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June 22, 2011

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant

By Jose Antonio Vargas

¶1 One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

My mother wanted to give me a better life, so she sent me thousands of miles away to live with her parents in America — my grandfather (Lolo in Tagalog) and grandmother (Lola). After I arrived in Mountain View, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang. One of my early memories is of a freckled kid in middle school asking me, “What’s up?” I replied, “The sky,” and he and a couple of other kids laughed. I won the eighth-‐ grade spelling bee by memorizing words I couldn’t properly pronounce. (The winning word was “indefatigable.”)

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”

Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted Lolo. I remember him sitting in the garage, cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to him, showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American citizens — he worked as a security guard, she as a food server — and they had begun supporting my mother and me financially when I was 3, after my father’s wandering eye and inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’ separation. Lolo was a proud man, and I saw the shame on his face as he told me he purchased the card,

along with other fake documents, for me. “Don’t show it to other people,” he warned.

¶5 I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.

I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-‐century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-‐old immigration bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been educated in this country. At the risk of deportation — the Obama administration has deported almost 800,000 people in the last two years — they are speaking out. Their courage has inspired me.

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.

¶10 My first challenge was the language. Though I learned English in the Philippines, I wanted to lose my accent. During high school, I spent hours at a time watching television (especially “Frasier,” “Home Improvement” and reruns of “The Golden Girls”) and movies (from

“Goodfellas” to “Anne of Green Gables”), pausing the VHS to try to copy how various characters enunciated their words. At the local library, I read magazines, books and newspapers — anything to learn how to write better. Kathy Dewar, my high-‐school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print — writing in English, interviewing Americans — validated my presence here.

The debates over “illegal aliens” intensified my anxieties. In 1994, only a year after my flight from the Philippines, Gov. Pete Wilson was re-‐ elected in part because of his support for Proposition 187, which prohibited undocumented immigrants from attending public school and accessing other services. (A federal court later found the law unconstitutional.) After my encounter at the D.M.V. in 1997, I grew more aware of anti-‐immigrant sentiments and stereotypes: they don’t want to assimilate, they are a drain on society. They’re not talking about me, I would tell myself. I have something to contribute.

To do that, I had to work — and for that, I needed a Social Security number. Fortunately, my grandfather had already managed to get one for me. Lolo had always taken care of everyone in the family. He and my grandmother emigrated legally in 1984 from Zambales, a province in the Philippines of rice fields and bamboo houses, following Lolo’s sister, who married a Filipino-‐American serving in the American military. She petitioned for her brother and his wife to join her. When they got here, Lolo petitioned for his two children — my mother and her younger brother — to follow them. But instead of mentioning that my mother was a married woman, he listed her as single. Legal residents can’t petition for their married children. Besides, Lolo didn’t care for my father. He didn’t want him coming here too.

But soon Lolo grew nervous that the immigration authorities reviewing the petition would discover my mother was married, thus derailing not only her chances of coming here but those of my uncle as well. So he withdrew her petition. After my uncle came to America legally in 1991, Lolo tried to get my mother here through a tourist visa, but she wasn’t able to obtain one. That’s when she decided to send me. My mother told me later that she figured she would follow me soon. She never did.

The “uncle” who brought me here turned out to be a coyote, not a relative, my grandfather later explained. Lolo scraped together enough money — I eventually learned it was $4,500, a huge sum for him — to

pay him to smuggle me here under a fake name and fake passport. (I never saw the passport again after the flight and have always assumed that the coyote kept it.) After I arrived in America, Lolo obtained a new fake Filipino passport, in my real name this time, adorned with a fake student visa, in addition to the fraudulent green card.

¶15 Using the fake passport, we went to the local Social Security Administration office and applied for a Social Security number and card. It was, I remember, a quick visit. When the card came in the mail, it had my full, real name, but it also clearly stated: “Valid for work only with I.N.S. authorization.”

When I began looking for work, a short time after the D.M.V. incident, my grandfather and I took the Social Security card to Kinko’s, where he covered the “I.N.S. authorization” text with a sliver of white tape. We then made photocopies of the card. At a glance, at least, the copies would look like copies of a regular, unrestricted Social Security card.

Lolo always imagined I would work the kind of low-‐paying jobs that undocumented people often take. (Once I married an American, he said, I would get my real papers, and everything would be fine.) But even menial jobs require documents, so he and I hoped the doctored card would work for now. The more documents I had, he said, the better.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local Y.M.C.A., then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at The Mountain View Voice, my hometown newspaper. First I brought coffee and helped around the office; eventually I began covering city-‐hall meetings and other assignments for pay.

For more than a decade of getting part-‐time and full-‐time jobs, employers have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did, I showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also began checking the citizenship box on my federal I-‐9 employment eligibility forms. (Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring permanent resident “green card” status, which would have required me to provide an alien registration number.)

¶20 This deceit never got easier. The more I did it, the more I felt like an impostor, the more guilt I carried — and the more I worried that I would get caught. But I kept doing it. I needed to live and survive on my own, and I decided this was the way.

Mountain View High School became my second home. I was elected to represent my school at school-‐board meetings, which gave me the chance to meet and befriend Rich Fischer, the superintendent for our school district. I joined the speech and debate team, acted in school plays and eventually became co-‐editor of The Oracle, the student newspaper. That drew the attention of my principal, Pat Hyland. “You’re at school just as much as I am,” she told me. Pat and Rich would soon become mentors, and over time, almost surrogate parents for me.

After a choir rehearsal during my junior year, Jill Denny, the choir director, told me she was considering a Japan trip for our singing group. I told her I couldn’t afford it, but she said we’d figure out a way. I hesitated, and then decided to tell her the truth. “It’s not really the money,” I remember saying. “I don’t have the right passport.” When she assured me we’d get the proper documents, I finally told her. “I can’t get the right passport,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

She understood. So the choir toured Hawaii instead, with me in tow. (Mrs. Denny and I spoke a couple of months ago, and she told me she hadn’t wanted to leave any student behind.)

Later that school year, my history class watched a documentary on Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city official who was assassinated. This was 1999, just six months after Matthew Shepard’s body was found tied to a fence in Wyoming. During the discussion, I raised my hand and said something like: “I’m sorry Harvey Milk got killed for being gay. . . . I’ve been meaning to say this. . . . I’m gay.”

¶25 I hadn’t planned on coming out that morning, though I had known that I was gay for several years. With that announcement, I became the only openly gay student at school, and it caused turmoil with my grandparents. Lolo kicked me out of the house for a few weeks. Though we eventually reconciled, I had disappointed him on two fronts. First, as a Catholic, he considered homosexuality a sin and was embarrassed about having “ang apo na bakla” (“a grandson who is gay”). Even worse, I was making matters more difficult for myself, he said. I needed to marry an American woman in order to gain a green card.

Tough as it was, coming out about being gay seemed less daunting than coming out about my legal status. I kept my other secret mostly hidden.

While my classmates awaited their college acceptance letters, I hoped to get a full-‐time job at The Mountain View Voice after graduation. It’s not that I didn’t want to go to college, but I couldn’t apply for state and federal financial aid. Without that, my family couldn’t afford to send me.

But when I finally told Pat and Rich about my immigration “problem” — as we called it from then on — they helped me look for a solution. At first, they even wondered if one of them could adopt me and fix the situation that way, but a lawyer Rich consulted told him it wouldn’t change my legal status because I was too old. Eventually they connected me to a new scholarship fund for high-‐potential students who were usually the first in their families to attend college. Most important, the fund was not concerned with immigration status. I was among the first recipients, with the scholarship covering tuition, lodging, books and other expenses for my studies at San Francisco State University.

As a college freshman, I found a job working part time at The San Francisco Chronicle, where I sorted mail and wrote some freelance articles. My ambition was to get a reporting job, so I embarked on a series of internships. First I landed at The Philadelphia Daily News, in the summer of 2001, where I covered a drive-‐by shooting and the wedding of the 76ers star Allen Iverson. Using those articles, I applied to The Seattle Times and got an internship for the following summer.

¶30 But then my lack of proper documents became a problem again. The Times’s recruiter, Pat Foote, asked all incoming interns to bring certain paperwork on their first day: a birth certificate, or a passport, or a driver’s license plus an original Social Security card. I panicked, thinking my documents wouldn’t pass muster. So before starting the job, I called Pat and told her about my legal status. After consulting with management, she called me back with the answer I feared: I couldn’t do the internship.

This was devastating. What good was college if I couldn’t then pursue the career I wanted? I decided then that if I was to succeed in a profession that is all about truth-‐telling, I couldn’t tell the truth about myself.

After this episode, Jim Strand, the venture capitalist who sponsored my scholarship, offered to pay for an immigration lawyer. Rich and I went to meet her in San Francisco’s financial district.

I was hopeful. This was in early 2002, shortly after Senators Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, and Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, introduced the Dream Act — Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. It seemed like the legislative version of what I’d told myself: If I work hard and contribute, things will work out.

But the meeting left me crushed. My only solution, the lawyer said, was to go back to the Philippines and accept a 10-‐year ban before I could apply to return legally.

¶35 If Rich was discouraged, he hid it well. “Put this problem on a shelf,” he told me. “Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”

And I did. For the summer of 2003, I applied for internships across the country. Several newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune, expressed interest. But when The Washington Post offered me a spot, I knew where I would go. And this time, I had no intention of acknowledging my “problem.”

The Post internship posed a tricky obstacle: It required a driver’s license. (After my close call at the California D.M.V., I’d never gotten one.) So I spent an afternoon at The Mountain View Public Library, studying various states’ requirements. Oregon was among the most welcoming — and it was just a few hours’ drive north.

Again, my support network came through. A friend’s father lived in Portland, and he allowed me to use his address as proof of residency. Pat, Rich and Rich’s longtime assistant, Mary Moore, sent letters to me at that address. Rich taught me how to do three-‐point turns in a parking lot, and a friend accompanied me to Portland.

The license meant everything to me — it would let me drive, fly and work. But my grandparents worried about the Portland trip and the Washington internship. While Lola offered daily prayers so that I would not get caught, Lolo told me that I was dreaming too big, risking too much.

¶40 I was determined to pursue my ambitions. I was 22, I told them, responsible for my own actions. But this was different from Lolo’s

driving a confused teenager to Kinko’s. I knew what I was doing now, and I knew it wasn’t right. But what was I supposed to do?

I was paying state and federal taxes, but I was using an invalid Social Security card and writing false information on my employment forms. But that seemed better than depending on my grandparents or on Pat, Rich and Jim — or returning to a country I barely remembered. I convinced myself all would be O.K. if I lived up to the qualities of a “citizen”: hard work, self-‐reliance, love of my country.

At the D.M.V. in Portland, I arrived with my photocopied Social Security card, my college I.D., a pay stub from The San Francisco Chronicle and my proof of state residence — the letters to the Portland address that my support network had sent. It worked. My license, issued in 2003, was set to expire eight years later, on my 30th birthday, on Feb. 3, 2011. I had eight years to succeed professionally, and to hope that some sort of immigration reform would pass in the meantime and allow me to stay.

It seemed like all the time in the world.

My summer in Washington was exhilarating. I was intimidated to be in a major newsroom but was assigned a mentor — Peter Perl, a veteran magazine writer — to help me navigate it. A few weeks into the internship, he printed out one of my articles, about a guy who recovered a long-‐lost wallet, circled the first two paragraphs and left it on my desk. “Great eye for details — awesome!” he wrote. Though I didn’t know it then, Peter would become one more member of my network.

¶45 At the end of the summer, I returned to The San Francisco Chronicle. My plan was to finish school — I was now a senior — while I worked for The Chronicle as a reporter for the city desk. But when The Post beckoned again, offering me a full-‐time, two-‐year paid internship that I could start when I graduated in June 2004, it was too tempting to pass up. I moved back to Washington.

About four months into my job as a reporter for The Post, I began feeling increasingly paranoid, as if I had “illegal immigrant” tattooed on my forehead — and in Washington, of all places, where the debates over immigration seemed never-‐ending. I was so eager to prove myself that I feared I was annoying some colleagues and editors — and worried that any one of these professional journalists could discover

my secret. The anxiety was nearly paralyzing. I decided I had to tell one of the higher-‐ups about my situation. I turned to Peter.

By this time, Peter, who still works at The Post, had become part of management as the paper’s director of newsroom training and professional development. One afternoon in late October, we walked a couple of blocks to Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Over some 20 minutes, sitting on a bench, I told him everything: the Social Security card, the driver’s license, Pat and Rich, my family.

Peter was shocked. “I understand you 100 times better now,” he said. He told me that I had done the right thing by telling him, and that it was now our shared problem. He said he didn’t want to do anything about it just yet. I had just been hired, he said, and I needed to prove myself. “When you’ve done enough,” he said, “we’ll tell Don and Len together.” (Don Graham is the chairman of The Washington Post Company; Leonard Downie Jr. was then the paper’s executive editor.) A month later, I spent my first Thanksgiving in Washington with Peter

In the five years that followed, I did my best to “do enough.” I was promoted to staff writer, reported on video-‐game culture, wrote a series on Washington’s H.I.V./AIDS epidemic and covered the role of technology and social media in the 2008 presidential race. I visited the White House, where I interviewed senior aides and covered a state dinner — and gave the Secret Service the Social Security number I obtained with false documents.

¶50 I did my best to steer clear of reporting on immigration policy but couldn’t always avoid it. On two occasions, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s position on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. I also wrote an article about Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who was defending his party’s stance toward Latinos after only one Republican presidential candidate — John McCain, the co-‐author of a failed immigration bill — agreed to participate in a debate sponsored by Univision, the Spanish-‐language network.

It was an odd sort of dance: I was trying to stand out in a highly competitive newsroom, yet I was terrified that if I stood out too much, I’d invite unwanted scrutiny. I tried to compartmentalize my fears, distract myself by reporting on the lives of other people, but there was no escaping the central conflict in my life. Maintaining a deception for so long distorts your sense of self. You start wondering who you’ve become, and why.

In April 2008, I was part of a Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. Lolo died a year earlier, so it was Lola who called me the day of the announcement. The first thing she said was, “Anong mangyayari kung malaman ng mga tao?”

What will happen if people find out?

I couldn’t say anything. After we got off the phone, I rushed to the bathroom on the fourth floor of the newsroom, sat down on the toilet and cried.

¶55 In the summer of 2009, without ever having had that follow-‐up talk with top Post management, I left the paper and moved to New York to join The Huffington Post. I met Arianna Huffington at a Washington Press Club Foundation dinner I was covering for The Post two years earlier, and she later recruited me to join her news site. I wanted to learn more about Web publishing, and I thought the new job would provide a useful education.

