Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics

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Migrants and Migration in Modern North America combines essays from scholars based in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Germany to challenge the ossified ideas about migration that have emerged in national historiographies. Contributors draw upon recent migration scholarship to debunk the dominant image of the typical migrant as a male crossing an international border. This includes recognizing the movements of groups thought to be sedentary, such as indigenous people and women; it also entails analyzing internal migration and historicizing the formation of borders. The vast majority of contributions are well written, with a lucid introductory synthesis and historiographical chapter by Dirk Hoerder. When unmoored from a myopic focus on the transatlantic journeys of Europeans to the United States, the North American framework is quite useful because it unites subfields of migration scholarship that are often treated separately. The significance of creating scholarly dialogue between the ever-expanding fields of migration history in the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada, Central America, and the United States, not to mention studies of the southwestern borderlands, should not be overlooked. For scholars already well versed in current migration theory, this comparative aspect represents the volume’s greatest strength.In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the borderlands between the United States and Canada in the north and Mexico in the southwest were crisscrossed by thriving networks of small-scale trade and seasonal migration. This created integrated communities of European-origin settlers and indigenous peoples that spanned international political borders, even as the latter shifted. Small groups of professionals and political exiles also moved between the Caribbean and the United States with significant effects in both. The existence of these transborder communities points to one of the volume’s recurring arguments: there are often more cultural commonalities across political borders than between subregions within them. This is not to say that political borders were meaningless. Trade policies enacted by the governments of the United States and Mexico created shifting economic inequalities on the border throughout the nineteenth century.Later in that century, the presence of railroads, commercial agriculture, and finance capital increased in the northern United States, the southwestern borderlands, and the Caribbean. Economic development and liberalization created new connections throughout the region at the same time that it displaced many people and destroyed local markets; some long-standing migratory practices became untenable, and new migrant streams were created. In Mexico, liberal economic policies enacted during the porfiriato broke up the communal holdings of church lands as well as those belonging to indigenous people, causing internal and international migration. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 increased migration to the United States. Despite linguistic and cultural similarities, Mexican immigrants were not initially welcomed by Spanish-speaking residents north of the border, again showing the need to historicize borders. Throughout Canada, the growth of railroads brought new competition in the form of distantly produced goods and people competing for agricultural lands. Small-scale farmers and indigenous people, themselves engaged in long-standing patterns of seasonal migration, were forced to migrate elsewhere. Emancipation in North America and the various parts of the Caribbean over the course of the nineteenth century allowed previously enslaved people to migrate. The rise of commercial agriculture played an important role in shaping their destinations.After a period of relative porosity, land and sea borders were militarized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on grounds of racial and economic concerns. In the late nineteenth century, the United States banned Asian immigration and con tract labor. Such restrictions influenced relations among states in North America and show the importance of a continental perspective. Fearing that Asians would enter the country from Canada or Mexico, the United States began guarding its land borders more stringently and pressuring neighboring countries to adopt similar restrictions. Canada acquiesced; Mexico did not. By the 1930s, racial and economic arguments were put forth throughout the region in an effort to halt immigration and deport foreigners. Although people continued to migrate, especially within nation-states, cross-border migration would not reach pre-Depression levels until the 1970s.The connections among different states and organizations within North America have become especially apparent during the past decades. During the 1980s, refugees from the wars in Central America began heading north to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Many spent time in multiple countries in search of legal recognition of their refugee status. However, a combination of unresponsive states and Cold War politics barred many from obtaining legal residence, forcing them to enter Mexico, the United States, or Canada illegally. Migrants received legal help, information about possible destinations, and material aid on their journeys from transnational networks of activists and organizations. More recently, Canadian guest worker programs have been lauded by the international community as a model of temporary migration that should be emulated elsewhere, a somewhat discouraging trend considering the abuses built into the system.

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“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era
  • Oct 1, 2022
  • Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-)
  • Alonzo M Ward

