Category Archives: migration

by Joel | 20 November 2007 · 6:52 am

Overview of Southern Immigration

The latest issue of Southern Culture (vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 24-44; Project Muse subscription required) contains an article by Carl L. Bankston entitled New People in the New South: An Overview of Southern Immigration (voluntary immigrants only; not slaves). Here are a few excerpts that caught my eye.

Old South

In 1850 Louisiana had the largest concentration of immigrants in the South, about 75,000 people and approximately one-quarter of Louisiana’s free population. New Orleans, the largest port in the South and the second largest in the nation after New York, was a natural point of entry for people from other countries. Between 1820 and 1860, over half a million immigrants arrived in Louisiana. Given Louisiana’s French history and the large French-speaking population in the state during the nineteenth century, it is easy to assume that France would be the place of origin for most of the state’s foreign-born residents. Many immigrants to Louisiana were, in fact, from France. About 15,000 people in Louisiana in 1850, or one out of five immigrants in the state, gave France as their birthplace. The largest immigrant group in Louisiana, though, came from Ireland. An estimated 26,580 Louisianans, or nearly 38 percent of the state’s immigrants, were born in Ireland in 1850. The Irish are generally described as having arrived in Louisiana in two waves. Those known as the “Old Irish” came primarily from the northern part of Ireland between 1803 and 1830. These earlier immigrants became part of the middle classes of New Orleans. The “New Irish,” consisting mainly of peasants, left their homes because of poverty and famine, particularly after the potato blight, which hit Ireland about 1845 and lasted into the following decade, leaving Ireland devastated. They settled in the area known as the City of Lafayette, which was later incorporated into New Orleans and is still identified as the Irish Channel. The New Irish provided much of New Orleans’s low-paying manual labor.

Germans made up the second largest immigrant nationality in antebellum Louisiana. Over 20,000 people in the state in 1850, or 28 percent of all immigrants, had been born in Germany. Germans first arrived at the port of New Orleans when Louisiana was a French colony. Many settled just north of New Orleans in the Parishes of St. John and St. Charles, in an area known as the Côte des Allemands, or German Coast. A second wave of peasant German workers followed the first wave of German settlers between 1820 and 1850.

New South

As a consequence of geographic access, Texas’s main immigrant population is Hispanic or Latino, yet Texas also has a substantial Asian minority (see Table 1), attributable to some extent to the general rise in Asian migration around the United States and to the booming economy in Texas cities such as Houston. In 2000 the Vietnamese were Texas’s single largest Asian immigrant group, accounting for one out of every four foreign-born Asian Texans, and the state had the second largest Vietnamese population in the United States, after California, with 12 percent of all Vietnamese in the United States.

The case of the Vietnamese illustrates the importance of Texas as a point of access even for members of these more distant national-origin groups. Initial U.S. government resettlement efforts in 1975 had planted Vietnamese communities in the cities of Dallas and Houston. Additional Vietnamese Americans were drawn to Texas by the existing ethnic communities, combined with the availability of jobs in that state. Shrimping became something of an ethnic specialty for Vietnamese Americans along the Gulf Coast of Texas and other states….

As a world center, Atlanta has attracted a diverse Asian population. The largest grouping of Atlanta’s Asians in 2000 consisted of people from the South Asian subcontinent, with just under 36,000 Asian Indians, over 1,000 Bangladeshis, and well over 3,000 Pakistanis. At that time, Atlanta was also home to nearly 25,000 Vietnamese, close to 22,000 Koreans, and just under 21,500 Chinese. Largely members of an educated work force, the South Asian migrants were drawn to this international-airport-hub city by its professional, white-collar opportunities in professional, scientific, and technical industries, which in 2000 employed one in five of the Asian Indians in the metropolis.

As in Texas, the Vietnamese first came to Atlanta as part of government resettlement efforts, and the initial Vietnamese communities provided bases for secondary migration from other parts of the country while Vietnamese job seekers looked for work. They found it in the blue-collar sector, with nearly one-third of Atlanta Vietnamese occupied in the city’s manufacturing industry in 2000. Koreans, as in New York and Los Angeles, became the small shopkeepers of Greater Atlanta, with about 22 percent of Koreans in retail trade. Chinese, like the South Asians, had often come with educational credentials to seek jobs in professional, scientific, and technical fields, which held 17 percent of the area’s Chinese workers. Other Chinese migrants tended to go in to restaurant and related work, as accommodations and food services held 16 percent of the city’s Chinese workers. A diversified metropolitan economy with global connections had pulled in workers from all over the world into a mosaic of national-origin specializations.