Still, I was apprehensive about the move: many companies were already using E-‐Verify, a program set up by the Department of Homeland Security that checks if prospective employees are eligible to work, and I didn’t know if my new employer was among them. But I’d been able to get jobs in other newsrooms, I figured, so I filled out the paperwork as usual and succeeded in landing on the payroll.

While I worked at The Huffington Post, other opportunities emerged. My H.I.V./AIDS series became a documentary film called “The Other City,” which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and was broadcast on Showtime. I began writing for magazines and landed a dream assignment: profiling Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker.

The more I achieved, the more scared and depressed I became. I was proud of my work, but there was always a cloud hanging over it, over me. My old eight-‐year deadline — the expiration of my Oregon driver’s license — was approaching.

After slightly less than a year, I decided to leave The Huffington Post. In part, this was because I wanted to promote the documentary and write a book about online culture — or so I told my friends. But the

real reason was, after so many years of trying to be a part of the system, of focusing all my energy on my professional life, I learned that no amount of professional success would solve my problem or ease the sense of loss and displacement I felt. I lied to a friend about why I couldn’t take a weekend trip to Mexico. Another time I concocted an excuse for why I couldn’t go on an all-‐expenses-‐paid trip to Switzerland. I have been unwilling, for years, to be in a long-‐term relationship because I never wanted anyone to get too close and ask too many questions. All the while, Lola’s question was stuck in my head: What will happen if people find out?

¶70 Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th birthday, I won a small reprieve: I obtained a driver’s license in the state of Washington. The license is valid until 2016. This offered me five more years of acceptable identification — but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I respect and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am.

I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.

So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses and employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.

I do know that I am grateful to my grandparents, my Lolo and Lola, for giving me the chance for a better life. I’m also grateful to my other family — the support network I found here in America — for encouraging me to pursue my dreams.

¶75 It’s been almost 18 years since I’ve seen my mother. Early on, I was mad at her for putting me in this position, and then mad at myself for being angry and ungrateful. By the time I got to college, we rarely spoke by phone. It became too painful; after a while it was easier to just send money to help support her and my two half-‐siblings. My sister, almost 2 years old when I left, is almost 20 now. I’ve never met my 14-‐year-‐old brother. I would love to see them.

Not long ago, I called my mother. I wanted to fill the gaps in my memory about that August morning so many years ago. We had never

discussed it. Part of me wanted to shove the memory aside, but to write this article and face the facts of my life, I needed more details. Did I cry? Did she? Did we kiss goodbye?

My mother told me I was excited about meeting a stewardess, about getting on a plane. She also reminded me of the one piece of advice she gave me for blending in: If anyone asked why I was coming to America, I should say I was going to Disneyland.

Jose Antonio Vargas is a former reporter for The Washington Post and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He founded Define American, which seeks to change the conversation on immigration reform. Editor: Chris Suellentrop (C.Suellentrop-‐ [email protected])

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Discussion questions for “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” by Jose Antonio Vargas”

1. How did Vargas get into the US? What is his immigration status today?

2. What are his accomplishments in the profession of Journalism?

3. What is the “Dream Act”? Look it up on the Internet.

4. In ¶11, Vargas states, “I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.” What does he mean? Why do you think he decided to tell his story? What are the risks and benefits of his actions? Do you think he did the right thing?

5. Do you think Vargas’ family did the right thing my sending him to the US? Did his

mother succeed in giving him “a better life” (¶2)?

6. Do you think Vargas’ definition of “citizen” – “hard work, self-reliance, love of my

country” (¶41) – is a good one? Should immigrants who satisfy such a definition be given citizenship? If not, what kind of criteria should the government use? Why do you think the government gives citizenship to immigrants who marry US citizens more easily than to people like Vargas? Do you think this is fair?

here are around 20 million adult, American-born children of immigrants

living in the United States. I am one of them. I am the daughter of two

immigrant mothers from Peru and Argentina. My roots are not directly

below me, beneath this ground that I stand on, but instead reach to many

parts of the world. I grew up in San Francisco, moving constantly from

house to house, sometimes in homes filled with other families. I quickly

learned to adapt. I became a traveler, just as my mothers are, and just as

many immigrants are travelers whose wandering feet and thoughts are

never still.

Technically, I am an American, but that label doesn’t quite seem to fit. For

much of my childhood I felt tension between the culture I was immersed in

at school and the culture that my mothers kept alive within our home, the

one I returned to each night. I ate milanesas and lomo saltado, while my

friends at school had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and spoke about

their excitement for a holiday I never celebrated, Thanksgiving. I spoke

Spanish until I felt too different from others. When I began primarily

speaking English, people were shocked whenever they heard a pale girl say,

“yo soy latina.” That’s when I started to feel neither South American nor2 ARTICLES REMAINING

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North American. I was stuck in an uncomfortable in-between, a place from

which I am still trying to free myself.

In discussions about children of immigrants, scholars often deal with

statistics, but rarely with the actual individuals who have their own voices

and ideas of identification. We are more than numbers, more than the

reports that analyze our educational attainment and economic standing.

This continuing portrait series is inspired by conversations I’ve had with

children of immigrants over the past two years. The people I met talked

about their childhoods and how they defined American culture. They

reflected on self-identification and the imbalance of cultural identity. And

they looked at how the label "children of immigrants" affects the members

of that community.

“A lot of the time, being a child of immigrants means constantly having to

defend your place as an ‘American,’” said Alex Santana, a Spanish- and

Dominican-American. By deconstructing our cultural identities, our

childhoods, and the ways in which some people misrepresent us, we are

reclaiming our individuality.

I never thought of myself as a “child of immigrants” per se, as I

feel the term comes loaded with undertones of immigrant

struggles — the old clichés of coming to a new country with

nothing and struggling to assimilate. The truth of the matter is

my father came to the United States comfortably with an M.D.

from Italy, fluent in English since his youth, and I’m the fourth

child to my parents, so by the time I was born they were very

well established.

— Michael Shami, 21, Syrian- and Hungarian-American (top photo)

“

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I think that where you are at the present is the most important, but at

the same time it’s essential to not let go of where you’ve been. You

should not have to let go of your roots to be a part of American society.

— Avnee, 22, British- and Indian-American

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I don’t always think of myself as Italian or American or Italian-American.

Oddly enough, when I’m here in this country I think of myself as a little

more Italian, but when I’m in Italy I think of myself as slightly more

American. For me, being American has to do with a certain way of life.

The New York lifestyle is much more frenetic than the laid-back Italian

lifestyle. — Giorgio Ravalli, 22, Italian-American

“

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I grew up with ‘When I was your age…’ stories describing how my

parents had to stand in line for two hours just to receive a loaf of bread

during Communist times. Their difficult experiences directly shaped

their lives and indirectly shaped my life, because I continue to think

about how fortunate I am to live a more comfortable life.

— Anna Sowa, 22, Polish-American

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Growing up was definitely a

mix of two worlds, Indian and

American. At times, I have felt

caught in the middle of the two,

but it’s one of those things that

you learn to find your way

through ... It definitely takes

mental fortitude to know where

you stand and what you want to

stand by. I can now stand for

more than one thing.

— Taher Hassonjee, 22, Indian-American

“ Growing up, we ate traditional

Indian food for breakfast and

dinner every day and I would

have had it for lunch, too, but

unfortunately I was too

embarrassed to bring Indian

food to school. But if I could go

back, I would have changed

that. — Sruti Swaminathan, 22, Indian-

American

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Something that I haven’t been able to call my

own lately is my last name, just because I feel

like I haven’t earned it. I feel like religion was

lost on me because I ate meat and could never

speak my parents’ native language, and that

was always hard growing up with. I was kind

of the black sheep of the family.

— Akshai Ajit, 21, Indian-American

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When others ask, ‘Where are you from?’ I

tend to respond with ‘New Jersey.’ Usually,

they are never satisfied with that answer

because for them, it does not explain why I

have the last name I have, why my hair is so

conspicuously curly, why my skin is brown,

and why I am able to speak Spanish.

— Alex Santana, 21, Spanish- and Dominican-American

“

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Funny enough, most of the kids

I grew up around were of

Russian descent. And oddly

enough, I felt a much bigger

disconnect with them than I did

with any of my American

friends. Growing up, I always

felt like the Russian kids didn’t

have as much respect for their

heritage as I did. I found much

more solace being the Russian

one among my Puerto Rican,

Italian, Polish, Ghanaian and

American friends. The

amalgamation of cultures and

backgrounds made for such a

richer experience. — Sasha Kazachkova, 19, Russian-

American

“ I would like to say I feel

comfortable calling myself an

Argentinian, but every year

when I return there I am

reminded that I have missed

huge cultural changes since I

was 9, and as perfect as my

Spanish may be, there are

always tiny indicators to them

that I am not one of them.

— Alex Fiszbein, 19, Argentine-American

“

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Produced by Whitney Dangerfield, Meghan Louttit and Jeffrey Henson Scales

When people meet me, they want to know what culture I come from or

where my family is from. They want to put me in a box or assign me a

label. So the question of ‘what are you’ has always made me feel

defensive of who I am and how I’m presented in the world.

— Shirley Acuna, 22, Peruvian-American

“

Photographs by Quetzal Maucci

Quetzal Maucci is an Argentine- and Peruvian-American documentary photographer focusing on human rights and activism. She is based in San Francisco.

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The Viet Nam War is also called "The American War" by the Vietnamese. It's not my intention to debate the moral or political justifications or consequences of the war from either the American or Vietnamese side. Rather, I highlight it as the latest example of Viet Nam's long history of fighting to remain a united and independent nation, free from all foreign control. As the cliché goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A Nation and Peopl e Divi ded

When Viet Nam was divided in half in 1954, the people of Viet Nam were given one year to move to the other half of the country, if they so chose. As a result, about one million Vietnamese who had previously lived in the northern half of Viet Nam chose to abandon almost everything they and dozens of generations before them had owned and built, in order to move to the south and live in a democratic society, without communist control. Among those were both sides of my family, about which you'll learn more later. Conversely, only about 10,000 southerners moved the other way into the north of Viet Nam.

Unfortunately, life was rather chaotic for them wherever they lived. The repressive policies of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem ultimately led to his assassination in 1963. Subsequent regimes didn't have any more popular support but were firmly entrenched, thanks to both the South Vietnamese and U.S. militaries.

The increasing number and intensity of insurrection activities by communists in both the north and south led the U.S. to fear that if Viet Nam were to become communist, it would produce a "domino effect" in which other countries in the area would also fall to communism. The U.S. feared that this scenario would seriously threaten their political, military, and economic interests on an international scale. Therefore, they felt stronger and more direct actions were needed to fight this threat.

Their opportunity for full and direct confrontation came after the U.S. destroyer Maddox was supposedly attacked by the North Vietnamese on August 2, 1964, although several sources claimed the attach never actually took place.

Nonetheless, President Johnson succeeded in passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that effectively authorized full-scale U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam. By the end of 1965, 180,000 U.S. troops were fighting in Viet Nam and reached its peak of 540,000 by 1969.

It So unds So S impl e

The U.S. felt that their superior weapons and military technology would easily overwhelm the communist forces. Conversely, the communists once again relied on guerrilla tactics perfected over centuries of fighting superior forces, and the growing support of the Vietnamese people. Of course, there are many reasons why the U.S. military's goals in Viet Nam were not achieved and why they ultimately lost the war.

Back in the U.S., many military leaders complained that the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations did not give them the authority, discretion, and resources they needed to conduct an effective military campaign against the communists -- that in effect, they were fighting with one hand tied behind their back. This situation frustrated much of the U.S. military, from officers to frontline soldiers along with the South Vietnamese army, and undoubtedly contributed to contradictory objectives, low morale, and desperate actions.

The U.S. military did not help its cause by committing a growing number of brutalities and atrocities against Vietnamese civilians (i.e., My Lai, Thanh Phong, the Tiger Force massacres, etc.) and indiscriminately bombing the countryside and mountains, planting untold numbers of land and sea mines, and using toxic chemicals such as Agent Orange to deforest the countryside, and which, even 30 years later, continues to contaminate Vietnamese food and people. All these actions ultimately devastated the lands and lives of countless Vietnamese and were contributing factors in the U.S. ultimately losing the support of many Vietnamese citizens.

Opposition to American involvement in Viet Nam in the U.S. was also increasing. This anti-war movement was bolstered by the Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) Offensive that began on Jan. 30, 1968. Communist forces launched simultaneous surprise attacks in 36 major South Vietnamese cities. While the

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communist forces were ultimately defeated, the offensive succeeded in swaying the public opinion of many people in the U.S. who now felt that the war was going to be long, protracted, expensive, perhaps even immoral, and may not even be winnable.

After President Nixon's orders to limit and then halt bombing in 1969, the first peace talks took place between the U.S. and North Viet Nam. This led to the first withdrawals of U.S. troops from Viet Nam and the new program whereby the South Vietnamese forces would gradually assume all military responsibilities for their defense. However, the fighting again escalated when the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces expanded their military actions into neighboring Cambodia.

After Nixon was reelected President in 1972, he fulfilled his promise to begin withdrawing U.S. ground troops but at the same time, he ordered that aerial "carpet" bombings and the mining of North Vietnamese harbors be intensified. Finally, on Jan. 27, 1973, a peace accord was signed that called for an immediate cease fire, for all U.S. fighting forces to be withdrawn, and for South Viet Nam to determine its own future. Nonetheless, fighting between the North and the South continued, although without U.S. involvement.

At What Price?

When the U.S. voted to drastically reduce military aid in August 1974, the South Vietnamese knew that their defeat was coming. In the spring of 1975, the North launched a full-scale offensive into South Viet Nam. This culminated in the surrender of the South Vietnamese government, the capture of South Viet Nam's capital of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the frantic departure of all remaining U.S. military personnel, and the beginning of the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of people from their lands and lives in South Viet Nam.

Ultimately, the Viet Nam/American War can be seen as a tragedy from all sides. Although the communists won and physically united the country, they are still struggling to rebuild the nation and to overcome the divisions that still exist in Viet Nam, undoubtedly exacerbated by their continuing political extremism and corruption. The South Vietnamese obviously lost their freedom, much of their livelihood, and for those who fled the country, their homeland -- wounds and bitter memories that will take lifetimes to heal.

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Most importantly, an estimated three quarters of a million Vietnamese died as a result of the Viet Nam War. In addition, Viet Nam's economy and land (the basic livelihood for so many Vietnamese) were devastated and the nation is still recovering from the lingering effects of this devastation. In addition to entire families, the fundamental fabric of Vietnamese culture and identity was severely disrupted, if not completely broken.

Finally, the U.S. not only lost a costly military war but also its sense of confidence, efficacy, and national unity. Approximately 58,168 U.S. soldiers lost their lives, another 153,303 were wounded, and about 2,500 are still listed as missing in action. All these soldiers who fought in the war faithfully answered their country's call for service, many paid the ultimate price to defend our right to reflect on these events, but most likely, few completely understood what they were doing and why they were sent there.

