Search Results

This chapter discusses how Asian Americans have featured most prominently in U.S. history in the Gold Rush period—as workers on the transcontinental railroad, and as the innocent victims of incarceration during World War II. The impossibility of Asians becoming U.S. citizens was established early in America's history. Much of immigration studies scholarship has usefully focused on the goal of restriction—the targeting of certain populations as unwanted in the United States. By focusing on restriction, however, the scholarship has neglected the selective aspects of immigration laws, which not only erected gates barring entry to unwanted persons but also established gateways that permitted admission to peoples deemed assimilable but also strategic, as determined by a variety of revealing rationales.

This chapter explores subjective documents and their relationship to immigration and ethnic studies, fields that historically have found these sources both appealing and problematic. By “subjective documents”, it refers to a broad class of evidence that reveals the participant's view of experiences in which he had been involved. They include autobiographies, life histories, letters, oral narratives, interviews, and court records. The discussion here familiarizes readers with some recent debates over the use and creation of this type of data, giving particular emphasis to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and textual analysis. Looking at the oral interview or narrative exposes both the unique peculiarities of these data and scholarly ambivalence about subjective sources.

The Introduction lays out the book’s focus on representations of migration from the former USSR to the United States—in TV shows, memoirs, fiction, and interviews—as responses to the global extension of neoliberalism and as contributions to scholarship on immigration and whiteness. By examining post-Soviet immigrants’ participation in diverse forms of human movement, the book adds a focus on the importance of legal status for accessing segmented US citizenship rights to the prevailing emphasis on the significance of collective group characteristics for immigrant adaptation and transnationalism. The New Immigrant Whiteness explores the emergence of discourses associating post-Soviet migrants with a pan-European whiteness that place them in explicit contrast to nonwhite populations even before their arrival in the United States. The book also examines representations of undocumented post-Soviet migration, analyzes post-USSR immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration from Mexico, and explores parallels between post-USSR and Asian immigrants who are similarly associated with the American immigrant dream of upward mobility. As the book renders members of the post-Soviet diaspora less exceptional from other contemporary arrivals, it creates an agenda for comparative work that addresses ongoing changes in the US ethnoracial hierarchy.

This chapter discusses the results of my interviews with post-USSR immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, which place male-dominated highly skilled and female-dominated marriage migration in the context of scholarship on adaptation and return migration. The two migratory forms have been spurred by the interests of US men in creating monoracial families and by the immense growth in the number of contingent academic positions at US institutions of higher learning. Their differential legal status upon arrival provides post-Soviet marriage and highly skilled migrants with divergent access to economic, social, and cultural forms of US citizenship, community building, and opportunities for return. Highly skilled migrants create middle-class lives, appear less interested in participating in a coethnic community, and maintain limited physical transnational connections, while marriage migrants face downward mobility and dependency, experience greater difficulty connecting to other post-Soviet migrants, and more often consider returning. While they are immediately provided with membership in their husbands’ middle-class lives, the globalized form of US whiteness that marriage migrants are assigned even before they leave their countries of origin creates heightened expectations of their complete assimilation to a middle-class whiteness at the cost of their and often their children’s bicultural and transnational identities.

Natalia Molina This chapter provides insight into how public health and immigration policies intersected and informed one another when it came to Mexican immigration through an examination of key events throughout the 20th century. Medical racial profiling marked Mexicans as unfit for citizenship while ignoring structural inequalities in health care.

This chapter examines Lifetime’s short-lived Russian Dolls and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, a widely watched US reality TV show. Both shows exemplify the emergence of narratives that associate the post-Soviet diaspora with idealized accounts of turn of the twentieth century European immigrant adaptation and upward mobility. While they focus on 1.5 generation immigrant participants, many of whom likely came to the United States as religious refugees, the two shows consistently represent their emerging collective “Russian” identity as just another ethnicized version of pan-European whiteness. Post-Soviet migrant cast members are portrayed as following in the footsteps of idealized and homogenized early European migrants, and they are set in firm opposition to Latina/os. The chapter also examines media commentary surrounding the two shows, interviews with participants, their social media posts, and their participation in a Ukrainian TV show where their identity is differently constructed to highlight migrants’ engagement with growing anti-immigration sentiment and their efforts to establish new collective transnational and diasporic identities, which are not represented on DWTS and Russian Dolls.