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Filed under Asia, France, Germany, Ireland, migration, South Asia, U.S., Vietnam

by Joel | 14 November 2007 · 5:29 pm

Learning to Trade Envidia for Unity in Chicago

From Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2007), pp. 210-212:

They [immigrants from Atolinga in Zacatecas, Mexico] became part of a Chicago ecosystem of immigrant nonfranchised fast-food restaurants that included Chinese food, Greek gyros, Italian hot-dog stands, and sandwich and donut shops owned by Indians. Several Atolingan taquerías replaced Polish and Italian hot-dog stands that went out of business.

Atolingans pooled knowledge, shared experiences, aided those in need. For a while, they formed an informal cooperative to buy vegetables and supplies. When one of Salinas’s taquerías burned down in 1998, he reopened two weeks later using equipment from other Atolingan restaurateurs.

This kind of cooperation was a radical concept for men from an isolated Mexican village. Back home, anyone who wedged his way into a small business wasn’t about to help or cooperate with the competition. Envidia was rife and pernicious. Envidia means “envy,” but it also implies backbiting and in commerce, even sabotage. Envidia is behind the common Mexican proverb “Pueblo chico, infierno grande” (Small town, big hell). When discussing envidia, particularly as it relates to business, many Mexicans tell the story of crabs in a pot of boiling water. When one crab tries to get out of the pot, the others pull him back down; if they can’t get out, why should he?

Chon Salinas came to view envidia as a devastating force. He felt it was behind the drug-smuggling rumors with which he’d had to contend.

A significant cause of Mexican poverty in small villages, he believed, was the way people not only wouldn’t cooperate in business, but at times actively tore each other apart. He told the story of Urbano Garcia, a great carpenter in Atolinga years ago, who so feared competition that he refused to teach the trade to his own sons. As Salinas went out on his own and then helped others do the same, he railed often against envidia.

“The loans we eventually gave each other weren’t that important,” he said. “What was important was to recognize the strength of unity, this support, backing each other up, this confidence that we all need. It’s what I learned at John Barleycorn‘s and what other people taught me there. I’d tell those who were starting restaurants that we have to break the pattern of those famous crabs.”

Chicago was a huge market that offered opportunity for everyone. The new immigrants found themselves together in the same strange land, facing the same challenges: the English language, U.S.-born children, business permits, leases, taxes, snow. The envidia impulse withered, and unity came easier.

How Meat Factories, Mexicans, and Futbol Came to W. Kansas

From Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2007), pp. 230-232:

In the 1950s, the invention of the turbine water pump allowed [people in western Kansas] finally to suck water from the massive Oglalla Acquifer, a sea of underground freshwater that stretches under the High Plains from South Dakota to Texas and New Mexico. New irrigation systems let them spread that water across wide swaths of land and decreased the threat of drought. Farmers could grow huge amounts of grain-corn, milo, and alfalfa—which could be fed to cattle. With that came the cattle feed yard.

In 1951, a Garden City farmer named Earl Brookover built the first cattle feed yard in Kansas, with large pens in which cattle ate locally grown grain from a trough. Cattle fattened faster and more efficiently—on high-protein milo, corn, and alfalfa—than when they grazed aimlessly on the range. Dozens of ranchers opened feedlots across the High Plains. The Irsik family, another feedlot operator near Garden City, built the first processor that turned corn into cattle feed. Today, there is feed yard space for a million head of cattle within a sixty-mile radius of Garden City.

Poets would find potent symbols of America’s vanished frontier in these yards, with their acres of penned and tagged cattle that once roamed the range. The cowboy was now as penned in as the cattle. He rode from yard to yard, culling the sick head.

Still, the feed yard changed the American diet. The price of beef dropped. On rangeland, cattle exercised as they grazed, making their meat lean and tough, so not much of the animal was usable for anything other than hamburger or pot roasts. America’s hamburger tradition was due to the fact much of the range-fed cattle was appetizing only when it was ground up with some of the animal’s fat. But in feed yards, cattle didn’t move much, so their meat was fattier and thus more tender and better tasting. Demand for beef rose. This added protein to the U.S. diet. Cattle producers could now harvest more profitable specialty cuts—brisket, chuck, inside skirt, flatiron, and flank steaks—from all over the animal.

Brookover’s idea was to keep in Kansas what was raised in Kansas. Up to that point, Kansas and a lot of rural America resembled the Third World: its commodities—cattle and corn, in this case—were shipped away to be transformed into more profitable products elsewhere. The feed yard transformed Kansas corn into a more profitable product—cattle. Thus a bit more of the wealth that these rural communities produced remained in the area.

By the 1970s, southwest Kansas was a cattle center unlike anything early settlers could have dreamed. Yet it was only a hint of what was coming.

The man who completed the transformation of southwest Kansas— and changed America in the process—was a tall, jowly fellow with a slow Iowa drawl named Andy Anderson.

Anderson cofounded a company known as Iowa Beef Packers—later IBP. Anderson had intense energy and creativity where building things was concerned. He’d been a butcher, then a meat wholesaler in Los Angeles. Anderson had no schooling in engineering but would become an expert, and endless tinkerer, in the science of meat-packing and refrigeration. He built the meat-packing plant of the future.