Although the U.S. has healed many of its psychological wounds in the decades after the Viet Nam War, its legacy still lingers in American society and can still divide us today. What we should all agree on however, is that Americans and Vietnamese suffered in many ways. I hope that our efforts to heal, to remember those who perished, and to learn from this event will ultimately unite us all.

Aut hor Ci tatio n

Suggested reference: Le, C.N. 2014. "The American / Viet Nam War" Asian-Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. <http://www.asian-nation.org/vietnam-war.shtml> (September 24, 2014).

http://www.asian-nation.org/terms.shtml

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This article is an edited chapter on the m ajor historical events and contem porary

characteristics of the Hm ong Am erican com m unity, excerpted from The New Face of

Asian Pacific Am erica: N um bers, D iversity, and Change in the 21st Century , edited

by Eric Lai and Dennis Arguelles in conjunction with AsianW eek M agazine and

published by the UCLA Asian Am erican Studies Center.

A P o p u l a t i o n W i t h o u t a N a t i o n

The Hmong people are an ethnic group whose origins go back about 3,000 years in China. Most

Hmong -- about eight million -- still live in southwestern China. Another four million live in the

Southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Burma, Laos and Vietnam, where they immigrated during

the 19th century following centuries of persecution in China. There, they existed mostly as

farmers living in rural areas.

The first Hmong migration of notable size to the United States began with the fall of Saigon and

Laos to Communist forces in 1975. Many Hmong had worked with pro-American anti-Communist

forces during the conflicts in Vietnam and Laos. As a result, they were subject to violence and

retribution in Laos. Many Hmong escaped Laos to Thailand where they were incarcerated in

refugee camps.

From 1981 to 1986, the number

of Hmong refugees slowed to a

few thousand each year, but

admissions picked up again

between 1987 and 1994, when

about 56,000 Hmong refugees

were accepted. After 1994,

Hmong refugee admissions

slowed to a trickle as most of

the Thai camps were by now

empty, with the remaining

Hmong repatriated to Laos.

Also, Hmong immigration based on family reunification remains low, especially compared to other

Southeast Asian ethnic groups.

With the first wave that arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, voluntary resettlement agencies

purposely tried to disperse the Hmong around the country, such as Providence (RI), Philadelphia,

Chicago, Des Moines, Iowa, Kansas City (KS), Denver, Missoula (MT), Tulsa, and Salt Lake City. This

strategy, however, proved unsuccessful as many Hmong were settled in a poor, predominantly

African American neighborhoods where they encountered much hostility and violence.

Also, many Hmong wished to be reunited with family and clan members. These reasons led to a

massive shift of the Hmong population in the mid-to- late 1980s to central California cities like

Fresno, Stockton, and Merced, and to a lesser extent, to Minnesota and Wisconsin. The 2000

Census counted 186,310 Hmong Americans across the U.S. (single race or part-Hmong),

representing a nearly 90 percent increase in the population from 1990. Many agree, however, that

the figure is probably a significant undercount.

B u i l d i n g a N e w H o m e

During the 1990s, the Hmong moved again: away from the West and towards the Midwest and the

South. This shift was epitomized by the emergence of Minneapolis and St. Paul as the unofficial

capitals of Hmong America, taking over from Fresno. About half of Hmong today live in the

Midwest, mostly in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, compared to 41 percent in 1990.

Meanwhile, the proportion of Hmong in the Western states fell to 42 percent in 2000 from 55

percent in 1990. Around 6 percent of the Hmong now live in the South (with most in North and

South Carolina), an impressive increase from just 1.3 percent in 1990. In 2000, the Hmong

population numbered in the Northeastern states remained very small, at just 2 percent.

Why did Minneapolis-St. Paul emerge as the new Hmong American capital? The opportunity to

make a better life seems to be at the heart of things. "The cost of living is cheaper here than in

California," Lee Pao Xiong, president of the Urban Coalition in St. Paul, told the Associated Press.

"The quality of education is better here, and jobs are available here." Xiong said he's recruited 10

families from his own extended family to come here from California in recent years. "They came

here and they found jobs within a month or two and are making ten, eleven, twelve dollars an

hour," he said.

A 2002 community

directory provides

listings of 13 Hmong

community

organizations and 39

Hmong religious

congregations in the

Minneapolis-St. Paul

area. Whereas many

Hmong in

California's Central

Valley have taken up

their old occupations

of farming, those in

Minneapolis have

found jobs working in factories. But there is a substantial emerging class of Hmong small

business owners -- many of them congregated near St. Paul's University Avenue -- and college-

educated Hmong professionals going into fields like law, medicine, and non-profit management.

And the United States' first Hmong politician, a 32-year-old female lawyer named Mee Moua, was

elected to the Minnesota State Senate in 2002.

The Hmong came to America less-prepared for the modern capitalistic society of their new home

than most other immigrant groups. Most had been farmers in their native country, and did not

graduate from high school or the equivalent. As a result, many Hmong families when they first

arrived were forced to go on public assistance. Data from the 2000 Census shows considerable

upward socioeconomic movement, as many Hmong settled into stable or more lucrative jobs.

L o o k i n g t o t h e F u t u r e

Traditionally, the Hmong favor large families with many children. Some of this can be explained by

the Hmong's traditional farming roots. As a result, Hmong households average more than six

persons per house or apartment in Minnesota and Wisconsin, compared to about 2.5 persons

among the entire population. This helps explain the huge Hmong American population growth

between 1990 and 2000, despite the decline in refugee admissions after 1994. These

demographic trends suggest the Hmong population will continue to be among the fastest growing

Asian group in the United States in the coming decades.

The Hmong are a fairly tight-knit group; many community leaders are old clan leaders or

politicians from Laos and are their descendents and relatives. For instance, the Hmong general

Vang Pao, who commanded the Hmong forces fighting against the Communist North Vietnamese,

remains a political leader for many Hmong in America.

Still, there is a new generation of Hmong leaders emerging. They are young, well-educated, and

not necessarily willing to be as beholden to old loyalties based on clan affiliation. Cleaved along

this generational divide, the younger leaders support the reform of some aspects of Hmong

culture that may clash with American customs. For instance, Hmong womens' groups have

campaigned against polygamy, domestic violence, and teenage brides -- not common but not

unheard of among more traditional Hmong.

Other leaders are trying to tackle the increasing number of Hmong youth being lured into gangs.

Others are trying to encourage Hmong entrepreneurship, a traditional route to the middle-class

for immigrants but one less common with the Hmong. Vang Pao, for instance, has established a

program with St. Thomas University in St. Paul to provide technical assistance to Hmong small

businesspeople. While Hmong Americans certainly face a number of challenges, they are moving

forward into a brighter future.

A u t h o r C i t a t i o n

UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Reprinted in accordance with Section 107 of the U.S.

Suggested reference: Pfeifer, Mark E. 2003. "Hmong Americans" Asian-Nation: The Landscape

of Asian America. <http://www.asian-nation.org/hmong.shtml> (September 24, 2014).

English 215 “Kelly loves Tony” – Movie Notes

Important scenes: Explain the significance of each scene: 1. Kelly talks about how she and Tony first met each other.

2. Kelly is in the hospital after giving birth to Andrew…She refuses to drink the special tea that her mother brings to her.

3. Kelly finds out about Tony’s deportation case.

4. Kelly and Tony talk about her school plans while he drives her to college on her first day.

5. Kelly joins Tony’s family’s New Year celebration.

6. Tony and David (Tony’s mentor) discuss his relationship with Kelly as they drive together.

7. Kelly and Tony argue as they do laundry together at a Laundromat.

Mien Customs: Kelly’s values:

Tony’s values:

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Annals of Immigration

OCTOBER 13, 2014 ISSUE

The Kitchen Network America’s underground Chinese restaurant workers. BY LAUREN HILGERS

Chinatown employment agencies can get immigrants kitchen jobs in a few hours. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNIE LING

n a strip mall on a rural stretch of Maryland’s Indian Head Highway, a gaudy red façade shaped

like a pagoda distinguishes a Chinese restaurant from a line of bland storefronts: a nail salon, a liquor store, and a laundromat. On a mild Friday morning this July, two customers walked into the dimly lit dining room. It was half an hour before the lunch service began, and, aside from a few fish swimming listlessly in a tank, the room was deserted.

In the back, steam was just starting to rise from pots of soup; two cooks were chopping ginger at a frenzied pace. Most of the lunch crowd comes in for the buffet, and it was nowhere near ready. “Customers are here already!” the restaurant’s owner, a wiry Chinese man in his fifties, barked. He dropped a heavy container onto the metal counter with a crash. “How can you possibly be moving this slowly?”

The senior cook, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old who goes by Rain, had been working in Maryland for almost two months. He stood silently frying noodles in a wok, his loose bangs tucked into a trucker hat with the band name Linkin Park written across the brow. “You’re too slow!” the boss yelled at the other cook, who had arrived only a few days earlier. Rain stayed focussed on the buffet dishes. He was weighing the possibility of getting a cigarette break soon. There was no sense in getting into trouble defending a co- worker he hardly knew.

Rain was born in a village in rural China. He had left his family, walked through a desert, and gone tens of thousands of dollars into debt to reach the United States. From Manhattan, he had taken a late-night Chinatown bus, which stopped at freeway off- ramps to discharge other restaurant workers, whose bosses picked them up and took them to strip malls along Interstate 95. He was in his fourth year of restaurant work and felt a growing pride in his fried noodles and sautéed shrimp.

The other cook set down his knife and squared off with the boss. “I have worked in a lot

The other cook set down his knife and squared off with the boss. “I have worked in a lot of restaurants, and none of those bosses complained!” he said. “If you’re so worried about it, why don’t you come do it yourself ?” The cook stormed out of the kitchen, on his way to catch a bus back to New York. Rain sighed. The next forty-eight hours were the busiest of the week, and he would be the only cook in the kitchen. “You think I was wrong to talk to him like that?” the boss asked. Rain didn’t answer.

There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets. There is one in Pinedale, Wyoming (population 2,043), and one in Old Forge, New York (population 756); Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania (population 1,085), has three. Most are family operations, staffed by immigrants who pass through for a few months at a time, living in houses and apartments that have been converted into makeshift dormitories. The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.

Rain, who asked that I use his adopted English name to protect his identity, is reedy and slight, with a wide face and sloping cheekbones. He is observant, in no hurry to speak, but he is more cagey than timid. Like his boss, and like everyone else who works at the restaurant, he is primarily concerned with saving as much money as possible. He needs to pay the snakehead that got him to the U.S. and send money to his family in China. He harbors the vague suspicion that everyone around him is angling for more money, less work, or some other benefit at his expense. So, instead of conversation, Rain occupies himself with the math of a transient cook: the time it takes to clean the shrimp, the days before he can visit his girlfriend in New York, and the balance of his debts. At night, he lies on a cot in his boss’s otherwise empty living room, mulling the slow processing of his green card. During the day, if he’s feeling bold, he walks across the strip-mall parking lot to order lunch at Subway, pointing at the menu when he doesn’t know the English word for something.

“I understand why he acts like this,” Rain told me, about his boss. “He’s been working in that restaurant for almost twenty years. He goes back and forth between the restaurant and the dorm where we live. Back and forth, back and forth, every day for years.” The boss’s wife and kids are in China. “You do this kind of work for that long, and you start to lose perspective.” Rain pinched his fingers together. “Your world is this small.”

met Rain in New York’s Chinatown, standing under a sign that read, “Lucky Days Employment Agency.” He had left his previous restaurant job, at a takeout place in

Connecticut, a week before, and after a few days off he was looking for a new job. “You can look online, but nobody does,” Rain said. “This is easier.”

The corner of Eldridge and Forsyth, at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, is cluttered

The corner of Eldridge and Forsyth, at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, is cluttered with employment agencies that do business in Chinese. Signs identify the Xingdao Restaurant Employment Agency, the Red Red Restaurant Employment Agency, and the Successful Restaurant Employment Agency. “There are only three jobs a Chinese immigrant can get without papers,” a woman from Beijing told me. “You can work at a massage parlor, you can work doing nails, or you can work in a restaurant.” People come here looking for work as busboys, waiters, or cooks.

It was Sunday, the busiest day of the week, and job seekers spilled out of the agencies, down stairwells, and out into the streets. In tiny local canteens, they ate spicy peanut noodles and pork dumplings before resuming the hunt. The corner gets quieter as the weekend approaches. Bosses don’t want new employees showing up on a busy Friday or Saturday; even an experienced chef requires a few hours to learn a new menu.

Each agency consists of a narrow room with a desk behind bars and employs a small staff of women who sit flanked by phones and notebooks. Stickers pasted to the bars differentiate jobs in New Jersey, Long Island, and upstate New York. Most everything else is just “out of state.” Rain moved among the offices, weaving through the crowd. “All the agencies are about the same,” he said, watching a Chinese couple pass from one door to the next. “But your chances are better if you leave your phone number with all of them.” The women behind the bars scribble the information in college-ruled notebooks. Then, Rain said, you sit around in stairwells and on sidewalks and wait for them to call. Job seekers have to be ready to leave within hours, and Rain expected to be on a bus by the end of the day.

In a smoky second-story office, Rain passed a man who was explaining to an agent that he specialized in painting mountain landscapes on plates, using hoisin sauce. He showed the agent pictures of his work on his cell phone. “I’ve got a job here out of state!” she shouted. “Connecticut! Talk to the boss!” She slipped the phone under the bars. “Hello, boss?” he said.

When an agency finds a suitable match, the cooks and the waiters speak to the restaurant owners, asking about hours, living conditions, and salary. A busboy might make twelve hundred or fifteen hundred dollars a month; a waiter who speaks English could make twice that. Restaurants farther from New York have a harder time attracting workers, so they tend to pay better. Rain explained that the first thing to ask a prospective boss is his age and his home town. “There’s a generation gap between people in their fifties and us,” he said. People who remember the privations of the Cultural Revolution are more focussed on money and more dismissive of quality-of-life concerns. There are regional differences, too. “The bosses from the north of China are usually more easygoing,” one cook told me. “People from Fujian and Taiwan only think about money!” This is a significant consideration; prospective workers will tell you that the Fujianese own the overwhelming majority of Chinese restaurants in the country.

or more than a hundred years, the restaurant trade was dominated by the

For more than a hundred years, the restaurant trade was dominated by theCantonese, whose cuisine, fantastically reimagined, provided America’s idea ofChinese food: sweet-and-sour pork, wonton soup, General Tso’s chicken. In the late nineteen-eighties, the mixture of immigrants changed. As reports of China’s one-child policy and of the clash in Tiananmen Square outraged the American public, Chinese immigrants started getting special dispensation in U.S. immigration courts. The Fujianese saw an opportunity. Fujian Province, hemmed in by mountains on one side and by the Taiwan Strait on the other, had been a largely impoverished place for centuries. Its inhabitants began leaving with such urgency that villages emptied out virtually overnight.