IN MARCH 1875, A CHICAGO TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT reported that a miners’ strike in Brazil, Indiana, continued with conditions worsening and the “breach between labor and capital widen[ing].” The year-long labor dispute found the striking miners “dogged and sullen” and was taking a dreadful toll on the men and their families. Many of the town's merchants initially supported the strike, but they increasingly feared violence would ensue as the striking miners became more vigilant and defiant. One merchant stated that he had witnessed other strikes, but none of them had “men so determined not to yield,” and he believed it would be necessary to bring in the military to prevent an outbreak of violence. The Tribune correspondent predicted that a “revolution in labor” was imminent because the desperate mine operators were willing to hire Black workers to take the place of the striking miners. The mine operators were “confident that, if negro labor [was] adopted unanimously, it [would] completely and effectively crush strikes, which [had] become so frequent and arrogant of late as to make any dependence on white labor impracticable.” African American workers, according to the correspondent, were more dependable than white laborers, and they would not become “turbulent at trifles, and for many other reasons that are apparent.” As a result, some midwestern mine operators had already arranged to fill their mines with Black workers, and “others will follow suit.”1The newspaper correspondent's prediction about a “revolution in labor” was accurate—during the height of labor unrest in the late 1870s, Northern industrialists sought measures to undercut the burgeoning labor movement by importing African American workers from the South into their predominantly European American worksites. Industrialists were encouraged by two overarching factors: first, Black workers from the South traditionally earned lower wages than their Northern counterparts and would therefore cost less; and more importantly, due to racist exclusionary measures, as well as the relatively small African American population in the North, semi-skilled and skilled worksites were dominated by European American workers. Industrialists correctly assumed that the racism of their workers would cause an exceedingly vitriolic reaction to the idea of Black workers replacing them. In addition to the typical labor conflict issues, racialized violence would invariably ensue. Industrialists then found justification to utilize draconian measures on the strikers—enforced by local militia or police—to ensure that the replacement workers would be allowed to work in relative safety, and to ensure that industrialists continued to make profits.2This racial dynamic became increasingly prevalent throughout the Midwest as rapid industrialization and massive population growth created whole new categories of workers. European American workers braced themselves for the possibility of a chaotic economic transformation by frantically jockeying for occupational viability within the racial hierarchy. In the environment of an increasingly racialized labor movement, Black and other non-white workers, with few exceptions, were forced to the bottom of the economic ladder.Among midwestern states, Illinois was particularly distinct due, in part, to the massive growth of Chicago as a central industrial hub for the region. In comparison to adjacent midwestern states, Illinois was also unique because of its relatively small African American population. By 1890, the African American population in Illinois was only 57,028 (1.5 percent of the state population); in 1900, 85,078 (1.8 percent of the state population). The dearth of a substantial Black population, coupled with a significant rise in anti-Black sentiment throughout the state, helped to create the perception that African American workers were unable to perform technologically advanced labor. Thus, Black Illinoisans of the late nineteenth century were often forced out or excluded from more desirable occupations and, subsequently, forced to the periphery of the labor movement.This article explores the labor activism of Black Illinoisans during the tumultuous late nineteenth century in the context of this relatively new phenomenon—that is, the racialization of labor. Of course, historians generally acknowledge this period as the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. Yet for African Americans, the period also signified a time in which their racial “character” was under severe scrutiny—not only in labor, but also in virtually every aspect of Black American life. Notions of white racial superiority invariably circumscribed Black people as inferior outsiders—undeserving of a place within mainstream American life. Thus, to most European Americans, it made perfect sense within the twisted logical framework of white supremacy to categorize labor based upon race.In the context of heightened anti-Black sentiment, Black Illinoisans were faced with a difficult decision: should they remain with the larger labor movement that increasingly viewed them as “inferior” workers? While the European American working class famously fought for labor issues such as unionization, safer working conditions, and the eight-hour workday, Black Illinoisans during the nineteenth century also supported these issues. Yet Black workers were forced into a hybrid labor activism—an activism where they fought for their rights not only as workers but also as workers who were gradually excluded from higher-skilled occupations based upon their race. In addition to the racialized occupational environment, Black workers were also forced into a battle for their civil rights during the late nineteenth century as they fought against the inimical rise in white supremacy throughout the United States.The concept of racializing labor was not entirely novel to Northern industries. As historian Jacqueline Jones explained, white Northerners had always expressed their apprehension over emancipating Black people from slavery in moralistic terms. As early as the eighteenth century, they claimed that free Black laborers had shown a lack of restraint in public—displaying “racial” behavior that European American city dwellers found galling. Various groups of African