Texas Textbooks Revisited

Given Audrey’s post on the Texas textbook controversy several weeks ago, I was excited to see the issue pop up again, this time framed in an interesting context and with some connection to this week’s discussion.

“Studies in Crap” is a weekly blog written by Alan Scherstuhl for The Pitch (a Kansas City news/entertainment/events website). This week’s find is a 1932 Texas history textbook entitled The Lone Star State: A School History, by C.R. Wharton. Given this week’s emphasis on issues of Native American and Latino identity, the post’s focus on these two groups was particularly interesting.

In an attitude derived from the philosophy of states’ rights, Wharton decries the reservation system as an example of unnecessary federal spending: “Nor did this handling of the Indians suit the white people. They worked hard to make a living without the assistance of the government and they resented the government’s aid to the Indians.”[1] Nowhere does it mention the forced relocation, broken promises, and crippling poverty that have too often defined relations between the US government and Native Americans. According to Wharton, this “aid” was purely benign and completely undeserved. Looking back a couple weeks to our discussion of feminism, Wharton’s argument is resurrected by the Reagan administration 50 years later in the form of the lazy, conniving welfare queen.

Shifting focus to relations with Mexico (specifically the Mexican-American War), Wharton’s words provide an interesting dimension to the arguments surrounding Hispanic immigration to the United States today. He decries Mexican President Bustamante, who in an effort to halt American migration into Texas (then held by Mexico), passed an 1830 law “prohibiting further immigration from the United States.”[2] Such a measure was cruel, Wharton argues, since “[s]uch an act would have kept relatives and friends of the settlers from joining them in their new homes.”[3]

A Call for Empathy

The Huffington Post is a favorite blog of mine, so when in the course of my surfing I ran across Jeffrey Kaye’s February 25^th article, “Short Memories: Jews and Immigration,” I thought it was a really timely post given last week’s discussion.

Kaye’s thesis is simple but hardly without controversy, “that the Jewish immigration experience over the past century has more in common with present-day migrants than many Jews recognize or fully appreciate,” and that his fellow American Jews “would do well to draw a lesson from our own history and resist the temptation to scapegoat and demonize those whose crimes consist mainly of crossing political boundaries in search of better lives.” [1]

This week 2/17

For those outside the class who are interested in joining the conversation online, this week we are reading:

Anzia Yezierska’s 1925 novel, Bread Givers, which tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, a Jewish immigrant girl struggling to make her way in the world.

Two articles from The Public Historian.

– Ruth J. Abram, “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” The Public Historian 29, No. 1 (Winter 2007): 59-76.

– Maggie Russell-Ciardi, “The Museum as a Democracy-Building Institution: Reflections on the Shared Journeys Program at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum,” The Public Historian 30, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 39-52.

And, finally, we are analyzing the content on the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s website.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

South Park Addresses Immigration

In the South Park episode “Goobacks” (4.28.2004), the town is infiltrated by people from the year 3045 who have entered the nation through a time portal and are looking for work.  The future is dismal; the economy is failing and jobs are very hard to find.  The people of the future do not look like the citizens of South Park.  They are a product of homogenization, a mix of all races displaying a yellowish-brownish-whitish color.  Race is no issue in the future because all races have mixed into one.  Their language has followed the same trend, and is a mix of all world languages.  As the people from the future begin to find work, citizens of South Park become increasingly angry.  They are losing their jobs because the immigrants from the future are willing to work for very low wages.  Does this social commentary which South Park producers do so well surprise you?

It makes perfect sense to me.  The episode aired in 2004, when immigration debates were becoming more and more heated.  It is no coincidence that the future immigrants were called “goobacks” as they crossed through a time boarder found in the desert.  This allusion to Mexican immigrants crossing the Mexican boarder into America reveals the contention surrounding this debate within American politics and society.  The episode parodies The O’Reily Factor, where a conservative working class man and a liberal “hippie” debate over the immigrant problem. These conflicting view points are rooted in “an economic debate regarding immigration’s impact on America’s business and labor, and civic debate over whether immigrants represent a sound addition to the U.S. polity” (Jacobson, Root Too, 347).

Mr. Garrison is mandated by the school board to teach his class in both future speak and present day English.  The boys are unhappy about his change, and feel that if the future immigrants are in the present time, they should learn to speak the present day language.  Sound familiar?  The current immigrant debate is closely connected to arguments surrounding language and used as ammunition in the assimilation argument.  Some believe that if an immigrant is not “willing” to learn English, then they are rejecting American values and have intentions of creating their own separate nation within the country.

Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America, discusses the current immigrant debate and its underlying truth that people fear “the browning of America”.  Immigration patterns of the late twentieth and twenty first centuries have shifted from European countries to Asia, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean.  Pride for the “nation of immigrants” displayed by so many white ethnics since the 1960s is changing to become selective and elitist.

As South Park’s ‘liberal hippie’ asked, “Your ancestors came to this country as immigrants.  What right do you have to turn these people away?”  To this question, many white ethnics turn to their ‘collective identity’ as Europeans who share the same values, customs, traditions – and the unspoken reality of whiteness.  This nativist thinking is collective memory turned selective memory, as white ethnics forget the initial negative perceptions of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants.  As the faces of American immigrants include more faces of color, the historic narrative of white ethnicity is used as a social and political tactic in the perpetuation of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.

Blaming immigrants for America’s problems?

"The Cause of it All," Judge, November 6, 1897, Courtesy of the New York State Historical Association