In the U.S., the Fujianese took restaurant jobs, learned the trade, and saved up to buy out owners or to open restaurants of their own. The restaurants were concentrated in big cities, but, as competition grew, enterprising immigrants moved away, in search of greater profits. “Previously, if you were looking for a job, it was inside Chinatown or Queens, so people just recommended each other,” Peter Kwong, a professor of Asian-American studies at Hunter College, in New York, said. As Chinese restaurants spread across the country, employment agencies cropped up to link them together.

Fujianese food is traditionally soupy and slightly sweet, heavy on shellfish and seafood. But, as Fujianese immigrants took over restaurants, they adopted their predecessors’ menus, offering the same spring rolls and egg foo young. In the Chinese-restaurant business, the Fujianese have a reputation for being hardworking and somewhat myopic. A common joke describes their doggedness: if an entrepreneur opened a successful gas station along a highway, Western businessmen might build a grocery store or a café nearby; an influx of Fujianese entrepreneurs would open fifty more gas stations.

The joke underplays how lucrative the restaurant business has been. In the villages surrounding Fuzhou, the provincial capital, the evidence of people flowing out and money flowing back in is visible on nearly every street. The village of Houyu, after a decades-long building boom, is filled with ostentatious mansions, even though few people remain to live in them; the area is so depopulated that, in some cases, squatters have moved in and stayed, undetected, for months. A woman I met there, who runs a takeout restaurant in New Jersey, waved at the empty houses and said, “It doesn’t matter if no one is living there. You have to build a big house so people look at it and say, ‘Oh, that person is doing really well in the United States.’ ”

The village that Rain left in 2009, on the water north of Houyu, has been similarly transformed. Most of the adults who still live there are supported by someone overseas, and the ones who remain eke out a living as fishermen or farmers. Rain’s father, a former teacher, worked in faraway factory towns, and came back when he could, bringing toys. “I worshipped him,” Rain told me.

Rain speaks nostalgically of village life. Growing up, he played games in the alleys until

Rain speaks nostalgically of village life. Growing up, he played games in the alleys until dinnertime and then ran out again to play under the stars. As he got older, he and his friends liked to light firecrackers, stick them in water-buffalo dung, and then sprint away. He remembers the days stretching out lazily, running into years with no urgency. There’s little leisure in the U.S., he says. “If you ask people here if they want to go out and eat dinner with you, or go somewhere to have fun one day, they’ll say, ‘What? You think I have that much American time?’ ”

He told me that he was forced out of the village not by poverty but by religious persecution. After he graduated from vocational school, at nineteen, he started attending a Christian house church with his mother, who had converted when Rain was a child. One day in 2009, he met with a group of other young people to discuss the Bible. The local police burst in, threw him roughly in jail, and demanded the equivalent of three hundred and twenty-five dollars in bail. Once he was released, the police told him not to go anywhere, and checked in regularly to make sure that he was at home. He couldn’t work, and he soon grew desperate.

In the U.S., stories of religious repression are frequently viewed with skepticism. Chinese asylum claims vastly outnumber claims from any other country. In 2012, more than ten thousand Chinese applicants were granted asylum, many of them with the help of high- priced lawyers and interpreters; Egyptians, the second-largest group, had fewer than three thousand successful applicants. The Fujianese government is not known to be particularly strict with Christians, and there are rarely crackdowns on small house churches. When pressed, Rain admits that there are other reasons a person from his village might want to go to the U.S. His parents, for instance, might want him to go: “They’ve been poor their whole lives. They don’t want their children to be poor.” Even well-educated Chinese find few opportunities to pull themselves out of the lower classes, Rain said: “There are a lot of people who went to college, who are very refined and cultured, and even those people can’t find work.”

The cost of passage to the U.S. varies by province. In a packed hostel in Queens, I met a twenty-six-year-old from Henan Province who paid twelve thousand dollars for a student visa. After a smuggler trained him to pass an interview with the consulate and enrolled him in an English-language school in Oklahoma, he flew straight to New York and applied for asylum. Peter Kwong points out that people from Fujian, working through a different network, pay some of the highest fees: “If you’re a Fujianese villager, you’re not likely to say, ‘The price is better in Shandong. I’ll go to Shandong.’ ”

When Rain decided to hire a snakehead, his parents asked around in the village and came back with a price: seventy thousand dollars. Once he arrived in the U.S., his family and friends would borrow to cover the fee, and Rain would slowly pay them back. “Seventy thousand dollars is a lot of money, but you can make two thousand dollars a

month—so you can pay it back in a few years,” he said. “And afterward you’re still

month—so you can pay it back in a few years,” he said. “And afterward you’re still making two thousand dollars a month.” A worker in China’s private sector makes, on average, about forty-seven hundred dollars a year.

The snakeheads instructed Rain to bring as little as possible, he told me: “They said, ‘Do you think we’re taking you on a tour? The lighter the better.’ ” Two weeks later, a van drove him to Fuzhou and dropped him off at the airport with a fake passport, an address on a slip of paper, and a ticket to Beijing. “As soon as I walked out my front door, everything was a first,” Rain said. “It was my first time on an airplane. It was the first time I travelled so far. And, in Beijing, it was the first time I saw snow.” Rain hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address, which turned out to be a hotel—a way station for emigrants. He spent two weeks there, walking around the neighborhood and watching TV. He felt as if he were on vacation.

Finally, Rain and an older man from Fujian were put on a plane and given another address on a slip of paper: a city in Mexico that Rain had never heard of. During a layover in France, they searched nervously for their connecting flight. Landing in Mexico, Rain was frightened. He took a taxi and paid the driver far more than the trip was worth. “I think they saw us and knew what we were,” Rain said. After spending a night in a hotel, he and his companion were picked up and driven north for hours, until they arrived at a small house with crops growing in the fields around it. Inside, a number of Mexicans, watched over by smugglers, were waiting to cross the border. No one spoke Chinese, so when Rain got hungry he pointed at his stomach and someone gave him a cup of instant noodles.

Wherever the house was, it was close to the border. The smugglers looked them over to make sure they were fit to spend the day walking in the desert, gave them each a bottle of water, and herded them out the door. Their guide blew up an inflatable boat, and they floated across the Rio Grande. “You didn’t need to understand anything besides ‘Go,’ ” Rain said. “When the guide said, ‘Go, go, go,’ you ran.”

Rain and his companions walked for a full day and most of the night, until, before dawn, they came to a road, where an associate of the smugglers picked them up. They went to Houston first, and from there a van took them straight to New York. “I just got here and looked at the sky,” Rain told me. “Everything looked so big. In China, everything seems squeezed together and small. I thought, The U.S. is going to be wonderful.”

ain had relatives near New York, and a cousin he barely knew drove him out of the

ain had relatives near New York, and a cousin he barely knew drove him out of the city to a family-owned restaurant. For a week, he stayed at his cousin’s house, alone,

while the rest of the family went to work. “Everyone is like this,” he said. “They don’t want to take you to the restaurant, because every person that goes into the restaurant wants to get paid.”

Eventually, Rain’s cousin got him a ride to Manhattan and told him that he was on his own. With the help of a friend from his village who was living in the city, he made his way to the employment agencies in Chinatown. He struck a deal with a restaurant owner and paid the agency a small fee of about twenty dollars. The agency gave him a slip of paper that listed his salary, the boss’s name and phone number, and the right bus to take. The restaurant’s address, in keeping with the usual practice, was left out. “No one knows where they’re going,” Rain explained. “They just show up and call the phone number.” Along with the other newly employed workers, he collected his belongings and walked to one of the Chinatown bus agencies, a few blocks away.

Rain’s first job was outside Albany, at a family-run restaurant where he was the only employee. When he arrived, his boss put him to work prepping all the food for the evening’s service. Rain kept cutting his fingers chopping chicken. The boss told him, “Oh, little brother, you don’t understand anything,” but he refused to help. At mealtime, the family handed Rain a bowl of rice with a few vegetables and left him to eat by himself. Later, the boss dumped buckets of water on the floor and told him to mop it up. Rain called his friend to complain. “That boss is bullying you,” the friend said. “He knows you just arrived in the U.S., so he’s making you do too much.” The next day, Rain was on a bus back to New York.

Rain’s friend told him to find a job farther away, “so the boss will treat you better.” Rain found work in South Carolina, where he stayed for two months. “At the beginning, I couldn’t do anything—I could only clean up, do a little frying,” he told me. “Now I can do pretty much anything.” He encountered his first eggroll and his first fortune cookie, and learned how to prepare dishes he had never seen in China. He practiced using cornstarch to make a crispy coating on General Tso’s chicken and to thicken the sauce for beef with broccoli. Like most cooks in busy Chinese restaurants, he figured out how to use a single knife, a heavy cleaver, for everything from cleaning shrimp to mincing garlic. “It’s important that you do it fast,” he said.

Since then, Rain has bounced from restaurant to restaurant, staying for a few months and then going back to New York for a rest before getting another job. He has few impressions of the states and cities where he has worked; he leaves the kitchen only to smoke cigarettes in a back parking lot or to be driven to the restaurant’s dorm at night. He told me that he would never go on a walk on his day off. “What if you get lost?” he said. “You can’t ask anybody directions, and your boss is going to be too busy at the restaurant to come get you.”

ix mornings a week, the boss picks up Rain and the other workers from their dorm

Six mornings a week, the boss picks up Rain and the other workers from their dormand takes them to the restaurant. Their preparations have a catechistic order: firstthe rice cooker, then dishes for the buffet, then those for the lunch rush. Twice a week, a Chinese-run company brings supplies, and everyone gathers to butcher meat, hacking it into small pieces for quick cooking. They put on rubber gloves and pour salt and cornstarch over the meat, mix it by hand, then seal it and put it into the freezer. Chinese kitchens in the U.S. have none of the badinage that makes for good reality TV. In Rain’s kitchen, the only person who talks is the boss, complaining. When a buffet tray gets low, a waiter calls through an intercom, set at a startling volume: “We need more pineapple chicken up front!”

When Rain arrived in the U.S., he assumed that he had a fair proficiency with Chinese food. His father had prided himself on his culinary skill, and his mother was a capable cook, too. She taught him when to add spice to a dish, when to temper it with Chinese celery. Rain worked briefly as a fry cook in his village, and found that he had absorbed some of his parents’ knowledge. “Even if I’ve never cooked a dish before, I can think about it and draw from my experience,” he said. Having grown up on his father’s subtly flavored fish soups, he was surprised by American Chinese food. Americans seemed to eat like kids: they love starches and sweet things, and are frightened of meat and fish with bones in it. “Americans eat all that fried stuff,” he told me. “It’s not healthy.” Real Chinese food is more refined: “You have to spend a lot of time studying and really understanding it.”

In Maryland, most of the patrons seem to come for the buffet and eat as much as they can. Still, Rain loves watching people in the dining room. “I like seeing a clean plate,” he said. “I like it when people take the first bite of my food and they start nodding their head.” He spends hours trying to create a perfectly round Chinese omelette. “There’s a lot of kung fu in making egg foo young,” he told me. “If you have time, you’ll make it really perfect. You’ll make it bigger, better-looking, rounder. They’ll think, I spent so little money and I got such good food, and on top of that it’s good-looking. And then maybe they’ll come back.”

Rain viewed the job in Maryland as an opportunity to expand his repertoire. “In a takeout restaurant, people order the same dishes over and over,” he said. At a bigger restaurant, he could learn new dishes. And his salary—twenty-eight hundred dollars a month—was good, but not good enough to arouse concern. “If you come across a job paying three thousand, you think there must be something wrong with that restaurant,” he told me.

Rain lives with five co-workers in a red brick town house that his boss owns, part of a woodsy development near the restaurant. The house is tidy; there are three floors covered with white carpeting, and each worker has been supplied with an identical cot, a desk, a chair, and a lamp. “Some bosses don’t take care of the houses,” Rain said. “If they’re

renting the house, especially, they don’t care. The rooms will actually smell.” Every

renting the house, especially, they don’t care. The rooms will actually smell.” Every restaurant worker has a story of sleeping in a dank basement or being packed in a room with five other people. Many complain of living in a house that has no washing machine, and being forced to spend their day off scrubbing their grease-spattered T-shirts in a sink.

Rain’s boss, in contrast, is fastidious. The house has a granite-countered kitchen, but he forbids the employees living there to use it; instead, a hot plate and a card table have been set up in the garage. Outside, the building is indistinguishable from the other town houses, aside from a tin can full of cigarette butts on the doorstep. The shades are kept drawn.

estaurant workers heading to jobs in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, or in Buffalo, New York, don’t worry much about the hard work or the long hours. They worry about

the isolation. “If you do this job too long, you’ll eventually lose your mind,” one cook told me. Rain said that the people around him were constantly on guard. In the kitchen and the restaurant dorms, no one talks to anyone else, so it’s difficult to ask questions. (“For example,” Rain said, pointing to the Linkin Park logo on his hat, “can you tell me what my hat says?”) He hadn’t learned the names of half the people working there. “I said hello to one guy, and he didn’t answer me,” he said. “Some people go to twenty different restaurants in one month. They don’t have time to make friends.” When Rain arrived, he shared the living room with another cook. At night, they sat on their beds across from each other, watching Chinese dramas on their computers or sending text messages. “You don’t talk, and you don’t say good night,” Rain said. “You just see that the other person has turned off their lamp and you think, Oh, I should lower the volume on my headphones.”

After a year in the U.S., Rain started thinking about a girl he had met in middle school, who was working in restaurants and passing through New York every couple of months. A friend told him how to reach her on a Chinese instant-messaging service, and Rain began inviting her to meet him on his days off. “The two of us were of the same world,” he said. “We had the same goals.” Rain’s girlfriend, who goes by Annie, is twenty-nine and lanky, nearly as tall as Rain. She came to the U.S. a year before he did, and she speaks with assurance about restaurant work. “She’s got a lot of opinions,” Rain told me. “She’s got more opinions than I do, even.” Annie pushes Rain to work harder, to take less time off, and to save for a family. Although she spoke no English when she arrived from China, she quickly learned enough to answer the phone in a takeout place. (Rain points out that the jobs women typically hold in restaurants—taking orders or working as hostesses—give them better opportunities to practice English.) Recently, she moved to a Japanese restaurant, which many Chinese workers prefer; the jobs pay well, and rolling sushi isn’t such hot work as frying noodles. Rain accepted the position in Maryland partly because she had worked in the area a few years before him. “I like to think I’m following a road that she’s walked on,” he told me.