American workers came under attack by the early nineteenth century for advertising for services in a supposedly unseemly fashion. For European American workers, their goal was to maintain their advantageous position in the workplace, and any other socio-political aspect in which there was the perception of losing ground within the racial hierarchy. Thus, European American workers developed new forms of self-definition that would establish a sharper distinction between “white” and “Black” labor.3One of the earliest and staunchest proponents for disrupting the burgeoning labor movement through racialization was co-owner of the Chicago, Wilmington, and Vermillion Coal Company (CW&V) Alanson Sweet. He quickly developed a reputation for slashing wages and firing workers when he forced workers at the Michigan Central Railroad Company to take a pay cut during a dispute in 1862. Workers that protested were fired and replaced with African American workers from the South.4 Sweet believed that the reaction of his predominantly white workforce would be intensified with the importation of an all-Black strikebreaking unit that would likely lead to violence. When violence inevitably ensued, Sweet and his co-owners were then able to utilize state-sponsored protection to ensure the protection of both his imported workers and his property.5As a co-owner of the CW&V in Braidwood, Illinois, during an economic depression, once again, Sweet reduced workers’ wages. Predictably, the unionized miners refused any pay cuts and went on strike. After some convincing, the CW&V co-owners acquiesced to Sweet's ideas on importing African American men to disrupt the conflict. “With the mines filled with colored men,” he assured his fellow owners and stockholders, “it is believed that the Company will not be burdened with the expense of another strike for many years.”6 The CW&V co-owners may have been willing to agree to Sweet's concept due to their past failures. In an 1874 labor dispute with their workers, both recently arriving European immigrants and white workers were recruited as strikebreakers. Instead of being a disruptive force, the replacement miners met with the striking Braidwood miners, became informed of the ongoing labor dispute, and were subsequently convinced to leave. Significantly, the workers left relatively peaceably within days of their arrival.7The nation was in the throes of a massive railroad strike starting in July 1877. Wage cuts, and generally poor conditions and treatment touched off a nationwide strike that shut down most of the nation's railroads. The Chicago Times observed that the arrival of African American workers, combined with the news of the national railroad strike created an “anxious mood” among the Braidwood miners, and “it would take but very little to cause an outbreak in this place.” When the African American workers arrived in Braidwood, there were no friendly meetings. Instead, the striking Braidwood miners gave them an ultimatum: leave town “peaceably or forcibly.” Fearing trouble, some of the miners left town.8 However, when Sweet and the CW&V ownership alerted Illinois governor Shelby Cullom of the intimidation tactics, the state militia was brought in to restore the Black miners to their jobs. The next day, 1,250 Illinois state militia were called into Braidwood to quell the conflict, and if the strikers resisted, “the troops [would] make short work of them.” The CW&V owners understood that an escalation in violence could possibly lead to such measures—and these measures would ensure that the African American workers would be protected and allowed to work in the mines.9Convinced that order could be maintained, and the African American miners would be allowed to remain in the mine shafts, the state militia left Braidwood several weeks later. Although relative peace did prevail after the departure of the state militia, the strike continued another four months. The Braidwood strike of 1877 was the longest strike in United States’ history (to that date) and took an enormous toll on the lives of the strikers and their families. With winter approaching in November 1877, the weary miners finally gave in and ended the strike. The owner's desire to destroy the miners’ union was successful, and the company refused to hire the union leaders as well. Feeling victimized by the CW&V owners, many miners complained bitterly about working alongside the African American strikebreakers who they believed had done “all they possibly could to assist capital to crush labor.”10 For the CW&V owners, the reaction of the Braidwood miners to the importation of African Americans into the mines was the crucial element in their victory. If white and immigrant miners did not react violently, the owners would not have brought in the state militia to see that their mines and their replacement workers were protected.Race relations remained strained in the Braidwood mines during the immediate years after the strike. Nevertheless, African American miners remained in Braidwood and continued to work in the mines. At least half of the seven hundred miners in Braidwood were African American; by 1880, there were 703 Black men and their families living in the surrounding area (compared to 242 in 1870). Institutions such as the Colored Odd Fellows lodge and the First Baptist Church were established in 1878 to support the town's African American community. Reverend T. C. Fleming, who was one of the strikebreakers during the 1877 strike, was the pastor of the church.11 Despite establishing themselves as viable workers in the mines, and decent citizens in Braidwood, the small African American population continued to experience difficulties in town and the workplace.While the African American miners at Braidwood established a reputation for being viable workers and willing union men, their white counterparts insisted on following national racist trends in the workplace. Moses Gordon, an African American miner among those imported from Virginia, observed: “[African Americans] could no more get work here until the year 1877 than they could fly. . . . [I]t was the miners themselves who would come out on strike before they would allow the negro to earn his daily bread.” White workers increasingly drew the color line in the workplace and the major