1. Im/migration History
2. Playing for Keeps
A Brief Colonial History of
Carnival and Powwow
COMPARATIVE COLONIALISMS
This chapter compares Carnival and powwow, framing them as responses to colonialism. I trace the history of Carnival in Trinidad from slavery days through emancipation in 1838 and the subsequent colonial administration of a profoundly mixed-race society. I follow pan-Indian culture through the 1880s, when the Dawes Act allocated Indian lands during the final phase of military conflict over the western frontier, and into the twentieth century, with its history of federal attempts to assimilate or eradicate native peoples and culture. The chapter continues a short way into the twentieth century, concluding with a description of Carnival and powwow in their contemporary im/migrant incarnations in Brooklyn and Minneapolis.
Throughout their long histories in this hemisphere, Carnival and powwow have responded to three central themes in Caribbean and Indian social experience: migration, colonial administration, and, in the twentieth century, the astounding reach and celerity of mass culture. These three things are, of course, linked: the forced migration of Africans in the Middle Passage resulted in their invention and remembering of a culture that was subject to vicious repression first by slaveholders, later by the postemancipation hierarchies of Caribbean colonies. American Indians were forced west by pressure from Euroamerican expansion. Removal of eastern nations to Oklahoma, for example, resulted in the formation
Both Helen Safa and Errol Hill suggest that the inability of Africans to return to their actual geographic homelands has a lot to do with the richness of Afro-Creole culture in the New World. Rooted in the concept of culture, rather than any specific place, slaves and their descendants forged a uniquely “indigenous culture,” as Hill phrases it.[2] While the respect given by these Caribbeanists to the power of diasporic memory is appropriate in light of the tremendous syncretic capacity of Afro-Atlantic cultures to remember and reinvent history, the example of Native American experience in the United States provides an illuminating parallel, connecting feats of cultural memory with geographic removal.
Rather than being barred from returning home, American Indians have had the experience of being interned and administered on their own land. They have been removed from or legally deprived of specific places that their nations held sacred; relocated to “Indian territories” on reservations or in Oklahoma; and then administered through the culturally genocidal practices of Indian boarding schools and the prohibition of Indian religions. As both Gloria Anzaldúa and John Martínez Weston point out, native and mestizo peoples often inhabit lands that are historically theirs but have been reshaped by colonial power.[3] Ties to the land are important as practice, much as ties to Africa or to a syncretic Afro-Creole culture are the products of historical struggle. “It is the land,” asserts Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, “real and imagined, lived in heritage and current political process, and expressed in discourse, which constitutes the connection between nature and culture for Indians.”[4] As evidenced by contemporary struggles at Black Mountain, the Paha Sapa (Black Hills), and Mole Lake, to name only a few, simple geographic proximity does not necessarily facilitate access to cultural practices of the land.[5] Patterns of im/migration and administration partially determine the relationship of diasporic peoples to their homes. I will discuss these two strands of Indian and Caribbean history together, and then move on to consider the role of mass culture in what Robert Orsi calls “the inner history” of im/migration.[6]
HEMISPHERIC MOVES
For both Indian and Caribbean people, moves to New York City and Minneapolis after World War II were only the most recent phase of ongoing migrations. People have moved throughout the history of this hemisphere, responding initially to the pressures of colonization and slavery that moved Indians west and brought Africans to the New World, and, in the twentieth century, to the hemispheric politics of labor and resources. Im/migration involves cycles of regional and hemispheric economic development; political restrictions such as immigration policy and official relocation programs; and local negotiations about municipal empowerment. The international economy has always pulled local versions of identity into a broader dialogue: race and class, ethnicity and nation are powerful narratives told both within and beyond the borders of the nation at different historical junctures.
From colonial conflicts over land up to the present-day pattern of leaving the reservations to find employment, migration has been a central feature of the experience of Indian people. The historical exigencies of such geographic mobility have brought about, in turn, cultural invention and change. The relocation of many nations to “Indian territory” in Oklahoma after 1830 brought different Indian cultures into close proximity. Such proximity, as James Howard and others have argued, led to the development of a pan-Indian culture in Oklahoma.[7] This pan-Indian culture centrally featured the powwow, which had long been a site where Indian nations have met to socialize.[8] As both William Powers and Carol Rachlin point out, the development of a pan-Indian culture in Oklahoma did not extinguish specific tribal cultures; nor does it signal the inevitability of assimilation. “There is no renascence of Indian culture in central and western Oklahoma,” Rachlin argues, “because Indian culture there never died in order to be reborn.”[9]
Relocation to Oklahoma brought diverse Indian peoples together. Before the Dawes Act (1887), the federal government used Oklahoma as a place to exile defeated Indian nations from the Midwest, South, and Southwest. Many of the newly arrived exiles, then, carried along with them the recent memory of pan-Indian political alliances, such as the one in the Ohio River Valley between Shawnee, Potowatomie, Miami, and Delaware nations in the early part of the nineteenth century, or other struggles, such as the Apache-Comanche resistance in Arizona and New Mexico.[10] At a powwow in Hinckley, Minnesota, during the summer of
It is important here to distinguish between assimilation, which denotes the gradual melting of different cultural groups into Americans, and acculturation, which signals the ongoing process of cultural adaptation and change. Many scholars have written about the ways Indians used Christian and federal institutions (churches, schools) to further their survival in an increasingly Euroamerican context and simultaneously to preserve native cultures.[11] Indians often drew on Euroamericans' efforts to assimilate them for their own ends; federal boarding schools in the twentieth century, as both K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Brenda Childs have documented, served Indian parents in hard times when they could not provide for their children's well-being, as well as becoming sites of resistance, where children from diverse tribes educated one another in their religious beliefs and languages, intermarried, and forged new political alliances.[12] Pan-Indian practices, such as the Ghost Dance of the 1880s and 1890s, allowed for the circulation of traditional Indian forms of dance, song, and culture around the fragmented geography of this time period. The Ghost Dance Movement used the trains and mail service to circulate people and ideas; many of its leaders, educated in missions or in off-reservation schools, used English as a movement lingua franca.[13] Both boarding schools and other pan-Indian forms, such as the Ghost Dance and the Native American Church, the Society of American Indians, and even the notorious Wild West shows aided in the circulation of cultural forms between Oklahoma and the Plains, and from these two centers of colonial pan-Indianism throughout Indian nations in the United States and Canada.[14] Michael Rynkiewich traces the spread of the Grass Dance from Oklahoma tribes such as the Pawnee to the Dakota by the end of the nineteenth century, and east to Minnesota and Wisconsin Ojibwa in the early twentieth century.[15] Pan-Indian diffusion combines with local tradition and invention in complex forms such as the Grass Dance, which is danced to local forms of drumming by dancers who wear costumes bearing both local and intertribal markings.
With the end of the period of removal and the implementation of the reservation system, Indian people were relegated to small pieces of land. Because the Dawes Act allotted land to individuals rather than along traditional lines, the reservation system after 1887 resulted in loss of land to entrepreneurs who offered quick cash for ancestral holdings; to swindlers who swapped paper titles for farm and forest land; and to outright theft by federal agents and Euroamerican settlers. In addition, the reservation system often broke up existing family and band alliances. Lakota individuals from a band near Pine Ridge, for example, might find themselves enrolled on the Rosebud or Standing Rock reservation. This tendency of the reservation system to break up existing social ties was exacerbated by the blood quantum standard, which mandated that individuals had to prove one-quarter lineage from a specific reservation to be officially recognized as Indian. The reservation system disrupted indigenous political organizations: the systems Indian people had devised to deal with cultural contact and trade. Aware of the potentially devastating effects of allotment on Indian life, both traditional leaders and a newer generation of reservation “progressives” struggled to maintain native lands and identities.[16] And, as Harold Hickerson argues, this colonial displacement brought about an emphasis on cultural organizations, such as drum societies and local councils, in Indian social life.[17]
Federal Indian policy attempted to break up native relationships: to the land; to social organizations of band and nation; and to religious and cultural practices. Because of their association with Indian military resistance, many religious and cultural forms were driven underground. Noel Dyck contrasts the efforts of Indian people to maintain their lands and culture to the impetus of U.S. and Canadian policy in implementing reservation systems in the late nineteenth century, explaining that federal policy assaulted all forms of Indian community in the interests of promoting the individualism necessary for capitalist development.[18]
At the same time that federal policy assaulted existing practices, it stressed the assimilation of Indian people during the postallotment period.[19] Colonel Richard H. Pratt had founded a boarding school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879 with the motto “Kill the Indian and civilize the man.”[20] Indian boarding schools attempted to silence and shame Indian students, and to prevent them from speaking their languages or practicing their cultures and religions, going so far as to force Indian boys to dress as girls until they spoke English.[21] The standard curriculum at federal boarding schools, half days in the classroom and the rest
By forcing geographical and cultural relocation, the boarding schools attempted cultural genocide in the name of assimilation and progress. At the same time, the boarding schools created a group of English-speaking intellectuals. Many of these bicultural individuals were involved in political pan-Indian reform efforts, such as the Indian Reform Association, founded in 1882.[24] Like the relocation to Oklahoma, the boarding schools forced Indians from diverse regions and cultures together. In addition to the class of reformers who emerged from the boarding school experience, the many Indian students went back home with common experiences and with a cultural pan-Indianism forged out of the immediate exigencies of institutional life. Lomawaima writes: “Tribal and pan-Indian identity were reinforced, not diluted, in Indian schools.”[25] Along with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the boarding schools, most of them located in the Midwest, helped to disseminate and popularize Plains Indian traditions as pan-Indian style.[26]
Indian people responded to forced relocation and cultural prohibitions with syncretic invention and historical alacrity. Similarly, the history of Carnival illuminates the ongoing struggle of Caribbean people as they created a home in exile from their diverse nations of origin. The history of Carnival begins in Trinidad and then travels, along with various migrations, throughout the Caribbean and later to Britain, Canada, and the United States.