After a year of sleeping in hostels and on friends’ couches whenever he returned to New

After a year of sleeping in hostels and on friends’ couches whenever he returned to New York, Rain decided that he needed a base. He now rents a bedroom in an apartment in Brooklyn, for five hundred dollars a month, and tries to visit every other weekend and cook a meal for Annie. “If you have your own apartment, you can put your luggage somewhere and your clothes somewhere,” he said. “When you’re injured, when you’re unhappy, when your boss scolds you, when you get fired, you know you can go home.”

The most worrisome problem for Rain is securing citizenship. Soon after he arrived in the U.S., his friends directed him to an asylum lawyer in Chinatown, whose services started at ten thousand dollars. Rain paid the fee, wrote up his claim, and collected supporting documents. Because asylum claims must be made within a year of crossing the border, he got a Brooklyn church to confirm the date of his arrival. Three months later, he was invited for an interview. “The lawyer told me to look the asylum officer in the eye,” he told me. “If you’re nervous, or if you mess up the timing, they’ll think you’re lying.”

Rain was granted asylum in late 2010, and a year later his lawyer helped him apply for a green card. But soon afterward, he told me, the lawyer was arrested in an F.B.I. sting targeting fraudulent asylum claims. The application process, which is supposed to take six months, has dragged on for almost three years.

n September, during China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, Rain negotiated a week of unpaid vacation, and he invited me to Brooklyn to try some home-cooked Fujianese food.

“Come to my cousin’s apartment,” he told me. “We hang out there most days.” The apartment was on Eighth Avenue, in Brooklyn’s Chinatown.

When I arrived, the door was wide open, and Rain was sitting at a glass-topped table with his cousin and two friends. They wore plastic gloves to protect their hands as they munched on cured duck heads. Rain poured tea and told me, “Don’t feel like you have to eat the duck head.” A soup-filled wok bubbled on the stove, and his cousin, having retrieved a half bottle of wine he had stashed away, cooked rice noodles in the broth, tossing in oysters and cabbage and a handful of tiny, curled squids. “There’s no name for it,” Rain said. “It’s just a simple soup, with noodles. Call it seafood noodle soup.” He opened kitchen cabinets to show me the ingredients his cousin kept. “You see?” he said. “Chinese people use all of these sauces and ingredients for just one dish.” His cousin, gesturing toward the duck heads, said, “Do you know why Americans don’t like eating meat with bones in it? They’re too lazy!”

Rain’s cousin had worked in restaurants when he arrived in the U.S., but he got out of the business as soon as he could. “It’s too hard!” he said, pantomiming a cook’s frantic routine: shaking a wok, grabbing things off shelves, tossing them in. “All day, for twelve hours, you’re like this!” Rain sat at the table, grinning. He sympathized with his cousin’s restaurant fatigue. “Americans, when they want to rest and enjoy themselves, they rest

and they enjoy themselves,” he told me. “Chinese people—it all depends on your boss.”

and they enjoy themselves,” he told me. “Chinese people—it all depends on your boss.” Rain’s father died in 2012, and he was unable to go back to China for the funeral. “I regret a lot when it comes to my family,” he said.

For many restaurant workers, the decision to come to the U.S. is irrevocable. But, as the disappointments of immigrant life accrue, it can be hard not to imagine that things might be better elsewhere. Chinese-Americans, despite a good public image, suffer higher rates of poverty than the general public. Mental-health problems are an increasing concern in New York’s immigrant communities. In parts of China where the growing economy has given people more options, the allure of working in the U.S. has faded. This February, in a hostel in Queens, I met a woman who had just returned from a difficult day of job hunting. “I thought America would be heaven, and all it is is cold!” she complained. She returned to Beijing after four months. In Fuzhou, a taxi-driver told me that he was glad his attempts to emigrate had failed. “My father says that having a son in the United States is like having no son at all,” he said.

Rain tried not to dwell on returning to Maryland, where he was due in a few days. Everyone else who had worked at the restaurant when he started had been driven off by the boss’s temper. “And it’s so far away,” Rain said. If he could find a job somewhere closer, he could see Annie every weekend. As his family’s only son, Rain feels increasing pressure to send money home to his mother. But, he reasoned, everyone who comes to the U.S. should be prepared for hardship. “Everything we do, we do for the next generation,” he said, and added, “No matter what, it beats sitting around in the village.”

When the soup was ready, Rain ladled out bowlfuls, thick with noodles and shellfish. The broth, barely salted, was delicate and fresh. Everyone at the table slurped it from the bowl before starting on the noodles, and Rain smiled proudly as we ate.

After dinner, he and I walked along Eighth Avenue to find some moon cakes, and he talked about the future. In five years, if all goes according to plan, he will have his debt paid off, and enough money set aside to help support a child. He and Annie want to raise a family somewhere with a Chinese community, and they sometimes talk about opening a restaurant of their own. He wondered if a Fujianese restaurant could succeed outside Chinatown. Americans might not be ready for it, he said, but if they just tried his food they would be convinced. The next time I came for dinner, he promised, he would make something more elaborate.

Rain watched the fishmongers on Eighth Avenue as they dumped out ice and packed up their fish. “This is the best time of night to buy cheap seafood,” he told me. “They’ll just have to throw it away.” He pointed at a woman buying a huge, scrabbling red crab. “If you’ve never had those crabs, you’ll have to try them!” he said. With a look of concern, he added, “Don’t worry—I’ll take it out of the shell and chop it up. It will be easy to eat.” 쁦

LAUREN HILGERS

English 215

Discussion questions for “The Kitchen Network America’s underground Chinese restaurant workers”

1. What is the Chinese Kitchen network? Describe the process of how undocumented Chinese immigrants find jobs in restaurants in the US. (p.2-3)

2. Why did Rain leave China? (p. 5) What is his immigration status in the US? (p. 10)

3. What was his life like in China compared with his life in the United States? (p. 5 & p. 7)

4. How did Chinese immigration affect Rain's village (Houyu) in China? (p. 4)

5. Do you think Rain assimilated into the American culture? What about his girlfriend Annie? What would Jed Bush say?

6. How does Rain and Annie's situation compare to Tony and Kelly's? What do you think their “American dreams” are? How do they plan to achieve them?

7. The reporter interviewed some Chinese immigrants, about their experiences as immigrants in the United States: “This February, in a hostel in Queens, I met a woman who had just returned from a difficult day of job hunting. 'I thought America would be heaven, and all it is is cold!' she complained” (p.11) A taxi driver in China, who couldn't emigrate to the U.S. said: “My father says that having a son in the United States is like having no son at all” (p.11). What did they mean by this?

8. Rain was granted asylum in 2010. He is therefore allowed to work legally in the U.S., and he's eligible to apply for a green card. Compare Rain's situation to that of Vargas'. Do you think it's fair? How do you think the government should deal with these different types of immigrants?

OPINION

By Sam Quinones

Jan. 17, 2015

SOUTH GATE, Calif. — A FEW weeks ago, the City Council in this suburb southeast of Los Angeles appointed a Mexican immigrant to its advisory council. Jesus Miranda is from Michoacán and owns a taco restaurant here. He’ll advise the council on housing development and other issues.

Mr. Miranda’s appointment is hardly national news. But small moments like these are signs of a historic change of heart toward America and civic engagement among Mexican immigrants, many of whom, like Mr. Miranda, have been here for decades. No place offers a clearer view of this change than the suburbs southeast of Los Angeles.

South Gate (pop. 96,000) and its neighbors were mostly farmland until the 1930s, when migrants from the Midwest and later World War II veterans moved to work in the factories of Chrysler, G.M., Firestone and Bethlehem Steel. Subdivisions sprouted. Towns emerged with bucolic names: Maywood, Huntington Park, Bell Gardens. Union jobs sustained a civic ecosystem of local newspapers, Rotary Clubs and Fourth of July parades.

Then, in the late 1970s, the factories started leaving, and so did the white people. Their civic institutions atrophied. By 1990, towns like South Gate that had been 90 percent white were more than 90 percent Latino.

The new residents, crucially, were not from East Los Angeles, where Mexican-Americans had developed an activist political tradition since the 1960s. Instead, they were Mexican, straight from the ranchos — small villages on Mexico’s frontiers, far from the center and from government. Most came here to work in jobs they believed, even after decades, would be temporary. They focused their lives on returning home someday. They packed into cheap housing and spent their savings on building homes back in Mexico.

Mexican rancho culture valued self-reliance and hard work. But rancheros also shunned politics, and, in particular, the paternalistic embrace of the PRI, the party that ran Mexico like Tammany Hall for 71 years. Immigrants brought that history with them, and in the dense southeast enclaves, their attitudes didn’t change.

How Mexicans Became Americans

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This tradition of non-engagement, combined with Mexico’s proximity to California, meant that this wave of immigrants was fundamentally different from previous groups in other parts of the country.

Arriving in the United States, the Irish in Chicago, Italians in New York and Cubans in Miami came for good. They wedged their way into big cities using politics as the crowbar to more economic opportunity, and jobs in government. They had to compete with, and learn from, established groups and elites.

This was not the case for Mexicans in the California suburbs. As the region morphed into a service economy, they easily found work. In 1986, Congress passed legislation granting amnesty to around 800,000 immigrants in Los Angeles County, many of whom eventually acquired citizenship. Suddenly many residents were voters, yet without any tradition of informed franchise or accountability. What’s more, those who lived out in these Los Angeles suburbs had no one to show them a way to civic engagement. Not many had the education, or English, necessary to run a California municipality. Caring little for politics, they avoided city hall and rarely participated in civic institutions.

In this vacuum, beginning in the mid-1990s, an astonishing cast of scoundrels was voted into office by immigrants casting the first votes of their lives.

In South Gate, an unhinged brand of politics mutated, based on anonymous fliers. In 1999, one council candidate was accused, in a fake newspaper article reprinted in an anonymous flier, of molesting two boys. In 2001, anonymous fliers mailed to voters falsely claimed that two councilmen had fathered children they later abandoned. Tapping immigrants’ deep connection to Mexico, fliers, in Spanish and English, accused candidates of being related to Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the disgraced ex-president of Mexico, and of belonging to the PRI.

These fliers seem clownish, but immigrant voters believed them.

The council majority that won power paid voters back with classic PRI-style giveaways: free hot dogs and sodas at first, and then toys one Christmas. Once in power, it was police badges to cronies and millions of dollars to law firms.

Eventually, enough voters woke up. Ashamed they’d been duped, they recalled the treasurer and his cronies in 2003. The treasurer was later prosecuted and sent to federal prison. South Gate, however, was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Most southeast towns, stripped of their civic girdings, have gone through similarly toxic municipal episodes.

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María Chacón, an immigrant from Chihuahua who ran Bell Gardens (pop. 42,000) like a Mexican cacique, or political boss, was convicted of conflict of interest for engineering her appointment as city manager.

The town of Cudahy hired a former janitor as city manager, and an opposing candidate had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house.

In Bell (pop. 36,000), the city manager voted himself and others annual salaries well above that earned by the president of the United States. He and his former assistant are now in prison. Five southeast suburbs, in fact, had at least one elected official go to prison in the last dozen years.

But each boil of corruption, once lanced, left its respective town a little cleaner, more chastened.

Today, a virtually secured border has significantly slowed the flow of new immigrants who kept ranchero political culture alive. Mexico’s recent medieval violence has also terrified many of those who are already here into staying put.

As a result, many Mexican immigrants no longer cling to the dream of returning home one day. This change is happening across the United States — from Idaho to North Carolina — but it is most palpable in these Mexican immigrant enclaves of Los Angeles County.

“I get the sense that folks now see this as home,” said Jorge Morales, a South Gate city councilman and son of Mexican immigrants. “My parents always talked about going back to Mexico. Now it’s a place they’ll visit, but this is home.”

Last summer, a shopping center opened in South Gate. It was to be called El Portal (The Gateway), but a market survey found that people in an area that is more than 90 percent Latino wanted no Latino theme to the center. “What people wanted was something like they saw on the West Side” of Los Angeles, which is predominately white, said Councilman Morales.

The Azalea Regional Shopping Center, as it was named instead, held a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony last month, at which members of South Gate’s Girl Scout Troop 16325, Latinas all, sang “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

No Girl Scout troop had existed in South Gate for some three decades. But two years ago, a local mother got fed up with driving her daughter two towns over and formed her own troop. “People are getting involved, coming out of their shells,” Daisy Prieto, the volunteer troop leader, and daughter of Mexican immigrants, told me.

St. Helen Catholic Church for years held toy drives for orphanages in Tijuana. This year, the drive benefited needy kids in South Gate.

MEANWHILE, immigrants like Mr. Miranda have learned to use city hall, and local government has become significantly more professional since the days of rancid fliers and giveaways. At a recent meeting, the City Council took up mundane but essential municipal issues: purchasing a

diesel flatbed truck, zoning for emergency homeless shelters and appointments to its advisory council. The town’s advisory councils are populated by a healthy mix of white and black, as well as Latino.

South Gate’s experience stands as a template for hundreds of small towns in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kansas and elsewhere — towns that have been rejuvenated by new Mexican workers, who now form their essential working classes, yet remain civically absent.

When I started reporting on the southeast suburbs in the 1990s, they felt to me like one enormous Mexican rancho — the way the Lower East Side of Manhattan must have once seemed a big shtetl. Today, they feel like an iceberg finally separating and floating away from mother Mexico. People are more focused on how things run where they raise children than in villages they’ll never return to.

It’s taken a long time. But it is a good thing for Mexican immigrants and for the small American towns where so many have landed.

A journalist based in Los Angeles and the author of “Antonio s̓ Gun and Delfino s̓ Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration.”

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2015, on Page SR6 of the New York edition with the headline: How Mexicans Became Americans

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Of Choios and Surfers

JACK LOPEZ

On the West Side of LA., where the population has traditionally been Anglo, lies the ocean. On the East Side, far from the beach but close to the original center of Mexican Los Angeles, dwell the descendants of the first Angelinos, as well as many new arrivals from Mexico. Born into the East L.A. community, Jack Lopez (b. 1950) writes here of the loyalties he feels for his birth community, even as he feels the lure of assimilation, of joining the world of surfing that has come to symbolize white culture and privilege. A fiction writer and essayist whose works include Cho- los & Surfers: A Latino Family Album (1998), Lopez is a professor of English at Cal- ifornia State University, Northridge.

T~"he only store around that had this new magazine was a Food Giant on 1 Vermont Avenue, just off Imperial. Surfer Quarterly, it was then called.

Now it's Surfer Magazine and they've celebrated their thirtieth anniver- sary. Sheldon made the discovery by chance when he'd gone shopping with his mother, who needed something found only at Food Giant. Nor- mally we didn't go that far east to shop; we went west toward Crenshaw, to the nicer part of town.