labor unions in the late nineteenth century. Significantly, Gordon also noted that CW&V owners fired African American workers that joined unions. Thus, the racialization of labor worked as a two-pronged attack against Black workers during the industrial era: As discriminatory policies against non-white citizens in the United States became the norm, and therefore accepted by the dominant racial group, employers increasingly utilized African Americans as strikebreakers in order to disrupt unionization. African American workers were either shunned from major labor unions by white union members who refused to allow them to join, or, as in the case in Braidwood, African American workers were threatened with termination. On the other hand, white workers—embracing the full social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century—and thus, completely accepting their collective place at the top of the racial hierarchy in American society—readily rejected African American workers from the most desirable occupations. As white workers wielded more bargaining power in the last decade of the nineteenth century, they insisted on the racialization of both the workplace and their labor unions. Gordon remarked on how this racist process in Braidwood would affect the working class: “Every nationality on the face of the globe can come here and go to work wherever there is work to be had, except for the colored man, and in nine cases out of ten the miners are to blame for it. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If the laboring class fights capital for their rights, they have enough to do without fighting against six millions [sic] of people that have got to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.”12Strikebreaking served as an occupational and economic weapon against the racialization of labor for men like Moses Gordon. As labor historian Eric Arnesen explained, strikebreaking was a viable form of working-class activism for African Americans as they sought to strengthen their economic position during the labor upheaval of post-Reconstruction America. The most important coal mining towns in Illinois followed the practice of racial exclusion. Strikebreaking not only allowed African American workers to gain entry into desirable industrial positions, but it also represented chances for low paid Southern African Americans to earn higher wages. Their decisions to become strikebreakers were often informed choices, rationalized by a complex and changing worldview that balanced their experiences as industrial workers, farmers, and African Americans. Indeed, these Black men were neither willing tools nor ignorant serfs—rather, they were poor and ambitious men who were often recruited by coal company agents, sometimes under false pretenses. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were never the only workers used as strikebreakers in Illinois or any other Northern state. Moreover, they were never the most used strikebreakers during the height of labor turbulence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, African Americans were usually the most visible strikebreakers because of American racism, and therefore, they were almost always the easiest targets for white working-class rage during the tumultuous labor disputes of this era.13As the Chicago Tribune correspondent predicted, other industrialists throughout the region adopted racialization as a weapon to squelch unionization among the working class. For example, in 1880, approximately one hundred African Americans were hired to replace striking coal miners in Rapids City, near Rock Island, Illinois. Tragedy struck immediately—one of the African American strikebreakers was shot and killed by a striking miner. That same year in Springfield, Illinois, mine owners resisted demands made by union officials and proceeded to import African American miners from Richmond, Virginia. The predominantly European American workforce was ordered to remove their tools from the mines and evacuate company houses. If any violence ensued, the mine operators, their property, and the African American workers, were all protected by local police officials. These drastic actions led to the demise of the union.14 In the summer of 1886, a strike for higher wages occurred in Vermillion County at Grape Creek. In this case, there was a small African American presence in the mines—yet they refused to strike with their European American coworkers. The African American miners belonged to the biracial Knights of Labor (KOL) union and refused to participate because it was “a white man's fight.” The Grape Creek operators brought in African American men from Tennessee and Kentucky under police protection. The conflict dragged out and defeated the strikers, as the mine operators brought in five to fifteen new African American workers each day.15 This pattern of racialization continued throughout Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to data compiled by economic historian Warren Whatley, Illinois industrialists utilized Black strikebreakers more than any state during this period. However, while Black strikebreaking increased substantially during this period—especially in high-profile conflicts—they remained a relatively small percentage of the nation's strikebreaking force.16While Northern industrialists continued to recruit Black workers from the South during the late nineteenth century, they virtually ignored Northern Black workers. This omission was particularly glaring in Illinois and other midwestern states due to the dearth of African Americans living in the region. Approximately 90 percent of the African American population remained in the South, and it was simply easier to find and recruit Black labor in the South. Another more compelling reason had to do with the collective attitudes of African Americans living in the North. While Southern Black workers were cajoled relatively easily due to precarious economic condition or general lack of knowledge of a particular labor conflict in the North, Northern African Americans simply had more exposure to Northern labor strife. Although the Black population of Illinois was quite small, they gained a reputation as ferocious labor agitators during the late nineteenth century. Like their European American working-class