Disorientation and Re-Orientation in the Modern West

Question for Discussion: What is the value of
seeing the modern American West from
multiple different cultural perspectives?

Reading: Limerick, "Disorientation and Reorientation";
Normura, "Significant Lives: Asians in the West"

Video: "I am an American" Ad; VHS: "Becoming American"; "Now: Jobs to India"

Multiculturalism in the American West

Buffalo Bill's Wild West (in-class)
Wild West Show Posters (in-class)
Understanding Borderlands (in-class)
Gloria Anzaldua: Borderland
Bulosan, America is in the Heart (in-class)
Nomura, Asian Americans lived in the West
(in-class)
Nomura, Recognizing a Multicultural West
(in-class)
Limerick, Ghosts in the American West (in-class)
Nomura, Siginificant Lives
Limerick, Disorientation and Re-Orientation
(in-class)
Angel Island Immigration Station (in-class)
Japanese Relocation and Internment (in-class)
during WWII
Thomas Friedman: Sending Jobs to India (in-class)
Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
(in-class)
The Multicultural American West (in-class)
Racial Demographics in the West (in-class)
The American West.com
Native American Fine Art Exhibit (in-class)
American Indian Art.com
The Ansel Adams Gallery (in-class)
Georgia OKeefe Landscape Posters (in-class)
Santa Fe Art Galleries. (in-class)
Chicano Murals in Tucson (in-class)
Artists specializing in the American West (in-class)
Cowboys.com (in-class)
The Mormon Pioneer Trail
Trails of Hope: The Mormon, Oregon,
and California Trails
The Church of the West: the Mormons (in-class)

American Citizens mistaken for
Illegal Immigrants
The Multicultural American West (in-class)
Understanding Borderlands (in-class)
Bulosan, America is in the Heart (in-class)
Racial Demographics in the West (in-class)
Immigrant Population gaining:
most newcomers Asian or Hispanic (in-class)
Whites are now a Minority in California (2001)
English Losing Ground (Nov. 2008) (in-class)
4 million illegal immigrant children
are native born (2009)
The Immigration Problem in the West (in-class)
Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
(in-class)
What is APEC? (in-class)
Map of APEC Nations (in-class)
Buffalo Bill's Wild West (in-class)
Wild West Show Posters (in-class)
Nomura, Siginificant Lives
Nomura, Asian Americans lived in the West
(in-class)
Nomura, Recognizing a Multicultural West
(in-class)
Limerick, Ghosts in the American West (in-class)
Limerick, Angel Island Immigration Station (in-class)
Japanese Relocation and Internment (in-class)
during WWII
Thomas Friedman: Sending Jobs to India (in-class)
Native American Fine Art Exhibit (in-class)
The Ansel Adams Gallery (in-class)
Georgia OKeefe Landscape Posters (in-class)
Santa Fe Art Galleries Posters (in-class)
Chicano Murals in Tucson (in-class)
Artists specializing in the American West (in-class)
Cowboys.com (in-class)
The Church of the West: the Mormons (in-class)

Understanding Borderlands

The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.
....Gloria Anzaldua, "Preface to Borderlands"

...I have become a cultural topographer, border-crosser, and hunter of myths. And it doesn't matter where I find myself, in Califas or Mexico City, In Barcelona or West Berlin...

We (Latinos in the United States) don't want to be a mere ingredient of the melting pot. What we want is to participate actively in a humanistic, pluralistic, and politicized dialogue, continuous and not sporadic, and that this occur between equals that enjoy the same power of negotiation.
...Guillermo Gommez-Pena, "Documented/Undocumented" (1988)

"In all these cases, the encounter with landscape was also a complex and often conflict-ridden encounter with other groups of people.... The landscapes of North America are heavily invested with human memories, and the tangle of those memories provided both common and contested ground for people of various origins whose descendants now populate this nation."
....Limerick, "Disorientation and Reorientation"

"This multilayed scene [which melds past, present, and future] is what the American landscape presents for our exploration. That enterprise requires historians to engage in a constant process of disorientation and reorientation, taking part in both the pleasures, the discomforts, and the conflicts of discovery."
...Limerick, "Disorientation and Reorientation"

Nomura, Significant Lives

"The first step in assessing any group is to know what it is. What we call "Asian Americans" is not, as my misguided colleague and many people in the United States seem to think, a unified, homogeneous grouping. The ethnic peoples called Asian Americans include Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian (e.g., Asian Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan), and Southeast Asian (e.g., Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, Cambodian, Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Singaporean). The complexity of this term Asian American is further illustrated by noting the many ethnicitics within the larger subcategories--such as Southeast Asian
American--or even within a seemingly homogeneous subcategory such as Japanese American, in which Okinawan Americans compose a distinct grouping."

