1. Teaching immigration

2. I: Myths of immigration
“The biggest challenge in teaching the history of immigration and ethnicity, I believe, is to help students to understand the relationship of popular myths about the immigrant experience to the actual experience of immigrants in American society.”
- Gary Gerstle, leading forum on teaching immigration (on “History Matters” site, 1999)

3. II: Going beyond Ellis Island
Asian immigration in 19th century; Angel Island, Chinese and Japanese exclusion
Mexican immigration in 19th/20th c
French-Canadian immigration
Puerto Rican migration
Immigration since 1965

4. III: Understanding Americanization
Metaphors: The Uprooted [Oscar Handlin, 1951]
The Transplanted [John Bodnar, 1985]
melting pot
salad bowl
mosaic
stew

5. ‘Official’ Americanization
Schools, settlement houses, local gov’t campaigns
Intensified and became more coercive during WWI

7. Many immigrants did not wish to become “Americanized”
Did not find process quick, easy, and liberatory; often alienating and disturbing
Did not become undifferentiated “Americans”

8. Resisting Americanization:
- Italian immigrants and others resisted sending children to school
- Catholic immigrants staying away from Irish-dominated churches
- avoiding settlement houses, etc.
- As much as a third of new immigrants did not become citizens; many intended to return

9. On their own terms
Immigrants and children flocked to movie theatres, amusement parks, etc. Often blended Old World and New World cultures (I.e., Yiddish theatre, early movie theatres, etc).
Americanized “on their own terms,” blending ethnic and American identities, using institutions they created

10. IV: Comparing immigrant groups or waves
18th and 19th century immigrants
“new” immigrants of period
Post-1965 immigrants from Latin America, Caribbean, Asia

11. Immigration and race
New immigrants of period as “in-between peoples”: seen as distinct races, though considered white for naturalization purposes
Slav, Hebrew, Iberic, Mediterranean seen as low on the racial hierarchy, “wretched refuse”

12. Who is “white”?
“The number of purely white People in the World is proportionately very small...In Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1751

13. Histories of “whiteness”
2005
1998
1991

14. “White, but not our kind of white”
Lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans, 1891; Greeks vicitmized by whites in Omaha riot, 1909
Greek and Italian immigrants seen as “nonwhite” in western mining areas; in MN’s Iron Range, Greeks, Serbs, South Italians, and Croatians were “black”
Italians assigned to black schools in some southern educational systems
“Only hunkies” work blast furnace jobs “too damn dirty and too damn hot for a white man.”

15. 1995
1998

16. Do Latinos and Asians today “pursue whiteness”?
How do black immigrants today respond to racial dynamics in U.S.?

17. V: Immigration policy 1790: free white men eligible for citizenship
Pro-immigrant consensus prevailed through 1860s

18. Immigration policy
Chinese Exclusion Act, beginning of immigration restriction
Japanese “Gentlemen’s Agreement”
1921 and 1924 immigration restriction
McCarran-Walter Immigration Act 1952
Immigration and Nationality Act repealed quota system