counterparts, they also battled for workers’ rights. To be sure, African American workers in Illinois were occasionally used as strikebreakers during the late nineteenth century—there would be a collective shift in their attitude toward the labor movement by the turn of the twentieth century as white working-class racism became more pronounced. Yet prior to the full implementation of white supremacist ideas about allegedly inferior and superior workers based upon race, Black Illinoisans were not only a part of the labor movement, in some cases they were at the vanguard of the movement.During the summer of 1877, while the Braidwood mine operators were importing African American workers into their labor fracas, more than 150 Black longshoremen from Illinois disputed recent wage cuts against the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company (MVTC). Like their Braidwood counterparts, they too were inspired by the “Great Railroad Strike” and organized their own all-Black union. In solidarity with the national movement, the workers arranged a general strike against all Illinois, employers due to the recent wage When the owners were of the strike, they hired strikebreakers. The next the striking longshoremen on the and their and that they leave the When they refused to the longshoremen them by a of in their The longshoremen then after the to ensure that none of the strikebreakers would only a few but it created quite a throughout The observed that the longshoremen may well have been within their rights to strike for higher but they no to prevent from working who willing . . . to work for the The noted that by the strikebreakers off the the Black longshoremen were a for which they be a significant in how the African American workers were in When African American workers for their rights, they were often as or workers. In Black labor activism was often viewed as chaotic and While strikebreaking was generally in white working-class when Black workers fought to their economic the they should be a that [would] last them for all time to the Braidwood which and supported striking miners during their African American workers were viewed with throughout and as workers throughout Illinois sought the same measures in unionization as other workers prior to the full of racialization in labor. As early as 1877, the Knights of Labor (KOL) established as many as seven in Illinois that African American men and into their For many Black workers, the was more than a labor the of leaders and as a than any other union in their the were able to the for African American After the national railroad strike in 1877, labor leaders recruited Black workers to the to racist to workers. goal of the labor leaders was also to the of Black workers during an 1878 African Americans the supported the and the city and with the white Chicago continued to into one of the nation's industrial the of the city was for African Americans. The battle for skilled labor in a environment, was often a losing for African American for from the South. African American men often to racist racist white and workers with the of racist to Black men out of viable As a result, Black workers in Chicago were left with occupational and often found themselves to with national of the racialization of labor was in Chicago by the last of the nineteenth century. By 1890, African Americans were as the to be laborers, workers, or to the During that decade they represented only percent of the population percent of all in the occupational for Black of or no higher than railroad or were also tools for the of such as or who were who or the of and dwellers more and the to their To ideas of racial and economic the their to an One noted that African American men of slavery . . . and became a of to the of the African American men, as a Chicago were the they are by and to were not always to ideas of racial if it in wages. A could a sense of and the of the of the South, which could lead to a was a relatively novel idea in the nineteenth Yet any that these men would allow these to into their in labor issues of the would be an Black in were the of hybrid labor activism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black over pay In 1875, they out of throughout the during and in some of At the out because their new to He informed the all-Black that they would be to at the an before their and they would no be allowed to left over by practice that allowed workers to their out in during the and workers of all and were toward labor unionization in the Yet European American workers to follow nationwide discriminatory in labor unions by Black workers from union Black often with their own of labor activism that all-Black unions or biracial unions. For example, after the of the five Black from the in Chicago, were to their of the that were to citizens of every and and were informed that it was against the to of their in the The the men a in the where the and their while on The by the left for another where they were and served without in Chicago were to find a labor union that would their in fighting for their labor and civil rights. The them with the of unionization that they In 1886, created the Colored local and more than four hundred Black and during a The Chicago Times the the Knights had on the Black the union the colored and gave the with This represented the entry of African Americans into organized labor in Chicago and was followed within two years by a Black the which organized after from the of the Black in Chicago little time in their reputation as labor In two hundred African American joined nine hundred white in of the of and in wages. The biracial an of substantial for The owners to a through the workers by importing African American replacement workers to replace the white The between the workers was and the Black were enough to the strikebreakers to A year during another Black labor conditions, and they also the to become more about their rights and the labor was not one African American predicted, by would for their working-class men and in Illinois for more biracial union during the late nineteenth century. an African American of the that more Black workers to the union to themselves as a within the labor than a within the the for laboring men and was an of wages. have been