Meat-packing began in the big cities, near large populations of workers, many of whom were Eastern European immigrants. Legions of well-paid union butchers in Chicago, Omaha, and Kansas City slaughtered the cattle that came in on trains from the High Plains. Anderson and IBP moved the meat industry to the small town in the American heartland where the cattle were raised. Anderson retired from IBP in 1970 and died in 1990 at the age of seventy-one. But by then, he and IBP had reinvented the way meat was slaughtered and sold. They’d also ended butcher unions and brought millions of Mexican immigrants to the heartland.

In 1960, Anderson and his partner, Currier Holman, used a U.S. Small Business Administration loan to form IBP in the town of Denison, Iowa. Anderson applied assembly-line principles to the disassembly of cattle. In this factory, the jobs of slaughtering, cutting, vacuum wrapping, and boxing the meat for shipping were mechanized and consolidated under one roof. His factories broke down these tasks until anyone could do them. A production line would send a cow carcass on a hook through the plant. A worker would make one cut, then the carcass moved to the next worker, who made another cut, and so on, until the skeleton remained. The cuts were then sealed in plastic and boxed for shipment.

This passage merely serves as background to a long and fascinating story about how Latino-dominated soccer displaced Anglo-dominated football as the top sport in Garden City High School, Kansas, in 2003.

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Filed under economics, Mexico, migration, U.S.

by Joel | 7 November 2007 · 6:35 am

A Velvet Painting Maquiladora in Juárez

From Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2007), pp. 128-130:

[Doyle] Harden and [Leon] Korol—a Georgia country boy and a blunt Chicago Jew—would become fast friends, business partners, and would transform the marketing of velvet painting in America.

“He changed my life in the velvets,” Harden said of Korol, who died in 2004 at the age of seventy-seven.

Harden had been sending a semi truck a week back to his Georgia warehouse. But Korol believed velvet had national potential. He was the first customer to buy an entire truckload of Harden velvets from Juarez. Within a month, he had ordered five trucks of paintings delivered to Chicago. He kept this up for years. Velvet paintings filled the cavernous warehouse at the Leon Korol Company in Chicago, exuding a smell of oil paint and fabric that years later Korol’s sons still remembered….

It was to meet this demand that, in 1972, Korol fronted the money with which Harden built a block-long velvet-painting factory on a Juárez vacant lot belonging to a Mexican customs commandant. The factory soon hummed with three shifts a day.

Harden’s velvet-painting factory is legendary among Juárez old-timers. It was really a cluster of about two dozen studios of different sizes—each with a master painter and team of assistants. Harden provided the materials and paid dollars for everything the master and his crew could churn out.

Harden tested the painters to see who could paint the best trees, or waterfalls, or clouds. Then he set up production lines. Each studio had a wooden shelf along which the artists would slide the paintings. One man would paint the clouds, slide the canvas to the next fellow, who’d paint the sun. The third guy would paint the mountains and slide it to the guy who’d paint the stream. And so it went until the painting was finished. A crew of framers cut the velvet, stapled it to frames, and fed blank canvases into the maw of it all.

An assembly line for handmade art, the factory was one of the first maquiladoras in a town now dominated by them. Each studio was designed so no painter used more than one color and thus avoided wasting time by switching or cleaning his brushes.

Each day, after reviewing sales orders, the master painters chose the subjects to be painted: a landscape, an eagle, a wolf, an Aztec warrior, a pachuco by his car. An assistant forged the master’s name on each painting. As soon as it was done, the artwork was in a truck and on its way to some far-off part of the United States, sometimes arriving still wet.

Two big rigs would leave Harden’s factory for the United States every day. Urged on by Leon Korol, who bought from no one else, Harden reached awesome heights in velvet production. A dozen or more competitors followed his lead into mass production. A man named Molina had a studio of twenty or more of Juárez’s best artists to whom he paid cash every day; it was accessible off a downtown back street with security guards vetting each person who wanted to enter. But no one equaled Harden’s volume.

In typical Quinones fashion, this chapter is a collection of interrelated stories about unusual people:

Edgar Leeteg (1904–1953), the weird kid from East St. Louis, Illinois, who moved with his mother to Tahiti, where he became the father of modern velvet painting
Aloha Barney Davis, who marketed Leeteg’s work in Hawai‘i, from which it spread to San Diego, then to Tijuana and other towns along the U.S.–Mexican border.
Chuy Morán, the hardscrabble artist who became the king of Juárez velvet painters and, for a time, a very wealthy man.
A.M. Shawar and other Palestinian emigrés in Edmonton, Alberta, who sold velvet paintings all over the Great White North, even flying them into isolated villages in the Canadian outback.
Hundreds of Scientology students in Florida who paid for their schooling by hawking velvet paintings during “velvet’s last hurrah” during the 1980s.

