The second performance of Citizen Who, which Liu wrote and produced as part of his fellowship at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University, took place in front of a full house at the Stage 2 Theater at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. As with Liu’s debut performance, the show interspersed monologues with moments of audience participation. At the very beginning of the show, the crowd stood to take the U.S. naturalization oath. At the start of each of five acts, they were asked to discuss and answer some of the questions that appear on the citizenship exam. “Where is the Statue of Liberty?” garnered a roomful of raised hands. “What is the rule of law?” brought on giggles and conversation but far fewer people clamoring to answer.

Liu tells the stories of several Americans whom he’s met and interviewed and also tells his own story—a story of growing up American in New York but admiring his grandfather, who helped lead the Chinese Air Force; being nicknamed “Glasses” in the Marine Corps Officer Training School; and going into, then getting out of, politics.

One of Liu’s stories belongs to Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Holocaust survivor and founder of Citizenship Counts, an organization devoted to civic education and promoting pride in U.S. citizenship. Klein, a friend and colleague of Liu’s, was in the audience watching the performance for the first time. With tears in her eyes, she said she was thrilled to hear Liu embody her dreams and to act as “messenger … for the love of the country I have.”

Lattie Coor, chairman and CEO of the Center for the Future of Arizona, has heard Liu talk about citizenship and immigration before. Yet he felt the setting and format gave Liu’s message a different type of power. “It’s a pretty gutsy thing to take so much personal identity” and to put it into a one-man show, he said. “It’s quite remarkable.”

But as much as they were bolstered by the audience response, Liu and Zoey Cane Belyea, who is the performance facilitator, feel that Citizen Who continues to evolve. This second performance was significantly shorter and tighter than the debut, and they agreed the new version worked well. But they also want to continue to deepen the program. “We found our feet, so it’s easier to see where we want to go next,” said Belyea.

At the reception after the performance, Liu was surrounded by audience members who wanted to tell him their own stories and to ask questions about the work. He felt this was a tribute to the format of the evening. “When you make points in pure argument form, it can stimulate intellect but not necessarily move people,” Liu said. “But when you make points via story, people lean in and find themselves in that story and connect in a way that is stickier.”

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It’s an oath familiar to some Americans but very foreign to most—the U.S. naturalization oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the armed forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

As the audience took their seats, Liu asked them how it had felt to take the oath. “What did we just do? To whom did we make that promise?” And, if it felt, odd—even unnatural—why?

Over five acts—“Dream,” “Arrival,” “Betrayal,” “Redemption,” and “Dream,”—Liu recounted his journey across America trying to answer that question, and to figure out what exactly this strange oath means and how it’s practiced.

Liu punctuated each act with a violin performance of a quintessential American song, from “America the Beautiful” to “This Land Is Your Land.” Along the way, audience members were asked to answer history and civics questions from the citizenship test, some simple (Who was the first American president?) and others more complex (What is one responsibility that is only for U.S. citizens?).

Liu wove together these acts through his story and his family’s—his mother’s journey from Taiwan to New York, from file clerk to a job at IBM, from immigrant to American—along with those of other Americans, both foreign- and native-born.

Gerda Weissmann Klein survived the Holocaust, moved to America, wrote a bestselling memoir, and founded an organization called Citizenship Counts. Her life, said Liu, has been extraordinary in many senses. But she also raised a family; she relished the simple pleasures she was denied as a girl. She lived an ordinary, American life.

Liu decided to join the Marine Corps as a sophomore in college. At officer training school, he was hazed: “I was a little guy, an Asian guy, an Ivy League guy, a guy with glasses.” When at last he was mocked for holding his head high—as “General Liu”—he realized he was an insider at last.

Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at Los Alamos who had emigrated from China, was falsely accused of espionage and imprisoned; his name was leaked, and his case was splashed across the media. When he was finally exonerated, no one noticed—or even apologized.