Characterized by an eighteenth-century observer as “the sinkhole of the Eastern Caribbean,” colonial Trinidad was a refuge for diverse populations of escaped slaves, renegade revolutionaries, and Catholics who did not fit into the British colonial order of other West Indian colonies. The island was settled by French, Spanish, and British colonists; by French republicans fleeing Napoleon's ascendancy; by generations of Creole and African slaves as well as free Blacks, some of whom had served in the British forces in Virginia; by Africans escaped from slave ships or freed from service in the
Carnival has traditionally been a site where the complex class and ethnic relationships among this diverse population have been articulated through inversion, parody, and imagination.[28] Where American Indians were “removed” out of the way of the developing United States, Afro-Creole slaves and their European owners were forced into an uneasy cohabitation on plantations as well as in cities. Because of its liberal colonization policies and the comparatively late introduction of sugar, Trinidad did not have the same rate of absentee plantation landlords as other colonies, such as Cuba and Santo Domingo. In addition, the presence of a sizable population of free people of color complicated the race question, both before and after emancipation. The colonial administration of culture provided symbolic resolution to questions of race and power, much as it did in the case of the federal Indian policy. Because the Afro-Creole and African populations were a much larger proportion of their populations in the Caribbean than Indians were in North America, the African influence permeated Caribbean culture; its effects on Carnival after emancipation were difficult to ignore. Supposedly disappearing but noble Indians came to symbolize a virtuous republican past in North America, but it was harder ideologically to sweep colonial cultures free of the African. Throughout Trinidadian history, Carnival and other public processions, such as the Madrasi Hindu festival of “fire pass” and the Muslim festival of Muhurram, have been focal points for this struggle between cultural invention, appropriation, and suppression.[29]
Initially imported to the island by the French, the Carnival preceding Lent during slavery days featured the cross-dressing and class inversion of European Catholic festival days. Slaves were not permitted to masquerade, though it is likely that they performed for their masters. Certainly Caribbean masquerading traditions—“playing mas',” as it is called today—retain as many African influences as they do European ones, although, because of the ongoing repression of the African in Trinidadian history, it is harder to document them.[30] British authorities, in command in Trinidad after 1797, banned drumming altogether in their colonies, starting in Jamaica in 1792. Drums sounded threatening and unfamiliar to European ears, and were associated by Africans and their descendants with Shango, the Yoruba god of war and fire.[31]
Free Blacks and the Creole working and middle classes celebrated Carnival in the period between 1797, the beginning of British rule, and 1838, when the four years of indenture after emancipation in 1834 expired. Fearing the disorder caused by drinking and dancing in the street, the British passed a law in 1808 requiring police permission for Blacks to hold parties after 8 P.M.[32] The Creole middle class in Port of Spain obtained police permission to hold balls, although they still faced a curfew at 9:30 P.M. and were expected to carry lanterns.[33] The French Catholic upper classes preferred house parties and costume balls. In the ongoing cross-racial exchange of the Americas, which Eric Lott has so aptly dubbed “love and theft,” the upper classes favored costumes portraying field and house slaves, while Black celebrants, according to contemporary descriptions, often dressed in mock-European finery as kings and queens and English mummers.[34]
Although they had been prohibited from participating in Carnival before emancipation, slaves had maintained and invented their Afro-Creole culture in the small gaps in colonial administration. In canboulay(from cannes brÛlées, French for burning sugar cane), for example, slaves would march to the fields to extinguish sugar cane fires, carrying torches and singing songs. Along with command performances for the slave owners, canboulay was a rare opportunity for slaves to perform without sanction. After emancipation, canboulay transcended its function as a slave fire squad, becoming an important site for Afro-Creole invention. Groups of revelers would march with their lit torches through the street in the early hours of Carnival morning; this pre-Carnival festival, called j'ouvert, or break of day, has been a site of suppressed Afro-Creole practices throughout Trinidadian and, as we shall see, Brooklyn history. As freed slaves moved away from the countryside and into urban centers, Carnival became more African during the 1860s and 1870s, driving respectable European and Creole classes away from a street festival that had become a festival for the “urban black underworld.”[35]
In 1881, as Ghost Dancers prepared themselves to fight for a land newly replenished with buffalo and rid of whites, Black working-class canboulay revelers clashed with police in Port of Spain in what have come to be know as the Canboulay Riots. Predominantly Afro-Creole revelers clashed with police in Princess Town in 1884 and in Cedras in 1885, and a struggle between Islamic Asian Indians celebrating Muhurram (Hosay) with the colonial authorities in 1884 resulted in twelve deaths and approximately one hundred injuries.[36] British colonial authorities responded to these incidents by abolishing canboulay and fixing the time for the start
Throughout Trinidadian history, Carnival has been the focal point for encounters between the colonial administration and the impetus of grassroots imagination. In the 1870s, as colonial authorities began clamping down on the new Afro-Creole practice of masquerading at Carnival, they banned the Madrasi Hindu “fire pass” festival; in the 1880s, such restrictions resulted in both the Canboulay Riots and the Muharram Massacre.[38] At the same time that these festivals were sites for working-class Black and East Indian performances of social unrest, sometimes resulting in physical clashes with the police, these conflicts marked and reinforced fears of working-class culture among both white Creoles and the colored middle class.[39] The latter groups responded by participating in Carnival in limited ways, holding private parties and sometimes taking advantage of the masquerading tradition to attend Carnival unnoticed, avoiding the social sanction that could come from such participation.[40] Civic efforts to police Carnival, to make it safer and more respectable, resulted in an ongoing struggle between working-class Blacks with their Afro-Creole cultural forms and the colored middle class, which favored a more European, regulated Carnival, with contained performances of more Africanized forms.
Carnival forms such as calypso and steel drums originated in the increasingly urbanized Black working class,[41] while the European origins of costuming mingled with African retention and New World invention in both the themes and designs of the costumes. In 1846 an observer of Carnival masquerades reported seeing pirates, Turks, Scottish Highlanders, Wild Indians, the Angel Gabriel, and Death portrayed at Carnival. He observed a group of Black Trinidadians “as nearly naked as might be, bedaubed with a black varnish. One of this gang had a long chain and padlock attached to his leg, which chain the others pulled. What this typified, I was unable to learn; but, as the chained one was occasionally thrown down on the ground and treated with a mock bastinadoing, it probably represented slavery.”[42] By the 1860s, the Black urban working class had taken over Carnival in the streets.[43]
The social organization of Carnival reflects the historical development of urban Black working-class spaces in tenement yards: mas' bands (groups of people wearing thematic costumes); pan yards (places where the steel drums are made and played); and even “tribes” of “Wild Indians” who wore costumes that separated them into groups of black, red,
Many members of early steel bands during the 1930s and 1940s were also supporters of labor struggles in the predominantly Black oilfields.[46] The emergence of road and yard forms such as the steel band into mainstream Trinidadian Carnival and its appropriation from the “grass roots” by the “national” marks a cultural negotiation over class, race, and national identity.
At the same time that Carnival has been marked by conflict over racial meanings between Europeans, the Creole middle classes, and the Black working class, it has also helped to consolidate a national identity based in an African heritage. The development of calypso and the steel band in the 1930s and 1940s in Trinidad as grass-roots forms critical of class and colonial domination pushed the African aspects of Caribbean culture into the political foreground of Trinidadian life. Donald Hill writes:
If fancy mas' was a harbinger of colored Creole power for the middle class, the steel band was a forerunner of a re-afrocreolization of the entire Creole complex, a development that eventually led to political independence. Carnival was once again being pushed by the grass roots, as in the 1880s. These groups tended to retain Afro-Creole culture to a greater degree than the middle and upper classes. The fusion of the new steel-band Carnival to the structure of the middle-class fancy mas' Carnival that had been evolving for fifty years resulted in a modern, truly Creole-Trinidadian popular culture, a re-afrocreolized culture.[47]
The steel band movement has been significant for the development of Trinidadian nationalism, at home as well as in New York. Often appropriated from the grass roots to speak of an entire nation, Carnival forms have been intricately linked with the development of a national identity. Black working-class neighborhoods such as Laventille, then, become simultaneously places of national origin and invention and “bad neighborhoods” of denizens that need more discipline.[48] Since decolonization,
Because Trinidad has always been a profoundly multicultural society, with a high rate of in- and out-migrations, Carnival did not remain a strictly Trinidadian cultural form. Both Dawn Marshall and Elsa Chaney delineate four stages of Caribbean im/migration: interterritorial movement after emancipation as former slaves left the plantations, primarily for English-speaking islands; movement toward the Hispanic Caribbean and, in smaller numbers, to the United States in search of work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a slower rate of migration during World War I and the Great Depression; and the massive emigration to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States after World War II. Four million Caribbean people left the region, primarily for the United States and Canada, between 1950 and 1980.[50] Cultural forms, such as the calypsos and costumes of Carnival, must have circulated through the Caribbean and reached the United States well before the arrival of the largest wave of Caribbean immigration, after 1965. And as Carnival cultures spread, they change to suit their locales, becoming variously a means of ethnic expression, a link to home, and a source of racial or pan-African solidarity and pride.[51] If “All o' we is one” was a popular slogan in Brooklyn as well as Port of Spain in the 1990s, the questions “Who is we?”; “Who is all?”; and “Under what circumstances does ‘we’ come together as ‘one’?” are profoundly political im/migrant questions.
THE LONG PAST AND THE CHANGING SAME
Indian and Caribbean people came to the U.S. urban landscape with cultural traditions that had long been articulated in the contexts of migration and repression. The revivals that have taken place in Minneapolis and New York during the post–World War II period are part of these traditions, which are always in dialogue with places known and affectively experienced as “home,” even for those who have never visited the
“Tradition,” in this context, is always contradictory, invented at the same moment that it lays its claims on the past. Tradition can be politically mobilized by the hierarchical authority of national, racial, or patriarchal formations, as it has been at various times. Mined with the multiple contradictions of a multicultural and migratory history, traditions also contain space for negotiation and reinvention.
New powwow forms invented in the post–Dawes Act period brought together Euroamerican style with native concerns. The Jingle Dress Dance, for example, was based on the dream of an Ojibwa elder about how to heal his sick daughter in Mille Lacs, Minnesota, in 1919.[52] The dress, an elegant cotton dress with a tiered skirt, was adorned with jingling metal cones made from Copenhagen chewing tobacco cans. When the women dancers move with a dignified step around the powwow circle, the cones make a jingling noise; the wearer creates a movement that both looks and sounds beautiful. The Jingle Dress Dance spread throughout Ojibwa country on reservation powwows during the 1920s; it also made a comeback during the 1950s.[53] Perhaps the dance's metaphorical message, about using the implements of mass culture to heal a sickness of Indian people, held great appeal in these periods of cultural deprivation and enforced assimilation.[54]
Ellie Favel, a guidance counselor and teacher at Heart of the Earth Survival School in Minneapolis, explained contemporary jingle dress stories among Indian people in the northern United States and Canada: “Well, the jingle dress story, the one that the elders gave me the right to tell, is from the Lake of the Woods area. And there's three that I heard: one from that lake, Red Lake, that area. And there's even one I heard from Sisseton, South Dakota. And they're all a little bit different, but they're all, you know, special, because they're visions and dreams, and the vision was a gift from the Creator.”[55]
Individual tellers are given permission to relate specific stories about the jingle dress, as well as about other powwow forms, such as the Grass Dance. Those who tell these stories publicly always announce the origins and partiality of the story, leaving room for the multiple layers of historicity these forms carry.[56]
As much as tradition is entwined with the historical exigencies of invention, the preservation of Carnival folk arts has been increasingly involved with the development of the mass culture industry in the twentieth century. Just as Caribbean and Indian people negotiated the repressive effects of colonial administration and migration, they also deal with the increasing power of mass culture as it not only commodifies and exoticizes their cultural practices but also allows for the huge increase in the reach and speed of specific forms.