To the above Asian American grouping we might also add Pacific Islanders (e.g., native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chantoru, Fijian, Tongan, and Taihitian). The U.S. Census Bureau lists Asian and Pacific Islanders together, and many political coalitions have been formed by these groups, who share some common agendas and histories." (136)

"Recognizing the significance of our Pacific and Asian territories forces us to question how we define the boundaries of the U.S. West. Indeed, with the acquisition of the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Wake, and American Samoa at the turn of the century and, after World War II, of Ameri can Micronesia, the U.S. West literally moved to the so-called Far East and became ever more entwined in Asian and Pacific affairs. The western border of the U.S. West became Asia itself: The Far East became the Far West.

It is impossible to view Asian American history without understanding this "Far Eastern" context. Asian American history connects the U.S. West to the global experience of the diaspora and the interchange of people and ideas from the colonial and postcolonial era, to transnational labor migration, to international assembly lines in Asia, and to multinational financial and corporate structures in the Pacific Rim. " (138)

"Asian American history begins in the U.S. West. It is in the West that the peoples, politics, and economies of Asia and the United States met and mixed at the grassroots level. This is particularly true in Hawaii and along the Pacific Coast, where a large population of Asian/Pacific Americans has resided since the nineteenth century. The large concentration of Asian immigrants in the U.S. West evoked an anti-Asian exclusion movement and racist policies."

"Asians became the accepted target of nativist-racist antagonism, which served to unify the increasingly heterogeneous white population in the U.S. West. An American ethnicity could be achieved through the assertion that it was not Asian. Asians were a necessary "Other" in defining who was an American. The idea of assimilability was utilized. Europeans were assimilable. Asians were declared unassimilable. In arguing for the unassimilability of Asians, exclusionists aimed to affirm a racist foundation for the American nation.9 Overriding all other factors in the construction of this exclusive definition of
"American "was the assertion that Asians were unalterably alien, naturally inclined to Oriental despotism, and incapable of assimilating to democratic self-government.

Asian immigrants were seen as the vanguard of the Yellow Peril. "

"The responses of westerners to Asian immigrants fixed the political psyche of Americans in their dealings with Asia in the twentieth century. American westerners responded to Asian immigrants as if they were an invading army. How Asian immigrants settled in the hostile West and struggled to enjoy rights equal to those of white European Americans is part of the history of a cultural confrontation that extended to diplomatic
confrontation: Anti-Asian discrimination was a national as well as local policy."

"U.S. naturalization laws kept Asian immigrants foreign. While these immigrants were systematically denied every avenue of legally becoming American, they were consistently faulted for remaining foreign. Exclusionist forces perceived Asian immigrants as incapable of being American. In the eyes of exclusionists, the melting pot of America could never be hot enough to melt Asian immigrants into the national culture. Asian Americans have challenged the exclusive definition of
"American" and have, by this search for justice, broadened the inclusiveness of American ideals."

"Asian immigrants persisted as active agents in the making of their own history. They challenged the fluctuating boundaries of who was and was not included in America. They disputed exclusion through legal and diplomatic channels and through creative resistance and organization. By taking a stand, they became a permanent part of the American experience.
Starting with the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, Asian immigrants chipped at the barriers to citizenship by arguing that anti-Asian discriminatory policies were not "democratic," especially in view of the war effort. Filipinos and South Asians, who were also allies in arms, joined in the challenge."
"Yet exclusionists persisted in viewing Asia and Asian Americans as alien to American culture. They refused to acknowledge
non-Western elements in the American core and professed that western Europe alone had created the idea of democracy and freedom. In truth, the idea of freedom and revolution has a long history in Asia . Confucianism carries the seeds of revolution, making it the duty of the people to overthrow a tyrant and to institute a humanistic government working for the benefit and welfare of all. Asian immigrants recognized injustice; they protested and opposed oppression not because they were Americanized" but because their own traditions had taught them to resist injustice."

