3. The Desire for Adoptive Invisibility

Abstract

This chapter analyzes additional data from my interviews with post-Soviet immigrants and Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010) in order to outline connections between post-USSR, Latina/o, and Asian American migration. In the interviews, post-Soviet migrants largely stressed their ambivalence toward laws like Arizona’s 2010 Senate Bill 1070 that target undocumented migration and from which they expected exemption because of their differential modes of entry. Because of their shared status as immigrants or experiences with state surveillance in the USSR or in post-Soviet nations, however, interviewees also expressed empathy with Mexican immigrants as the group most targeted by the law. While these views are reminiscent of turn of the twentieth century European immigrants’ insistence on their differences from nonwhite contemporaries, they also recall eastern European Jewish immigrants’ ambivalence toward or rejection of white supremacy through empathy with African Americans because of their own marginalization in the Russian empire. Set in a dystopian United States that is undergoing similar neoliberal shock therapies as the former Soviet Union, Shteyngart’s novel draws attention to parallels between second-generation Russian Jewish immigrants and Asian Americans, who are similarly associated with upward mobility, while Latina/os and African Americans are considered losers in the neoliberal era.