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Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America
  • Jan 1, 2014
  • Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History
  • Joanshelley Rubin

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

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A Century of Chicano History: Empire, Nations, and Migration
  • Nov 1, 2004
  • Hispanic American Historical Review
  • José Angel Hernández

Chicana/o history has witnessed a number of historiographical debates that date back to its emergence in the 1960s. Paradigms and periodization once again emerge as important themes in González and Fernández’s A Century of Chicano History. The authors challenge current historiographical trends concerning the formation of the Chicana/o community, structure and agency, the importance of gender as a category to analyze labor and Bracero programs, and the ideological forms of colonialism—both past and present—deployed in Mexico as part and parcel of U.S. empire building. They especially believe that scholars need to reconsider the role of early U.S. imperialist activities in Mexico during the nineteenth century. The origins of U.S. domination in Mexico can be traced to the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a period that signaled the economic subordination of that country to U.S. capitalism (p. 29). Consequently, “the rise of the Chicano national minority was not an event marginal to U.S. history; quite the opposite, it was central to the construction of a U.S. neocolonial empire” (p. 59). The cozy relationship between Porfirio Díaz and U.S. capitalists spurred Mexican migration. The coming of the railroads, the exploitation of minerals, and the sprouting of an agricultural economy in the Southwest further facilitated this trend. The formation of the Chicano community in the United States, therefore, “reflects Mexico’s economic subordination in the face of U.S. hegemony and the limitations placed on its national sovereignty by that domination” (p. 29).This monograph challenges current Chicana/o historiography in focusing on Mexican migration to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that the bulk of the Chicano community in the U.S. is descended from these migrations. That is, the nonmigrant community residing primarily in the American Southwest is a small percentage of the overall Chicano community, one composed predominantly of more recent migrations beginning in the late nineteenth century. Thus, with the exception of New Mexico, “the small number of Mexicans annexed by the conquest are inconsequential compared to the much larger number of late nineteenth-century Mexican migrants to the region” (p. 13). Most scholars argue for a continuity of Chicano history from 1848 to the present and overlook the impact of later Mexican migrations on the formation of Chicano/a communities. In the words of González and Fernández, most Chicana/o historians “nearly unanimously emphasize a continuity of Chicano history from that point to the present” (p. 11). But by comparing the periods of increased Mexican migration with those of increased American investment in Mexico, it is easy to see how the creation of the Chicano community is due to immigration. As such, “Rather than the commonly held belief that the Mexican American War of 1848 led to the construction of the Chicano minority, this study proposes that the origins of the Chicano population evolved from economic empire led by corporate capitalist interests with the backing of the U.S. State Department”(p. 59).González and Fernández also incorporate some important ideological and cultural components in their economic interpretation. Two chapters are worth noting: “The Ideology and Practice of Empire: The United States, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants” and “Denying Empire: The Journal of American History on the Ideological Warpath.” In the American imaginary of Mexico and Mexicans, as viewed through the extensive production of travel literature in the nineteenth century, the authors see something similar to the “Orientalism” that Edward Said described in his pathbreaking postcolonial study of the East in the European imaginary. This knowledge was employed alongside U.S. economic policy and later combined with Americanization programs imposed upon the Chicano community. As a result, the “interconnections of the Chicano historical experience with the economic and political hegemony exerted by the United States over Mexico and of the ideology that that domination inspired need to be placed on the research agenda” (p. 93)A few experts in Latin American history will probably see the residual elements of an earlier dependency theory model, while postcolonial critics will perhaps read this interpretation as another effort to impose European categories of analysis à la Marx. These points aside, however, A Century of Chicano History will more than likely stimulate a healthy level of discussion within Chicana/o studies itself and should be required reading for scholars of U.S., Latin American, and borderlands history.

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Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy by Torrie Hester
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  • Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
  • Kunal M Parker