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Filed under art, economics, Mexico, migration, U.S.

by Joel | 6 November 2007 · 5:42 pm

How Zacatecans Became Risk-takers

From Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2007), pp. 42-45:

On a map, Zacatecas looks like an amoeba in the middle of Mexico. Its lines curve in and out of territories with the logic of a modern art painting. On the ground, the state is vast and beautifully rugged. In parts, mesquite trees pock forbidding deserts of beige dust. Elsewhere, the-desolation gives way to dirt the color of cayenne pepper. But whatever its color, the land of Zacatecas never could hold people to it.

The Zacatecan upper classes owned large tracts of land, much of which they’d inherited, but were averse to investing in anything more than their houses.

“There are very few classic entrepreneurs in Zacatecas, in the strict sense of people who, with their own resources, create jobs,” said Rodolfo Garcia, a professor of immigration and development studies at the University of Zacatecas. “In Mexico, the capitalist class has mostly grown due to the support and money of the government. The capitalist class in Zacatecas, more than in any other state, has grown up on public money.”

The extraction and export of raw materials began in the late 1800s, when mining ruled Zacatecas. The minerals from Zacatecas went elsewhere to be processed into something of greater value. When the mines gave out, they were replaced by ranching and agriculture but not by a new attitude toward risk. Zacatecas, the Mexican state that produces more beans and chiles than any other, still has few companies that process those products into, say, canned beans and canned chiles. Almost everything produced in Zacatecas leaves for places where it is transformed into something of greater profit.

This includes its people. Nothing has left Zacatecas like its people. Emigration to the United States began in the late 1800s, declined in the 1930s, then picked up a momentum in the 1940s that it hasn’t lost. No Mexican state has a greater percentage of its people in the United States than craggy, red Zacatecas.

The folks who left were the state’s real risk-takers. They risked their own capital—their lives—on the promise of a better return than Zacatecas offered. For most of them, the bet paid off. In time in the United States, they opened businesses, bought houses, and sent their kids to school….

Strangely, immigrants’ daring and risk-taking indirectly stymied what the state needed most—which was a daring, risk-taking state of mind. Instead of using immigrant dollars to jump-start an industrial economy, Zacatecas simply limped along, addicted to the dollar injections. Immigrants became the state’s primary foreign investors and job creators. They hired local folks to build lavish homes in the villages they’d left as paupers.

Then came the Mexican presidential election of 1988. The ruling PRI faced real competition for the first time in its history. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas—a PRI apostate who had left the party—formed a movement that would become the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Sinaloan businessman Manuel Clouthier rejuvenated the National Action Party (PAN) by swiveling it away from right-wing social morality and toward the issues of corruption and efficient government services.

Cárdenas and Clouthier were the first Mexican presidential candidates to visit the United States and avidly court immigrants. The PRI and its candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, beat back their challenge through massive vote fraud. But the 1988 election showed the PRI that immigrants up north were a dangerously uncoopted source of dissent. Salinas set up an office of Attention to Mexicans Abroad.

Zacatecas Gov. Genaro Borrego tried another idea. Every dollar immigrants put up for public works projects in their villages, he announced, the government would match. It started as “1 for 1” and quickly expanded to “2 for 1″—with money from the state and federal governments. Immigrants could stretch their dollars, and Zacatecan villages could get the schools, wells, and clinics they needed.

For decades, the PRI had used budgets to buy off union leaders, businessmen, academics, and neighborhood groups. Zacatecas’s “2 for 1” was the party’s first try at buying off immigrants in the United States, and it grew largely from the PRI’s 1988 election scare. Zacatecan immigrants were urged to form village clubs and raise money for projects back home.

But the PRI miscalculated. These immigrants were no longer the humble campesinos who went hat-in-hand to mayors across Mexico. They’d done well in the United States, and felt confident in their abilities. They blamed the PRI for having to leave their villages. They weren’t about to let the party push them around up in the United States, too.

The clubs they formed were not docile. On the contrary, as the party pushed, immigrants pushed back. They insisted on a say in how their money was spent. The PRI was adamantly secular, but when some clubs insisted that the money they put up be used to renovate village churches, the government relented.

Because of “2 for 1,” Zacatecans became the best-organized Mexican immigrants in the United States. By the time Andres Bermudez ran for mayor of Jerez, there were some 240 of these clubs in the United States. No other Mexican state had even half that number. They invested millions of dollars in public works. Their money built the necessities for their people back home that the government hadn’t provided. In time, immigrants nurtured a righteous sense of their economic importance to Zacatecas.

