to be rational. That was impossible, she claimed, because “everybody” drove a car in our hometown. I said she was not everybody and mustn’t follow the trend. She wouldn’t listen and asked me to remit her money as a loan. She already had a tidy sum in the bank, about eighty thousand yuan, she confessed.

Then why couldn’t she just go ahead and buy a car if that was what she wanted? She replied: “You don’t get it, sister. I cannot drive a Chinese model. If I did, people would think I am cheap and laugh at me. Japanese and German cars are too expensive for me, so I might get a Hyundai Elantra or a Ford Focus. Please lend me $10,000. I’m begging you to help me out!”

That was insane. Foreign cars are double priced in China. A Ford Taurus sells for 250,000 yuan in my home province of Sichuan, more than $30,000. I told Yuchin an automobile was just a vehicle, no need to be fancy. She must drop her vanity. Certainly I wouldn’t lend her the money, because that might amount to hitting a dog with a meatball – nothing would come back. So I said no. As it is, I’m still renting and have to save for the down payment on a small apartment somewhere in Queens. My family always assumes that I can pick up cash right and left here. No matter how hard I explain, they can’t see how awful my job at a sushi house is. I waitress ten hours a day, seven days a week. My legs are swollen when I punch out at ten p.m. I might never be able to buy an apartment at all. I’m eager to leave my job and start something of my own – a snack bar or a nail salon or a video store. I must save every penny.

For two weeks Yuchin and I argued. How I hated the e-mail exchanges! Every morning I flicked on the computer and saw a new message from her, sometimes three or four. I often thought of ignoring them, but if I did, I’d fidget at work, as if I had eaten something that had upset my stomach. If only I had pretended I’d never gotten her e-mail at the outset so that we could have continued writing letters. I used to believe that in the United States you could always reshape your relationships with the people back home – you could restart your life on your own terms. But the Internet has spoiled everything – my family is able to get hold of me whenever they like. They might as well live nearby.

Four days ago Yuchin sent me this message: “Elder sister, since you refused to help me, I decided to act on my own. At any rate, I must have a car. Please don’t be mad at me. Here is a website you should take a look at . . .”

I was late for work, so I didn’t visit the site. For the whole day I kept wondering what she was up to, and my left eyelid twitched nonstop. She might have solicited donations. She was impulsive and could get outrageous. When I came back that night and turned on my computer, I was flabbergasted to see that she had put out an ad on a popular site. She announced: “Healthy young woman ready to offer you her organ(s) in order to buy a car. Willing to sell any part as long as I still can drive thereafter. Contact me and let us talk.” She listed her phone number and e-mail address.

I wondered if she was just bluffing. Perhaps she was. On the other hand, she was such a hothead that for a damned car she might not hesitate to sell a kidney, or a cornea, or a piece of her liver. I couldn’t help but call her names while rubbing my forehead.

I had to do something right away. Someone might take advantage of the situation and sign a contract with her. She was my only sibling – if she messed up her life, there would be nobody to care for our old parents. If I had lived near them, I might have called her bluff, but now there was no way out. I wrote her back: “All right, my idiot sister, I will lend you $10,000. Remove your ad from the website. Now!”

In a couple of minutes she returned: “Thank you! Gonna take it off right away. I know you’re the only person I can rely on in the whole world.”

I responded: “I will lend you the money I made by working my ass off. You must pay it back within two years. I have kept a hard copy of our email exchanges, so do not assume you can write off the loan.”

She came back: “Got it. Have a nice dream, sister!” She added a smile sign.

“Get out of my face!” I muttered.

If only I could shut her out of my life for a few weeks. If only I could go somewhere for some peace and quiet.

Excerpted from A Good Fall by Ha Jin Copyright (c) 2009 by Ha Jin. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

*Photo courtesy like, totally.