Recent scholarship has documented the dependence of emergent mass culture at the turn of the twentieth century on working-class popular forms. Early films drew on the popularity of immigrant theater and vaudeville, much as the minstrel shows, with their love, hate, and theft of Black culture, provided the grounds for a white audience for Afrodiasporic cultural forms. As early as 1910, Victor Recording Companies was recording Trinidadian calypsos for a New York audience that was made up of both West Indian immigrants and white socialites.[57] In Los Angeles during the same time period, Chicanos, Jews, and Italians found work in the emergent film industry; movies depicting frontier conflicts needed extras to play Indians, but avoided hiring Indian people, because of their supposed volatility.[58]
The early mass culture industry drew on narratives of migration and transformation as they were encoded in Afro-Atlantic performative forms. Tin Pan Alley songwriters, for example, drew on the “coon songs” of Black and white performers, including the most famous African-American musical comedy star, a Bahamian immigrant named Bert Williams, to write the tunes that came to embody American urban glamour and power.
Music, in particular, would continue to cross over between Afro-Caribbean performers and Euroamerican mass audiences. The song that became popular as “Rum and Coca-Cola,” for example, originated as a Martiniquan folk song, and became popular in Trinidad during the 1890s. In the 1940s, Lord Invader put new lyrics to the tune and popularized it throughout the Caribbean. Decca Records, a U.S. company that had been recording West Indian calypsos and folk songs during the 1930s, released an Andrews Sisters cover of “Rum and Coca-Cola” during World War II. This popular song helped sustain Decca through the war and a protracted musicians' strike, and revived the popularity of calypso music in North America.[59]
The title proclaims the mixing of Yankee ingenuity—Coca Cola, possibly the most widely marketable product of U.S. capital—with a well-known
The song, as well as the pattern of postcolonial economic development, feminizes labor.[61] In addition, it narrates the close connection between economic and cultural circulation in the Western Hemisphere.
The rise of a mass culture industry facilitated the spread of both pan-Indian powwows and Caribbean Carnival at the same time that it influenced changes in these forms. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which toured the country with Indian dancers, drummers, and such famous warriors as Sitting Bull, spread Plains Indian cultural forms throughout the Indian United States, resulting in the diffusion of such practices as the Grass Dance and of the Lakota war bonnet to other cultural regions. Sitting Bull, as well as Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, Jack Red Cloud, the son of the famous Lakota chief, and Métis veterans of the Riel Re bellion of 1886 all toured in the show.[62] Because the popularity of the Wild West Show coincided with the final military conflicts over the in termountain West, Plains Indian forms came to symbolize resistance to other Indian people.[63] In addition, the Wild West Show introduced ele ments of non-Indian origin into powwow practices: the Master of Cer emonies figure, the Grand Entry Procession, the contest powwow, and the Indian Princess competition, all central elements in contemporary powwow culture.[64] Some of the major powwows in the country date back to the turn of the twentieth century. William Powers writes of the influence of the Wild West Show on Indian performances:
The famous Wild West shows of the latter part of the nineteenth century, which partly gave rise to the notion of War Dance, also created for the next century the idea of the Indian musical performer as showman. Along with this newfound role came attributes of the theatrical performer—a calendar of events, performance outside the usual setting—the rodeo arena, coliseum, auditorium, theatrical stage.[65]
Another “tribe” of Indians influenced by the Wild West Show, the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, combined Afro-Atlantic Carnival performances with their interpretation of both their own mixed bloodlines and of the touring anticolonial Plains heroes.[66] “Playing Indian” is an old Caribbean Carnival tradition, dating back to the appearance of
Wild Indians were among the most popular Carnival bands throughout Trinidadian history. Their descendants, the often spectacular “Fancy Indians,” remain popular today among master costume designers as well as among those who want to slap something together quickly to wear on Carnival morning. People who “play Indian” at Carnival explain their costumes variously. They talk about the tradition of Carnival Indians, about the Carib Indians in the Caribbean, about the multicultural history of Trinidad, and, in the United States, sometimes about the struggles of Native Americans against colonization. One costume designer I met in Brooklyn during the summer of 1993 showed me his Carnival king, a tenfoot-tall Indian figure. Two years after the Mohawk resistance at Oka made headlines throughout the country, the Carnival king of the Association of Belizean Americans was called “Mohawk Spirit Dancer.”
Narratives of frontier conflict have long been a staple of American popular culture. In addition to Fancy and Wild Indians, two other popular Carnival figures emerge from frontier conflicts. The Trinidadian tradition of the Midnight Robber, derived from the icon of the masked cowboy, “holds up” onlookers and must be paid off in contributions of change. Although this costume has diverse incarnations, Daniel Crowley's folkloric research led him to speculate that the probable source of imagery for the Midnight Robber figure was the pulp or “Texas” magazines, an early form of the Western genre, with its romanticized cowboys and noble Indians, popular in the 1890s.[70] Another extremely popular figure at Carnival, the
Mass culture must be seen as a part of the colonial enterprise. Tourism has been almost as ongoing a source of interest in Caribbean and Indian cultures as hunger for land, resources, and labor. Rarely situating Indian and Caribbean people in their actual historical circumstances, films exoticize and objectify them. Frontier narratives rewrote the history of the West at the same time that the nascent music industry bleached the Afro-Atlantic origins of much popular song. Mass media images of contemporary immigrants and urban Indians are almost inevitably negative: one more piece of a seemingly formidable colonial arsenal that breaks apart colonized nations and national minorities, and with them cultures and memories. It becomes difficult to separate mass media images of waves of poor brown and Black people mobbing the shores and cities of the United States from the equally surreal policy initiatives designed to “deal with them.”
At the same time, mass culture imagery can be appropriated as part of a temporary shelter against the colonial effort as a whole. Midnight Robbers symbolically mug people at Carnival, demanding a share of the loot, while drunk and dirty Yankee Sailors cavort, offering entertainment and a reminder that imperial force is made up of men who depend on Port of Spain for their pleasure. The Master of Ceremonies at powwows is likely derived from the imperialist spectacle provided by Buffalo Bill Cody, but today he is also likely to talk about red power and rallies for treaty rights. These symbolic figures, by themselves, do nothing to oppose the ongoing depredations of imperial capital; but they imaginatively reconfigure a mass-mediated universe.
Carnival in New York and powwow in Minneapolis encode a history of resistance to colonial administration. But I want to conclude this chapter on the colonial past of these festivals by skipping forward in time to look at the ways these festivals carry on the traditions of invention and resistance in these urban contexts. Grass Dancers and Midnight Robbers, jingle dresses and steel bands: all arrive in an urban landscape that offers Indian and Caribbean people only partial access to power and citizenship. These festival denizens, bearing their complex and potent historical
Just as the Midnight Robber and the Yankee Sailor costumes reflect the circulation of popular imagery throughout the United States, Canada, Britain, and the Caribbean, the meanings of Carnival in metropolitan contexts shift. Alma Guillermoprieto notes the rediscovery of Zumbi, the leader of the maroon community Palmares, in the late 1970s by Brazilian Carnival designers. Emphasis on Zumbi in Carnival floats paralleled contemporary Afro-Brazilian interest in Black history and cultural pride.[72] Similarly, Abner Cohen, in his detailed study of Notting Hill Carnival in London, talks about how Rastafarian themes emerged as the festival became both more dominantly West Indian and more explicitly political during the 1970s. Cohen explains these changes by emphasizing the role of Carnival in immigrant identity formation. “London carnival was continuously transformed, within certain cultural and social conventions, into an expression of, and an instrument for, the development of a new homogeneous West Indian culture that transcended affiliations to islands of origin, to confront the economic and political realities of contemporary Britain.”[73]
In Brooklyn, contemporary Carnival practices deploy different structures of meaning than the same practices would elsewhere. As Philip Kasinitz points out, eating a roti on Eastern Parkway on Labor Day in Brooklyn takes on an ethnic significance it lacks in Trinidad.[74] At the same time, the meanings of costumes and music are always in dialogue with the Caribbean as well as with other metropolitan festivals, inventing local practices both traditional and specific to New York. The name of the mas' camp and front office for the West Indian–American Day Carnival Association in 1992, “The Culture of Black Creation,” has a different meaning in Brooklyn than it would have had in Port of Spain or London. Brooklyn Carnival emphasizes West Indian Black ethnic identity against the background of a predominantly African-American city. The name “The Culture of Black Creation” carries both ethnic and Afrocentric pride. Gesturing to second-generation Caribbean-Americans and to African-Americans with a broadly inclusive pan-Africanism, the name simultaneously points out to Caribbean immigrants that their culture is as Black, and can be as proud, as the African-American culture that surrounds them. It also points to the geographical segregation in New York of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean im/migrants. One year and several blocks from the 1991 Crown Heights conflict, the name of the mas' camp also announced its origins and alliances to those passing by the building.
The tendency of Trinidadian Carnival bands to memorialize actual and imagined pasts was amplified in the 1950s, when the designer Harold Saldenha began to draw on contemporary Hollywood imagery to create themes rooted in past empires—Romans, Greeks, and Asians.[75] Carnival designers have always done extensive research into the themes and sartorial specifications of their bands; through Hollywood productions, images of cultures elided in British canonical histories became available.[76] More recently, Carnival themes have turned to imagining great non-European empires of the past, particularly in Brooklyn.
In Brooklyn as in Trinidad, Indian, Asian, and African empires are especially popular. The celebration of empire on Eastern Parkway carries resonance of im/migrant national pride. Carnival in Brooklyn, after all, falls on or directly after Trinidad's Independence Day; many of the sound systems move down the parkway on floats that proclaim Panamanian, Belizean, or Grenadian pride and solidarity. At the same time, in the context of contemporary Afrocentricity in Brooklyn, the celebration of non-Western empires also relates directly to a politicized geography of Blackness that draws heavily on the ideas of Egyptian and ancient African splendor. “I wouldn't even break it down in terms of Caribbean,” one pan player argued. “I think what you see happening, especially in our community, is African.”[77]
As Kasinitz argues, the strength of Carnival has always been in its multivocality, its refusal to speak in what sounds like a unified, political voice. While it frustrates politicians who attempt to support Carnival as representing a monolithic community, such multivocality allows for the existence of multiple layers of history. Such layers of history, in turn, constitute the grounds for the formation of a new urban identity; both Kasinitz and Frank Manning argue that Carnival is the space where West Indian immigrants mark an identity that is at once Black and distinct from the African-American community; ethnic but generically West Indian, rather than identified with any specific Caribbean nation.[78] In the cultural space of Carnival, then, immigrants and their children negotiate various claims of assimilation, racial identification, and dual loyalty.