Yet they religiously avoided politics. Mexican politics had been the exclusive domain of lawyers, teachers, merchants. Every ranchero seemed to know some fool who’d gone into politics and lost everything, been jailed or killed, or gotten rich and turned on his friends. So while Zacatecan immigrant prosperity created a vast ranchero constituency in the United States with money, organization, and talent, it was oblivious to its own political potential. That’s how things remained until the late 1990s, when a lot began to change back home.

Sam Quinones on Two Mexicos

This post from its introduction concludes my series of excerpts from the fascinating book, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001). I look forward to reading his newest book, which I ordered at the same time.

The Priista/licenciado is the modern version of the hacienda owner and the Spanish noble. He doesn’t return phone calls to anyone less important than he is. He is accountable only to those above him. He keeps those seeking employment waiting in his lobby for hours because he can. His shoes are too well shined to belong to anyone who really works. His sinecure insulates him from the higher standards the world demands, and from this he derives his inertia.

The Priista/licenciado culture remains an anchor around the neck of Mexico’s development. It assumes the superiority of those with power and thus is fundamentally unfair. Though clad in double-breasted suits, this part of Mexico remains emotionally stuck in the sixteenth century. It is the modern expression of the ossified top-down, hierarchical tradition left the country by the Aztecs, the Spanish, the Catholic Church, and the dictator Porfirio Diaz. This side of Mexico is hardly ready for the demands of democracy and the global economy. The very term licenciado is supposed to conjure up some kind of innate wisdom. The licenciado doesn’t need to prove his worth; he is entitled to more than his labor produces. The Priista is a Priista precisely because adhering to the state endows him with special rights. Mexico’s world-famous corruption has its roots here, and so therefore does Mexicans’ belief that their society is unjust.

I mention all this because this part of Mexico is what the world seems to know best. Certainly the press, other governments, and tourists are most aware of the official, elite, corrupt Mexico; the Mexico that won’t allow a poor man a chance; the Mexico behind the sunglasses. I’ve even been told by people, including Mexicans, that this is Mexican culture. But I know that’s not true. There is another Mexico.

This other side is vital and dynamic and is often found on Mexico’s margins. The other side of Mexico is not always pretty, but it is self-reliant and adventurous.

And this Mexico is what this book is about….

The emigrant stands for the country’s vital side. He uses his wits and imagination. He strikes out on his own, looking for a future. One emigrant does not require two people attending to his needs. Some twelve million Mexicans reside year-round in the United States. Many millions more have lived and worked there or spend part of the year up north. The United States is now part of the Mexican reality and is where this other Mexico is often found, reinventing itself.

Official Mexico holds their absence against them. Emigrants are resented for their daring. In official Mexico’s twisted point of view, emigrants must explain why they aren’t traitors to their country….

The country’s greatest modern catastrophe is that it has treated the emigrant poorly and thus been deprived of his dynamism. His absence is of greater consequence to Mexico than the nineteenth-century territorial losses of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Mexico survives today largely because the emigrant cannot bring himself to fail his country the way the licenciado so miserably fails him.

Much the same could be said for the Philippines and so many other major exporters of migrant labor.

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Filed under Mexico, migration

by Joel | 18 September 2007 · 8:21 pm

Lumpy Japanese Diaspora in a Well

Jonathan Dresner has a tantalizing post about lesser-known participants in the Japanese diaspora at Frog in a Well. Here’s the introduction.

I’m always interested in interesting tales and connections regarding the Japanese diaspora. Here’s a couple that I’ve run across: New research on Japanese settlers in Korea; Jorge Luis Borges, the great surrealist, married a Nikkei Argentinian woman late in life; Japanese post-WWII settlers in the Dominican Republic abandoned by both governments. I love being part — a small part, but nonetheless — of the diaspora studies movement. We’re complicating the history of the world, chronicling the wonderful diversity of seemingly simple things.

I followed Konrad’s note about Sayaka’s new blog and the post at the top points me to this Asahi report about a new research conference about “Japantowns” in colonial Korea. The tendency of Japanese migrations to be … lumpy? maybe there’s a better word… anyway, they often involve a lot of people from the same region ending up in the same place. It happened in the Hokkaido settlement, it happened in the migration to Hawai‘i, it was deliberately built into the Manchurian settlement program.

The Oaxaca Diaspora’s Protestant Ethic

My rule of thumb is to try to blog no more than about a page per chapter (depending on the lengths of the chapters) from the books I buy and read, but the following excerpt is from my favorite chapter so far in a book where I can hardly resist “reading aloud” every few pages. I was undecided about which of three thematic passages to cite: on Mexico’s Okies (the victim angle), Oaxacan self-help (the agency angle), or religion (the spiritual angle). I ended up concatenating two of the three. So I’ll have to do hard penance by biting my tongue through several other chapters. From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 102-103, 110-111:

Mexicans generally view the border and those who live there as only semi-Mexican—too close to the gringo, where too many of his ways are imitated. In truth, that is what shaped the [San Quintín] valley. With drip irrigation farmers saw the potential of growing for both the United States and Mexico and dropped subsistence farming for a very American capitalist ethic. Acres under cultivation went from two thousand in 1980 to almost twenty thousand in 1990. Nighttime electricity came to San Quintín. Then a few stores, a couple of motels, a movie theater, satellite television.

