American Conversations

2. Marginality, Mobility, and the Melting Pot

2 Marginality, Mobility, and the Melting Pot America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! A fig for your feuds and vendettas. . . . into the Crucible with you all! -Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1909:37) Contemporary struggles over "multiculturalism" in the United States cannot be understood without also considering the sociohistorical context in which these struggles have evolved. From the very conception of the nation people of color were excluded from the imagined national community ; it is this marginalization and exclusion, I all but invisible in the public arena until the 1960s, that have fueled the current multicultural thrust. From the outset the nation's founders sought to limit eligibility for citizenship. In 1790 Congress passed a bill limiting naturalization to "free white citizens." African-American, Native American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican populations, meanwhile, were forcibly incorporated into the nation without being extended the rights and protections granted to Euro-Americans. People of African descent, most of them enslaved through 1865, were granted citizenship and their men given the right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments after the Civil War. Despite Constitutional changes, though, they remained legally segregated and essentially denied the vote-through the use of literacy tests, poll 32 Copyrighted Material Marginality, Mobility, and the Melting Pot 33 taxes, violence- throughout the South and much of the Southwest.2 Through the 1960s African Americans would remain without the legal protections and rights accorded Euro-Americans, and it has been little more than a quarter century since those barriers to equality fell. Other people of color also have fared poorly. Puerto Rico became a colony of the United States in 1898, without any say on the part of its people. Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, making possible their participation in World War I. Mexicans too were granted citizenship , with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the Mexican American War of 1846- 1848, but for both groups the reality3 has been less than ideal: "In spite of legal rights, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have remained largely unacknowledged as 'fellow' citizens of Americans throughout much of the twentieth century. Denied full citizenship and human rights by the customary practices of exclusion, they could be routinely bounced in and out of the 'national community' according to the everchanging political and economic needs of the nation" (Oboler 1995:38). Native Americans, decimated in the wake of war and the genocidal policies of the 1800s, were not granted citizenship until 1924. Chinese and Japanese workers, meanwhile, encountered violent racial hostility in the United States. Indeed , Asian immigration was essentially halted with passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1908 Gentlemen 's Agreement. Not until the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act were all Asians granted naturalization eligibility. Mexican Americans were deported during the Great Depression and Japanese Americans were forced into innternment camps during World War II. Not until 1967 did the Supreme Court rule antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional, compelling Copyrighted Material 34 Chapter 2 the sixteen states that still had them to repeal the ban on interracial marriages. The long-term historical perspective in the United States has often been woefully shortsighted. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that "for most of American history, women of any race and men who were Native American, Asian, black, or poor were barred from all but a narrow range of 'electable futures. '4.... Until recently no more than about a third of the population was able to take seriously the first premise of the American dream" (Hochschild 1995:26). What the excluded groups (except white women) shared was a perception by Euro-Americans of being racially "other." It was a designation also applied, albeit for a far briefer period of time, to Irish Catholics in the mid- to late 1800s, and to southern and eastern European immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These groups, too, were conceptualized as inferior racial stock capable of damaging the national wellbeing (Gould 1981; Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1991). Racist sentiments, in tandem with post-World War I isolationism, ultimately culminated in the passage of the 1920s National Origins Acts, putting into place for almost half a century a quota system that favored those judged to be more "acceptable " as future Americans. These various acts severely curtailed immigration from southern and eastern Europe while favoring...