The Ebb and Flow of the Foreign-Born: Changing Conditions for Collective Identities

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xlv:2 (Autumn, 2014), 201–207.

COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES Reed Ueda The Ebb and Flow of the Foreign-Born: Changing Conditions for Collective Identities

Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Trans- formation, and Social Belonging. By Jamie Winders (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2013) 318 pp. $39.95 The quasi-mythic portrayal of the United States as an “immigration country” has obscured the great variability of immigration throughout U.S. history, the recurrence of dearth and plenitude in the foreign-born population, immigration’s multiplying racial and ethnic factors, and the shifting locations of its impact. The shrink- age of immigration and the decline in the foreign-born population from the Great Depression to the early Cold War era, for example, were followed by a global transformation of immigration to the United States. A mass inºux from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa constituted a cohort for replenishment of the foreign-born inhabitants, creating new collective identities. More- over, this demographic re-stocking from worldwide sources was distributed in a variegated geographical pattern that reºected the historical conditions of regional and local contexts. Winders’ Nashville in the New Millennium is a study of the local effects of the new immigration in areas that had historically experi- enced a paucity of immigrants and international culture. Nashville had relatively few immigrants compared to such northern cities as Boston, New York City, and Chicago and such western cities as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Nashville’s transformation into a host site for Latino immigration was sudden and unexpected; it raised the problem of the adequacy of collective identities in the public sphere for ethnic groups. Conducting ªeld work in the Latino and long-term resident neighborhoods of southeastern Nashville, Winders skilfully explores what sociologists and political scientists describe as the process of “immigrant integration.” By

Reed Ueda is co-editor of JIH and Professor of History, Tufts University. He is the editor, with Mary C. Waters and Helen B. Marrow, of The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965 (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). © 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00685

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00685 by guest on 27 September 2021 202 | REED UEDA gathering qualitative data in enclaves and schools—through a year of in-depth “participant-observation” and interviews with “teach- ers and school administrators, black and white residents, neighborhood association leaders and members, business owners” in class- rooms, diners, community centers, ofªces, community meetings, local festivals, and Mexican bakeries—she draws a wide-ranging portrait of the patterns of intergroup encounter and mutual adjust- ment (41–42). Winders ªnds that historical consciousness has been a primary factor underlying “immigrant integration and community change in a new destination in the 2000s.” She argues that “if ‘two worlds’ collided” in southeast Nashville, they did so because of the con- frontation between “two histories.” “One history stretched into the early twentieth century, and the other began in the early twenty-ªrst.” She also cites a related factor of dual and opposed social geographies: “One geography placed southeast Nashville in re- lation to itself in the past, and the other placed it alongside Latin American cities and towns.” Historical consciousness and geographical perspectives provided “two frames of reference for un- derstanding neighborhood and the place of immigrant settlement within it.” The “distance and differences” between the reference frames of long-term residents, on one hand, and immigrant new- comers, on the other, “complicated” the “path toward immigrant integration in the 2000s” (45). Newcomer immigrants and the established power structure were at a pivot point of historical transition that “produced contrasting interpersonal and institutional responses to change for each group and sometimes led to contra- dictory efforts to adjust to southeast Nashville’s multicultural reality” (43). A biracial pattern for group identities had evolved in Nashville under African-American slavery and legally instituted segregation, embedded in what Winders calls the “terrain of reception.” She describes how institutions in Nashville that could “see” only an order of black–white bi-racialism and popular memory in old neighborhoods rendered the new immigrants from Latin America existentially anomalous. The new and growing foreign-born population of Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other Latinos were not pre- sented with a public sphere of immigrant integration in which they could operate as a visible group in the local community. The landscape of local history that revolved around African Americans as