At Brooklyn Carnival in 1992, the popular Hawks mas' band celebrated the Columbian Quincentennial by playing Empires of the Americas, with vast sections devoted to the Aztec, Inca, and Mixtex empires. The Culture of Black Creation mas' camp was dressed in the theme of Sophisticated Africa. A Trinidadian immigrant and an artist who makes the copper masks used by the large Carnival bands explained the importance of designing such costumes, connecting the Sophisticated Africa
Like Brooklyn Carnival, Trinidad Carnival in 1992 also featured bands that portrayed pre-Columbian splendor, illustrating Shadow's calypso hit of that year, “Columbus Lied.” Such parallels indicate the constant circulation of contemporary Caribbean culture, from sending nation to metropole and back again. The popular historiography of Carnival involves the transatlantic transmission of intellectual currents, of dreams and imaginings of exile and homecoming. At the same time, the great popularity of such bands as Sophisticated Africa in contemporary Brooklyn and the rows of stalls along Eastern Parkway that sell Caribbean food along with contemporary Afrocentric commodities such as kente clothe and cowrie shells indicate the growth of a Caribbean-American Carnival culture that negotiates boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nationality to stake out a Caribbean identity in Brooklyn.
Like West Indians in Brooklyn, Indians in Minneapolis navigate the multiple hierarchies of contemporary urban life. As I have argued, pan-Indian culture in the United States developed in response to the exigencies of serial relocations, as well as the boarding school experience, the cultural imperialism perpetrated by Wild West shows and the Western genre of popular novels and films they influenced. In some cases, as Gail Guthrie Valaskakis writes in her political memoir about growing up in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, the preservation of tradition mingled with pan-Indian performance in the context of tourism. The powwow at the Lac du Flambeau reservation, according to Valaskakis, became more tourist-oriented during the 1950s, as automobiles proliferated with postwar affluence, and with them the development of the white middle-class family vacation.[80] At the same time, according to Jim Clermont of the Lakota Porcupine Singers, the diffusion of automobile travel also helped proliferate powwow singing styles, as more Indians visited reservations during their annual powwows.
The knitting of traditional practices into the fabric of Indian life in Minneapolis required adaptation into an urban, intertribal context. Along with the memories woven into the fabric of daily life, Indian people in the 1950s and 1960s inherited a history of direct repression of
In attempting to reinvent this spirit of reverie, Twin Cities Indian organizations confronted a long history of repression. Bill Means described the early days of the American Indian Movement during the 1960s, when AIM organizers decided to include drumming and singing in their demonstrations. He recalled: “See, when AIM first started, we used to have to go get the singers out of bars and—because a lot of our Indian people didn't even want to sing, because in some ways they were kind of ashamed, unless if they had a few beers. And then they said, ‘Oh, wow, let me be an Indian.’” In creating a politicized cultural revival in Minneapolis, Indians drew on their diverse cultures, bringing them together into an urban pan-Indian form.
According to both Clermont and Powers, the move from the reservation to the cities changed the ways people sang and danced. Migrants brought their songs to the cities and shared them; by 1962 the Upper Midwest Indian Center boasted a singing group with members from the Crow, Chippewa, Sioux, Arapaho, Gros Ventre, and Canadian tribes. Powers argues that relocation changed singing styles because people who were not known for their singing in reservation communities often got involved in it in the cities, changing and reinterpreting traditional songs.[85]
With the mobility brought partially by relocation, singing groups traveled to various reservations. Groups such as the Porcupine Singers, traditionally based in Standing Rock and Pine Ridge, traveled around, teaching and performing. When the Porcupine Singers began to travel around the northern United States and Canada in the 1960s, Clermont recalled, they spread the Lakota singing style to diverse urban and reservation communities, “mainly in Canada. A lot of their powwows sat idle
Today a popular drum group at both urban and reservation powwows is the Boyz. Jim Clermont's son, Hokie, started the group, along with Opie Day, who is a Nett Lake Ojibwa. Like the Porcupine Singers, the Boyz travel to reservations and urban powwows. Also like the Porcupine Singers, they influence other drum groups through the recordings that people make at powwows by standing around the drum group with small, portable tape recorders held high in the air. Unlike the Porcupine Singers, though, the Boyz are urban Indians: they sport the fade haircuts popular with their African-American contemporaries and listen to rap music at the same rate that they play tapes of drum groups at powwows. Their name, with its echoes of popular films like Boyz in the Hood, indicates the multiple influences of contemporary urban Indian culture.
The Boyz's participation in powwows marks their commitment to Indian culture, but as Valaskakis points out, this is not a simple maintenance of an uninterrupted tradition. Rather, urban Indians continue to transform a tradition that has survived largely because of the creativity and ongoing commitments of Indian people. Because Indians residing in urban areas often return to reservation communities for extended visits, to live, or for short periods during the summer “powwow trail,” when Indians from all over the nation travel to weekend powwows held in rural communities, the urban Indian revival is in constant dialogue with reservation life as well.[87] Some years ago the Red Lake Nation changed its guidelines for the Red Lake Nation Princess competition. Previously, young women who wanted to represent the nation had to reside on the Red Lake Reservation; because many young women enrolled in the reservation live in the Twin Cities or in Bemidji, the competition was opened to women living in urban areas. Such changes indicate the ongoing “intertwining,” as Valaskakis calls it, of contemporary Indian reality with local interpretations of tradition.
Means explained, “The powwow has become that link to our homeland and to the past for the urban area. On the reservation, where you live in that setting … of course they have a lot of powwows, and I think that for the urban Indian the powwow is really a chance to come together and to recreate that. In the past and to their home.”[88]
As Carnival and powwow change to reflect and create new narratives of identity, these forms are also in dialogue with the urban environment.
Chapter 3 discusses the foundational fictions of immigration and termination that brought Caribbean and Indian people to the cities during the 1950s and 1960s. This national romance operates at a local level through discourses of ethnic empowerment and machine politics: new immigrants to the cities work their way into municipal power by constituting themselves as the latest ethnic group to be absorbed into local opportunity structures. Of course, the conversion of foreign immigrants to white ethnics is race-based; these accommodations are less available to nonwhite immigrants.[89] The transnational cultures of such groups as urban Indians and Caribbean immigrants respond to racialized hierarchies. By maintaining and reinventing ties to home, these im/migrants use the ethnic model against itself, participating in nation-building “back home” and using their identities as a basis for local empowerment. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc write: “Transmigrants simultaneously participate in nation-building in their home country and in processes of nation-building in the U.S. that are ordinarily subsumed under the rubric ‘ethnicity.’”[90] The question, then, is the role that emergent pan–West Indian and pan-Indian identities play in the struggle for municipal power, for citizenship, or a role in the national romance. Racial and ethnic identity in Minneapolis and Brooklyn bear heavily on the positions of these communities in the urban order.
3. Im/migration Policy, the
National Romance, and the
Poetics of World Domination,
1945–1965
DECOLONIZATION AND IMPERIAL SLEIGHTS OF HAND: THE NATIONAL ROMANCE
This chapter analyzes the ways in which im/migration policy attempted to write Indians and immigrants into dominant imaginings of U.S. life during the postwar period. In those years a reexamination of national borders became ideologically significant, in light of emergent movements for self-determination and sovereignty among former colonies as well as minority groups within the country. The emergence of the United States as an international power after World War II makes possible the tremendous mobility of capital today. Historians and cultural critics must respond to this mobility by considering the powerful narrative of the nation, and what is done in its name.[1]
At the close of World War II, the United States consolidated its position as a world power. Like his European counterparts during the nineteenth century, the American publisher Henry Luce could now proclaim an “American century,” in which the sun would never set on the busy whir and hum of an internationalized economy. Geopolitically, the nation had ascended to the leadership of the “free world,” while domestically, the military-industrial complex had expanded and consolidated, using war production as the machine to pull the national economy out of the Depression. The spatial fix so crucial to capitalist development was available
American hegemony in the postwar period was a matter of controlling the flow of international labor, as well as extending the development of national resources to include lands guaranteed to Indian peoples. This hegemony, generally associated with the Cold War against communism both internally and externally, was crucially reliant on immigration and Indian policy: im/migration policy. By creating a national romance of assimilation and unity through citizenship, im/migration policy both authored and responded to formative discourses of race and ethnicity in this period. As Nikhil Pal Singh writes: “Anti-communism was the modus operandi for a political project in which a racial animus and an imperial ambition remained paramount, if sublated.”[3] The assimilation of disparate cultures and politics into a harmonious national family was a key part of the rhetoric of corporate liberalism; social conflict would no longer be necessary in the technological progress guaranteed by capitalist democracy.[4] Cold War im/migration policies took the idea of bringing im/migrants into this family as a keystone of social order.
This notion of assimilation was part of a more general “foundational fiction” of national identity in the postwar period. “Foundational fictions,” according to Doris Sommer, attempt to reconcile social inequalities by creating romantic fantasies of collective national destiny. Inevitably, these fictions betray their origins: they are specifically gendered, highly racialized imaginings of national unity that rely on a familiar cast of characters for their heroes, villains, and walk-ons. The importance of Sommer's work is that it teaches us about what she calls “the inextricability of politics from fiction in the history of nation building.”[5]
The enduring rhetorical accomplishment of the foundational fiction of federal im/migration policy in the postwar period was to translate claims to civil rights and sovereignty into a language of ethnicity and assimilation.
In the post–World War II period, the extractive power of First World capital increasingly involved the transformation of Third World workers into domestic laborers; in other words, workers around the world were recruited for the parts they would play in the national romance: as suitors (appropriate or inappropriate), servants (faithful or treacherous), or, simply, insignificant extras. This recruitment happened in plants built by multinational corporations in newly decolonized home countries; through austerity and “import substitution” programs implemented by the World Bank and other international development agencies, and through the emigration of large sections of the labor force away from the Third World and into the United States. At the same time, the national romance increasingly wrote Indians—the “domestic dependent nations” of nineteenth-century jurisprudence—into the national family, not as domestic dependent nations but as potential family members in need of domestication.