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Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space
By John R. Bowen

–Reviewed by Angilee Shah

Americans share with the French an ideal of religious freedom. But last month, France considered a law that would be unlikely to gain much traction here: A parliamentary commission recommended that France draft and pass a law banning burqas – the loose cloak, headscarf and veil donned by some Muslim women –  in public service spaces, including government offices, public hospitals and public transportation.

Considering the news, it’s a good time to revisit John R. Bowen’s book Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves. It’s an inquisitive work of social anthropology, combining history, documentation and summaries of media reports with first-person accounts and interviews.

Bowen consistently resists the impulse to make snap judgments about people’s motivations as he explores the rationale behind a prior French law, restricting students from wearing clothing with clear religious affiliation in public schools. He lays bare France’s distinct concept of republic. Unlike its American counterpart, the French republic is integrative, emphasizing shared values and behaviors over individual identities. It shudders at communalism, when groups turn inward to create enclaves rather than turning out to the nation. It remembers its struggle with the Catholic Church and treats Islamism as a similar threat. Of central importance is the evolving concept of laïcité, or secular society. Where headscarves are concerned, the concept came to mean that France, rather than allowing any religious expression anywhere, must eliminate religion from public spaces all together.

As Bowen explains, “Organized religion, as I will now translate le culte, is supposed to remain just that: organized, bounded, orderly, confined in its buildings and defined by worship practices in those buildings.” Indeed, France supported the buildings of mosques, even at the height of the headscarf debate. But for the French, Islam by its very nature puts this version of laïcité in danger. The veil came to stand for all aspects of Islam that seemed contrary to supposed French norms, from a Muslim woman requesting a female doctor in a medical emergency to questions about women’s rights in a Muslim marriage. It came to represent communalism and often overshadowed discussions about the unemployment and ghettoization that isolate French immigrants and minorities.

Bowen presents the headscarf debate in France with nuance and empathy, but ultimately sides against laws restricting dress. He concludes that France’s Republic is based on “faith in the possibilities of sharing a life together” which “liberates citizens to explore their differences, not conceal them.” The strength of this analysis comes from the openness with which Bowen explored different sides, and the willingness to understand where France’s religion anxiety originates.

Excerpt: “Given that relatively few debates over scarf-wearing ever went beyond the classroom and that virtually no one accused scarf-wearing girls of presenting a serious danger to French society, why would a law that forced them to choose between leaving their scarves at home or leaving school be seen as such a palliative for France’s social ills and such an important step for women everywhere? Why focus on this issue above all others? The French actions puzzled most of the world; many people saw it at best a misplaced concern and at worst a violation of religious freedom.”

Further Reading: Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women, Can Islam Be French?: Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State, and Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning

Angilee Shah is a freelance  journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy JonnyL.

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Tomás Jiménez knew that something was missing from the way the press and academia portrayed Mexican Americans. Growing up in California in a Mexican American family, Jiménez said he noticed “that there was an incredible amount of diversity within the Mexican origin population – socioeconomic diversity, diversity with respect to legal status, diversity with respect to language abilities, the way people looked.” Jiménez, a past Zócalo guest, began to study immigrant assimilation, particularly the differences for Mexican immigrants and early 20th century European immigrants. “Things really were different for Mexicans. You can be third, fourth, fifth generation, and if you’re growing up in California, in all likelihood you’re running into Mexican immigrants every day,” he said. “If you’re fifth generation Italian, you almost never bump into an Italian immigrant.” Jiménez , author of Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity and a New America Foundation fellow, discussed with Zócalo the Mexican immigrant experience, the challenges of assimilation, and how immigration debates and drug wars complicate the process.

Q. What is ethnic replenishment, and how does it change the Mexican American experience?

A. The idea of replenishment I think of more as a demographic concept, but also a kind of cultural concept. The demographic concept simply means that there is a constant and fairly large immigrant population coming from Mexico into the U.S. Even as an immigrant population that came from a previous era kind of grows up and passes on, giving rise to generations of U.S.-born, there is still another wave of immigrants moving in after them.