We all wanted to be surfers, in fact called ourselves surfers even though we never made it to the beach, though it was less than ten miles away. One of the ways you could become a surfer was to own an issue of Surfer Quarterly. Since there had been only one prior issue, I was hot to get the new one. To be a surfer you also had to wear baggy shorts, large Penney's Towncraft T-shirts, and go barefoot, no matter how much the hot sidewalks burned your soles.

That summer in the early sixties I was doing all sorts of odd jobs around the house for my parents: weeding, painting the eaves, baby- sitting during the daytime. I was earning money so that I could buy Lenny Muelich's surfboard, another way to be a surfer. It was a Velzy-Jacobs, ten

1 2 Introduction: California—The Bellwether State

feet six inches long, twenty-four inches wide, and it had the coolest red oval decal. Lenny was my across-the-street neighbor, two years older than I, the kid who'd taught me the facts of life, the kid who'd taught me how to wrestle, the kid who'd played army with me when we were chil- dren, still playing in the dirt.

Now we no longer saw much of each other, though he still looked out for me. A strange thing happened to Lenny the previous school year. He grew. Like the Green Giant or something. He was over six feet tall and the older guys would let him hang out with them. So Lenny had become sort of a hood, wearing huge Sir Guy wool shirts, baggy khaki pants with the cuffs rolled, and French-toed black shoes. He drank wine, even get- ting drunk in the daytime with his hoodlum friends. Lenny was now re- spected, feared, even, by some of the parents, and no longer needed or desired to own a surfboard—he was going in the opposite direction. There were two distinct paths in my neighborhood: hood or surfer.

I was entering junior high school in a month, and my best friends were Sheldon Cohen and Tom Gheridelli. They lived by Morningside Heights, and their fathers were the only ones to work, and their houses were more expensive than mine, and they'd both been surfers before I'd aspired toward such a life. Sheldon and Tom wore their hair long, con- stantly cranking their heads back to keep their bangs out of their eyes. They were thirteen years old. I was twelve. My parents wouldn't let hair grow over my ears no matter how much I argued with them. But I was the one buying a surfboard. Lenny was holding it for me. My parents would match any money I saved over the summer.

Yet Surfer Quarterly was more tangible since it only cost one dollar. Lenny's Velzy-Jacobs was forty-five dollars, quite a large sum for the time. The issue then became one of how to obtain the object of desire. The Food Giant on Vermont was reachable by bike, but I was no longer al- lowed to ride up there. Not since my older brother had gone to the Southside Theatre one Saturday and had seen a boy get knifed because he wasn't colored. Vermont was a tough area, though some of the kids I went to school with lived up there and they weren't any different from us. Yet none of them wished to be surfers, I don't think.

What was needed was for me to include my father in the negotia- tion. I wasn't allowed to ride my bike to Vermont, I reasoned with him. Therefore, he should drive me. He agreed with me and that was that. Ex- cept I had to wait until the following Friday when he didn't have to work.

My father was a printer by trade. He worked the graveyard shift. I watched my younger brother and sister during the day (my older brother, who was fifteen years old, was around in case anything of con- sequence should arise, but we mostly left him alone) until my mother

Lopez • Of Cholos and Surfers 1 3

returned from work—Reaganomics had hit my family decades before the rest of the country. Watching my younger sister and brother con- sisted of keeping them quiet so my father could sleep.

In the late afternoons I'd go to Sportsman's Park, where I'd virtually grown up. I made the all-stars in baseball, basketball, and football. Our first opponent on the path to the city championships was always Will Rogers Park in Watts. Sheldon and Tom and I had been on the same teams. Sometimes I'd see them in the afternoons before we'd all have to return home for dinner. We'd pore over Sheldon's issue of Surfer while sit- ting in the bleachers next to the baseball diamond. If it was too hot we'd go in the wading pool, though we were getting too old for that scene, since mostly women and kids used it.

When Friday afternoon arrived and my father had showered and my i o mother had returned from work, I reminded my father of our agreement. We drove the neighborhood streets up to Vermont, passing Washington High School, Normandie Avenue, Woodcrest Elementary School, and so on. We spoke mostly of me. Was I looking forward to attending Henry Clay Junior High? Would I still be in accelerated classes? My teachers and the principal had talked with my parents about my skipping a grade but my parents said no.

Just as my father had exhausted his repertoire of school questions, we arrived at the Food Giant. After parking in the back lot, we entered the store and made for the liquor section, where the magazines were housed. I stood in front of the rack, butterflies of expectation overtaking my stomach while my father bought himself some beer. I knew immedi- ately when I found the magazine. It looked like a square of water was floating in the air. An ocean-blue cover of a huge wave completely en- gulfing a surfer with the headline BANZAI PIPELINE. I held the magazine with great reverence, as if I were holding something of spiritual value, which it was.

"Is that it?" my father asked. He held a quart of Hamm's in each hand, his Friday night allotment.

"Yes." I beamed. At the counter my father took the magazine from me, leafing

through it much too casually, I thought. I could see the bulging veins in his powerful forearms, and saw too the solid bumps that were his biceps.

"Looks like a crazy thing to do," he said, finally placing the magazine 15 on the counter next to the beer. My father, the practical provider, the person whose closet was pristine for lack of clothes—although the ones he did own were stylish, yet not expensive. This was why he drank beer from quart bottles—it was cheaper that way. I know now how difficult it must have been raising four children on the hourly wages my parents made.

1 4 Introduction: California—The Bellwether State

The man at the counter rang up the purchases, stopping for a mo- ment to look at the Surfer. He smiled.

"tEres mexicano?" my father asked him. "Si, tcomo no?"the man answered. Then my father and the store clerk began poking fun at my magazine

in Spanish, nothing too mean, but ranking it as silly adolescent nonsense. When we got back in the car I asked my father why he always asked 20

certain people if they were Mexican. He only asked men who obviously were, thus knowing in advance their answers. He shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know. It was a way of initiating conversation, he said. Well, it was embarrassing for me, I told him. Because I held the magazine in my lap, I let my father off the hook. It was more important that I give it a quick thumb-through as we drove home. The Surfer was far more inter- esting for me as a twelve-year-old than larger issues of race.

I spent the entire Friday evening holed up in my room, poring over the magazine, not even interested in eating popcorn or watching 77 Sunset Strip, our familial Friday-night ritual. By the next morning I had almost memorized every photo caption and their sequence. I spoke with Sheldon on the phone and he and Tom were meeting me later at Sportsman's Park. I did my chores in a self-absorbed trance, waiting for the time when I could share my treasure with my friends. My mother made me eat lunch before I was finally able to leave.

Walking the long walk along Western Avenue toward Century and glancing at the photos in the magazine, I didn't pay attention to the cholo whom I passed on the sidewalk. I should have been more aware, but was too preoccupied. So there I was, in a street confrontation before I knew what had happened.

"You a surfer?" he said with disdain. He said it the way you start to say chocolate. Ch, like in choc—churfer. But that didn't quite capture it, either.

I stopped and turned to face him. He wore a wool watch cap pulled down onto his eyebrows, a long Sir Guy wool shirt with the top button buttoned and all the rest unbuttoned, khaki pants so long they were frayed at the bottoms and so baggy I couldn't see his shoes. I wore Bermuda shorts and a large Towncraft T-shirt. I was barefoot. My parents wouldn't let hair grow over my ears. Cholo meets surfer. Not a good thing. As he clenched his fists I saw a black cross tattooed onto the fleshy part of his hand.

His question was not like my father's. My father, I now sensed, 25 wanted a common bond upon which to get closer to strangers. This guy was Mexican American, and he wanted to fight me because I wore the outfit of a surfer.

Lopez • Of Cholos and Surfers 1 5

I rolled the magazine in a futile attempt to hide it, but the cholo viewed this action as an escalation with a perceived weapon. It wasn't that I was overly afraid of him, though fear can work to your advantage if used correctly. I was big for my age, athletic, and had been in many fights. The problem was this: I was hurrying off to see my friends, to share something important with them, walking on a summer day, and I didn't feel like rolling on the ground with some stranger because he'd de- cided we must do so. Why did he get to dictate when or where you would fight? There was another consideration, one more utilitarian: Who knew what sort of weapons he had under all that baggy clothing? A rattail comb, at the least. More likely a knife, because in those days guns weren't that common.

At Woodcrest Elementary School there was a recently arrived Dutch Indonesian immigrant population. One of the most vicious fights I had ever seen was the one when Victor VerHagen fought his own cousin. And the toughest fight I'd ever been in was against Julio, something during a baseball game. There must be some element of self-loathing that propels us to fight those of our own ethnicity with a particular ferocity.

Just before the cholo was going to initiate the fight, I said, "I'm Mexi- can." American of Mexican descent, actually.

He seemed unable to process this new information. How could someone be Mexican and dress like a surfer? He looked at me again, this time seeing beyond the clothes I wore. He nodded slightly.

This revelation, this recognition verbalized, molded me in the years so to come. A surfer with a peeled nose and a Karmann Ghia with surf racks driving down Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. to visit my grandparents. The charmed life of a surfer in the midst of cholos.

When I began attending junior high school, there was a boy nick- named Nino, who limped around the school yard one day. I discovered the reason for his limp when I went to the bathroom and he had a rifle pointed at boys and was taking their money. I fell in love with a girl named Shirley Pelland, the younger sister of a local surfboard maker. I saw her in her brother's shop after school, but she had no idea I loved her. That fall the gang escalation in my neighborhood became so pronounced my parents decided to move. We sold our house very quickly and moved to Huntington Beach, and none of us could sleep at night for the quiet. We were surrounded by cornfields and strawberry fields and tomato fields. As a bribe for our sudden move my parents chipped in much more than matching funds so I could buy Lenny Muelich's surfboard. I almost drowned in the big waves of a late-autumn south swell, the first time I went out on the Velzy-Jacobs. But later, after I'd surfed for a few years, I expertly rode the waves next to the pier, surfing with new friends.

16 Introduction: California—The Bellwether State

But I've got ahead of myself. I must return to the cholo who is about to attack. But there isn't any more to tell about the incident. We didn't fight that summer's day over thirty years ago. In fact, I never fought an- other of my own race and don't know if this was a conscious decision or if circumstances dictated it. As luck would have it, I fought only a few more times during my adolescence and did so only when attacked.

My father's question, which he'd asked numerous people so long ago, taught me these things: The reason he had to ask was because he and my mother had left the safe confines of their Boyle Heights upbring- ing. They had thrust themselves and their children into what was called at the time the melting pot of Los Angeles. They bought the post-World War II American dream of assimilation. I was a pioneer in the sociologi- cal sense that I had no distinct ethnic piece of geography on which my pride and honor depended. Cast adrift in tfie~city streets. Something gained, something lost. I couldn't return to my ethnic neighborhood, but I could be a surfer. And I didn't have to fight for ethnic pride over my city street. The neighborhood kids did, however, stick together, though this was not based upon race. It was a necessity. The older guys would step forward to protect the younger ones. That was how it was done.

The most important thing I learned was that I could do just about anything I wished, within reason. I could be a surfer, if I chose, and even cholos would respect my decision. During my adolescence I went to my grandparents' house for all the holidays. They lived in East Los Angeles. When I was old enough to drive I went on my own, sometimes with a girlfriend. I was able to observe my Los Angeles Mexican heritage, taking a date to the placita for Easter service and then having lunch at Olvera Street. An Orange County girl who had no idea this part of Los Angeles existed. I was lucky; I got the best of both worlds. v~_

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT

1. What symbolic significance did being a surfer hold for Lopez and his friends?

2. How did Lopez's attitude toward his Mexican heritage compare with that of his father?

3. Why does the cholo object to Lopez's surfer clothing?

4. How did Lopez eventually reconcile his surfer and his Mexican American identities?

5. What did Lopez gain and lose through assimilation into mainstream California culture?

Double-Entry Notebook 1

Double-Entry Notebook – “Of Cholos and Surfers”

Quotes from the essay What does the quote mean? Why is it significant?

“I held the [Surfer] magazine with great reverence, as if I were holding something of spiritual value, which it was.” ¶ 12 “I asked my father why he always asked certain people if they were Mexican. He only asked men who obviously were, thus knowing in advance their answers. He shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know. It was a way of initiating conversation, he said. Well, it was embarrassing for me, I told him.” ¶ 20 “ ‘You a surfer?’...[The cholo’s] question was not like my father's. My father, I now sensed, wanted a common bond upon which to get closer to strangers. This guy was Mexican American, and he wanted to fight me because I wore the outfit of a surfer. “ ¶ 25

Double-Entry Notebook 2

“Just before the cholo was going to initiate the fight, I said, "I'm Mexi- can." American of Mexican descent, actually. He seemed unable to process this new information. How could someone be Mexican and dress like a surfer? He looked at me again, this time seeing beyond the clothes I wore. He nodded slightly. This revelation, this recognition verbalized, molded me in the years to come… ¶ 30 “The most important thing I learned was that I could do just about anything I wished, within reason. I could be a surfer, if I chose, and even cholos would respect my decision. ¶ 34

Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles

NAYEREH TOHIDI

In California, the popular face of immigration tends to be either Latin American or Asian, but large numbers of immigrants who come from other regions in the world, especially the Near East, have been quietly reshaping California demography. In this study, Nayereh Tohidi focuses on the Iranians who have come to Los Angeles in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution, largely middle- and upper-middle-class Tehrani- ans who have fled the repressive policies of the current post-Shah, fundamentalist regime. But American freedoms have offered particular challenges to Iranian immi- grants, especially women, who tend to have "more egalitarian views of marital roles than Iranian men," in Tohidi's words, a "discrepancy" that has led to "new conflicts between the sexes." Thus, Iranian women immigrants are at once freer than their sisters in Iran, more conflicted, and more in need of a "new identity acceptable to their ethnic community and appropriate to the realities of their host country." Tohidi is an associate professor of women's studies at California State University, Northridge. She directs a new program in Islamic Community Studies at CSUN and is also a re- search associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of Califor- nia, Los Angeles. Tohidi's publications include Feminism, Democracy, and Islamism in Iran (1996), Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity (1998), and Global- ization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women's Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts (2001).

I mmigration is a major life change, and the process of adapting to a newsociety can be extremely stressful, especially when the new environ- ment is drastically different from the old. There is evidence that the im- pact of migration on women and their roles differs from the impact of the same process on men (Espin 1987; Salgado de Snyder 1987). The mi- gration literature is not conclusive, however, about whether the overall effect is positive or negative. Despite all the trauma and stress associated with migration, some people perceive it as emancipatory, especially for women coming from environments where adherence to traditional gen- der roles is of primary importance. As [one researcher] said, "When the traditional organization of society breaks down as a result of contact and collision .. . the effect is, so to speak, to emancipate the individual man. Energies that were formerly controlled by custom and tradition are re- leased" (Furio 1979, 18).

