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Israel Potter Deported Rodrigo Lazo Israel Potter Deported Rodrigo Lazo Leviathan, Volume 22, Number 1, March 2020, pp. 146-165 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2020.0009 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/750720 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Israel Potter Deported RODRIGO LAZO University of California, Irvine This lecture aims to break down the walls separating fields of study by inter- preting Israel Potter in relation to concerns about migration and transnational labor that are common in Latino/a/x and trans-American studies. Turning away from a critical emphasis on the book’s dedication to the Bunker Hill Monu- ment as a response to national US mythology, I consider Potter’s movement away from home and his status as a refugee to engage questions of national belonging. Israel Potter is an important book for those who study migration in the Americas and the transatlantic dimensions of the age of revolutions. In the spirit of C.L.R. James’s commitment to reading Melville through “the world we live in,” I argue that Israel Potter’s condition as a migrant subject who is denied national reintegration at the end of his life shares structural similarities to recent governmental efforts to detain and deport migrants, some of whom have lived in the United States for years. begin with profound gratitude to the conference organizing committee for inviting me to deliver this lecture. Your kindness inspires me, partic- I ularly because I can think of many Melville scholars whose work would merit this distinction, and so I am humbled. I also feel particularly indebted to friends whose work on Melville continues to inspire me and who have helped me remain engaged with Melville’s work with their interesting conver- sation and the publication of my work.1 My research is highly interdisciplin- ary and I am, like Israel Potter, a wanderer of sorts in the academic fields of trans-American studies, Latino/a/x literary history, and the Hispanic history of North America. My research agenda pulls in different directions. But I have always found Melville to be a writer in dialogue with those fields because he often thought and wrote about what in his time would have been consid- ered Spanish America. It should be no surprise that the great mid-twentieth- century Melvillean Stanley T. Williams was also the author of The Spanish Background of American Literature (1955), a book with a far-ranging vision and one that informed the research agendas in the 1990s of many of us starting in trans-American studies. In the spirit of putting Melville in dialogue with fields Vol. 22.1 (2020): 146–165 © 2020 The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press 146 L EVIATHAN A J OU R NA L OF M E L VI ll E S TUDIES ISRAEL POTTER Deported of study that might seem out of his immediate orbit, in this lecture I bring Israel Potter together with conversations that are important in trans-American studies and Latino/a/x studies.2 Israel Potter is not the most obvious of Melville’s books to discuss Lati- noamérica because other works have a more direct geographic affinity (e.g., “Benito Cereno” and “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles”) or address directly aspects of the people and cultures of the region (e.g., Moby-Dick and White- Jacket). But Israel Potter should not be an unexpected choice; it may be the most important Melville book for the current crisis over immigration in the United States and across the globe. It is a book that speaks to migratory expe- riences and thus is relevant to current discussions in the United States about restricting immigration, opening doors to refugees fleeing persecution in other countries, and the deportation of people who have been living in the United States for many years. On the day I began working on this lecture, the Washington Post pub- lished an article about a war veteran whose personal history raised issues rel- evant to my reading of Israel Potter. This veteran, Jilmar Ramos-Gomez, had fought in the War in Afghanistan, which has now entered its nineteenth year and surpassed Vietnam as the longest war in US history, which is to say it seems to have gone on since Ishmael proclaimed, “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHAN- ISTAN” (Moby-Dick 22). Ramos-Gomez’s service as a lance corporal and tank crewman had earned him “a National Defense Service Medal, a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, an Afghanistan Campaign medal, and a combat action ribbon” (Rosenberg). These decorations suggested that Ramos-Gomez had given a lot of his heart and mind to the cause. But after his return, the decorations did not keep him from coming under the scrutiny of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ramos-Gomez, a US citizen born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was detained by ICE and held in a facility to await depor- tation. We could say, to quote Israel Potter, that “His scars proved his only medals” (192). As a war veteran who is denied a pension, Israel Potter raises for us ques- tions about how a nation, both through its institutions and in the popular imagination, responds to soldiers who fall into hardship after service. In the case of Ramos-Gomez, the ACLU said in a statement, “He has episodes where he disappears and when he is found again, he often has no recollection of where he has been” (Rosenberg). Ramos-Gomez was released before depor- tation, but it appears his mental state from post-war stress, his psychological scars, put him in a precarious situation with a government agency eager to deport people. As reported in the Washington Post, ICE told one reporter that Ramos-Gomez claimed to be a foreign citizen who was unlawfully present in A J OU R NA L OF M E L VI ll E S TUDIES 147 RODRIGO LAZO the United States. But, according to some news reports, Ramos-Gomez had a copy of his US passport in his possession, and thus he was racially profiled (Silva). That implies that the color of his skin and his name led authorities to assume that he was not a US citizen. In both the Ramos-Gomez case and the end of Israel Potter, a government bureaucracy denies a claim to national participation. Ramos-Gomez was situ- ated as a person not belonging in the United States and Israel was “repulsed in efforts, after a pension” (192). For Ramos-Gomez, the issue was something more basic than a governmental benefit, namely the right to live within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. We could apply to Ramos-Gomez the point that Hester Blum has made about Israel Potter, “As an American citizen unable to claim the ‘protection’ of his nation, whether at sea or on foreign shores, Potter discovers that his rights are neither inalienable nor independent of the will of sovereign states” (117). The two situations share a structural exclusion in that operations of the state reject soldiers who have gone to war for the nation and become vulnerable in succeeding years. In Israel Potter’s case, he has become an “old man” (190) who has faced years of poverty and, in the other, Ramos-Gomez faces psychological challenges, possibly from trauma caused by a war. (The treatment of war veterans in the United States has been a matter of concern in recent decades as a result of the reception of those who fought in Vietnam.3) Critics have emphasized that Israel Potter raises concerns about how a nation treats soldiers after a war. Robert S. Levine brings forward the social questions raised by the denial of the pension and writes, “The novel is ulti- mately rejuvenating in the spirited way that it presses its readers to reflect on the value of wars that are made in the name of nations but not necessarily in the service of the ordinary people who inhabit them” (“Introduction” viii). Noting that Israel is an unknown person who dies a pauper, Levine goes on: “Melville can be seen as telling the story of a common man who does good work for his country but remains in the margins, unrecognized by his compatriots” (x). That emphasis on Israel being a common man, a term used also by other crit- ics, opens the connection with Ramos-Gomez, whose war decorations cannot shield him from going through a process that has become common for Latinos without papers. What might Israel Potter, the character, have in common with those who are being deported, some of whom see themselves as US patriots, in this one notorious case even when they have served in the military? The Ramos-Gomez situation does raise the question as to whether in today’s United States Israel Potter could face deportation.4 I invoke deporta- tion in the title of this lecture to bring forward some of the concerns of the field of Latino/a/x studies. Those include the following: 1) the relationship 148 L EVIATHAN ISRAEL POTTER Deported of a migratory individual person to the nation, the nation as a monumental conception, and the nation-state as a bureaucratic apparatus; 2) the transna- tional dynamics created by migration; 3) the role of migrant labor; and 4) the relationship of counter-history to national mythologies and even mythical his- torical figures. Of course, those concerns are not solely of Latino/a/x Studies, and they overlap with other approaches, including trans-American and trans- national studies as well as ethnic studies approaches that emphasize labor.
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