The cultural concept of replenishment has to do with the affect that the constant influx of immigrants has on the people who came before. It has to do not only with the access that people have to all of the things we do to feel attached to an ethnic identity – speaking a certain language, eating a certain food, listening to certain music, dressing a certain way. But there is also replenishment in that people notice a sense of ethnic difference among later-generation Mexican Americans because there is so much immigration. What I mean by that is later-generation Mexican Americans – those people whose families have been here for several generations – still experience a sense that they are treated in some cases as foreigners, despite the fact that their families have been in the U.S. for several generations. There are assumptions about what it means to be of Mexican descent and those assumptions are informed by immigration and all the political and social attention given to immigration.

Q. How do Mexican Americans of different generations relate to each other, and to immigrants?

A. I think the relationship is pretty ambivalent. The people I studied feel as though, in one sense, they like having all the immigrants around them. In an age of multiculturalism, where no one wants to be plain vanilla, immigrants add ethnic vibrancy to their lives, and so they get to maintain traditions that most other groups leave by the wayside, or explore only sporadically. Mexican Americans have access to the customs, the languages, the celebrations, at all times.

That’s the positive side of the ambivalence. The negative side of the ambivalence comes from the sense that later-generation Mexican Americans have that the negative attention given to Mexican immigrants affects them too. There is a way in which the poverty and the unauthorized status that a lot of Mexican immigrants have sours the perception people have of Mexican origin people in general, regardless of their generation. It doesn’t necessarily get at the interactions between generations. Where these interactions generally happen is between Mexican immigrants who are more established in the U.S., and Mexican Americans. They rarely have meaningful sustained interactions with recently arrived immigrants.

There is also marriage between people of different generations, which is one way in which that cultural replenishment I was talking about takes place. Over the course of the 1990s, intermarriage rates for Mexicans went down, partly because there were a lot more people of Mexican descent to marry.

Q. How does the way in which Mexican Americans are sometimes seen – as foreigners even if they were born here – compare to the experience of other groups, like Europeans or Asians?

A. If you go back to the turn of the century, and read about some of the things that especially Southern and Eastern European immigrants experienced, they sound a lot like the things that today’s Latino and to some extent Asian immigrants experience. Back then, there were fears about how Southern and Eastern European groups were remaking the United States into something that made some people uncomfortable, people who bought into the Northern European, Anglo roots of American identity. I think the same thing is happening now.

Later-generation descendants of European immigrants are accepted as part of the mainstream in many ways. Part of that has to do with the way they look – it has to do with the fact that they are from Europe and have lighter skin. But part of it has to do with the fact that, with the passage of time, we’ve become very comfortable with those past immigrant groups having integrated into U.S. society – the surnames they brought with them, the customs, they’re all taken for granted ways of being American. The St. Patrick’s Day parade is an ethnic celebration connected to a group that was long despised and at one time seen as very un-American. And now we think that this is just something Americans do. This is also due in part to the fact that immigration has stopped. That has allowed these groups to be seen not so much as foreign but as American ethnics.

Asian groups have a different experience as well. The difference is partly due to the way they look, and partly to their history in the U.S., a history that includes discrimination that – I think a few people would dispute this – was harsher than what Europeans experienced. And like people of Mexican descent, later-generation Japanese and Chinese Americans are still attached to a sense of foreignness partly because of the demographic weight of immigration. Instead of those folks being seen as American ethnics – though it is happening to some extent-they’re seen as a group of foreigners. What’s also interesting about Asian immigrants is that no single group tends to dominate demographically, and Americans do a very poor job of telling apart people from the different Asian countries, except I think for South Asians versus Southeast and East Asians.

