Impounded
As I headed into Asian American Heritage Month* I told myself that that I didn’t need to read more about was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It is the one moment in Asian American history that most of us know something about. But I kept coming across interesting stuff with new perspectives. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, is one of them.
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I have no doubt that you are familiar with Dorothea Lange’s work. She was one of the photographers hired by the Farm Service Administration to document rural poverty during the Depression. The purpose of their work was to document the need for FSA programs; Lange did much more than that. She created powerful portraits of the human cost of the Depression.
What few of us knew is that in 1942, the War Relocation Authority, which had been established to organize the internment of Japanese Americans, hired Lange to document the program. They, too, got more than they expected. And unlike the FSA, the WRA wasn’t happy with what they got. Lange’s photographs are an unflinching portrait and critique of a program that she did not support. Unlike her portraits of migrant and farm workers in the Depression, her photographs of interned Japanese Americans were suppressed by the United States military during the war—the word “Impounded” written across some of the prints— and then quietly buried in the National Archives. (Can you say “erasure”?)
Impounded is divided into three parts. The first tells the story of how Lange took the photographs, placing them within the larger context of her life and work. It grapples with the question of why the photographs were commissioned at all, and the way they were buried in the records. (But not destroyed.) The second part, titled “An American Story,” tells the story of the internment. The third is a large selection of Lange’s photographs, with their original captions. A brilliant and heartbreaking indictment of one of our most shameful moments.
It turns out I was wrong: I did need to read more about the internment camps.
*I’ve given up typing out the whole thing. Realistically, I’m not going to read anything dealing with Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders this month. But I’ll keep an eye out for the future.
From the Archives: A Great Book About Immigration Law
I went into this month of reading about Asian-American history with one thought clearly in mind: that the patterns of Asian immigration were often shaped by changes in United States immigration law. Reading Asian American Histories of the United States confirmed that idea, which led me back to a wonderful book on the subject that I read and reviewed here several years ago. It’s a timely read now.
* * *
I have often complained that one of the failures of American history class as I experienced it in high school* was that everything after the civil war was taught as a series of legislation punctuated by two world wars. The world wars were taught as story, and subsequently stuck with me . But the history of legislation was essentially a list: a name, a date, a paragraph about what the law in question accomplished. Here’s what stuck: anti-trust legislation, labor rights legislation, and, inexplicably, the Taft-Harley Act (the name, not the content).**
It turns out that the history of legislation can be pretty thrilling in the right hands.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 began as an attempt by journalist and second-generation American Jia Lynn Yang to understand the law that allowed her parents to come to the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The result is a gripping account of forty years of Congressional wrangling over immigration law in the United States.
Yang successfully argues that the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is a relatively new one—and demonstrates that laws controlling immigration are even more recent. The book centers on the passage of three major immigration laws—in 1924, 1952 and 1965—and the competing ideas about ethnicity, race and the nature of the United States as an entity that shaped those laws.
Yang never loses sight of the fact that laws are passed by people. She introduces us to the often colorful and sometimes awful politicians and activists who lobbied for and against changes in immigration policy, clearly evoking each man’s character as well as describing his political career. She outlines ugly relationships between immigration laws and the eugenics movement, isolationism, anti-Communist rhetoric, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and calls to keep the United States true to its “Northern European roots.”
Yang ends where she began, with the impact of the 1965 bill, which opened the door to non-white immigration, closed the border with Mexico for the first time and changed the United States in ways that its promoters had never anticipated.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is an important and sometimes surprising history of American immigration policy and the people who made it.
*I realize that this is not a universal experience. It wasn’t even my universal experience. My world history teacher did an excellent job of capturing my imagination despite the challenges inherent in the concept. Fabulous high school history teachers exist. My hats off to you all.
**I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: formally known as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, it restricted the power and actions of labor unions. The 80th Congress passed it over President Truman’s veto.
In which I jump into the deep end of Asian American history
It’s been almost two weeks since I announced my intention to read my way through Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.* So far it has been a frustrating and fascinating experience.
Unlike Black History Month and Women’s History Month, the places I hang out on the internet have not been full of fascinating stories about forgotten people and incidents. (Though there have been several interesting pieces about the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of South East Asian refugees into the United States at the end of the Vietnam War* and a number of heart-breaking reminders of the Japanese internment camps in WWII.) The Chicago Public Library’s list of ways to celebrate is largely focused on novels and movies, which do not really serve my purpose. (Also demonstrations of hula dancing and Korean music. Very tempting.) The Goodreads list of Asian American non-fiction is heavy on celebrity and restaurant memoirs—also not what I had in mind.**
In the absence of any clear path, in mid-April I went to the bookstore around the corner, Call and Response Books,which specializes in books by and about people of color, and threw myself on the bookseller’s mercy. I walked out with Asian American Histories of the United States by Catherine Ceniza Choy. It turned out to be a very good place to start.
Choy, a professor of ethnic studies who has studied, taught, and written about Asian American history for more than two decades, began the book in 2021 at the height of Covid in response to the anti-Asian violence and hatred that was part of that experience. Her primary argument is that the themes that fueled that violence, as well as the violence itself, have been part of American history for 150 years. Nonetheless, the book is not simply a catalog of hate crimes and historical erasure.
As the title makes clear, Asian American Histories of the United States is a series of histories of different Asian groups who arrived in the United States at different times under different circumstances. Choy looks at the ways in which their experiences differ, and the ways in which they are the same. Some of the stories are familiar, such as the arrival of some 20,000 Chinese men to work on the transcontinental railroad.**** Other stories were totally new to me: for example, the important role played by Filipino workers in creation of the United Farm Workers and the development of a Punjabi Mexican-American community in Texas at the beginning of the twentieth century.*****
Choy structures the book in reverse chronological order, from 2020 to 1869. The structure is surprisingly effective, underlining that Asians arrived in the United States earlier than most of us knew. Each chapter looks at a particular historical moment and specific Asian population, then expands the themes across time and ethnic group. She shows both how the chapter’s issue had earlier roots and how that issue plays out in the modern world. A freestanding, and fascinating, chapter at the midpoint titled “The Faces Behind the Food” looks at the impact of Asian Americans on food in the United States in often surprising ways. (For example, a Chinese worker named Ah Bing, who arrived in the United States in 1855, worked on an Oregon fruit farm and is credited as the cultivator and namesake of the Bing cherry. I was stunned.)
If I read nothing else for Asian History month, Asian American Histories of the United States would accomplish my basic goal of learning more. But don’t worry, I intend to read on. We’re not done yet.
*That fifty years sure went by quickly!
** Thanks to those of you who made suggestions.
*** I realize that we are only a week into May and I may not be hanging out in the right places.
****Not so familiar: the fact that Chinese railroad workers were not included in the iconic photograph of the ceremony that marked the completion of the railroad despite their critical role in its construction. (According to Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, ninety percent of the workers on the western half of the Transcontinental Railroad were Chinese. In fact, the National Park Service account states that “On the morning of May 10th, 1869, eight Chinese men moved the final rail into position.”—An act that was symbolically important.) Historical erasure in real time.
*****According to historian Karen Leonard, there are people in the region today who think Singh is a Hispanic surname. Which I find both very funny and slightly sad.