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00685 by guest on 27 September 2021 COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES | 203 the principal minority of Nashville did not provide for civic and political spaces that would allow Latino immigrants to organize their public status and present their collective identities. A dawning awareness of the problems of public recognition created by a local history that lacked a sphere of immigrant life indicated a move toward new multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural collective identities suited for an era of globalism and transnationalism to serve better the public interest of Nashville and its new minorities. The move that challenged Nashville in “the new millennium,” as described by Winders, can be seen in historical perspec- tive by comparing Nashville with Los Angeles. Los Angeles began the transition toward multi-racialism and multi-culturalism decades earlier in the 1960s, mirroring the urban re-conªguration oc- curring elsewhere in California through the replenishment of the foreign-born population that globalization caused. Los Angeles during the ªrst half of the twentieth century can be compared to Nashville during the second half. As Brooks described in Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, a multifaceted history of Paciªc-coast racial geography, Los Angeles was known as “the white spot” of urban America.1 For a big city, Los Angeles had a strikingly limited population of racial minorities and immigrants from southern and eastern European countries, especially when compared with the large metropolises of the Northeast and Midwest that had received an exodus of blacks from the south and waves of Italians, Slavs, eastern European Jews, and Greeks. In the decades after World War II, Mexican immigration in- creased Los Angeles’ foreign-born population dramatically, trig- gering a search for a new collective identity among Hispanics. A younger generation of activists in the expanding Mexican neighborhoods of Los Angeles and students on such campuses as Califor- nia State College at Los Angeles and California State College at Dominguez Hills explored theories of ethnic liberation that followed the track of black power.2 In late 1960s Los Angeles, the new leaders organized a politics of protest that complemented anti-war and black-power movements. In the process, they fashioned the

1 Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Trans- formation of Urban California (Chicago, 2009), 135–158. 2 “The Struggle for Chicano Liberation,” International Socialist Review (November 1971), reprinted in Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera (eds.), Readings on La Raza: The Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), 218–224.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00685 by guest on 27 September 2021 204 | REED UEDA embryonic structure of ethnic relations that eventually evolved into the ofªcial multicultural pluralism founded on ethnic collective identities during the 1970s and 1980s. In Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, a study of the social thought of ethnic categorization, Hollinger found that by the 1990s, an “ethnoracial pentagon [had divided] the population into African American, Asian American, Euro-American, Indigenous, and Latino segments,” composing “an ofªcially sanctioned system of demographic classiªcation” of “black, yellow, white, red, and brown.”3 In Los Angeles, the rainbow model of different collective identities emerged as a predominant and progressive form of ethnoracial order intended to promote recognition, empower- ment, and social justice in a new American landscape of transnational ties, cultural internationalism, and globalization.4 The new paradigm encouraged a reduction of the complex American ethnic pattern into two divisions—“people of color” and a monolithic category of Eurocentric whites. In Los Angeles, whites were categorized as “Anglos,” and the varied Mexican American population—ranging from descendants of Californios (originally Mexican citizens before the U.S. annex- ation of Alta California) to foreign-born new arrivals (both docu- mented and undocumented)—acquired the homogenized identity of “Chicanos” or “La Raza.” Portes and Rumbaut describe the components of this population “as single entities in numerous ofªcial publications, lumped together in afªrmative action programs, counted together by the census, and addressed jointly in ofªcial rhetoric.”5 Mexican Americans were being molded into a new political category, displaced from the paradigm of ethnic relations that had heretofore guided the assimilation of European immigrants.6 The ºow patterns of international mass migration operated as keys to a variety of developments in the collective identity of other major ethnic groups. Canadian Americans and Mexican Americans