It is important to note that the policies aimed at the transformation of Indians and immigrants in this period had only partial success. Both groups attempted to use federal policy initiatives to advance alternative agendas of tribal land claims, expanded civil rights, and social and economic mobility. Attempts to modify denizens' lives from the top down often met with consequences that surprised politicians and policy makers. As K. Tsianina Lomawaima puts it, “no institution is total, no power is all-seeing, no federal Indian policy has ever been efficiently and rationally translated into practice, and much of the time produced unpredicted results anyway.”[9]
At the same time that the U.S. consolidated domestic and international hegemony, nations all over the world were engaged in decolonization struggles. National liberation movements begun before World War II won political victories after 1945 in Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. Weakened by centuries of colonial rule, nations such as Egypt, Senegal,
The rhetoric of decolonization abroad had substantial echoes within the borders of the United States. For Native Americans, the immediate postwar period was a time of changing consciousness. Like other minority veterans, native veterans such as Ira Hayes and the 382nd Platoon of Navajo code talkers returned from distinguishing themselves in defense of democracy to diminished opportunities, and to a national community that recognized them as citizens only in theory. The Dakota linguist Ella Deloria wrote in 1944: “The war has indeed wrought an overnight change in the outlook, horizon, and even the habits of the Indian people—a change that might not have come for many years yet.”[12]
In the immediate postwar period, such organizations as the National Congress of the American Indian (NCAI), founded in 1944, contested the status of Indian people under federal law. The NCAI brought together, according to its first president, Napoleon Bonaparte Johnson, “a cross-section of Indian population: old and young, full-bloods, mixedbloods, educated and uneducated Indians from allotted areas and others from reservations,” all of whom “were dissatisfied with many phases of the government's administration of Indian affairs.”[13] Many Indians initially supported a shift in policy, thinking either that the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was at last making good on the promise of self-rule made under John Collier in the 1930s or that they could best manage their own affairs as individual citizens of states. Urban California Indians, for example, favored termination, as it allowed them per capital settlements on lands from which they were dispossessed.[14] Eventually, however, the problems with termination and relocation policies catalyzed the formation of new alliances between Indians on reservations and in cities, and the emergence of a new generation of Indian activists.
Similarly, a coalition of ethnic, religious, and civil rights groups fought the imposition of restrictive immigration legislation throughout the 1950s. A diverse coalition opposed the McCarran-Walter Act (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1954). African-American organizations such as the NAACP contested the racialized basis of the law. Civil rights
African-American groups, because of the presence of Caribbean-Americans in civil rights organizations as well as the influence of pan-African and anticolonial discourses in the Black community, recognized the interdependence of Northern and Southern hemispheres. While Congress debated immigration reform, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-N.Y.) presented a bill in the House in 1961 calling for unlimited immigration from the British West Indies and the nascent West Indian federation.[16] Powell, whose participation at Bandung had been controversial in both Black and diplomatic communities, grounded his civil rights leadership in a background informed by internationalist movements such as the 1955 conference and his work in the Council on African Affairs during the 1940s.[17] Ethnic organizations such as the Sons of Italy and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, as well as Christian organizations such as the Church World Service, sought a more liberalized policy of admission for Southern and Eastern Europeans, hardest hit by the aftermath of the war.[18]
As it has done throughout U.S. history, immigration policy balanced concerns about domestic security with the need for cheap labor. The Displaced Persons Act of 1947 allowed 100,000 European refugees into the country: a drop in the bucket, according to their relatives in the United States and refugee social service workers. The McCarran-Walter Act attempted to resist the globalization of the labor force by reverting to the highly restrictive national origins quotas of 1924. Until the Hart-Cellar Act (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) repealed national origins quotas, allowing immigration by family and employment preference, many potential immigrants, particularly those from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, would be virtually excluded from legal admission to the country.
But an ongoing need for cheap labor drove a whole other set of policies. The Bracero Program, operative from 1946 until just before the passage of Hart-Cellar in 1964, provided temporary work visas for Mexican men. These braceros, or hired hands, would be denizens of the workforce not eligible for marriage into the national family of citizens.
As the paradigmatic new Americans, immigrants, particularly those fleeing communism, were expected to assimilate into the “American way” much less problematically than Native Americans. Immigration policy was charged with screening out “undesirable immigrants” who would not make good citizens. “Undesirable immigrants” were those whose loyalties were questionable on grounds of their ties to other nations or political systems, or those who sought refuge in the United States not for access to democracy but for economic opportunities. The drive to immigrate or naturalize could be a matter of only “political” rather than economic or social coercion.[20] Determining competency for citizenship, then, was not a matter of individual preparation, as it was with Indians. Instead, the assimilability of new immigrants rested on their political loyalties. The pressure to receive immigrants democratically and to be the traditional “golden door” to the poor and oppressed of the world was mitigated by an overarching Cold War concern for national security. Senator Patrick McCarran (R-Nev.) argued that immigration policy should err on the side of security:
Our entire immigration system has been so weakened as to make it often impossible for our country to protect its security in this black era of fifth column infiltration and cold warfare with the ruthless masters of the Kremlin. The time has long since passed when we can afford to open our borders indiscriminately to give unstinting hospitality to any person whose purpose, whose ideological aim is to overthrow our institutions and replace them with the evil oppression of totalitarianism.[21]
Cold War ideology translated the mythologized democracy of the western frontier into Third World skirmishes as actively as possible. But the reinvention of America as a land of opportunity was contradictory. Many of the actual opportunities for new immigrants were maintained by agribusiness and industry at the minimal wage made possible by cheap labor provided by the Bracero Program.[22] The logic of assimilation here was contradictory: For many new immigrants, particularly those of color, it would be difficult or impossible to participate in what Daniel Bell touted as a classless society.[23]
Calls for immigration restriction during this period were also couched in the rhetoric of civic responsibility and anticommunism. Demanding restriction of immigration and naturalization in 1951, McCarran “indicated that the bill would call for a careful ‘screening’ of persons seeking to come to the United States to see if they were ‘adapted to our way of life’ … [under the current system] proof of good moral character, adaptability to our way of life, and general conduct have been most laxly dealt with.”[24] While the call to restrict immigration echoes similar arguments of an earlier period, the language here is decidedly that of the Cold War. Immigration policy during the 1950s became one more site of struggle against invisible threats to the national body.[25] Im/migrants, then, would have to be transformed before they could safely become citizens.
Cold War federal Indian policy attempted to resolve the long-standing, messy business of relations with Indian nations, “domestic, dependent” peoples defeated in the nineteenth century. The Bureau of Indian Affairs established the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) in 1946 to resolve unsettled land titles, clearing the way for unrestricted exploitation of western lands. This move was initially supported by many Indian leaders, who saw the ICC as a way to finally address native land claims that had long been pending.[26]
Debates about the “special status” of Indian peoples in the 1950s linked the rhetoric of Indian wars with contemporary anticommunist rhetoric: Michael Rogin's useful term “red scares” points to the continuous need in U.S. political thought to cohere around a perceived threat from an “other,” whether internal or external.[27] In attempting to deal with the “red threat” posed by communalistic Indian nations claiming valuable western lands, Congress during the 1950s implemented a policy known as termination: the ending of the trust relationship between Indians and the federal government. Under termination, reservations
At the same time that the code talkers and the war hero Ira Hayes brought Indians into the public consciousness, allowing the discourse of national policy to scrutinize them as both “first Americans” and potential citizens, the war had also turned national economic attention to the West. Federal expenditures on economic development in the West increased, in California by as much as ten times. Resisting the sway of internationalist arguments, cold warriors such as McCarran and Arthur Watkins (D-Utah) eyed native land claims, arguing that the United States could become self-sufficient if only it were to fully develop the resources within its borders.[30] Kenneth Philp writes:
McCarran emphasized that (these) energetic European homesteaders had turned “wild wastelands” into “productive, wealth-creating, revenue producing property.” Furthermore, the entire edifice of the Indian Bureau was built on “the fiction of tribal political organization and the constitutional delegation to the federal government of power to deal with Indian tribes.”[31]
McCarran's language is worth noting here; the “fiction of tribal political organization” clearly contradicted his attempts to write another foundational fiction of national cohesion.
While Indian people had become citizens by national law as of 1924, federal termination policy attempted to “integrate” them into the social, political, and economic life of the nation, “emancipating” them from the federal trust relationship that protected their treaty rights to the land.[32]
By no coincidence, many of the most strongly pro-termination congressmen belonged to a coalition of political and corporate interests that saw the postwar West as the site of a new America. Indians stood in the way of this progress, and the termination-era Bureau of Indian Affairs, under Dillon S. Myer, former head of the War Relocation Authority, consistently supported the claims of local white ranchers and farmers to land and water claimed by Indian people. In the case of the controversy over water rights at Pyramid Lake, the BIA did this in direct contradiction to a 1944 Supreme Court settlement in favor of Paiute Indian claims.[36] The development of the West promised American economic autonomy and the certain replication of a familiar foundational fiction. McCarran wrote: “The West today is the land of empire, of opportunity, of destiny. Today, more than ever, the West is plain every day American for ‘opportunity.’”[37] The West had water and uranium to support growing urban populations and an emerging nuclear state; in addition, the West has long had tremendous ideological capital in the national imagining of freedom and destiny.[38] If this glorious and familiar future was to be realized, of course, the rich “opportunities” that existed on Indian land would have to be made available to the national project. “Emancipation” of Indians through termination of the federal trust relationship would allow for the exploitation of Indian lands.
Ann Stoler comments perceptively about the way racial discourse “invariably draws on a cultural density of prior representations that are recast in new forms.”[39] In its concern to cast the United States as a free nation in a world threatened by communist totalitarianism, in its use of nineteenth-century racial categories to explain the necessity of termination, federal Indian policy in the 1950s and early 1960s very much paralleled contemporary immigration policy. Both im/migration policies attempted to select individuals who would enter the national family as
Citizenship, as the racialized grounds for inclusion in the national family, became a contested terrain—a culture war, in Singh's terms—for public policy during the immediate postwar period. At the same time federal policy makers set out to create a safe way of filtering the addition of internal denizens and external émigrés into the national body, im/migrant groups organized to press for inclusion on their own terms. With this conflict, the narratives governing inclusion would shift throughout the 1940s and 1950s, finally yielding in the 1960s to renewed calls for reform and a transformation in the ideas of what citizenship would mean.
The foundational fictions informing immigration and Indian policies in the postwar period can be divided into different chapters, according to how they created citizens. Sometimes citizenship was written as a narrative of descent, in which citizens are produced through the bodies of other citizens, through biological reproduction and the socializing institution of the family.[41] In the case of naturalization, however, citizenship becomes a narrative of ascent, in which the legitimating body of the nation stands in for the actual bodies and genealogies of subjects. In the case of naturalization, the state is the parent bringing already existing individuals into the national fold. These various origins of citizenship point to different constructions of race and ethnicity in the postwar period.
Immediately after the war, between 1945 and 1952, policy debates focused on bloodlines and reproduction, and the ways new citizens were related to the actual bodies and immediate families of those who were already members of the national family. Policies concerning nonnational “war brides” and the families of returning Indian veterans in this period emphasized lineage and reproduction.[42]
After 1952, the attention of social scientists and policy makers shifted away from the military heroics and physical depredations of war. Social fictions in this period did not correspond so directly to bodily incarnations of citizenship. As they considered the domestic ramifications of “the American century,” the authors of im/migration policy turned to the legal production and naturalization of new citizens, and cultural conceptions of race and citizenship came to supplant biological distinctions.