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Bulosan, America is in the Heart

"As Carlos Bulosan pointed out in his 1946 book America is in the Heart , people throughout time and history have been struggling for and contributing to the formation of "America" ,which is still an unfinished dream. Despite the dated use of gendered terminology, Bulosan has written one of The best statements about " America ":

"It is but fair to say that America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known
oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers. America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world. America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering. America is a warning to those who would try to falsify the ideals of freemen.

America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant, and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate--We are America? "

___________________________________

"Gordon Hirabayashi's conviction for resisting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was overturned in 1987 by the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, on the basis of recently uncovered evidence that the U.S. government knowingly suppressed, altered, and destroyed evidence proving that there existed no military necessity for the removal and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Moreover, after a concerted redress movement by Japanese Americans, Congress passed and the president signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which issued an apology and paid monetary compensation to redress the unjust relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. "

"In the mid-nineteenth century, Asian immigrants represented a major segment of the population of the U.S. West. Chinese composed 9.2 percent of the population in California in 1860; in 1870 they were 28.5 percent in Idaho and 9.5 percent in Montana, and in 1880 they were 8.7 percent in Nevada. I7 But anti-Asian immigration exclusion acts dis torted the population composition of the U.S. West. We can ask what exactly would have been the racial composition of the U.S. West if Asian immigration had been allowed to continue without the imposition of these acts. Yet though immigration restrictions altered and stunted the demographics, significant Asian American populations were concentrated in cities, in certain regions, and within particular occupations. "

"Asian immigration was vital to the economic growth of the U.S. West, but listing Asian contributions creates misunderstanding because it means that the Anglo is still the focal point. In the context of the U.S. West, when I am asked to discuss the "contributions" of Asian Americans, I feel I am actually being asked, "How much did your group contribute to the Anglo capitalist system of oppression of native peoples and destruction of the
environment?" Yet I believe that it is necessary to fully acknowledge the critical role of Asian Americans in the transformation, for good or bad, of the U.S. West. To ignore this Asian American role is to discount or trivialize the role of Asian Americans as builders of our country and to acknowledge, as either villains or heroes, only the elite."

"Asian Americans lived in the West. They shaped the western landscape through cultivation and toil. They were not simply excluded. They were not just passive victims to be conquered and subjugated. They built and they molded and they struggled. "

"As an Asian American myself, I am particularly aware that the vital role of Asian Americans in the history of the U.S. West goes unrecognized. I believe we need to hear the voices of Asian Americans themselves in order to understand their place in history and gain a full account of the western U.S. experience."

"Asian Americans have persisted as a discrete ethnic group despite repeated forecasts that they would disappear or assimilate into oblivion. Moreover, new immigrants from Asia are further changing the composition,
especially of the U.S. West. Changes in immigration laws since 1965 resulted in Asians becoming the highest number of non-Western hemisphere immigrants. The number of Asian/Pacific Americans has doubled with each census since 1970. This population growth is reflected in our education system in the U.S. West--with large percentages of Asian Americans in the major universities, particularly in California and Hawaii ."

"I welcome the new western history, which is more inclusive and cognizant of the complexities of the western U.S. experience. But it must be emphasized that there is nothing particularly " new " in the new western history. The recognition of a multicultural, multi-ethnic U.S. West is not an original idea. Monoculturalism has never had a place in the history of the U.S. West. Asian Americans and other people of color knew that the West was multicultural, no matter what traditional historians wrote. "

"I believe we need to recognize a shared memory of the many diverse groups inhabiting the U.S. West and the nation as a whole. We need to recognize the West as populated by women and men and people of all colors. By recognizing and incorporating the views from the "margins, " we gain a more inclusive and fuller history and achieve a greater understanding of the multiple centers and, more important, the whole. The changing demographics of the United States will further challenge our writing of U.S. history to better reflect the understanding of an increasingly diverse United States ."

Limerick, Disorientation and Re-Orientation

"Rather than an occasion for defeat, this dilemma offers an opportunity to broaden the turf of inquiry, to look for evidence of the experience of discovery, first, in unconventional literary sources and, second, in action and behavior. In the first category, one turns to the walls of the Angel Island immigration facility. Those walls held poems, written by immigrants and recently transcribed and translated by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. In these poems, one finds ample evidence that a people, who might initially seem inarticulate to the historian, were charged with intense and profound responses to the American landscape. Opened as an immigration station in 1910, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay served as a focal point in the Chinese discovery of the landscape. Many immigrants spent weeks, even months, on the island, enduring prolonged interrogations and inspections. " (191)

"The Chinese immigrants "tunneled through mountains, cleared forests, re-claimed swamps, and helped to open up the American West for settlement," Shih-Shan Henry Tsai writes. To this proclamation, the environmentally sensitive reader of the late twentieth century may well respond, "Too bad," rather than "Hurrah." This is not only a matter of putting environmental history into some relationship with ethnic history; it also involves the relationship between different categories of ethnic history. A reader of Tsai's sentence might be equally troubled by the impact that the "opening up" of "the American West for settlement" had on Indian people. The question is an enormous one: what place did Asian immigrants occupy in the broadest picture of the conquest of both nature and natives in North America?"