3 David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 2000; orig. pub. 1995), 8. 4 Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley, 2006), 59–179. 5 Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley, 1990), 136–139; “Struggle,” in Meier and Rivera (eds.), Readings on La Raza, 218. 6 Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York, 1972), 53–75; Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 347.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00685 by guest on 27 September 2021 COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES | 205 displayed certain similarities as trans-border groups with an impres- sive continuity of replenishing migration from their home countries across several generations. However, Canadian immigrants and their descendants blended into the melting pot whereas Mexican immigrants and their descendants—whose collective identities were based on a strong sense of ethnic particularism that placed them in a marginal position relative to the mainstream of assimilation—did not.7 Levels of education, job skills, and the politics of race shaped this divergent pattern, but the relationships between these factors and others remain to be explored through deeper study. The effects on collective identity that the increase in a foreign- born population can cause may well have been most pronounced in Asian family structures, particularly those of the Chinese and Asian Indians. The long swing from anti-Asian exclusion, which kept families from forming, to the more family-friendly policy of worldwide admissions established by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 saw the foreign-born Asian population become an unprecedented demographic force in the development of a collective identity based on globalized transnational connections and cultures.8 The new wave of immigrants from post-Communist Poland who de- parted for American cities—Chicago, for one—were seen, and saw themselves, as disconnected from the Polish Americans whose ancestors arrived during the Industrial Revolution. These newcom- ers deliberately dissociated from the traditional “white ethnic” categorization, presenting themselves instead as a “new Polonia,” global and sophisticated Polish immigrants updating Polish Ameri- can life.9 The alternation of plenitude and dearth in the foreign-born population of European immigrant groups shaped distinctive patterns in the intergenerational production of collective identities. The descendants of European immigrants—whose family structures took shape during the decades that witnessed the declines to, and disruptions of, the foreign-born population created by the

7 Tomas R. Jimenez, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity (Berkeley, 2010), 20–25, 126–127. 8 Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford, 1993), 17–120. 9 Mary Patrice Erdmans, Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990 (University Park, 2007), 210–215.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00685 by guest on 27 September 2021 206 | REED UEDA quota policies of the 1920s, the Great Depression, and World War II—tended to produce increasingly symbolic forms of collective identity in ethnic enclaves composed of dwindling and aging pockets of their foreign-born ancestors. Concluding in 1937 that the “great historic westward tide of Europeans has come to an end,” Hansen, through his study of Danish, Swedish, and Norwe- gian communities of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Midwest, established the principle of “third-generation interest,” “derived from the almost universal phenomenon that what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” In Hansen’s view, “the third [generation] appears [as] a new force and a new opportunity which, if recognized in time, can not only do a good job salvaging [ethnic heritages] but probably can accomplish more than either the ªrst or the second could ever have achieved.”10 Exemplifying the operation of Hansen’s principle, the ªrst ethnic studies programs in American colleges were supported by students and faculty of Scandinavian heritage.11 Much as Hansen predicted, the descendants of European immigrants in the Cold War era, such as assimilated Irish Americans, became receptive to movements that built symbolic ethnic identity. Columbia Univer- sity Press summarized the depth of Irish integration into American life in its announcement of The Columbia Guide to Irish American History: “Once seen as threats to mainstream society, Irish Ameri- cans have become an integral part of the American story. More than 40 million Americans claim Irish descent, and the culture and traditions of Ireland and Irish Americans have left an indelible mark on U.S. society.”12 Notwithstanding their inclusion in the Ameri- can demographic and cultural core, symbols of ethnic particularism grew with magnetic power among later-generation Irish Ameri- cans, who re-engaged with performing arts like step-dancing and

10 Marcus Lee Hansen, “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant” (talk delivered to the Augustana Historical Society, Rock Island, Illinois, 1937), reprinted in Peter Kivisto and Dag Blanck, American Immigrants and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the Hansen Thesis after Fifty Years (Urbana, 1990), 192, 194–195. 11 Victor R. Greene, “Ethnic Confrontations with State Universities, 1860–1920,” in Ber- nard J. Weiss (ed.), American Education and the European Immigrant, 1840–1940 (Urbana, 1982), 189–207. 12 The Columbia University Press announcement for The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York, 2005) is available at http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231- 12070-8/the-columbia-guide-to-irish-american-history.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00685 by guest on 27 September 2021 COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES | 207 Gaelic folk music and traveled to ancestral-home counties on heritage tours.

By employing a methodology based on participant observation, personal interviews, and oral histories, Winders demonstrates that a surge of immigrants in a local community can produce a complex challenge to epistemologies of collective identity based on historically entrenched ethnic categories and popular memories. She ex- tends the conceptual pathways of social science into the realm of historiography to interpret the role of immigrant inºux in collective identity as a problem of historical consciousness as much as so- ciology. Her research is a fresh addition to a ªeld of scholarship that has produced illuminating interdisciplinary studies about the effects of the changing ºows of immigrants on communities, generations, and minority groups.

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