Finally, as the coalitions that opposed both termination and immigration policies during the 1950s challenged these restrictive practices, a more liberalized approach to assimilation emerged. Reformed Indian and immigration policies after 1965 would emphasize ethnicity over race, liberalizing the terms of inclusion in the national body. Where termination and immigration policy adopted racialized definitions of culture, reform efforts responded to the influence of the civil rights movement by implementing an ethnicity-based model of access to economic and political rights. These different models of citizenship and assimilation overlap to a great degree: while reforms changed the immediate racial hierarchy of existing policies, they maintained continuity with racialized social thought and continued to limit democratic access to full citizenship. Lisa Lowe writes: “While the nation proposes immigrant ‘naturalization’ as a narrative of ‘political emancipation’ that is meant to resolve in American liberal democracy as a terrain to which all citizens have equal access and in which all are equally represented, it is a narrative that denies the establishment of citizenship out of unequal relationships between dominant white citizens and subordinated racialized noncitizens and women.”[43] In other words, while racial paradigms change, influencing social policy, conflicts over citizenship and inequality remain because of a lack of real redistribution of power and resources.[44] These different chapters of the postwar romance do point to the limited romantic resolutions possible within the national fictions of capitalist democracy.
WE ARE FAMILY: CITIZENSHIP EMBODIED
In 1945, as Congress was beginning to debate issues of national origin, immigration, and ancestry, the War Brides Act passed both houses and was signed into law by President Truman. Under this law, the spouses and minor children of United States citizens serving in the military were allowed to enter the country as nonquota immigrants. Because of the long-term barriers to the naturalization and citizenship rights of Asian-Americans, servicemen of Asian descent were the exceptions to this policy, but the law was amended to include them in 1947. McCarran-Walter legislation, passed seven years later, maintained this special right for families of GIs.[45] Women married to American servicemen and the children of these marriages were beyond the racialized scrutiny applicable to other refugees and immigrants.[46]
The War Brides Act rested on two assumptions about the family and citizenship: first, American GIs, the defenders of democracy, would be
At the same time that war brides were admitted as potential U.S. citizens, Congress debated the status of American Indian veterans. Because of the federal trust relationship, Indian veterans were not eligible for Veteran's Administration mortgages.[50] House Resolution 1113 in 1947 addressed this problem:
The Secretary of the Interior is authorized and directed, upon application of any Indian who shall have served honorably in the armed forces of the United States in time of war, to remove all restrictions upon the lands, interest in lands, funds, or other properties of such Indian, and, if such lands or interests in lands are held in trust for such Indian, to issue an unrestricted patent in fee therefore.[51]
While veterans had shown themselves to be worthy of inclusion in a country that they had fought and died for, Congress saw fit to amend the initial bill providing for the removal of restrictions on the land of Indian veterans by requiring them to take a competency test. A veteran over the age of twenty-one could “apply to any naturalization court for the area in which he resides for a ‘writ of competency.’”[52] A second amendment, debated at length in Congress, restricted the rights of citizenship to the individual Indian veteran who successfully applied, granting the offspring of Indians who had achieved competency the right only to apply for citizenship on becoming twenty-one. In other words, Indians were capable of becoming citizens, but not of engendering them; being an Indian born in the United States did not necessarily grant an individual the right to claim citizenship in the national body. This policy gave Indians the same status as immigrants before naturalization.
The “emancipation” of Indian veterans through competency tests set a precedent that would be at the center of termination policy: Indians had to be transformed in order to enter the national family. This requirement
The national romance, as it was written into the War Brides Act and House resolutions for competency testing of Indian veterans, centered on a national family constructed on actual biological descent, shored up by federally adjudicated competency. In a minor but illuminating subplot of this postwar romance, House Resolution 2108 in 1949 allowed refugee doctors, ordinarily prevented from practicing medicine in this country by the complexities of passing national certification tests, to practice in Indian hospitals.[55] Citizen/subjects deemed incompetent to operate on the bodies of full citizens were allowed to practice on Indian bodies. In turn, Indian bodies needed legal operations to enter the national family.[56]
Indian people took note of the discussion of their status in Congress, and responded to its qualified promises of liberation. The NCAI dubbed House Resolution 1113 the “phony emancipation bill.” José Carpio, governor of Isleta Pueblo, pointed out the injustice of such policies:
In our recent struggle for freedom from European aggression, many Indian boys donned the uniforms of Uncle Sam to fight the threats of the aggressors. But it seems that it resulted in vain, because by the so-called “emancipation bill” many are going to be affected to the end of our natural lives. It seems like our white brother is shaking us with his left hand and stabbing us with his right.[57]
In 1949 the NCAI's Sixth Annual Convention's resolution on “emancipation” pointed out the bill's problematic construction of Indians as “foreigners” and its inherent unconstitutionality:
This bill operates under a false premise: namely, that Indians are foreigners who must apply and prove their competency; no other native citizen is required to humiliate himself to prove his competency; this again, is in conflict with the rights of native-born citizens as prescribed within the framework of the United States Constitution; the whole tone of the bill stresses the approach that the Indian is inferior and not really a citizen; for example, he is put on the same level as aliens. …[58]
Here the NCAI points to the central contradiction in the policy of naturalizing Indians. The BIA attempted to resolve this contradiction through the civil rights rhetoric of “emancipation” and “desegregation” of American Indians. At the same time, immigration policy would implement a biologically based discourse of race, screening immigrants for their potential assimilability by the restrictive policies of national origins quotas and loyalty tests.
THE RECOMBINANCE OF RACE:
NATURAL SELECTION OF CITIZENS
The reliance of the national romance on the physical family and on explicitly biological constructions of race and citizenship gave way after 1952 to a model of the nation as a homogenizing social body. The actual bodies and families of American GIs could not be the only incubators of good American citizens. Increasingly, the national romance relied on discourses of assimilation and selection for the integration of new bodies into the national family. This discursive shift, in turn, made room for different strategies of resistance on the part of immigrants, Indians, and their political allies.
The McCarran-Walter Act was the culmination of debates on immigration that took place between 1947 and the passage of the act into law under Eisenhower in 1952. Like the termination policy pursued during the same time period, immigration policy under McCarran-Walter legislation gestured toward American egalitarianism while at the same time mandating a racialized selection process for the assimilation of new citizens. Harry N. Rosenfeld, commissioner of the Displaced Persons Bureau, pointed out that the law “would remove racial barriers from our current laws but would tighten the provisions for admissions and deportation on security grounds.”[59] While the law did continue to eliminate restrictions against the naturalization of Asians as citizens begun during the war, it also implemented national origins quotas that applied the “Nordic race theory” of immigration restriction from the 1920s. In
In concert with the Internal Security Act of 1950, McCarran-Walter legislation set up strict and subjective loyalty tests for potential immigrants.[60] Finally, and most important in terms of foundational fictions of citizenship, assimilation, and national inclusion, the law distinguished between political and economic immigrants and refugees.[61]
The enduring ideological success of the McCarran-Walter Act, even after its abrogation by the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Bill of 1965, lay in its ability to conflate racial distinction and political loyalties. From the 1950s through the present, immigration and refugee policy take as a given the distinction between economic and political refugees that McCarran-Walter legislation recognized. Under this policy, individuals fleeing “Communist-totalitarian” regimes are given preference and considered “political” refugees. This ironic Cold War vote of confidence in the economies of the Eastern Bloc left other refugees fleeing “friendly” governments such as Antonio Salazar's Portugal, Reza Shah Pahlavi's Iran, and Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua designated “economic” refugees. This distinction between political and economic migrants is what David Theo Goldberg calls a “racialized exclusion”: “If it is reasonably clear that some institutional practice gives rise to racially patterned exclusionary or discriminatory outcomes, no matter the institutional aims, and the institution does little or nothing to avoid, diminish, or alleviate these outcomes, the reasonable presumption must be that the institution is racist or effectively promotes racism of a sort.”[62]
Conceiving of “political” immigrants as rational subjects, able to assess their situation and opt for the democratic freedom offered by the United States, immigration policy posits “economic” immigrants, almost without exception nonwhite people from developing countries, as part of push/pull cycles of hemispheric and international migrations, not as viable democratic citizen/subjects. In this Cold War fiction, “political” immigrants assess their situations in an analytical manner, whereas “economic” immigrants seem to wash up on our national shores, out of control of their lives, family economies, and destinies. Ironically, the political “freedom” touted in Cold War discourse is largely economic: the freedom of the free market, the abundance of economic opportunities for hardworking and deserving families.
Controversy over McCarran-Walter preceded its congressional approval and accompanied the law's thirteen-year dominance of national immigration policy. Support for the bill came from the same western senators who backed termination, from Dixiecrat cold warriors such as Senator James O. Eastland (D-Miss.),[63] as well as from such eastern conservatives as Francis Walter (R-Pa.). These policy makers saw the postwar epic arising from western lands and domestic ingenuity.
But this romance of national development through isolationism and selection contradicted the logic of postwar capitalist development. By 1956, even John Foster Dulles had concluded that national health and racial selection were incompatible. The national origins system, he argued, “which draws a distinction between the blood of one person and the blood of another, cannot be reconciled with the fundamental concepts of our Declaration of Independence.”[64] National homeostasis needed to be maintained, but the discourse of blood and competency was to be transformed into a discourse of social assimilation.
As the national economy boomed during the 1950s, riding the “peacetime conversion” of military-industrial development into consumer goods, the family assumed ongoing importance as a social and economic unit. Cold War economics as well as political rhetoric depended on a fiction of “the American way of life,” which in turn took family life as its moral and cultural justification.[65] Notions of assimilation and “emancipation” came to replace the ideas of race and national origins prevalent during the immediate postwar period. During the 1950s, Cold War concern for the loyalties of citizen/subjects coincided with racially laden ideas about the assimilation of minorities into “mainstream” American society. For example, Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay argued that Indian nations should not have a right of “consent” to termination policies outside of their rights, as American citizens, to vote for candidates for elective offices. In a 1955 letter, McKay conflates his distaste for Indian self-determination with a Cold War aversion to nongovernmental political organizations:
The issue of consent has most serious Constitutional implications … for Indians would thus be given over and above the normal rights of citizenship, a special veto power over legislation which might affect them. … No other element in our population (aside from the President himself) now has such a power, and none has ever had in the history of our country … it would be extremely dangerous to pick out any segment of the population and arm its members with the ability to frustrate the will of the Congress which the whole people have elected.[66]
Termination, then, was presented as the emancipation of Indians from their segregated status as owners of reservation land and self-determining politics. The national romance here offered Indians the chance to marry into the family, to emerge from their more primitive relationship with the federal government into full rights as citizen/spouses. Pro-termination statesmen such as Senator Hugh Alfred Butler (R-Nebr.) compared Indian emancipation to civil rights for African-Americans: “Let me say frankly that I do not believe Negroes should be segregated, and I do not believe Indians should be segregated. Any institution or any public policy which strengthens and enforces segregation for these two minority racial groups in my judgment is wrong.”[67] Self-determination meant different things to Indian people and policy makers in this period. To Indians, it meant a chance to control their individual and collective destinies outside the administration of the BIA. Indian supporters of termination, including the NCAI until 1953, tended to see it as removing a level of bureaucracy and allowing Indians to administer their land and lives directly. Many Indian veterans, for example, wanted federal restrictions removed from their lands so that they could be eligible for Veteran's Administration loans. For non-Indian proponents of termination, however, self-determination meant, strictly, individualism; all communal claims to land and governance had to be renounced in order that Indians might finally “become Americans.”[68]
Like many marriages, however, Indian emancipation required the restructuring of the economics and social life of one of the partners. Lomawaima calls the education of Indian girls in federal boarding schools “training in dispossession under the guise of dependency.”[69] The paternalism of termination policy, as well as its disciplinary intentions, were well expressed by Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bill Warne, who said at a meeting with the Association of Indian Americans in 1949: “What we need most is the knowledge which will enable us to awake in our Indian fellow citizens a desire to move away from the past of their fathers into the future we have arranged for every youngster.”[70] Gendered metaphors of transformation indicate the ways the state was to minister: to real Indian families, and as an agent of naturalization into the national family.