Reviewed by: Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy by Torrie Hester Kunal M. Parker (bio) Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy. By Torrie Hester. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. viii, 243. $45.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook) Torrie Hester's book is an important addition to the substantial literature on American deportation policy. The scale and significance of deportation are unquestionable. As Hester points out at the beginning of the book, between 1892 and 2015, the United States deported over 50 million people, close to 95 percent of them after 1970 (p. 1). That enormous number understates the terrible impact of deportation in both the United States and elsewhere: families torn apart, communities sundered, businesses disrupted, and American social problems such as crime willfully shifted to other countries less able to cope with them. Hester traces how the basic structure of deportation policy took shape. She begins in the late nineteenth century, showing how the U.S. Supreme Court exempted substantive deportation law from the purview of the U.S. Constitution. Because deportation was not seen for constitutional purposes as punishment for a crime, immigrants were unable to avail of the various protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution to criminal defendants. Hester then moves to explore how U.S. deportation policy developed two distinct tracks, one for Chinese immigrants that allowed for judicial challenges to deportation decisions and another for all other immigrants that vested administrative decisions with finality. Eventually, she shows how both tracks merged, so that it became increasingly difficult to challenge deportation decisions in court. This did not, of course, stop immigrants from seeking judicial review of deportation decisions, although they would increasingly do so on procedural, rather than substantive, grounds. Hester also shows in detail how deportation law shifted from the aim of removing excludable immigrants (those who should never have been admitted in the first place but who were let in erroneously) to punishing immigrants for post-admission activities that the state frowned upon. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, [End Page 563] deportation law increasingly became an instrument of domestic social policy. Invoking the fact of immigrants' non-citizenship, the state could remove immigrants from its territory when they engaged in behaviors ranging from crime to seeking public assistance to expressing politically undesirable views. This has been the focus of deportation law ever since. While deportation continues to function as an adjunct to exclusion, its main purpose is to punish immigrants for acts committed after (in many cases, long after) they have entered the United States. While citizens may be incarcerated, immigrants' incarceration is often followed by deportation to countries they might not even know. Much of Hester's story is familiar in its broad outlines to scholars of immigration and citizenship law, although the details she provides are compelling. Her major contribution is in highlighting the international dimension of deportation law. The United States might be eager to get rid of immigrants, but how did it decide where to send them? What if immigrants preferred to be sent elsewhere? Hester highlights state-to-state negotiations over the repatriation of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also shows how the old system of transporting immigrants to the border gradually ceded to the practice of sending immigrants back to their countries of origin. Her account of the "Red Scare" deportations around 1920 is a particularly detailed account of deporting immigrants from the Russian empire back to the Soviet Union at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations. Overall, Hester's book is a fine addition to the literature on American deportation policy. It historicizes one of the urgent problems of our time. [End Page 564] Kunal M. Parker KUNAL M. PARKER teaches law at the University of Miami. He is the author of Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (2015) and is currently working on a project on mid-twentieth century American legal thought. Copyright © 2018 Kentucky Historical Society

  • Research Article
  • 10.1353/hcy.2023.0036
Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915 by Marinella Lentis
  • Mar 1, 2023
  • The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
  • Mackenzie J Cory

Reviewed by: Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915 by Marinella Lentis Mackenzie J. Cory Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915. By Marinella Lentis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xxvii + 421 pp. Marinella Lentis's Colonized through Art examines how local and federal policy decisions shaped the implementation of art education in Native American boarding schools across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the core of her analysis is Jean and John Comaroff's conception of colonization as both a physical and mental imposition, supported by Gramsci's idea of cultural hegemony, the soft policies used to maintain control across generations without physical violence. This "colonization of consciousness" influenced the actions of boarding school administrators as they sought to create a serving class of Indigenous workers with skills learned in art classrooms (xxi). Throughout the volume, Lentis also relies on Lomawaima and McCarty's "safety zone" to describe how education incorporating traditional Indigenous arts fell in and out of fashion (xxii). This inclusion serves as the keystone explaining the seemingly contradictory policies present in boarding schools and constitutes one of the most groundbreaking aspects of the volume. The volume's chapters first present an overview of the current research regarding art education and Native boarding school policies before demonstrating how these policies were actually implemented at two institutions. These case studies are followed by a broader look at how the works produced by Native students were viewed by audiences from pedagogical backgrounds and the general public, both nationally and internationally. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the development of art education pedagogy for the lower classes during the nineteenth century. Lentis argues that these efforts to develop the morality and character of children of rural and immigrant workers directly influenced boarding school policies in the last twenty [End Page 322] years of the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 presents a general discussion of how pedagogical models affected boarding school arts education during this time, strengthening Lentis's argument and setting the groundwork for the rest of the volume. These chapters provide excellent overviews of art education both broadly and in the boarding schools and allow scholars lacking familiarity with either field to form an understanding of Lentis's argument. Chapter 3 examines how the beliefs of individual boarding school superintendents influenced the policies identified in the preceding chapter. Though the ultimate goal of the superintendents was to educate Native youth into becoming productive members of industrial society, Lentis discerns considerable disagreement between administrators' opinions of the economic role of art in Native communities, the danger of preserving Native artistic motifs, and the risk of over-homogenization of Native youth. In particular, this chapter does an excellent job of demonstrating how the whiplash between superintendents with relatively short tenures and widely differing pedagogies opened the door for more local control, which is confirmed in the following two chapters. Chapters 4 and 5 present case studies of how these policies were implemented in the Albuquerque Indian School and Sherman Institute, respectively. Though it would be expected that the Albuquerque Indian School would encourage a strong arts program, given the emergence of a local Native art scene in the late nineteenth century, local administrators often defied federal calls for just that due to their belief that Native artisans were preventing the community from integrating into industrial American culture. Conversely, the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, encouraged art education, going so far as to include regional Native motifs in their lessons and encouraging performance of indigeneity for the local community and tourists. In both cases, Lentis clearly shows the influence of local administrators on their school's art education as well as the impact these choices had on other boarding schools in the region and nationally. Chapter 6 discusses the inclusion of artwork created by boarding school students at international fairs. The artworks and their creators were instrumental in producing a narrative of the United States' success in taming the North American interior while simultaneously allowing foreign visitors to experience the Other. During the early twentieth century, this belief shifted towards one of Native artwork as an essential method...

