Becoming American Becoming Ethnic

Afterword

Mterword What are we to make ofthese accounts-ofthe thirty essays and two poems that students at the University of California, San Diego, and the State University of New York at Binghamton wrote in an immigration history course between 1977 and 1994? A skeptical reader might find them interesting yet pose the question, Are they true? I would respond by quoting from Studs Terkel, in his introduction to the collection Hard Times: An Oral History ofthe Great Depression: "This is a memory book, rather than one of hard fact and precise statistic." Addressing the truthfulness ofhis respondents, Terkel quoted an exchange among Pa and Tom Joad and Preacher Casy in John Steinbeck's Grapes ofWrath: Pa said, "S'pose he's tellin' the truth-that fella?" The preacher answered , "He's tellin' the truth, awright. The truth for him. He wasn't makin' nothin' up." "How about us?" Tom demanded. "Is that the truth for us?" "I don' know," said Casy. Terkel reflected on the relevance of this fictional passage to the interviews he'd conducted: "I suspect the preacher spoke for the people in this book, too. In their rememberings are their truths." So I would judge for the students writing about their ethnic roots in this collection.l One thing is clear from these essays-students used the occasion to construct the current meaning ofethnicity in their lives. One's ethnicity is the product of historical experience working upon an evolving sense of oneself. It is not a biological given; it is not even the simple result of be- 230 Afterword ing a member ofa particular social group. In these papers students bring together their own experiences and conversations they have had with their parents and other relatives, and construct a "script" that explains to themselves and to readers how they have come to view their ethnicity in the way they have. They view the experiences ofgrandparents and parents in a teleological way, as events that shaped the kind of people they (the authors) have become and the attitudes toward ethnicity they hold as they write their papers.2 We see the "ethnicity" ofeach student at a particular point in its evolution-at another time, each student would undoubtedly offer a somewhat different picture. In reading these essays I have been struck by the revelations they provide ofchanging cultural patterns in the United States. Ifone had access to similar immigrant family stories written eighty years ago, one might find many more references to trade unions. Given that the forebears of these student authors often worked as laborers, in coal mines, and in garment shops, the references to trade union activities are surprisingly scanty. The authors recall relatives buying land or starting their own businesses far more frequently than they mention labor or political radicalism. Tanya Mlodzinski's grandfather and father were active in Finnish-American radical circles, but they stand alone. The relative invisibility oftrade union activity or political radicalism in these accounts no doubt reflects the decline of the labor movement and of leftist politics in the post-World War II years. Such movements have not been important in these students' lives; consequently they play little part in the family stories they reconstruct. While class issues are muted in these accounts, instances of racial and ethnic confliCt are more readily acknowledged. Such incidents are more common in the stories of recent immigrants than in the recollections of grandparents, reflecting in part the greater immediacy ofrecent events, but also the changing racial and ethnic composition ofimmigrants. Stories of European immigrants-as in the Carnicelli, Koch, and Turetzky accounts -are more likely to detail discrimination in the Old Country than in the United States. Hispanic writers, in contrast, frequently comment on the pervasiveness of racial discrimination in the United States. Thus Josephine Burgos found herselfplaced in classes with non-English speakers simply because ofher Latin American last name. Shana Rivas's father, who felt that the color barrier made it impossible for him to assimilate into American society, returned to Puerto Rico. And Lizette Aguilar's darkskinned Peruvian father so internalized this country's color consciousness that he married a white Puerto Rican and became upset when his teenage daughter dated a black person. 231 Afterword Racial taunts and epithets appear frequently in the stories of Asian Americans. Philippine-born Cecilia Pineda was called "Chink" and "Jap" by Maryland high school classmates. Both of Sang-Hoon Kim...