“I have uncles in the state of Zacatecas who grow chile,” says Ruiz Esparza, “They harvest the crop, but only apart of the profits goes back into the fields. They’re afraid of risking it all. Here, it seems they’re a little crazy. They risk it all every year. People here aren’t interested in having money in their wallet. Everything they have goes back into the fields.

“I look at the farmers of Oceanside, Bakersfield, Oxnard battling against the city, high water prices, taxes, and I see them keep going. They’re very brave. I think having those people before us as examples inspires us to do the same. If they can do it, why can’t we?”

From the north, San Quintín had its market, and from there it imported machinery, capital, and an entrepreneurial spirit. What the valley of San Quintín had never had was abundant labor. And that came from the south.

The Dust Bowl in all this became the states of Guerrero and, above all, Oaxaca, both states with enormous Indian populations who retain the customs and languages of their ancestors. Like the northerners with whom they now live, they are considered somewhat less than Mexican, disdained as “dirty Indians.” It was a strange yet perhaps appropriate pairing: two outcasts coming together to create something in the dust of the northern Mexico desert.

Agriculture in Oaxaca, like that in Oklahoma during the Depression, is a limp and stagnant thing. Inefficient farming and the division of land into ever smaller slivers have bequeathed the state a withering poverty, bloody feuds over land ownership, and generations of uneducated children. Hundreds of thousands of Oaxacan Indians—Mixtecos primarily, but also Triquis and Zapotecos—have been leaving home for four decades now. They are Mexico’s migrants, the cheapest labor in a cheap-labor country. “They provided labor that was easily exploited,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Human Rights Center in Tijuana. “They were docile, didn’t speak Spanish, would accept almost any treatment and work hard.”…

But in Tijuana, migrant Indians also discovered San Quintín’s almost unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. Through the late 1970s and 1980s the valley evolved into a major stop on the Indians’ migrant trail, part of what came to be known informally as “Oaxacalifornia”—the diaspora that starts in San Quintín and runs through North San Diego County and up the state. Entire families came to the valley to live in labor camps designed for transient men. The camps teemed, and the work was tough in the hot sun and choking dust. But it was work, which was something Indians had never had in Oaxaca….

Indians transformed their new home when they came here to live. But just as profoundly, their new home changed them. And the clearest distillation of all those changes is the Protestant Church. “If you take a poll, you’ll find that 80 or 85 percent of those who are established here now are Protestant,” says Meza. That number might be high. But Protestant churches—especially of the more fundamentalist bent—proliferate in the valley. Indians here have become Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, and scads of obscure denominations to which Luther’s Reformation gave rise. The new churches are symbols of economic success, of modernity, of the monumental power and attraction of the United States. The adoption of a Protestant faith is almost standard issue in leaving Oaxaca for a future.

And that process is best told by one man who, now in his late forties, stands clapping in unison with the rest of the Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus. Twenty years ago Luis Guerrero took his family and left his Oaxacan Indian pueblo and its traditions, moved to the valley of San Quintín, and hasn’t yet looked back in fondness.

Guerrero, a Mixtec Indian who speaks halting Spanish in a thick Indian accent, faced a brutish dead-end life as a subsistence farmer, depending on unpredictable rains, in the village of Santa María Asuncion, where landholdings were no longer measured in acres but in meters.

In 1972 Guerrero was among fifteen people who had to pay for the village’s traditional party for its patron saint, the Virgin of Asuncion. It was the custom: every year a few people had to become deeply impoverished to throw the three-day party for everyone else. His job was daunting: he had to give 2,000 pesos—the equivalent of two and a half years’ local wages at the time—to buy food and alcohol for everyone, fireworks, candles, and more. The responsibility almost broke him. He borrowed the money at high interest rates, then left his young family and pueblo for that year to pick tomatoes in Sinaloa to pay it back.

In 1974 he began migrating to San Quintín with his family. Finally in 1978 they moved here to live, leaving Oaxaca forever.

Away from the cloistered atmosphere of his Oaxacan village, Luis Guerrero began a religious and secular awakening, one he likes to illustrate by talking about the books he bought.

In San Quintín he bought his first book ever—a Bible. In Oaxaca he had never read a Bible; though the whole village was Catholic, no one owned one. Like everyone else, he depended on a priest to know what it said. “I began reading it and I began to awaken my mind…. I like knowing myself: I went to the Catholic Church, the Apostolic Church, Prince of Peace, Los Olivares, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Open Door—to see how each denomination preached.” He finally settled on the Apostolic Assembly.