A South Philadelphia high school student becomes embroiled in a race war, and decides to empower his fellow Asian classmates. A Latina Republican becomes an accidental activist. A Pentecostal preacher in Tulsa rescues abused guest workers from India.

These are people with consciences, said Liu—people whose consciences have been animated by the question of what is freedom for, when is loyalty dissent, and when is dissent loyalty?

Most of us remain citizens by birthright only. We don’t earn it. But what if we had to? What if, like naturalized citizens, we too had to take an oath? Liu asked the audience to test this proposition, and to join him in taking the Sworn-Again America Oath:

I pledge to be an active American; to show up for others; to govern my self
to help govern my community. I recommit myself to my country’s creed: to cherish liberty as a responsibility; to serve and to push my country—when right, to be kept right; when wrong to be set right. Wherever my ancestors and I were born, I claim America
and I pledge to live like a citizen.

But how do we live up to these vows?

It starts, said Liu, by introducing yourselves to your fellow Americans.

“I am Eric Liu, citizen. Who are you?”

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Chad Ress is a photographer based in Los Angeles and a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. His most recent project, America Recovered, was featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Harper’s Magazine.

The post Familiar Yet Unfamiliar America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“We never really were one nation,” Woodard, author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, told a full house Monday night at Arizona State University’s Washington Center in Washington, DC.

Woodard–in a conversation sponsored by the Center for Social Cohesion and moderated by Zócalo Public Square editorial director Andrés Martinez–said he realized North America was much more complex than its political boundaries after he spent time as a foreign correspondent in the Balkan Peninsula, where cultural ties, not state borders, determine how people live. Upon moving back to the United States, he noticed stark differences in peoples’ values from one region of the country to the next and realized again that state borders didn’t give much insight into the people who lived there.

Woodard identified those ideals and studied their histories to create a new map of North America divided into 11 different nations. The nations date back to colonial times, when different groups of European settlers came to the New World with different religious and political goals in mind.

For example, the nation Woodard calls Yankeedom spans New England, the Great Lakes, and the Upper Midwest–and is one of North America’s superpowers. Calvinists founded this “nation” as a religious experiment in whether social engineering would make the world a better place.

“From the beginning the idea was that you could perfect earthly society and make it more godly,” Woodard said. The legacy of this experiment is an American region with strong public institutions designed to improve society.

Just south of Yankeedom on the East Coast lies New Netherland, made up of the New York City area, New Jersey, and parts of eastern Pennsylvania. The Dutch founded New Netherland as a trading post for their global trading society. Today it is a global financial center.

Another nation, the Midlands, starts in Pennsylvania and runs through the Rust Belt, into the Great Plains, and up to southern Canada. The Midlands was another religious experiment, but along different lines than those pursued by the Calvinists of Yankeedom. Founded by the original Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Midlands historically welcomed immigrants and people of different beliefs.

“It essentially became, from the beginning … a mosaic where no one group was particularly in charge,” Woodard said. This history has shaped American politics by establishing the idea of American identity as the ability of different people to live comfortably next to each other. Politically, this region has been full of swing states, where the existence of a variety of beliefs means whoever can win a slight majority often wins the day.

“If you were planning out a national election, look at the Midlands,” Woodard said.

To the south, a fourth nation, dubbed Tidewater by Woodard, encompasses the Chesapeake area, the eastern half of Virginia, and the northern border of North Carolina. It was settled by the younger sons of English gentry who recreated the English hierarchy. As they embraced the idea of aristocracy, they emphasized the importance of property and agriculture that defined much of the region and separated the north and south early on in American history.

A fifth nation, Appalachia, runs through much of the center of the continent. It started as a warrior culture because of the challenges of governing the mountainous region. Today that sentiment survives as a strong commitment to personal sovereignty.

