Re-Imagining United States History Through Contemporary Asian American and Latina/O Literature
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
LATINASIAN NATION: RE-IMAGINING UNITED STATES HISTORY THROUGH CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O LITERATURE Susan Bramley Thananopavarn A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: María DeGuzmán Jennifer Ho Minrose Gwin Laura Halperin Ruth Salvaggio © 2015 Susan Bramley Thananopavarn ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Susan Thananopavarn: LatinAsian Nation: Re-imagining United States History through Contemporary Asian American and Latina/o Literature (Under the direction of Jennifer Ho and María DeGuzmán) Asian American and Latina/o populations in the United States are often considered marginal to discourses of United States history and nationhood. From laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the extensive, racially targeted immigration rhetoric of the twenty-first century, dominant discourses in the United States have legally and rhetorically defined Asian and Latina/o Americans as alien to the imagined nation. However, these groups have histories within the United States that stretch back more than four hundred years and complicate foundational narratives like the immigrant “melting pot,” the black/white binary, and American exceptionalism. This project examines how Asian American and Latina/o literary narratives can rewrite official histories and situate American history within a global context. The literary texts that I examine – including works by Carlos Bulosan, Américo Paredes, Luis Valdez, Mitsuye Yamada, Susan Choi, Achy Obejas, Karen Tei Yamashita, Cristina García, and Siu Kam Wen – create a “LatinAsian” view of the Americas that highlights and challenges suppressed aspects of United States history. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ………………………………………………………………………….. vi INTRODUCTION: ASIAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O VOICES WRITING HISTORY, RE-WRITING NATION…………………….……………………………........... 1 Immigrants and Aliens: Historical and Legal Constructions of Otherness ……………….. 6 National Amnesia: Race and the Erasure of Historical Memory …………………………. 24 Re-Imagining the Past: Latina/o and Asian American Comparative Work ………………. 34 CHAPTER 1. REMEMBERING U.S. IMPERIALISM ……………………….……………….. 45 Embodying the Colonial Past: Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart …...................... 50 From Gringo School Days to Military Espionage: Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez …...................................................................................... 63 Education, History, and National Ideologies ……………………………………….…….. 78 CHAPTER 2. WORLD WAR II AND PATRIOTIC RACISM …………………………….. 82 Battle on the Homefront: Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit and Wartime Propaganda ……………. 91 “Looking Out” from Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes ……………………………...…….. 105 Remembering the “Good War”: Memory, History, and Art……………………...…….…. 118 CHAPTER 3. INTERROGATING COLD WAR EPISTEMOLOGIES …………………. … 121 “Translation’s Unnatural Byproduct”: Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student ………............ 128 “What Really Happened”: Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo ……………………............... 140 National Memories, National Amnesia ……………..……………………………….......... 154 CHAPTER 4. LATINASIAN CONTACT ZONES ………………………………………… 158 Text, Context, and HyperContext: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange ....……….... 170 iv Adoption and Military Violence: Cristina García’s The Lady Matador’s Hotel …............ 185 CONCLUSION. LATINASIAN LITERATURE BEYOND NATIONAL BORDERS ……. 197 In the “No-Man’s Land” of Siu Kam Wen’s El tramo final ……………………............... 201 Ripping Aside the Veil: Asian Contract Labor in the Americas ………………………….. 204 Multiple Migrations and Mestizo Chinese: Imagining Asian Latin America …………….. 209 Towards a LatinAsian Approach to American Studies ……………………………..….…. 216 ENDNOTES …………………………………………………………………………............. 219 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………………... 231 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 – “A Trifle Embarrassed,” Illustration by Udo J. Keppler ……………………………64 vi INTRODUCTION: ASIAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O VOICES WRITING HISTORY, RE-WRITING NATION It must be odd to be a minority he was saying. I looked around and didn’t see any. So I said Yeah it must be. Mitsuye Yamada, “Looking Out,” Camp Notes and Other Writings In the confusion, Pedro ran, terrified of being caught. He couldn’t speak English, couldn’t tell them he was fifth generation American. Sin papeles – he did not carry his birth certificate to work in the fields. La migra took him away while we watched. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera In her poem “Looking Out,” Japanese American writer Mitsuye Yamada critically examines the idea of a racial “minority,” as an unnamed speaker remarks, “It must be odd/ to be a minority,” and the narrator agrees, not considering herself a minority within her own community (39). “Looking Out” is part of an autobiographical collection of poetry about Yamada’s experiences as a Japanese American during World War II. Along with her family and approximately 120,000 other Japanese Americans, Yamada was incarcerated as an enemy alien during the war; when she was still a teenager, her family was sent to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho, far from their California home. Read in this context, the title of her poem invokes the image of a young girl gazing outwards from a position of captivity, perhaps from behind a barbed-wire perimeter fence like those used in many of the western camps that 1 housed Japanese Americans during the war. The girl does not identify with the label “minority,” since inside the camp she is in the majority, nor is her status as a Japanese American “odd.” Displacing the oddity of minority status onto a hypothetical other, she concurs with the male figure in the poem: “Yeah/ it must be” (39). In another situation, this deferral might indicate a benign and even amusing difference in perspective. Within the context of the incarceration camps, however, the fact that the girl is “looking out” means that she is being observed from a position of power. The “he” in the poem has the freedom of movement conferred by his status as a white male looking in, and the category of “minority” is one in which the narrator is imprisoned. The very fact that she is not technically in the minority in her immediate environment proves that the term is less about numbers and more about power: who has the power to fix the captive other with his gaze. And the use of the word “odd” confirms this power, for the white male names the Japanese American girl “odd” in a way that places her outside the racial (and gendered) norm. The poem’s perspective shift challenges this norm, even as it draws attention to the real, barbed-wire consequences of the power of the majority/minority construction, a construction that defines who is an American by default, and who must be subject to definition by others. Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa also disrupts dominant assumptions of who is American as she tells the story of Pedro, a fifth generation U.S. citizen who is caught “sin papeles” – without papers – in the fields where he works as a laborer. If Yamada’s poem must be read within the context of her experiences during World War II, this passage from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera recalls Anzaldúa’s own childhood along the U.S.-Mexico border, a place that she has famously referred to as an open wound, “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (25). Within this border space, U.S. citizens like Pedro 2 are “terrified of being caught” and run from la migra – the immigration officials – despite their status as native-born U.S. citizens (26). The passage relies on the reader’s knowledge of Pedro’s constitutional rights: the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits unwarranted search and seizure. Unless driving a car or travelling by air (ostensibly voluntary activities), United States citizens are not required to carry identification with them. Pedro does not “carry his birth certificate to work in the fields,” but no American is required to carry a birth certificate to go to work; the statement both explains his arrest and highlights the injustice of such a requirement. Likewise, Anzaldúa leaves the phrases “sin papeles” and “la migra” untranslated to show their importance and common usage for Pedro and his community. Pedro’s terror “of being caught” is a terror that has nothing to do with his legal rights. As a fifth generation American, he is by rights an American citizen. Instead, his terror is a result of the dominant construction of the non-English speaking Latina/o as alien to the nation. This construction is more powerful than the presence of witnesses who are also presumably U.S. citizens – “La migra took him away while we watched” – and results in the tragic deportation of a man to a country that is not his own (26). Both “Looking Out” and Pedro’s story critique dominant constructions of America that exclude Asian Americans and Latina/os from the United States imaginary. They call into question narratives of outsider encroachment that position Asian Americans and Latina/os as external to the U.S. nation, forever in the “odd” position of racial “minorities” or illegal aliens, without recognizing centuries-old patterns of migration, colonization, and military contact between Asia, Latin America, and the U.S. They also interrogate the erasure of Latina/os and Asian Americans