Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping American’s Immigration Story Edited by Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber (review)

Kraut and Gerber have assembled chapters by an impressive range of scholars, who reflect on how their own lives and experiences and those of their ancestors have informed their academic work. With few exceptions, the authors are second- or third-generation immigrants; their ancestors hail from across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Describing the shared efforts of these scholars to “overcome marginality,” the editors work to fit these historians into the ethnic-assimilation narrative. Gerber asserts that “the trajectory of the histories, the organization of daily individual and group life, and the aspirations of the various peoples are more similar than different” (13).

There is much that unites these scholars. The importance of place looms large, for example, in Dominic Pacyga’s upbringing in the Back of the Yards (New City, Chicago), in Deborah Dash Moore’s childhood in Greenwich Village, and in Eileen Tamura’s life and work in Hawaii. Social class is central to a number of these scholars, among them María Cristina García, the child of Cuban refugees in Miami, and Timothy Meagher, raised by wealthy parents of Irish descent in Worcester, Mass. The complications negotiating religious identity and faith for non-Protestants are evident in John Bodnar’s Slovak Catholic family, Moore’s Jewish roots, and Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp’s Muslim heritage.

The editors acknowledge the difficulty of fitting all of these histories into the classic assimilation narrative. They identify gender as one complicating issue. A number of women historians—Virginia Yans, Barbara Posada, and Judy Yung among them—relate their battles to gain purchase in academia and to focus on gender-based research agendas. The editors also note a generational divide between scholars who completed their doctoral work before and after 1990. Those in the earlier generation, they argue, tend to focus on issues of ethnicity, religion, place, race, class, and gender, whereas those in the later generation frame their studies in trans-national or diasporic terms.

The editors also nod toward the importance of racial identity, the issue on which the ethnic-assimilation model falters. Its enduring salience is reflected by scholars writing about their struggles to create successful careers in the United States as rooted in their often complex racial identity. Posada gives a heart-rending account of her mixed-race parents’ decades-long fear of being seen in public together. Violet M. Showers-Johnson, born in Nigeria and raised in Sierra Leone, writes of the ways in which the racial identity imposed on West Indian and African immigrants conflated their experiences with those of African Americans. She discusses how two women, one her mother, described having “become Black” in the United States. When asked how she identifies herself, Velcamp, the great-grand daughter of a Lebanese Shi’a Muslim and the granddaughter of a Mexican bracero, stated, “For me, it all depends on the context” (177).

Though it is weighted a bit heavily toward the earlier generation and could have been strengthened by addressing a broader range of Latin American immigration experiences, this collection presents compelling and revealing work from an outstanding group of scholars.