A sixth nation–the Deep South–was founded by farmers from Barbados as a West Indies slave society, albeit one modeled after the Roman Republic, with a rigid caste system that was an unchanging fact of life. While the structure of society has changed in the Deep South, its distinct ideological history keeps it at odds with Yankeedom.

Woodard touched on the nations of New France (in Louisiana and eastern Canada), El Norte (the New Mexico area), and First Nation in northern Canada. But he put more emphasis on the two Western regions–which he calls the Far West and the Left Coast.

These regions, he said, are “hybrid, second-generation locations.”

Heat, drought, and distance were such difficult challenges in the early Far West (including northern Arizona and the interiors of California, Washington, and Oregon) that they trumped social forces like ethnicity. The people had to latch on to capitalist endeavors like the railroad and the gold rush to survive. Their economic dependence on the eastern regions essentially turned the Far West into a colony, Woodard said, which fostered resentment of the federal government that continues today.

Finally, the Left Coast (a skinny nation extending along the Pacific from Monterey, California to Juneau, Alaska), which was founded earlier than the Far West, was an experiment by the people of Yankeedom to establish yet another light on the hill. Their experiment, however, was thwarted by another gold rush and the arrival of many settlers from the Appalachians.

“The Left Coast combines the utopianism and the belief in the possibility of social reform of Yankeedom with a emphasis on individual self discovery and actualization that comes from the Appalachians,” Woodard said.

Taking all of this together, Woodard said it’s important to see that the cultures don’t change over time, and their values and expectations are passed down as a sort of cultural DNA.

Martinez, the moderator, noted that while cultural divisions in today’s political climate might support the claims of many different nations in America, it wasn’t that long ago that 49 of 50 states voted for Ronald Reagan for president. He asked what it is about today that makes the divisions so apparent.

Woodard answered that there have always been some periods of strong polarization and other periods of relative unity. The new development–seen only in recent decades–is the advance of coalitions among regions. For example, while we associate “red states” with the Far West, Appalachia, and the Deep South, it wasn’t long ago that the Far West was much more populist than it is today, and in the Civil War, Appalachia sided with Yankeedom over the Deep South.

“The nations tend to act together, but they act for different reasons in different situations,” he said. “This is another one of those moments where understanding what we’re fighting about would be handy.”

Overall, Woodard said his goal is to look past where we are now to what we can be in the future. What we need to recognize, he said, is that the federal government was created to facilitate compromise among the different groups in the United States.

“If we recognize that, I am optimistic that we will carry through and that there will be better dialogue,” he said.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book: Skylight, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read Colin Woodard’s essay on how the 11 nations can help presidential candidates here.
Read expert opinions on our culture wars here.

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After work, she said, “I’d get everybody together and cook Mexican food, and we’d sit around outside and eat Mexican food and drink beer and make friends with each other. That worked.” So, the question, she continued, is “how can we as a nation sit around and eat Mexican food and drink beer and make friends?”

The question served as a running theme for “Can the United States Remain United?,” a half-day conference curated by the Center for Social Cohesion, a joint project of Arizona State University and Zócalo Public Square in partnership with the New America Foundation. More than 100 people crowded a lecture hall at the National Press Club in downtown Washington to hear O’Connor, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy and two panels of experts on the forces that divide and unite Americans today.

Read remarks from O’Connor and Kennedy.

Framing the Conversation

The first panel of the event, “What’s Dividing Us?” (pictured at top), began by setting the parameters of the discussion. Gregory Rodriguez, founder of the Center for Social Cohesion, said he focused for many years on immigration issues, studying how new immigrants become part of “the whole.” More recently, he’s taken a step back, asking “What is the whole?” That question, he said, helped lead to the creation of the Center for Social Cohesion and guided the conference in Washington.

One topic of debate was whether social cohesion is a bigger problem in the United States today than it has been historically – in other words, are we more divided than ever before? Participants on the first panel, moderated by Center for Social Cohesion fellow and New America Foundation fellowship director Andrés Martinez, brought varying opinions.