"The pain of forced relocation dramatized the degree to which the landscapes of the West Coast had been transformed into home both for first-generation Japanese immigrants (Issei) and their American-born children (Nisei). "We had bought a house and my husband had been happy just to smell the trees in the garden up until we were evacuated," Kamechiyo Takahashi remembered. " .. , Even mowing weeds gave us pleasure." (202)

"Immigrants or the children of immigrants, Japanese American families had in the space of a few decades transformed the West Coast from a newly encountered landscape to home. When Yoshiko Uchida stood in the mess hall line at the Tanforan Assembly Center and felt "degraded, humiliated, and overwhelmed by a longing for home," she was not yearning for a far-off, ancestral, foreign home in japan but for a familiar, domestic, residential landscape in Berkeley, California.'' (202)

"In 1943 , the Chinese anthropologist and sociologist Fei Xiaotong toured the United States and compared what he saw with his childhood in China. In his home, "there were more places for ghosts than for people." Americans lived in another world entirely. "How," he asked, in the United States , "could ghosts gain a foothold . . . ? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places." Fei Xiaotong could not, he said, "get used to people today who know only the present moment." Indeed, he confessed to feeling "a little sorry for people raised in a world without ghosts."

"In 1992, we can no longer think of the United States as "a world without ghosts." The landscapes of North America are heavily
invested with human memories, and the tangle of those memories provided both common and contested ground for the people of various origins whose descendants now populate this nation. Life "melds past, present, and future" into one "multi-layered scene, a three-dimensional body," Fei Xiaotong wrote. "This is what ghosts are."' This "multi-layered scene" is what the American landscape now presents for our exploration. That enterprise requires historians to engage in a constant process of disorientation and reorientation, taking part in both the pleasures, the discomforts, and the conflicts of discovery."

Friedman: Sending Jobs to India

Blue Chip Companies Send more Jobs to India (in-class)

Jobs in India Online site

Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

TERENCE SMITH: Why are these jobs going to India, and why to Bangalore?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Why to India? Why is India so well positioned for this? It's a lot of reasons that have come together. One is very simple. You have a huge number of educated people who speak English. You have a culture, also, where being a doctor or an engineer is absolutely the top of the pyramid. It's amazing. You go down any side street in Bangalore, and there seems to be an engineering school, you know, or some kind of software programming classroom.

Another oddity: Their day is exactly the opposite of ours. You can work all day in America, then outsource all the stuff you need done overnight to India. They work all day in India, and send it back the next day. And so a lot of these things have converged. And then there's a couple of just accidents, Terry.

One is the dot-com bubble and huge over-investment in dot-com stocks in America. You know what it did? It laid all these pipes, these fiber optic cables around the world, and created all this excess capacity, which made it easy -- not only easy, almost cost-free -- to transmit data from America to India. And then there was something called Y2K.

Y2K comes along, and you need all these software programmers basically to go through code, to see if the date is going to be a problem in whatever software program you're running. Well, what country in the world had that many programmers easily available, cheaply available? And once the Indians did that, they said, by the way, could we do this for you? Maybe you'd like your taxes done also.

TERENCE SMITH: You mentioned that they speak English, and yet they have a wonderful little phenomenon there that you wrote about called the "accent neutralization class." What's going on there?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Accent neutralization class is very popular in Bangalore today, you know, because you have all ... a whole less sort of sophisticated side of this phenomenon are the call centers. Young men and women basically selling credit cards, tracing your lost luggage on Delta Airlines, and also providing tech support for big American computer companies from IBM to Microsoft and whatnot.

Well, these are all put together in these call centers and when you pick up the phone and dial that tech number, a young Indian answers. But they want to make sure that you're going to understand their accent so they teach them or put them through accent neutralization courses where they learn to roll their R's and to soften their T's.