Now thirsting for more, he bought his second book—a copy of the Mexican constitution. “In our pueblos in Oaxaca, we didn’t know the earthly law, or how to defend ourselves [legally]. Also we didn’t know spiritual law. So I searched on my own to discover what constitutional law said. I searched on my own to discover what the Bible said so that I myself could understand earthly law and spiritual law.

“Earthly law allows you to speak up for your rights with the police, the bosses. That’s why I put forth an effort to learn it. [In the villages] people don’t have education. The [local] authorities pressure them to fulfill tradition. They want them to put on traditional parties. [In Oaxaca] you can’t give your children education because the little money you earn you have to spend on parties for the saints. Our children have no shoes because of tradition. We came here to leave all that behind.”

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Filed under economics, Mexico, migration, religion, U.S.

by Joel | 5 August 2007 · 3:52 pm

Black Resorts in the U.S., White Resorts in Japan

From Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), pp. 152-153

Even though we’d been going there since I was two years old, such was the arrogance of black privilege on that island that it never even occurred to me that white people had summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard until I was ten or eleven years old. Of course I saw white people at the Flying Horses, at Our Market, and at the tennis courts off South Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs. But I assumed they were just passing through as guests of black people who had homes there, or as unrooted tourists. Just people passing through a place that was ours.

But of course Martha’s Vineyard had white families. The black neighborhoods of Oak Bluffs were dwarfed by the white sections in the town and by the white population that dominated the rest of Martha’s Vineyard. But I was a summer kid who defined the resort by the boundaries of the black neighborhoods and by whole days and evenings spent with our extended black family in our all-black tennis tournaments, all-black yachting trips, all-black art shows, and all-black cookouts, and the white vacationers had no relevance for me.

As I grew older, I saw what my younger and more naive, self-satisfied eyes had missed. As an adolescent, I finally paid notice to the racial lines that long ago had been drawn between blacks and whites on Martha’s Vineyard. I eventually even saw the many hierarchies that existed within the groups of blacks who summered there. But in spite of these changed perceptions and my newfound confrontation with reality, the one unalterable impression that remains today is that when vacationing among our own kind, in places that have been embraced by us for so long, there is a comfort—and a sanctity—that makes it almost possible to forget that there is a white power structure touching our lives at all.

Today, America’s black elite is closely associated with three historic resort areas that became popular as a result of laws that had kept other vacation spots exclusively white. They are Sag Harbor, Long Island; Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard; and Highland Beach, Maryland. In the past, and to some extent still today, blacks also choose Hillside Inn, a black-owned resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains; and Idlewild, Michigan, a small town two hundred miles north of Detroit that was a popular escape for the midwestern black elite. In recent years, the elite have built ancillary vacations around the annual Black Summit ski vacation event that brings hundreds of black skiers and their families to resorts in Aspen and Vail, Colorado.

Until I read this book, I had never given much thought to the favorite resorts of America’s black elites, but a lot of what Graham says about Oak Bluffs and Martha’s Vineyard conjures up memories of my own childhood experiences at a couple of the favorite resorts of foreigners long resident in Japan: Karuizawa and Lake Nojiri.

Starting in the 1920s, many missionaries of all denominations from Europe and North America would spend summers in rustic cabins at Lake Nojiri’s Gaijin-mura (“Foreigner-ville”), where they could boat, golf, hike, play tennis, swim, read, relax, and catch up with other missionaries from all over Japan. An earlier generation of missionaries during the late 1800s had helped turn Karuizawa into what’s now a thriving upscale resort where only the very wealthy can afford to buy vacation homes. The Nojiri Lake Association seeks to prevent the same thing from happening to Gaijin-mura by enforcing rustic standards: for instance, by keeping roads and paths unpaved, and by allowing electricity but not indoor plumbing. The last time I was there, in 1975, we had to haul water in buckets from community faucets. It was considered bad form to run a hose all the way into your cabin’s kitchen or toilet.

Our family spent a week or so at Karuizawa in 1957, the same year Japan’s current Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko first met on a tennis court there. We stayed at the rustic cabin of one of my father’s Quaker cronies, Herbert Nicholson, a prewar missionary in Mito who was affectionately known to the postwar generation of Japanese schoolkids as Uncle Goat (Yagi no ojisan) for his relief work after the war.

We couldn’t afford a vacation cabin of our own. We depended instead on the kindness of cronies with different furlough schedules. The next year we spent a week or so at an isolated beach bungalow in Chiba that belonged to a wealthier Japanese American missionary family from Waimea, Kaua‘i. My mother enjoyed the absence of other missionary wives, and we two eldest boys enjoyed playing on a big derelict fishing boat lying on the beach, then watching the fishermen and their often bare-chested wives haul their boats up on shore every day at dusk.