James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who co-wrote Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth About the “Real” America, said there is less cohesion today than in the past. Political divisions, he said, once were simply stand-ins for people’s socioeconomic status. Now, he said, partisanship has come to represent all sorts of other differences between Americans.

“It seems like in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the economic foundation of the party system remained there, but overlaid on top of that came these cultural issues and divisions,” he said. Now, “your music preferences predict your political identity.”

But Michael Lind, co-director of the Economic Growth Program and the Next Social Contract Initiative at the New America Foundation, took issue with the claim that Americans are more divided today.

“At the political level we’re more divided,” he said, acknowledging partisan rancor in Washington. “At a social level, I think we’re more integrated, outside of immigrant enclaves, than we’ve ever been.”

In the keynote address, Kennedy identified poverty as America’s deepest fault line. Poor people in America, he said, don’t have the chance to participate fully in society because their circumstances hold them down.

Diagnosing Demographics

Journalist Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, agreed with Gimpel and said the trend away from interacting with people different from themselves might seem counterintuitive in a nation that has steadily become more diverse.

“Essentially, what we’re seeing is this weird event where where we live is becoming more homogenous, but from place to place within the United States, we’re seeing greater diversity,” he said.

Bishop mentioned a handful of examples of that paradox from his book. Income differences between towns have risen, and the number of people with college degrees has skyrocketed in some places – like Bishop’s hometown of Austin, Tex., Los Angeles and the nation’s capital, to name a few – while plummeting in many others. And, of course, the number of counties in which elections are decided by 20 or more points – whether in favor of Republican or Democrat candidates – has increased dramatically. In short, he said, Americans are sorting themselves into tribes of people like them.

Gimpel’s book and corresponding web site uses a similar framework to Bishop’s. He has divided the nation into 12 types of counties – from “Mormon Outposts” to “Industrial Metropolises” to “Monied ‘burbs” and “Tractor Country” – that divide people based on their lifestyle and priorities rather than geography.

Martinez, the former editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times , said that this type of clustering made his job very difficult.

“People think that when an editorial takes a side of an issue, they should be able to infer where you’ll come down on every other issue,” he said. “So even for people who try to set themselves up as arbiters from the sideline who decide each issue separately, people get very angry and confused if you start mixing and matching and trying to plot an independent course.”

New Americans Joining the Fold

The second panel, titled “What Are We Loyal To?”, focused primarily on how immigration has affected the ways both native- and foreign-born Americans cohere.

Tamar Jacoby, a journalist and CEO of ImmigrationWorks USA, a national federation of small business owners working for better immigration laws, framed the conversation with some dramatic statistics. In 1970, following decades of extremely tight restrictions on immigration to the United States, five percent of American residents were foreign-born. Today, 13 percent of Americans were born in other countries.

Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and a Cuban immigrant, said new Americans’ religious affiliations often dictate what level of cohesion they find in the United States. Latino immigrants, who are generally Christian, often have an easier time finding a religious home than Muslims or Hindus from the Middle East and South Asia, he said.

University of California at Irvine sociologist Jennifer Lee said immigrants’ social cohesion patterns are poorly understood. For example, the idea that immigrants are not learning English is a misconception, she said, concluding that “children of immigrants uniformly speak English well or very well.”

Furthermore, she said, interracial relationships are increasingly common, a key indicator of cohesion. In 2008, one of every seven marriages was between people of different races or ethnicities.

Increased diversity, Lee said, is “actually not leading to fragmentation, but a reduction of social divisions among groups.”

In fact, Jacoby said, immigrants are often the people most interested in cohering to American society, and Rodriguez added during his panel that white Americans are increasingly the people feeling aggrieved.

“Often, immigrants are coming together around sense of patriotism and a sense that they belong here while the white people in Los Angeles and Kansas are fighting their civil war,” Jacoby said.

For event photos, please click here.

*Photos by Sam Hurd

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