Working at the Crossroads: American Studies for the 21st Century Presidential Address to the American Studies Association November 9, 2001

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our role as American studies scholars and teachers has taken on dimensions and conditions we could not have imagined just one year ago. The horrific events of September 11, 2001, and the aftermath of a new-fashioned global war on terrorism, have transformed the thinking and direction of many of us who study and interpret social and cultural life in the United States. For me to make sense of my own world in these troubling times, I have deliberately returned to work that I have done for over a decade that gives meaning to my own life as an academic.

Lastyear, as I prepared for a presentation to a community forum in East Los Angeles, I noticed an elderly African American woman enter the auditorium carrying two plastic grocery sacks full of what appeared to be letters. This forum was being held at the International Institute in Boyle Heights, a place where immigrants from around the world had been welcomed to Los Angeles for the past eighty years (fig. 1). But this meeting brought together different generations of newcomers to Los Angeles that had rarely met: today's largely recent Latino immigrants in the neighborhood and an older group of white, Jewish, African American, Asian American, and Latino citizens who had first entered Boyle Heights in the mid-twentieth century but no longer lived in the community (figs. 2 and 3). [Begin Page 3]

This community forum was sponsored by the Japanese American National Museum, located in Los Angeles, an organization that I have been working with over the past three years. Along with three co-sponsoring organizations--the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California, Self-help Graphics, a Chicano arts collective, and our host for this forum, the International Institute--we have been formulating a museum exhibition that will open fall 2002 concerning racial interaction in Boyle Heights, a polyglot community of East Los Angeles for most of the twentieth century. This forum was part of the community activities associated with that exhibition. Having been trained as a twentieth-century American historian whose research focuses on immigration and race in urban areas, I know that the importance of the histories of communities like Boyle Heights cannot be underestimated for American studies and ethnic studies. Most of the history written about urban neighborhoods takes as a given that the norm in the twentieth century has been racially exclusive communities best characterized as ghettoes or barrios. But increasingly, historians are finding this to be a mischaracterization across the nation; much more widespread have been racially mixed areas in which the dynamics and hierarchies of racial power and differentiation were played out in neighborhood politics and personal relationships, as well as being sites of interaction which taught everyone the meaning of American identity.

The woman I noticed walking into the room, who later was introduced to me as Molly Wilson-Murphy, represented the comparatively small African American community of Boyle Heights, but the packages she carried represented the power of ethnic interaction that this project, and I believe a newfound American studies, hopes to capture. Mrs. Wilson-Murphy had carefully brought this package of letters to our forum to hand them over to the Japanese American National Museum after more than a half-century of storing them in her closet at home. During World War II, she had carefully written letters every week to five of her Japanese American friends who were taken away from Boyle Heights to internment camps. What she carried into the auditorium last year were the return letters from these five friends. These letters told us stories of young teenage friends from high school from different backgrounds who had sustained their friendships by committing themselves to...