My own observations of Iranians in Los Angeles over the past eight years, as well as survey research I carried out in 1990,1 reveal that Iranian

1 This article draws on a survey of a sample of 134 Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles, 83 females and 51 males, and on interviews with a smaller sample of women and men.

149

1 50 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History

women immigrants in Los Angeles are a homogeneous group, despite ethnic diversity. Most of them come from Tehran and represent an urban cosmopolitan subculture. And most are educated members of the upper- middle and middle classes who oppose the present regime in Iran and its repressive policies against women.

Migration has had both costs and benefits for women. Positive expe- riences include the sense of freedom, new opportunities and options, increased access to education and gainful employment, and a move to- ward egalitarian conjugal roles in many Iranian families. On the negative side is grief over the loss of the homeland, loved ones, and the social and emotional support of the kinship network. Many also feel marginal and, at least initially, experience a decline in their own socioeconomic status or that of their husbands. Moreover, conflicts between parents and their children and between women and men have heightened tension and led to an increasing divorce rate.

Migration involves culture shock. Immigrants' experiences of migra- tion and the process of adaptation are influenced by a number of vari- ables (Dane 1980; Melville 1978; Taft 1977; Salgado de Snyder 1987; Espin 1987; and Shirley 1981). Personal characteristics, such as age, language proficiency, educational level, and job skills, influence the migrants' abil- ity to adapt. Immigrants are also affected by attitudinal factors, such as their own perceptions of the decision to emigrate, their sense of respon- sibility for those left behind, and their perceptions of the conditions in both home and host countries. Economic factors also play a role, espe- cially the immigrants' ability to find a job, their financial resources, and their losses or gains in social status or class. Another set of influential conditions includes the attitudes of the citizens of the host country to- ward the migrant group and the degree of similarity between the two cultures. Finally, some personal factors, such as ego strength, decision- making skills, resolution of feelings of loss, and the ability to tolerate ambiguity (including ambiguity about gender roles), also influence the intensity of the culture shock experienced by the immigrants and their ability to adapt.

All these factors vary substantially for men and women, with the result that the processes of acculturation and adaptation differ for them as well.

The survey questionnaire consists of a demographic section and five scales measuring acculturation, national/ethnic identity, perceived prejudice, acculturative stress items, and attitudes toward gender roles. To measure the respondents' attitudes toward gen- der roles, a Persian adaptation of the Spence-Helmreich scale (1978) has been em- ployed. This scale consists of twenty-five declarative statements about proper roles and behavioral patterns for women and men. For each statement there are four response alternatives: agree strongly, agree mildly, disagree mildly, and disagree strongly.

Tohidi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1 51

Acculturation and Changes in Gender Roles

All immigrants experience acculturation, a process involving changes in values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The inevitable collision of home and host cultures ensures that some acculturation will take place. This does not mean that all values, customs, and behaviors originating in the home culture will disappear. In fact, the healthiest experiences of accul- turation result in biculturalism or multiculturalism. Not every individual immigrant, however, manages to attain a bicultural balance. Many never cease feeling alienated in the new society, while others experience com- plete assimilation.

As part of the process of acculturation, all immigrants develop a "new identity" that integrates elements from the host and home cultures (Garza-Guerrero 1974). A psychologist who experienced the challenging and often painful process of migration firsthand writes:

Immigrants in accepting a new identity (or a new version of the old one) at the price of instant identification and intense work must leave behind not only old countries but also unlived futures, and not only enemies to be dis- avowed but also friends to be left behind—maybe to perish. What right, then, does the immigrant have to usurp a new identity? (Erickson 1974, 77)

For Iranian women, the process of developing a new identity is perhaps the most psychologically challenging and delicate aspect of immigration....

Iranian women and girls are entering North American society at a time when the role of women is changing, both here and in their home- land. During the peak of the Iranian influx into the United States, the pro- gressive forces of revolution, on the one hand, and the subsequent character of the Islamic government, on the other, fostered a transforma- tion in the role of women. The Islamization of the last decade, however, has enforced a uniform identity for Iranian women, based on traditional and restricted roles. The difference between appropriate behavior for women in Iran and in the United States is much greater than that for men in the two societies. The differing demands on men and women can ei- ther facilitate acculturation or create confusion and conflicts for women.

My survey indicates that changes in traditional conceptions of wom- anhood, manhood, and marriage—from an autocratic male-dominated model to a more egalitarian one—are taking place faster among Iranian women than among Iranian men. Studies of Latina immigrants reveal similar patterns. Even though the pace of acculturation tended to be slower for Latinas in other respects, the women exhibited more egalitar- ian attitudes toward gender roles than men (Vazquez-Nuttall, Romero- Garcia, and DeLeon 1987; Espin 1987).

1 52 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History

In studies of the acculturation of Iranians in the United States, Ghaf- farian (1989) found the same patterns; that is, that Iranian male immi- grants were more acculturated than females and that despite their lower level of overall acculturation, Iranian women migrants had more egali- tarian views of marital roles than Iranian men. Such a discrepancy would naturally lead to new conflicts between the sexes.

This is not to say that changes in sexual attitudes and family roles are the result of migration and acculturation into American society. Actually, the cultural collision between modernism and traditionalism, between liberalism and conservatism, and between male chauvinism and femi- nism had begun in Iran long before the major waves of Iranian immigra- tion to the United States. By the turn of the century, growing urbanization and the introduction of new industries, new modes of production, and new ideas had wrought major changes and raised questions concerning the proper role and place of women in the new society, and their access both to education and to work outside the home. Long-standing cultural and religious traditions, such as the segregation of women's space from men's and veiling requirements, were called into question. During the 1978-1979 revolution, special emphasis was placed on discovering the authentic (aseel) identity of Iranian women, especially in comparison to "West-struck" or "Westoxicated" (gharb zadek) women. All these issues have remained unresolved since the . .. first decade of the twentieth century.

Women and the Family in Iran

During the years preceding the 1978-1979 revolution, the "woman ques- tion" became part of the Iranian intelligentsia's debate about national identity, development, modernization, and cultural and moral integrity. Those participating in the discussion included Iranian nationalists, Is- lamists, Marxists, and those influenced by the West.

Islam undergirds the patriarchy in Iran, just as Judeo-Christian ethics justify the same system in the United States. The family, with its patrilineal and patriarchal structure, is the basic social unit. Male and fe- male roles are organized in a hierarchy based on sex, age, and experi- ence. A traditional Iranian woman's place is in the home. Because her role and activities are limited to familial and domestic spheres, she has no identity outside the family. She is identified only by her connections to her male kin—she has status only as the daughter, sister, wife, and mother of male family members. As a wife, her status is determined by her fertility, especially her ability to give birth to sons. The wife is always under her husband's tutelage or, in his absence, that of her eldest son.

Tohidi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1 53

Her honor (namus) requires that she never be left unprotected by her fa- ther, husband, or other male kin (Nassehi-Behnam 1985, 558).

An old Persian expression illustrates the traditional conception of women in Iran: "Woman is a sweetheart when a girl and a mother when married." Such a view reduces women to their sexual and reproductive capacities.

The gender-based discrimination and double standards that pervade 15 Iranian social life restrict women's movements, the physical spaces they may enter, their work and economic autonomy, their access to education, their personal power and authority, their sexual behavior, and their ability to express themselves artistically. From childhood, the members of each sex are socialized to prescribed roles. Boys are taught to command, to protect, and to make a good living for themselves and their families. Girls learn to be chaste and beautiful and to find a good husband....

The Impact of Migration

The impact of migration on Iranian women in Los Angeles depends on the reasons for their migration and the conditions under which it took place....

Some women left Iran (with or without their husbands) to provide their children with better education and broader opportunities. They found the Islamization of the educational system and the political indoc- trination of their children unacceptable. Other women accompanied their adolescent sons into exile to ensure that the youths would not be drafted during the Iran-Iraq war. Still others came to the United States alone, leaving their husbands and other family members behind because of economic considerations or to increase the likelihood of their getting a U.S. visa. These motivations are reflected in the immigrants' sense of marginality, their development of a new identity, and other aspects of ac- culturation.

Individual and Political Freedom

In comparison with women living in Iran, migrant and refugee women have gained considerable personal and political freedom. Their basic human rights are no longer violated by such institutions of control as the mandatory veil, strict dress code, and sexual apartheid. Many middle- class and professional women who found these repressive measures in- tolerable appreciate their new freedom. The sense of relief is even more profound for those women who escaped persecution and imprisonment in Iran.

1 54 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History

Women who migrated alone may feel free of familial control, of con- stant surveillance by the kinship network. They may feel free to experi- ment with new patterns of behavior and to search for a more autonomous personal identity. The opportunity to become self-reliant and to develop a personal identity is often considered the most positive consequence of migration for women. Many Iranian women who immigrated alone, how- ever, feel shame and guilt for developing an American-influenced identity. Other Iranian immigrants or family members back home may criticize them for not conforming to traditional roles. Although they may have left their families behind, the success or failure of individual family members reflects on the family as a whole. A woman's misbehavior, especially sexual misbehavior, brings shame not only on her, but on all members of her family (Barakat 1985).

Iranian women who successfully adapt to American society are often 20 rejected by the home culture. Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles, espe- cially the women, have a reputation for conspicuous consumption among other Iranian immigrants in this country and in Europe, as well as back home. They are stereotyped as taghooti, a term rooted in idolatry that in this context implies decadence, narcissism, immorality, and hedonism. The Iranian community in Los Angeles is known in Iran as the source of contraband music videos—vulgar and commercial, these represent the worst elements of westernization.

Because of love-hate sentiments toward the West in general and Americans in particular, immigrants in Los Angeles, particularly the fe- males, must prove that such stereotypes do not apply to them. To be westernized or Americanized has strong negative connotations, politi- cally, culturally, and sexually.

Even before the revolution, westernized members of the urban upper-middle and middle classes were regarded as a fifth column, pro- moting imperialism, family disintegration, moral degeneration, and cultural erosion. In the campaign against westernization waged by the Iranian intelligentsia, particularly the Islamists, westernized women were held to epitomize all social ills (Najmabadi 1989; Tohidi 1993). The clergy cleverly pointed to a few highly visible upper-middle- and

middle-class women preoccupied with Western fads and fashions in condemning all unveiled, nontraditional, and progressive women as "Westoxicated." In the Islamic clergy's political discourse, modern women were stereotyped as frivolous and westernized and condemned as fitna, the erotic agents of social and moral disorder (Mernissi 1975). The clergy demanded a return to the veiled Islamic model of woman- hood. During the Islamic revolution, the Iranian women's rights move- ment, which opposed the discriminatory and retrogressive policies of the new government, was crushed as an accomplice to imperialism.

Tohidi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1 55

With such a political history, Iranian immigrant women have had to search for a new identity acceptable to their ethnic community and ap- propriate to the realities of their host country. To avoid becoming mar- ginal members of both societies, these women are trying to find their way along a painful and tangled route between tradition and modernity. The quest for personal as well as national and cultural identity has be- come a major concern of educated and politically conscious Iranian women, immigrant or otherwise. A very difficult challenge for a migrant woman is to balance her individuality and personal aspirations with a positive ethnic identity.2

Migration studies show that "light-skinned, young, and educated migrants usually encounter a more favorable reception in the United States than dark-skinned, older, and uneducated newcomers" (Espin 1987, 493). Even though the majority of Iranian women immigrants in Los Angeles possess these helpful attributes, hostile political relations between Iran and the United States have kept them from being accepted. The American bias against Arabs and other Middle Easterners was com- pounded by the "hostage crisis," making Iranians one of the least liked minority groups in American society.

Nevertheless, Iranian women migrants perceive less ethnic and 25 racial discrimination against them in American society than do Latinas, for example. They are less worried about having an Iranian surname than Latinas are about having a Spanish surname (Blair 1991). No signifi- cant differences were found in the perceived prejudice against Iranians in Los Angeles based on gender.

The marginality of Iranian immigrants and the other difficulties they encounter in the United States are not without rewards for women. Women can wield power from their position as mediators between the two cultures. But the positive potential of marginality can be realized only by women of the right age, class, and educational status, with the right reasons for migrating. For others the cost of being marginal to both societies is overwhelming. Isolation from one's family, especially if the separation from parents and loved ones is premature and traumatic, ex- acerbates the sense of belonging nowhere.

Intergenerational Conflicts Immigrant parents tend to be distressed by the rapid pace of their children's acculturation, brought about by the media, American schools, and American peers. Whereas parental au- thority in the traditional Iranian family is based on the parents' passing

2 See N. Tohidi, "Identity Politics and the Woman Question in Iran: Retrospect and Prospects/' in Identity Politics and Feminism: Cross-National Perspectives, ed. V. Mo- gadam (Oxford University Press: forthcoming).

1 56 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History

on to their children their own knowledge of life, children in immigrant families cannot readily apply their parents' knowledge to their own new lives. Instead, roles become somewhat reversed. The children are the ones passing on important information to their parents, correcting their English, and helping them in their daily interactions with Americans.

Such role reversals threaten traditional relations in the family and create tension. The children's development of an identity culturally dif- ferent from that of their parents intensifies intergenerational conflicts. The gap is especially wide in families whose children grow up in Ameri- can society.

One particular area of conflict concerns children's rights to privacy and personal boundaries. For example, reading mail addressed to an adolescent son or daughter is considered part of an Iranian parent's re- sponsibility rather than an invasion of privacy. Iranian parents often re- sist their children's wishes to become financially independent or to move into their own apartments once they turn eighteen. While the children complain about their parents' interference in their lives, the parents complain about their children's lack of respect.

Adolescent girls and young women, especially those who immigrated with their families, must decide how to "become American" without losing their own cultural heritage, if they decide to "become American" at all. Role models of successful and respected bicultural Iranian American women are scarce, and for young women the negative cultural and politi- cal connotations of being westernized or Americanized are particularly problematic. Given the myth prevalent among Iranians that American women are sexually loose, being Americanized may be equated with sex- ual promiscuity. Conflicts between female adolescents and their parents frequently focus on appropriate sexual behavior. Hanassab's 1991 study of dating and sexual attitudes among younger Iranian immigrants shows that the women are torn between two norms: behavior acceptable to their American peers, on the one hand, and their parents' expectations and their own obligations to their native culture, on the other. Some young women rebel against parental pressure by turning their back on Iranian culture and customs—changing their Iranian names to American ones (Blair 1991), for example, or refusing to speak Persian at home.