The Conclusion explores how whiteness continues to function as a privileged racial identity that provides exemption from racial profiling and that is regularly mobilized in the service of white supremacy and white nationalism, even as the immigrant myth of bootstrapism is becoming disconnected from accounts of turn of the century European immigrants’ ascendance to a pan-European white identity and expanded to other immigrant groups. This chapter calls for more inclusive struggles for migrant citizenship rights based on connections—rather than stark divisions—between the post-Soviet diaspora and other migrants that place whiteness among other racial formations, in order to decenter its persisting centrality as a US founding mythology despite significant domestic and global changes. Coalitions across ethnic, national, and legal status will be needed to address increasingly explicit and encompassing anti-immigration discourses and policies in the United States.

This concluding chapter articulates the theoretical and empirical contributions that this activist research provides to the knowledge about and struggle against violence against Latina immigrants. It expands the call for culturally sensitive services by redefining the meaning of cultural sensitivity. It also counters stereotypes that portray battered immigrants as passive or ignorant. The stories of all the immigrants presented here have proven the contrary by focusing on their nuanced agency. Furthermore, this analysis also advances the call to put intimate partner violence research in dialogue with immigration studies, particularly as the analysis builds on other literature that explores the links between gender violence, citizenship, and social inequality.

This chapter shows how popular narratives of Vietnamese refugees have been deployed to rescue the Vietnam War for Americans. It asserts that studies of Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese refugees are necessarily joined: as the purported rescuers and rescued, respectively, they together re-position the United States as the ideal refuge for Vietnam’s “runaways” and thus as the ultimate victor of the Vietnam War. The chapter contends that it is this seeming victory—the “we-win-even-when-we-lose” certainty—that undergirds U.S. remembrance of Vietnam’s “collateral damage” as historically necessary for the progress of freedom and democracy. By critically juxtaposing the constructions of the Vietnam veterans and the Vietnamese refugees together and in relation to continued U.S. militarism, this chapter draws on and brings into conversation three often-distinct fields: American studies, refugee/immigration studies, and war/international studies.

Susan M. Reverby Voice and agency and resistance and suffering have been the operating tropes in historical analysis of race and medicine. Rather than opening analysis, it is argued that focus on historical contingency, uncertainty in medicine where race fills in the lacunae, and a critique metaphoric use of suffering might provide better historical tools.

John McKiernan-Gonzalez Camp Jenner, a quarantine camp on the Texas border for black migrants, provides an unexpected lens on medical authority and black migrant citizenship in 1895. The returning migrants were quarantined in Eagle Pass when the United States Marine Hospital Service needed to test a promising smallpox treatment. The migrants, in turn, leveraged their status as objects of a federal field trial to guarantee their return home in defiance of white southern authorities. Camp Jenner illuminates the ways African American workers leveraged their role as commodities in an emerging research economy, even as federal health officers exploited their illness while laboring on their behalf.

Jean Kim This chapter examines the multiple colonial roots of “local girls,” or indigenous Hawaiian, Asian, and mixed-race women working in Hawai’i as nurses in the early twentieth century and how these women both reproduced and challenged the racializing impulses of colonial biomedicine within changing parameters of settler and territorial inequalities.

Lena McQuade Documenting the history of New Mexican midwives, known as parteras, this chapter foregrounds the racialization of birth practices and practitioners in the decades following New Mexico’s admission as a state in the nation.

Veronica Martinez-Matsuda This chapter documents how the U.S. Farm Security Administration aimed to improve Mexican farmworkers’ dire health status through direct medical treatment and social and cultural reform. Such efforts paradoxically helped Mexican families achieve improved health even as they frequently perpetuated racialized views blaming Mexicans for their poor condition.

Jason E. Glenn This essay explores the role that crack baby narratives played in redefining race in America. It helped policymakers come to a consensus as to how newly-coded racial discourses of behavioral pathology and personal irresponsibility could be employed to manufacture consent for neo-liberal economic policies and dismantling the New Deal state.

Martin Summers This chapter argues that black physicians’ understandable preoccupation with somatic diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and pellagra–diseases that allowed them to highlight the physical trauma of racism–contributed to the marginalization of those African Americans with functional mental illnesses as well as psychotherapy as a legitimate therapeutic practice.