Many Indian people did desire economic and social progress, though their ideas for achieving these ends did not include giving up the land. At a statewide conference on Indian affairs in Minnesota in 1950, Joe Vizenor, White Earth Ojibwa, stressed the need for a jobs program on reservations, so that Indians could become economically self-reliant. Keying in to one
To some people, Indian self-determination meant that they “no longer feel attached to tribal custom [and] are leaving the reservation to make their own independent way in the world.”[72] But many Indian organizations and non-Indian policy makers wondered how Indian citizens would fare off the reservation. Concern centered on how members of the Klamath and Menominee nations, the first to be targeted for termination, would spend their allotment money and what kinds of households they would establish off the reservations. In 1961 each Klamath to accept termination was eligible to receive $43,000.[73] The Reverend Harvey Zeller, who worked in a Methodist mission on the Klamath reservation from 1945 to 1963, reassured New York Times reporters that “the Klamaths are behaving just like white men. Some blew their cash, others put it to work. Some bought new cars, lots are buying new houses.”[74]
Marriage into the national family required the ministering of a coalition of university social scientists and state, county, and government agencies. This coalition saw the attachment of American Indians to their land and culture as typical “laboring class psychological problems [that] often come from the lack of requisite practical social skills, or from lack of opportunity to fulfill white middle class goals—not from a reluctance to adopt them or inability to fully assimilate them.”[75] The psychologization of Menominee resistance to termination by this coalition is worth quoting at length here, because it exemplifies how the romance of assimilation dealt with different conceptions of citizenship and subjectivity.
Most Menominees would prefer to maintain the present federal guardianship status rather than accept termination. The widespread belief that they were bribed or coerced into accepting termination is a poor psychological foundation for a program which demands the utmost cooperation and efforts of the tribal membership. … Underlying this feeling is the strong attachment that the Menominees have for their “homeland,” a birthright that they feel is worthy of and entitled to protection. This feeling is reinforced by the exceptional beauty of the Reservation forest, streams and lakes, the passion of the Menominees for hunting and fishing, and its symbolic significance for them as Indians; and on the human side, the fact that the Reservation psychologically
Not surprisingly, the termination coalition attempted to override these sentimental objections, implementing assimilation by drawing on the related discourses of citizenship and family. The BIA offered Menominee adults classes in citizenship and government, and employed a home agent to help Menominee women prepare their households for termination and relocation. The Menominee News, a pro-termination paper, carried regular tips on sanitation, canning, and gardening, as well as advice on how to buy appropriate clothing for children attending integrated county or city schools.[77] In his monthly column, Relocation Officer George McKay offered fatherly advice on home economics: “We all desire to have something better for our home, to improve our living conditions, but we must work and save in order to obtain this type of living.”[78]
Just as allotment and termination policies individualized Indian land holdings by taking them out of federal trusts, relocation policies emphasized the success of individual Indians in mainstream American society.[79] Pursuing the goal of Indian assimilation, federal policy during the 1950s and 1960s focused on individual Indians. Programs often rested on individualistic assumptions about success and motivation, discounting cultural context and values as important factors. Joan Ablon, a social scientist who researched relocation for the BIA extensively in the early 1960s, thought that even the family was too large a unit to take into account when the potential success of the individuals being relocated was considered: “The importance of the personal psychological characteristics of the individual relocatee cannot be overstated in their influence on the future of the relocation experience, and are so varying that they can rarely be figured in as a generalized ‘given’ when planning for the individual or family unit.”[80]
Evaluations of relocatees' success often focused on individual factors, such as previous arrest record, marital status, and even blood quantum. One study even suggested an inverse relationship between degree of Indian ancestry and successful employment.[81] Another social scientist found that successful relocatees were most likely to “take their Indianness lightly.”[82] The assumptions here about Indians come from both the assimilationist paradigm of the relocation programs and a traditional U.S. emphasis on the reform of the poor, rather than from any thought of economic redistribution.[83] Criteria for fitness for termination and relocation
In 1950 the Minnesota governor's Human Rights Committee reported that the estimated 1,000 Indians in the Twin Cities area were following the time-honored immigrant path of concurrent assimilation and nostalgia:[85]
Those Indians who have become “acculturated” to city life have, by definition, ceased in all ways but appearances to be Indian. Many of them, hating childhood memories and dreaming of a new life for their children, think this is just as it should be. However, there is a growing number of city Indians who have passed through and beyond the pains of cultural rebirth and are now emotionally and economically able to be nostalgic about better things from their past.
Perhaps the future of city Indian life is to be seen in the ways of these people: Craftsmen and laborers whose children attend neighborhood schools, they make a point of learning and using the labors of their fathers, and they master the old arts and crafts and dances—but only for Saturday night.[86]
The writer of this report was not only concerned with Indians' economic success in the city and the viability of federal policy that it would imply. Rather, Indians' success, and thus the success of the termination project, had something to do with the memories, dreams, and entertainment of individuals. In becoming citizen/subjects, Indians had to progress from collective cultural identification to the individualized life of consumers in the American empire.[87]
Under pressure from the termination coalition, Wisconsin Public Law 399 changed the legality of Indian inheritance in 1956. In contrast to Goldwater's earlier concern that only full-bloods be considered Indian, this law made it possible for all legal heirs, not just those eligible for tribal enrollment, to receive a “certificate of beneficial interest.” A share of tribal property, then, would be passed on to all legal heirs.[88] This law concerning inheritance undermined the limited legal sovereignty of the trust relationship, and allowed for the eventual dissolution of the Menominees' land claims, along with their seemingly inevitable intermarriage into white society. The termination coalition here made war on the internal frontiers of Indian self-determination, opening sovereign nations to literal and figurative marriage and the social and economic exploitation accompanying both.
Under termination, the national romance replaced its emphasis on bloodlines and kinship with the legally administered conversion of citizens. The state adopted a therapeutic attitude toward Indian people in the 1950s: they would be converted into citizens through social psychology and political education. The “internal frontiers” here are no less racialized than those based on biological conceptions of race. Instead of operating through the exclusions of biology and reproduction, however, they emphasize culture and social standing. As Donald Fixico points out, “the real circumstances of terminating trust relations set the stage for scrutinizing the Indian ability to exchange traditional life for that of dominant middle class values.”[89] The coalition of state, federal, county, and university forces in this period authored a narrative of transformation. Under their scrutiny, Indians were to give up their national identity and through the ministrations of the therapeutic state become singular American citizens.
In their work on East Indian colonial history, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid describe policies closely parallel to those of termination and relocation in the United States: “Such ostensibly gender-neutral land settlements … in fact, began a process of social restructuring which was simultaneously and necessarily a process of reconstituting patriarchies in every social strata.”[90] Termination and relocation policy wrote Indians as the child brides of the state, emerging from the infancy of the trust relationship into citizenship and wifely maturity. These policies, ultimately designed to abolish the separate national and cultural status of Indian people, offered a citizenship that was specifically gendered and racialized. National Indian organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), as well as activists in specific reservation communities from Oklahoma to Wisconsin to Montana, resisted the narrow choices that termination ultimately represented.
Federal im/migration policy during the Cold War always deployed race and gender, categories of personal identity, as technologies for securing the expansion of state power. Anticommunism, in other words, was necessarily rather than incidentally racist and sexist. The McCarran-Walter Act, by far the most important immigration legislation of the immediate postwar period, combined an anachronistic focus on “national origins” with a Cold War discourse of national loyalty and potential subversion. The biological aspects of Nordic race theory and their continuing influence through the Cold War discourse of political and economic motivations for migration provided the grounds for the coalition that challenged the basis
In 1958, Governor Averell Harriman of New York used his Columbus Day address to support changing the racialized basis of the law, calling for a “new age of discovery” and progress in the United States based on “continuous infusion of new vigor and new ideas from other countries. … Italians and peoples from other countries of southern and eastern Europe have added enormously to our culture, our progress, our strength.”[91] Columbus Day speeches like this one wrote a narrative of ethnic assimilation onto the story of heroic national origins.