The next summer we two oldest boys took a long overnight train trip by ourselves, up the Japan Sea side from Kyoto to Aomori, to visit another missionary family there with boys of the same age. That family brought us back down to the annual Southern Baptist summer mission meeting at Amagi Sanso, up in the mountains of the Izu Peninsula.

The physical environment at mission meetings was very Japanese: each family had its own tatami room, older boys and girls slept in separate group rooms, males and females of all ages bathed in separate public baths, and everyone removed shoes inside the buildings. But the cultural environment was very American: from Southern fried chicken, Kool-Aid, and 12-oz. cans of Coke, to loud talk, boisterous laughter, and emotion-laden church services. I found the unrestrained gregariousness and emotionality rather alien and intimidating. But I can imagine that it was a great relief for the American-raised missionaries to finally let loose after working in a foreign culture for most of the year.

Those missionaries who had dachas at Lake Nojiri would then spend a few more weeks of Euro-American summer vacation before returning to the stress of work and school in the majority culture. My first summer at Nojiri was after 10th grade, when our family borrowed the cabin of another family on furlough. I took a junior life-saving class, went sailing a time or two with friends who had boats, and played the only round of golf I’ve ever played.

At mission meeting that year (1964), I had hung around with an agemate who had arrived in Japan on the same ship I did in 1950. I was painfully shy; she was not. That relationship intensified in the back of the overnight bus full of missionary families en route to Nojiri, but our summer romance ended when my family returned to Hiroshima, hers returned to Mito, and we each returned to our respective high schools in Kobe and Tokyo that fall. (Our next and final date was at her senior prom in Tokyo.)

My next mission meeting’s budding romance was nipped in the bud when neither of us went to Nojiri that year. She was a schoolmate and we had already been to the junior prom together, but my family didn’t get a cabin that year, and her parents didn’t approve of such long vacations. So we spent the rest of that summer at our respective homes in Hiroshima and Osaka, and then found other distractions when school resumed in the fall. Such were the disadvantages of not frequenting the right resorts.

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Filed under family, Japan, migration, U.S.

by Joel | 22 December 2006 · 4:57 pm

The Oldest Mosque in North America

Freelance journalist and journalism professor Michael Judge profiled the oldest mosque in North America in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–Not far from the banks of the Cedar River and the concrete silos of the Quaker Oats plant, in a working class neighborhood adorned with Christmas lights and American flags, sits the oldest mosque in North America. Founded in 1934, and admitted to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, it’s not what you think of when you think of a mosque. There is no lofty minaret, no balcony for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer. There is, however, a place of worship that most resembles a one-room schoolhouse–a single-story, white clapboard box with plain black shutters. If it weren’t for the crescent-topped green vinyl dome and the canopy above the entrance bearing the words “The Mother Mosque of America: Islamic Cultural & Heritage Center,” one might easily mistake it for a modest, if not meager, Pentecostal church, which indeed it was for a brief stint in its history before being abandoned altogether….

“We’ve been here for four and now five generations,” says Imam Tawil, pointing to a panoramic black-and-white photo of dozens of early settlers; the picture dates to 1936 and shows an imam and priest, both of Middle Eastern descent, proudly shaking hands in the center. “We’re as old as the oak trees in Iowa,” he continues. “We’re part of the fabric of this great state. We’re Americans with dreams and aspirations.” Many of the earliest Muslim settlers came to Cedar Rapids in the late 19th century from what is now Lebanon to work the farmland and raise crops of their own. As the community grew, it needed a permanent place to worship. Despite the hard times of the Great Depression, the local Muslim community pooled its resources and the “Mother Mosque” was dedicated on June 16, 1934. Sixteen young men from the Muslim community here served their country in World War II; two of those men never made it home. Since then, Muslim-Americans from eastern Iowa have served their country in nearly every major military conflict. “At least 20 members of the community are currently enlisted in the military,” says Imam Tawil. “Several are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq right now.” Cedar Rapids is now home to Muslims from some 30 countries, including Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, dozens of Iraqi families–mainly Shiites who rose up against Saddam–found refuge here. Today, of the 700 Muslim families who call eastern Iowa home, more than 50 are from Iraq. “Nearly all of these refugees are striving to become U.S. citizens,” says Imam Tawil, who emigrated from Jerusalem in 1983 and became a U.S. citizen in 1990. A Palestinian by birth, he says, “I have never had citizenship anywhere else but America. Every time I vote I feel so proud because I didn’t have this right in my home country.” Around the same time that he became a U.S. citizen, Imam Tawil set out to renovate and restore the Mother Mosque. The building, which had gone vacant after housing a Pentecostal church and a teen center, was purchased in 1990; renovations began in 1991 and a grand opening was held in February 1992. The mosque serves mainly as a cultural and historical center since a modern Islamic Center was completed in 1971.

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Filed under Islam, migration, religion, U.S.