Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America: Migration Stories for the Twenty-First Century

Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America. By Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 400 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper), $15 (audio CD).

Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, December 2003–March 2004, Queens Museum of Art, New York; March 11–June 11, 2005, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York; July 7–November 23, 2005, Hudson Museum, University of Maine at Orono; February 1–March 16, 2006, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; and September 16, 2006–January 14, 2007, SUNY-Purchase Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York.

I invite you to read this book—not because it is "smart" or because it is "important," but because it is a pleasure to read. It's beautiful, moving, funny, stimulating, horrifying, and illuminating. The people profiled in this book of migration stories remain tangibly alive in your memory. There is Remi Ortiz, the Nigerian Pentecostal priest, praying to protect the cab drivers in her congregation from unnecessary tickets and the nurses from giving the wrong medications (fig. 1). There is Eugene Hütz, founder of a "punk-gypsy cabaret band" with musicians from the Ukraine, Kazakstan, Israel, and Russia, calling for a global music of the underground—"where people are not relaxed or comfortable." And there is Shekaiba Wakili, the feminist photographer whose father brought her from Afghanistan in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Kabul, taking on the ultimate INS challenge after 9/11 of helping her young, single uncle in his thirties join her and her family in the United States. Then there is the signscape opening the book with Tata Restaurant—Más Calidad y Mejor Servicio lined up alongside Top of China—Best Chinese Retaurant, India's Gifted Psychic Reader, Queen Joffa's African Braiding & Weaving, and Sybil's Bakery & Restaurant—Bakers of Fine Guyanese Baked Products.

Crossing the BLVD is a paradigmatic American studies text. Authors Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan present their migration stories in an innovatively designed book, along with a CD of specially commissioned music; a traveling road show of performances of narratives from the book; a museum exhibition of photographs, stories, music, and artifacts; and an interactive Web site where other migrants are invited to add their stories. Form is only part of what makes Crossing the BLVD an exemplary American studies text. The stories that Lehrer and Sloan have collected of migrants who came to the United States after passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments speak to the wide-ranging interests of American studies scholars. If you are interested in visual culture, religion, oral history, class and labor, music, immigration, ethnicity, urban history, race, queer studies, narrative and storytelling, gender, or transnationalism and globalization, you will find touchstones for your own thinking and your classroom discussions.

Crossing the BLVD presents stories from Queens, New York, collected over three years from the fall of 1999 to the fall of 2002, with September 11 becoming a part of the tales gathered in the book. With its use of the comfortable form of the immigrant narrative; its historical frame of "old" and "new" immigration; its self-conscious awareness of the global vectors of colonialism, war, capital, and labor; and its provocative invitation to join these "strangers, neighbors, aliens" in a "new America," the book invites us to approach it in terms of problems of the national and the transnational that have been shaping recent American studies discourse.

Collecting personal narratives was part of the work of both authors prior to this project. Warren Lehrer is a book artist who has produced works of "visual literature" that have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, and the Georges Pompidou Centre among others.¹ In his works...