Angel Island: Immigration Gateway to America (review)

I pull up the Wikipedia entry to "Immigration to the United States." No entry for Angel Island Immigration Station. No entry for Chinese Exclusion Act. (Note to JAAS readers. We need to rectify this!) This reveals a double erasure. Anti-Asian racism and its foundational impacts on the very formulation of U.S. immigration policies are missing among this crowd-sourced entry. If any single book can disrupt these erasures, I'd nominate Erika Lee and Judy Yung's path-breaking new history on Angel Island.

Angel Island: Immigration Gateway to America is a meticulously and exhaustively researched historical study. This is a dazzling piece of scholarship that works on many levels. First, it establishes the U.S. immigration story as also an immigration detention story complicating the mythos of our nation as "a nation of immigrants" with the simultaneous policies of a "gatekeeping nation" (22). The Chinese detention story, first researched and contextualized in 1980 in Island: Poetry and History by Yung, playwright Genny Lim, and pioneering historian Him Mark Lai, is here told concisely and with more details conveying a clear sense of both the unjust practices created by unjust laws and examples of the organized chains of resistance. What Pierre Nora framed as the milieu de mémoire is reconstructed effectively. One stunning Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) photograph shows a crumbled coaching paper hidden in a banana peel by mess hall cooks to aid detainees getting through the interrogation process. On two recorded occasions riots erupted in the dining hall at the attempted confiscation of hidden papers (89-90).

Second, the Angel Island Immigration Station was also the point of entry and rejection for other Pacific world's migrations. A chapter each is devoted to Japanese immigrants, South Asian immigrants, and Korean refugees and "picture brides." Another chapter is on Russians and Jews, a story not much researched and told, along with the rarely explored story of Mexicans entering portside post-U.S.-Mexican War. And the authors also detail the story of Pinoy caught in the legal limbo of U.S. colonial classifications of "U.S. Nationals" to "Aliens." Here Lee and Yung also deftly demonstrate the utility of intersectional analysis of racialization, labor recruitment, class-based discrimination, transnational desire, gender segregation, and health and sanitation policies. Great care is given to relating and comparing these differential experiences at different moments on Angel Island. In effect, this Angel Island history offers a wonderful opportunity to understand how the labor needs of an expansionist and industrializing nation reckoned with racial and moral panics and norms of proper manhood and citizenship.

Third, much attention is paid to the everyday working of Angel Island: the inspection apparatus, bureaucracy, and spatial segregation are all described, setting the scene of what happens and how within the design of the confined, specialized spaces themselves. The opening chapter, for example, begins with the 1916 records of Rev. Hugh and Lillian Linton compared to Jung Look Moy, a merchant's wife and her three children, and Louis Gar Fen, a Boise-based businessman. These contrasting treatments in the same place at the same time are startling and of great use for teaching, even at the high school level.

Fourth, Angel Island is the culmination of a long-term collaborative, dialogic community study, exemplary of what Mike Frisch has called "the shared authority." The collaborative work herein between scholar/researchers and community-based knowledge is important to note because such histories speak to the necessarily social nature of archival recovery projects and of community-making. This story, buried in the U.S. imaginary, has taken activist, organizing efforts spanning generations to reconstitute and tell. This is not the typical work of a lone scholar sitting in the archives poring over documents. That work is evident here, but not sufficient to understand how this study is the culmination of decades of scholarship that has fought for a whole peoples...