  • Research Article
  • 10.1086/653928
Notes on Contributors
  • Mar 1, 2010
  • Isis

Notes on Contributors

  • Research Article
  • 10.5406/21638195.95.2.04
Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks
  • Jul 1, 2023
  • Scandinavian Studies
  • Jonas Bakken

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

  • Research Article
  • 10.1215/15476715-8643568
A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism
  • Dec 1, 2020
  • Labor
  • Nancy Raquel Mirabal

A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism

  • Research Article
  • 10.1353/cusp.2023.0000
Thinking with the Nation: "National" Literatures at the Cusp
  • Jan 1, 2023
  • CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures
  • Sukanya Banerjee

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

  • Research Article
  • Cite Count Icon 1
  • 10.1215/00295132-9353766
Revolutionary Violence and the Rise of the Art Novel
  • Nov 1, 2021
  • Novel
  • Michaela Bronstein

Revolutionary Violence and the Rise of the Art Novel

  • Single Book
  • Cite Count Icon 9
  • 10.1215/9780822394419
Migrants and Migration in Modern North America
  • Jan 1, 2011

List of Maps xi Preface / Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires xiii Introduction. Migration, People's Lives, Shifting and Permeable Borders: The North American and Caribbean Societies in the Atlantic World / Dirk Hoerder 1 Part I. Intersocietal Migrations 1. Mirando atras: Mexican Immigration from 1876 to 2000 / Jaime R. Aguila and Brian Gratton 49 2. Through the Northern Borderlands: Canada-U.S. Migrations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries / Bruno Ramirez 76 3. The Making and Unmaking of the Circum-Caribbean Migratory Sphere: Mobility, Sex across Boundaries, and Collective Destinies, 1840-1940 / Lara Putnam 99 Part II. Connecting Borderlands, Littorals, and Regions 4. Population Movements and the Making of Canada-U.S. Not-So-Foreign Relations / Nora Faires 129 5. Greater Southwest North America: A Region of Historical Integration, Disjunction, and Imposition / Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez with Dirk Hoerder 150 6. Independence and Interdependence: Caribbean-North American Migration in the Modern Era / Melanie Shell-Weiss 174 7. Migration to Mexico, Migration in Mexico: A Special Case on the North American Continent / Delia Gonzalez de Ruefels with Dirk Hoerder 188 8. The Construction of Borders: Building North American Nations, Building a Continental Perimeter, 1890s-1920s / Angelika E. Sauer 210 9. The United States-Mexican Border as Material and Cultural Barrier / Omar S. Valerio-Jimenez 228 Part III. Complicating Narratives 10. Migration and the Seasonal Round: An Odawa Family's Story / Susan E. Gray 253 11. Market Interactions in a Borderland Setting: A Case Study of the Gila River Pima of Arizona, 1846-1862 / Dan Killoren 264 12. Paying Attention to Moving Americans: Migration Knowledge in the Age of Internal Migration, 1930s-1970s / James N. Gregory 277 13. The Black Experience in Canada Revisited / Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu 297 14. Circumnavigating Controls: Transborder Migration of Asian-Origin Migrants during the Period of Exclusion / Yukari Takai 313 15. Migration and Capitalism: The Rise of the U.S.-Mexican Border / John Mason Hart 333 Part IV. Contemporary and Applied Perspectives 16. Central American Migration and the Shaping of Refugee Policy / Maria Cristina Garcia 347 17. Central American Transmigrants: Migratory Movement of Special Interest to Different Sectors within and outside Mexico / Rodolfo Casillas-R. 364 18. Interrogating Managed Migration's Model: A Counternarrative of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program / Kerry Preibisch 377 19. 1867 and All That . . .: Teaching the American Survey as Continental North American History / Angelika Sauer and Catherine O'Donnell 391 About the Contributors 399 Index 401

  • Research Article
  • Cite Count Icon 15
  • 10.1215/00182168-86-1-61
Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism
  • Feb 1, 2006
  • Hispanic American Historical Review
  • Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

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