For ethnic associations, the romance of assimilation was key to their claims to citizenship for themselves and their friends and relatives in Europe. In order to write themselves into this narrative of assimilation, ethnic groups such as Jews and Italians emphasized their good citizenship and downplayed any potential rivalries for their loyalty to the nation. In a heated exchange with Representative Emanuel Celler at the Democratic National Convention of 1956, Clarence L. Coleman, president of the American Council for Judaism, insisted that being Jewish was a religious rather than a national matter, and that Jews had no extranational loyalties. He argued: “We regret the Zionist thesis that all of the Jewish faith by virtue of being Jews hold a common Jewish nationality.”[92]
Similarly, organizations such as the Sons of Italy argued for enlarging the quotas for their ethnic group, rather than against the idea of national origins itself.[93] Claiming citizenship for themselves and potential citizenship for other immigrants, they emphasized their assimilability. While they were temporarily allied with African-American groups in achieving reform, their identifications were, for the most part, as “white ethnics” who wanted to allow their friends and relatives into the country.[94]
Immigration reform was also supported by a coalition of eastern and midwestern congressmen. This coalition sought greater immigration, in the words of Senator Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.), “not only in the name of humanity but in our own enlightened self-interest.”[95] In contrast to the coalition that supported termination and immigration restriction in Congress, supporters of immigration reform saw postwar prosperity founded on increasing internationalization of both capital and labor. Javits
Pro-termination congressmen, who in general also favored immigration restriction, saw the sovereignty of the nation within its geographic borders as all-important. They sought to extend state hegemony over separately governed Indian land, creating a return to a heroic national economy. Immigration reformers such as John F. Kennedy and Herbert Lehman were more likely to see national progress wedded to the international expansion of markets and the ingenuity and hard work of immigrants. “Who can say how far ahead in science we would be today,” asked former congressman Lehman in 1959, “if Congress had not created so many immigration barriers and kept out of our country so many individuals of ability and promise. The loss is not only in the scientific field but in the whole fabric of American life.”[96]
In the vision of immigration restriction, national interest lay in strictly policing both internal and external frontiers. A New York Times editorial worried in 1956 that the days of the “golden door” for immigrants were over: “There are no new lands on which they might settle; no unpopulated prairies, no shores where orchards have never been planted.”[97] In 1959 a proposal was made in Congress that control over immigration be moved to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), so that potential threats to the national order might be nipped in the bud. Richard Arens, the chairman of HUAC, commented, “If the liberal groups succeed in the destruction of the immigration system, it will be the destruction of the first line of defense of this country.”[98]
The contradictions between the ideological needs of state and nation to maintain sovereignty by screening new immigrants and the internationalization of labor and capital in the postwar period were resolved domestically through discourses of social assimilation. Just as actual competency tests and immediate family members proved to be too limited a method of screening individual Indians for their readiness for “civilized” life, national origins quotas were controversial as well as unrealistic in light of the increasingly hemispheric economy of the Americas and the Caribbean. Traditional immigration restriction had been part of the historic pact between capital and organized labor since 1924. After World War II and the reorganization of capital and labor, unauthorized immigrant labor became particularly important, particularly in the Southwest.[99]
Like similar conversations about Indian policy, debates on immigration policy during the late 1950s and early 1960s focused on discourses
In 1959 Senator John F. Kennedy proposed amending immigration policy by allowing unrestricted immigration to relatives of citizens and resident aliens. Family reunification, as a central component of immigration policy, would “make it easier for future immigrants to assimilate into the United States and eliminate much of the bitterness engendered by the present system.”[100] The discourse of family reunification attempted to counter fears that immigration would get out of control. As Guillemina Jasso and Mark Rosenzweig point out, the assumption of family reunification policy is consonant with Cold War policies that sought to screen out unsuitable immigrants. “If the characteristics of family members are similar, then given that priority in sponsorship is provided to naturalized immigrants, who presumably have had some success in the United States, the family preference system will select new immigrants who are also likely to succeed.”[101]
Like the War Brides Act, family reunification, a central component of immigration reforms since 1965, presumes that the family is a competent crucible for selecting likely citizens. Unlike the War Brides Act, however, family reunification is administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, drawing on a complicated set of laws governing relationships and their relative priorities for admission. As in termination
In a parallel move that did not draw on this discourse of family and was ultimately politically unacceptable, Senator Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) proposed a “new seed” program in 1961. Immigrants would have to pass physical tests similar to those for entrance into the Army. In addition, the state would settle immigrants in areas appropriate to their potential assimilation; immigrants would be “prevented temporarily from settling with their own ethnic groups or where jobs are scarce.”[102] What this rather toothless subplot of the national romance suggests is that the welfare of actual families was not so important to state policy as the use of a discourse of family unification as an arena where the confluence of national and private good allow for the intervention of a therapeutic state apparatus in planning assimilation. Family reunification as a policy, of necessity, favors a culturally specific notion of family relationships. Immigrants attempting to use family reunification policy to gain entrance into the United States would have to draw on a culturally acceptable model of kin relations.[103] By 1988, for example, more than one-third of all adult immigrants who did not come under refugee/asylum status got visas through marriage.[104]
The second component of the immigration reform that supplanted national origins was a discourse of “special skills” and “domestic labor market needs.” This component of the law gave preference to professionals and skilled workers who could find employers to vouch for their importance on the job. As Whitney Young observed in an Amsterdam News editorial, this idea of special skills “is likely again to discriminate in favor of the industrialized nations of Europe, while excluding those from Africa and Asia, which are not as highly developed.”[105]
Even though the particular provisions of immigration reform maintained a national romance of assimilation through the discourses of family and work, the 1965 amendments largely satisfied the coalition backing reform. Kennedy's Nation of Immigrants, itself a foundational fiction of the diverse nationalities that had come together to form the United States, was widely acclaimed as endorsing a more tolerant immigration policy. Praising the talents and hard work of America's immigrant stock, Kennedy celebrated the marriage of new blood into the family of the nation: “Somehow the difficult adjustments are made and people get down to earning a living, raising a family, and building a nation.”[106]
FICTIONS OF EMPIRE: TOWARD REVISION
In the 1950s and 1960s Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in concert with social scientists and western business interests, installed policies that undermined Indian sovereignty and cultural self-determination in the name of epic narratives of democracy and progress. Immigration policy implemented a racially based national origins quota system and used political loyalty tests to determine the eligibility of potential immigrants for the American way of life.
State policy draws on and imposes the foundational fictions of national life. The termination and relocation policies of the 1950s used the epic of the national struggle for freedom to claim to “emancipate” Indians from “primitive” reservation conditions. Correspondingly, immigration policy invoked narratives of upward mobility and American love of freedom, screening immigrants on the basis of whether they would “assimilate” into the national community. At the same time, of course, to emancipate Indians was to open their land to development; to assimilate new immigrants was to accept those who were presumed to become loyal citizens and a docile labor force.
Viewing state policy as a story allows for elaboration of the practices and politics of specific regimes. On the one hand, state policies construct disciplined populations. Both Indian and immigration policy in the post–World War II period extended an institutional gaze to marginalized populations, studying their preparedness for emancipation and assimilation. Indians and immigrants were carefully studied in this period, so that their social lives, their very existence as subjects of the state and citizens of the nation might be remade. In this context, social policy provides “a technique of power/knowledge that enabled administrators to manage their institutional populations by creating and exploiting a new kind of visibility.”[107]
Immigration and federal Indian policy were and are part of a complex system of global and hemispheric domination. Of necessity, the struggle to reform repressive policies takes place in a national arena. The contradiction here is that the factors that make immigration such a crucial source of cheap labor, the reasons that Indian lands are perennially sought after by western land and mineral developers, are part of much larger, more global processes. The national results of these processes are still under way, as many states consider legislation like California's Proposition 187 and the Save Our State initiative in Florida. Congress passed highly restrictive immigration reform bills in 1990 and 1996.
In embodying a fiction of national unity based on social assimilation and family values, the immigration reforms of 1965 ignored the contemporary realities: increasing dependence on both cyclic and permanent migration of workers from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean; racial barriers against the access of many of these immigrants to the rights of full citizenship in this country; the feminization of the labor force. It would not be long before the rediscovery of those shadowy outlaws of the national romance, the undocumented, pregnant fugitive and her brothers, the dark hordes sweeping “out of control” across the border, would make defending the national family through immigration restriction seem a crucial next act.
Similarly, the national movement toward antifederalism and block grants to the states threatens to undermine the limited sovereignty that native peoples have achieved within the confines of the United States. An irony of federal Indian policy, from termination through the present day, is its attempt to provide civil rights for Indian people through an increasing political emphasis on states' rights, which has historically meant the delimiting of native sovereignty.
Understanding state policy as a discursive field allows for the use of this field for the articulation of oppositional claims. If the state writes foundational fictions of the nation, it also provides an arena where these fictions may be edited, revised, or altogether rewritten by social movements and by groups that do not have access to hegemonic power. While termination policies articulated a discourse of emancipation, Indian groups such as the National Congress of American Indians were able to use the contradictions in social policy to argue that true emancipation should not mean the end of the federal trust relationship and relocation of Indians from their land to cities, but rather broader access to their constitutional and treaty rights. Similarly, groups opposed to restrictive immigration policies drew on discourses generated by the Civil Rights Movement to demand equal status under the Constitution for people of all races.
At the same time that resistance to termination and restrictive immigration policies were crucial to their subsequent reform, the kinds of reform available, authored through the racialized discourses of national citizenship, maintained continuities with the discriminatory policies of the immediate postwar period. Where the nation claims a subject in the form of a citizen, alternative imaginings of citizenship status undermine the totalizing claims of nationalist ideology. Instead of identifying with the national narrative of assimilation, new immigrants often think of
In the postwar period, im/migrants from all over the world and from Indian reservations within the national borders arrived in U.S. urban centers in record numbers. Pushed by federal policy as well as underdeveloped reservation economies, American Indians came to cities in search of the democratic opportunities that the war was fought to defend. Refugees from war-torn Europe waited in the relocation centers and devastated cities of their homelands for permission to migrate to the United States. As newly consolidated U.S. power reshaped the world political economy, Third World people were pulled to seek opportunities away from the ravaged economies of their home nations. These im/migrants joined communities that had existed in the United States as long as the intrahemispheric, intercultural economies of colonialism had been bringing North American and Caribbean Indians into contact with Euroamerican settlers and African slaves; as long as immigrants had come back and forth across the oceans in search of economic opportunity and political liberties; as long as im/migrant peoples had had to leave their homes for temporary work, from which many of them never returned. The historical experiences of Indian and Third World peoples in this hemisphere brought these im/migrants to identify home with multiple political geographies, some of which were not illustrated on the maps available in the Cold War United States
Almost by definition, the narrative of the nation can't recognize the dual identities maintained by groups of people whose historical experiences position them in places where the claims of dominant foundational fictions are less convincing than those of alternative discourses of nation and community. The existence of citizens with cultural and political loyalties tied to more than one homeland challenges liberal ideas of what the state is, as well as its relation to the nation. Assimilation, as Howard Winant points out, is part of a modernist framework for understanding social relations. Equality and social harmony are presumed to come about as various classes, races, and ethnicities grow to be alike under the generalizing rubric of the nation.[108] Emancipation is part of the enlightenment
With all its historic discontents, citizenship became a crucial site of political struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. African-Americans drew on the discourse of national consolidation to claim the equality promised to them as citizens under the Thirteenth Amendment and reaffirmed by Truman's desegregation of the military in 1948. The achievement of the civil rights movement in asserting African-Americans' claims to citizenship and equality rearranged the field in which foundational fictions of the nation could be written. Similarly, the celebration of Indian veterans as American heroes changed the ability of Indian political organizations such as the NCAI to make claims in nationalist discourse. At the same time, decolonization created newly conscious citizens who had struggled for their identities; immigrants from these countries were unlikely to easily accept melting pot paradigms of assimilation and national unity. Both im/migrants and citizens working for civil rights accepted the ideological claims of Cold War egalitarianism at the same time that they used these claims to pressure the state for additional rights. This refusal to let the state manage the terms of national ideology set up a challenge to primary U.S. foundational fictions in this period.
The next chapters examine the ways in which Caribbean and Indian im/migrants have defined themselves against the narrow parameters of citizenship established for them by the state. Drawing on historically complex identities, these im/migrants have created social institutions and cultural narratives that resist the discourse of social assimilation offered to them by federal policy. For this reason, termination resulted not in the end of the trust relationship between Indian nations and the federal government but in a renewal of claims to the land and in demands for rights for Indian people who relocated to cities. In Brooklyn, Caribbean people contested discourses of assimilation that erased their identities as Black citizens of newly decolonized nations and of neighborhoods struggling for municipal empowerment.