Gender Role Conflicts Commentators who cite cultural collision, eco- nomic pressures, and sexual freedom as the causes of familial instability among Iranian immigrants also blame women for the current crisis be- cause of their failure to fulfill their proper role. Women who have become "Americanized" are criticized for their loss of originality (esalat) and Iranian "female virtues," including obedience (etaat), chastity (nejabaf),

Tohldi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1 57

patience (saburi), and self-denial (fadakari). Americanization, which is equated with individualism and selfishness, undermines the commit- ment to family and the endurance needed to withstand the hardships of immigration.

In response, some immigrant women, particularly feminists, criti- cize Iranian men for failing to adjust their attitudes and expectations in the face of new realities. Women criticize their resistance to egalitarian relationships and their conscious or unconscious adherence to tradi- tional values and patriarchal norms.

Some men actually cling to traditional norms for gender relations as a reaction to the perceived threat of women's new independence. A simi- lar reaction is also seen among parents who perceive their children's faster pace of acculturation and parent-child role reversals as intolerable challenges to parental power and authority. When adult immigrants are uncertain and confused about what is right and wrong, many hold on to the "old ways," which they idealize in defending against a loss of identity. This refusal to accept change may intensify both intergenerational and gender-role conflicts in the immigrant families (Espin 1987, 493).

Ethnic Variations Such defensive loyalties to the traditional gender norms of the home culture seem to be less common among Muslim im- migrant families than among the religious and ethnic minorities. In my survey, for example, lewish and Armenian Iranians exhibited more conser- vative attitudes toward sexual norms and gender roles than their Muslim counterparts,3 perhaps in part because Iranian Jews and Armenians tended to migrate to the United States as families and kinship groups rather than as isolated individuals. Therefore, from the beginning of the acculturation process, ethnic pressure and the surveillance of the kinship network have reinforced conformity to traditional norms. The very presence of the kin- ship network may protect young women so that they need not develop self-reliance and autonomy.

Muslim Iranians tend to be more secularized than other Iranian eth- 35 nic groups. Perhaps they developed an antipathy to Islam and Islamic tradition out of their own political and cultural opposition to the Islamic theocratic government in Iran and found that it was reinforced in the United States by the pervasively negative image of Muslims in the media and public opinion. For most Muslim Iranians in Los Angeles, male and female alike, language and national culture, rather than religion, seem to constitute the primary components of identity (Ansari 1990).

3 The number of other Iranian ethnic or religious groups in the research sample was too small to allow any meaningful comparisons.

1 58 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History

References

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Barakat, H. 1985. "The Arab Family and the Challenge of Social Transformation." In Women and the Family in the Middle East, edited by E. W. Fernea. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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English 215 “Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles” by Nayereh Tohidi “Despite all the trauma and stress associated with migration, some people perceive it as emancipatory, especially for women coming from environments where adherence to traditional gender roles is of primary importance” (Para 1). Your paraphrase of the above quote:

Conflicts of emancipation for female Iranian immigrants Male/female relations Political/individual freedom Generation gap (with their children)

Although one's identity may seem to be a very personal and individual decision, as we shall examine, there can be many historical, socioeconomic, and sociological factors that can directly or indirectly influence this decision. Just as there is a wide range of experiences and circumstances within the Asian American population, so too can there be many different, overlapping, and simultaneous forms of ethnic identity among Asian Americans.

The Fundamentals of Ethnic Identity

Scholars from many different academic disciplines have generally categorized ethnic identity formation along two main theoretical frameworks: primordial versus situational. While these two categories ultimately represent a simplistic dichotomy to characterize processes of ethnic identity formation, they are still very useful in framing our analysis of ethnic identity.

The primordial (also known as "essentialist") perspective argues that people have an innate sense of ethnic identity -‐-‐ it is something that people are born with, is instinctive and natural, and is difficult if not impossible to change. This is illustrated by the natural instinct to favor one's kin or co-‐ethnics over non-‐kin and non-‐ethnics. The persistence of ethnocentrism and even outright conflict between different racial/ethnic groups attest to the historical and continuing validity of the primordial basis of ethnic identity.

On the other hand, the situational perspective (also known as the "constructionist" or "instrumentalist") states that ethnic identities are socially defined phenomena. That is, the meaning and boundaries of ethnic identity are constantly being renegotiated, revised, and redefined, depending on specific situations and set of circumstances that each individual or ethnic group encounters.

Within the situational perspective, there are several sub-‐theories about how ethnic identity is formed and reformed, shaped and reshaped. For example, sociologists argue that ethnic identity can resurgent or emergent. Resurgent ethnic identity is the idea that traditional or ancestral identities can reemerge through historical events and particular circumstances.

One common example is the ethnic identity of Japanese American after World War II. Many Japanese American adults who were imprisoned during WWII initially discarded their identity after the end of war, to avoid any association, shame, or embarrassment with being

imprisoned. However, after movement to demand compensation and redress for this injustice developed in the 1980s, many felt a newly resurgent sense of being Japanese American as they united to fight for an official apology and reparations from the federal government.

Also, many Japanese American children who were born after the end of the war felt a resurgent sense of Japanese American identity after learning about their parents' imprisonment experiences and identifying with their history of perseverance and strength. This idea about resurgent ethnic identity is sometimes represented by the famous quote "What the father wishes to forget, the child wishes to remember."

On the other hand, emergent ethnic identity involves the creation of new forms of group identity due to the convergence of particular circumstances. More specifically, because of demographic changes or competition and conflict with other groups, a new ethnic identity based on group solidarity and similarity of experiences might form. Some argue that the identity of "Asian American" is a perfect example of an emergent ethnic identity.

That is, prior to the Civil Rights Movement, virtually no Asian ethnic group considered themselves part of a larger "Asian American" social group. Rather, they identified solely based on their own national origins (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.). But building on the Civil Rights Movement's focus on racial/ethnic solidarity and group consciousness, the pan-‐ Asian identity of "Asian Americans" eventually emerged, emphasizing shared experiences and commonalities of having Asian ancestry.

Connections Between Assimilation and Ethnic Identity

Because ethnic identity among second generation Asian Americans is inevitably tied to the process of assimilation, we should recognize the different forms of assimilation and how different factors can affect assimilation outcomes. Among the most famous conceptions of assimilation is the distinction between behavioral assimilation (otherwise known as "acculturation") and structural or socioeconomic assimilation.

Behavioral assimilation/acculturation occurs when a newcomer absorbs the cultural norms, values, beliefs, and behavior patterns of the "host" society. This may also involve learning English and/or becoming an American citizen. Within this process, Asian Americans may choose to retain much of their traditional Asian culture, norms, and behaviors while still acquiring those of mainstream American society, or to discard his/her traditional forms of

Asian culture entirely in favor of complete immersion and identification with mainstream American society.

The second major type of assimilation, structural or socioeconomic assimilation, refers to when Asian Americans enter and become integrated into the formal social, political, economic, and cultural institutions of the host country -‐-‐ i.e., when they begin to participate as full members of American society. Alternatively, it can also refer to when they attain socioeconomic mobility and status (usually in the form of income, occupation, residential integration, etc.) equal to other members of mainstream American society.

The process of undergoing either behavioral or structural/socioeconomic assimilation can occur in a linear or "straight-‐line" manner in which the passage of time and the succession of generations lead to increasing economic, cultural, political, and residential integration into American society. Or it can happen in a non-‐linear, circular, or "bumpy" manner in which Asian Americans revive or retain old cultural traditions, norms, and behaviors and choose to remain somewhat isolated from mainstream American society (the "ethnic resilience" model) or alternatively, to combine elements of both traditional Asian (although they may modify old traditions and values to fit their contemporary circumstances) and mainstream American culture (sometimes referred to as "segmented assimilation").

Multiple Factors and Multiple Outcomes

Other research has focused on why why certain racial/ethnic groups assimilate faster than others. One factor are racial differences. White immigrants who came to the U.S. back in the 1800s did experience prejudice and discrimination. But because they were White, they were eventually able to integrate into American society more quickly and easily than non-‐White immigrants and minorities.

The second factor is the structure of the economy. During times of economic prosperity, there are plenty of economic opportunities to go around for everyone. But in times of economic difficulties, there is more economic competition and therefore, more hostility toward minorities and immigrants who are frequently seen as economic threats. In this situation, groups who are in similar economic situations are likely to be antagonistic toward each other because they're competing for the same jobs and social/economic resources.

The final reason why some immigrants assimilate faster than others is because of class differences. Some ethnic and immigrant groups on the whole have higher levels of education, job skills, and English proficiency than others. This in turn gives them specific advantages in achieving socioeconomic success faster than others by allowing them to get jobs that are higher-‐paying, more stable, and that offer higher status. As a result, they are able to achieve socioeconomic mobility and success faster than other groups.

Sociological research has also found that the strength of the child's relationship with his/her parents, along with the level of his/her attachment to the ethnic community also play important roles in determining ethnic identity among second generation Asian Americans. For example, if child-‐parent relationship is strong and healthy, the child is more likely to take on the parent's identity, whatever that may be (i.e., national origin, hyphenated American, pan-‐Asian, or just "American"). However, if the child has conflicts with his/her parents, the more likely the child will identify differently from the parent.

Studies also show that the strength of a child's ethnic community strongly affects his/her identity. Those who live within a cohesive ethnic community and who regularly participate in co-‐ethnic organizations and activities (i.e., peer groups, churches, etc.) are more likely to identify with a national origin or hyphenated-‐American identity, even if the ethnic group tends to be low-‐income or working class. In other words, socioeconomic success is not as important in determining ethnic identity as the level of social solidarity within the co-‐ethnic community.

Perceptions of racism and discrimination can also have influences on Asian American second generation ethnic identity. According to the situational/constructionist/ instrumentalist perspective, for an Asian American to have a strong attachment to traditional forms of ethnic identity, it is not enough to just perceive or experience high levels of ethnic competition, prejudice, or discrimination. It is the person's reaction to these perceptions and experiences that will determine how s/he identifies.

That is, if s/he internalizes these experiences of competition and discrimination and his/her self-‐esteem is negatively affected as a result, s/he is more likely to be embarrassed to be identified as Asian American. On the other hand, these experiences of competition and discrimination can also lead to a greater sense of unity and solidarity and as a result, greater identification with his/her Asian ethnicity.

The Personal and The Political

Finally, one of the most famous theories of assimilation comes from sociologist Milton Gordon. He theorized that there are three possible outcomes of assimilation. The first is Anglo conformity, which is when the minority or immigrant is taught that the norms, values, and institutions of the majority group are superior and that they should adopt them in order to be accepted. This is symbolized as A+B+C=A.

The second outcome can be the melting pot, a term that almost all Americans have heard about. That's when different racial/ethnic groups come together and out of this interaction comes a new culture that incorporates elements from all groups into one. This can be represented as A+B+C=D.

The third possible outcome is cultural pluralism, which others have also called the "salad bowl." This is when the different racial/ethnic groups keep their unique cultural norms, traditions, and behaviors, while still sharing common national values, goals, and institutions -‐ -‐ A+B+C=A+B+C. Gordon concluded that up to this point in American society, Anglo conformity has best represented the history of assimilation in America.

In the end, there are many internal and external factors that can affect how ethnic identify among second generation Asian Americans. Research suggests that there can be notably institutional patterns to this seemingly individual process. These identities can also overlap, change over time, and even be one of many simultaneous identities in effect at the same time.

Author Citation

Suggested reference: Le, C.N. 2014. "Assimilation & Ethnic Identity" Asian-‐Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. <http://www.asian-‐nation.org/assimilation.shtml> (September 24, 2014).

Jeb Bush weighs in on 'multiculturalism' Candidate says government should fund assimilation efforts By Ashley Killough CNN Published 09/23 2015 11:37AM Updated 09/22 2015 11:22PM CEDAR FALLS, Iowa (CNN)

Jeb Bush argued Tuesday that the United States is "creeping toward multiculturalism" and described it as "the wrong approach."

His answer came in response to a question at an Iowa diner Tuesday from a woman who wanted to know how the former Florida governor would help refugees and immigrants integrate into U.S. society and "empower them to become Americans."

"We should not have a multicultural society," the Republican presidential candidate responded.

But Bush, who's a self-admitted policy wonk and tends to use nuanced language, was referring to "multicultural" in the literal sense -- a social model in which cultures live in "isolated pockets," as he described them, rather than assimilating into society.

"America is so much better than every other country because of the values that people share -- it defines our national identity. Not race or ethnicity, not where you come from," he said. "When you create pockets of isolation -- and in some cases the assimilation process is retarded because it's slowed down -- it's wrong. It limits peoples' aspirations."

He added that people who aren't "fully engaged" in a broader community will struggle to get the best education and argued that learning English would better accelerate access to opportunities.

"We need to get back to that. We're creeping towards multiculturalism and it's the wrong approach," he said.

Answering another question from the same woman, Bush said he agreed that the federal government should help fund assimilation efforts in communities.

The Democratic group American Bridge, however, pounced on the comments, blasting out video of the exchange and knocking Bush for appearing to denounce "multiculturalism" in the more commonly known sense of tolerance for other cultures.

Bush is "now tacking hard to the right," the group said in an email blast to reporters, and described the comment as an effort to mimic inflammatory language about minorities by other Republican presidential candidates, like GOP front-runner Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

But Bush, who's fluent in Spanish and lives in Miami, has made cultural diversity a key staple in his campaign. He routinely talks about his wife, who's from Mexico, and the "bicultural" children that they've raised together. On Monday, while addressing the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Houston, Bush lauded the country's mixture of cultural backgrounds, saying the immigrant experience adds a "vitality that is different and unique and extraordinary for our country."

"If we embrace a set of shared values, then it shouldn't matter if you have a 'z' at the end of their name, or your accent might be different," he said. "What matters is that we embrace a set of shared values and that we have a right-to-rise society."

Still, Bush argues that immigrants who are in the country illegally can only earn legal status if they take steps toward assimilation, like learning English and American civics.

The multiculturalism vs. assimilation debate has especially been prevalent in Europe. In his first speech as prime minister in 2011, for example, David Cameron assailed multiculturalism as a failed model and called for a more united national identity.

broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

“Jeb Bush weighs in on 'multiculturalism'”

How would you define the following terms?

How does Jeb Bush use these term?

Multiculturalism

Assimilation

Acculturation

Cultural diversity

Bicultural

United national identity

Paraphrase Bush’s main point: Look at Bush’s diction: What words does he use to make his point? Respond to the following quote from Bush: “America is so much better than every other country because of the values that people share -- it defines our national identity. Not race or ethnicity, not where you come from," he said. "When you create pockets of isolation -- and in some cases the assimilation process is retarded because it's slowed down -- it's wrong. It limits peoples' aspirations."

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13 Assimilation and Ethnic Identity
14 Jeb Bush weighs in on (1)

Jeb Bush weighs in on 'multiculturalism'

Candidate says government should fund assimilation efforts

15 Jeb Bush worksheet