Q. What’s the future for Mexican Americans – are they becoming American ethnics as well?

A. I think it is happening to some degree. You have people who are very prominent Mexican Americans, whose ethnic ancestry is very clear and very much signaled in how they do things, but it doesn’t define everything they are. Think about the mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. The reason why he won the second time is because he did not run as the Mexican American candidate, although that was clearly a part of who he was. He ran as the candidate for the mayor of Los Angeles, writ large. There is a sense now, especially with Latino politicians, that people in high-profile positions can be of Mexican descent but they can transcend ethnicity as well. It doesn’t have to be everything they are. I think when that situation exists for millions of people of Mexican descent, then you will have the notion that the Mexican ethnicity stands alongside Italian and Polish as an American ethnic group. The question remains whether that can happen as immigration keeps on going. My sense is that, even if immigration keeps going, it can happen if immigration is less of a political issue than it has been in the past few years. It got very uncomfortable to be of Mexican descent in 2006 and 2007, when the debate was running really hot. And my speculation is that the drug problem today only adds to the stereotype we’ve long held about Mexico – as a lawless land. Even before the drug problem heated up, you would hear about people not wanting to go to Mexico because of bandits. So this certainly can’t help.

But it is promising that more and more Mexican Americans are taking prominent positions, and they don’t feel like they have to leave their ethnicity at the door, but they also don’t feel like they have to only be an ethnic Mexican. As that happens more, I think you will have Mexicans as a sort of classic American ethnic group. I think it is a possibility.

Q. Some Americans seem especially afraid of Mexican immigration – where does this fear come from?

A. I think the fear is really about cultural change. Intellectually, it’s not hard to understand – emotionally it’s a different thing. We’ve never had numerically more immigrants in the U.S. Slightly more than three in 10 of those immigrants come from Mexico. The demographic weight of the Mexican origin population is large, and there is a huge proportion of the population that is unauthorized. I think people use the idea of illegal or undocumented or unauthorized as a euphemism for saying, “We don’t like how they’re changing us culturally and racially.” I think that’s a salient way that people look at immigration. The fear is largely cultural.

We have some historical amnesia about what the country was like 100 years ago. As now, there were lots of people who spoke different languages and lots of people who practiced different traditions and lots of people who seemed, to folks at the time, like they would never become American. The same thing is happening today. The fear is at some points really irrational. It fails to heed the lessons of the past. But again, intellectually, it is in some ways very predictable.

I have my own concerns, largely related, especially in California, to the state of our public schools going from kindergarten all the way up through university. We live in a time where 50 percent of all school-aged children in California are immigrants or children of immigrants. The engine of mobility for immigrants in the past has been schools. But our schools are in disarray right now. If we don’t do a better job, or create opportunities for immigrants to realize their full potential, the kind of assimilation we’ve grown accustomed to probably won’t take place. The second concern I have is the large number of unauthorized immigrants. That is the biggest handicap to assimilation. I think it’s actually a disaster to have so many people who can’t participate. Those are concerns that we can certainly address. They’re a different flavor of concern than the one that is based on the belief people don’t want to become American. That just isn’t true.

*Photo courtesy hey skinny.

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Jorge-Mario Cabrera is Director of Public Relations for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. He was born in El Salvador, but moved to the U.S. in 1982. He attended Bell Gardens High School , UC Santa Cruz and UCLA focusing in Community Studies and Public Health. He became a U.S. citizen in 2008. He sat down with Zócalo before his panel discussion on the Census.

Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?

A. My grandma making rice with milk, arroz con leche.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. I have a picture my niece made when she was three years old. It’s a flower. I still keep it at the office.

Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?

A. That I will not eat carbs.

Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?

A. A lot of CDs.

Q. What teacher or professor changed your life?

A. Ms. MacKenzie. She taught me it was OK to not say the words in English perfectly, but that I should still say them. That was in sixth grade.

Q. If you were about to be executed, what would you want for your final meal?

A. Probably just water.

Q. What is the best gift you have ever received?

A. A kiss.

Q. When do you feel most creative?

A. In the fall.

Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles?

A. That I have my family here.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. She just died recently and I would’ve loved to have met her. Mercedes Sosa, a singer from Argentina.

To read about Cabrera’s panel on the Census, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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