Teaching History Through Immigration Stories

What is the “typical” immigrant story? Most of my students at Trinity College—a small, selective, liberal arts institution in Connecticut—would frame the answer conventionally, in terms of what they vaguely know: people coming from Ireland or the Pale to escape persecution, avoid the draft, have enough to eat, practice their religion in peace, or participate in something they like to call “the American dream.”

Of course, from the viewpoint of a serious historian, the question is more of a problem than the answer—after all, no single set of experiences can typify the enormously varied processes which brought people to these shores. Pilgrims came to insure their own—but no one else’s—religious practices; Africans were brought in chains; around the turn of the last century most Jews came in families and stayed, while a majority of Southern Italians were single men who returned to their homeland (1). Besides, if one is teaching the history of the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, why should one be interested in narratives other than the historical one being constructed and examined in class? Why get involved with complicating fictions or even those forms of fiction we call “autobiography”?

The short answer to such questions is that strategic use of “literary” texts is effective in engaging students. The longer answer involves asking what our classroom objectives might be. We are interested in helping students first to grasp and then to get “inside” the structures of events that constitute historical accounts. But there are at least two stumbling blocks to their doing so. First, like most of us, students carry around in their heads certain unexamined notions—for example, about the “typical” immigrant story—which often keep them from reading evidence, evaluating it sensibly, and posing alternative explanations, all central tasks in achieving historical knowledge. And, second, “getting inside” events requires acts of imagination. Literary texts are very helpful, both in penetrating the ideological screens that disable student perceptions, and in modeling for them ways of imagining others’ lives in other times and other places. It is also true, of course, that any text can be read, with great care and modesty, as historical and ethnographic evidence. Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity by Indians tells us something about the Narragansett, something also about the beginnings of what would become an important literary-religious genre, but probably most of all, it tells us about the world view of a group of late-seventeenth-century English settlers in the New World.

The texts I will be discussing here illuminate the cultural conflicts generated when rural people migrated a century or so ago to the growing cities not only of the Western hemisphere but also of Europe. In this sense, the texts constitute not so much “evidence” for the historian’s files, which, with a variety of other more empirical data, might be used to draw conclusions; rather, they represent historical speculations that express certain “structures of feeling” of people in the historical moments about which we study (2).

The United States of a century ago seems to most of our students extraordinarily remote—a world still poised between horse power as a literal statement and as a metaphor of measure, between the daguerreotype and the “moving picture,” between the presumed and long celebrated virtues of agrarian life and the newly consolidated power of the metropolis. For many of our students, however, one primary experience, the experience of migration, bears directly on their own. I am not talking just of those students—an increasing number, to be sure—who are themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. I am also thinking of those whose lives have been marked by a variety of “internal” migrations: city to suburb, Rust Belt to Sun Belt, job vanished to job in prospect. For many students, the immigrant story—or at least an immigrant story—is in some senses their own. As such, these experiences provide a bridge back into the previous century.

In order to examine what constitutes the “typical” immigrant story, I like to assign an excerpt from chapter IX of Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) and Edith Eaton’s (Sui Sin Far’s) story, “In the Land of the Free” (1909) (3). I have often assigned a number of other texts with these two, including a selection from Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896); Finley Peter Dunne’s hilarious satire, “Immigration” (1902); early sections of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906); Sarah Orne Jewett’s story “The Foreigner” (1900); and, more recently, breaking chronology, Helena Viramontes’s story “The Cariboo Café” (1984). The last is particularly powerful for reconnecting the issues of a century ago with today’s conflicts about immigration.

I begin class with a sentence early in the Antin excerpt: “Anybody who is acquainted with the slums of any American metropolis knows that that is the quarter where poor immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt, half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of social missionaries, the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward politicians, the touchstone of American democracy” (4). I ask my students what they make of the direction of Antin’s series, and they quickly see it embodies an optimism carried out in greater detail in the subsequent paragraphs. There, Antin contrasts the grim picture a “well-versed metropolitan” draws of the alleyway in which she lives with her own view of the place: “He would say that it is no place at all, but a short box of an alley. Two rows of three-story tenements are its sides, a stingy strip of sky is its lid, a littered pavement is the floor, and a narrow mouth its exit.” She sees it differently: “two imposing rows of brick buildings, loftier than any dwelling I had ever lived in...I looked up to the topmost row of windows, and my eyes were filled with the May blue of an American sky!"

What accounts for Antin’s unambivalent enthusiasm, even in a slum? What do students make of the ease with which she sheds her “despised immigrant clothing,” her “impossible Hebrew” name, her European languages, and embraces everything American, even, finally, the need for her sister to go to work in a sweatshop while Mary goes to school? Are those good things or more ambiguous accomplishments? How do students—as people close to Antin’s age—react to the circumstances she faces?

Such questions often lead to discussions of what Antin particularly values in America, everything from canned food to a rocking chair, from the “free light” in the street to the free brass band on Union Place, from the department store to the “free education.” “Free” is the operative word here, but what precisely does it mean? Is Antin’s outlook shaped primarily by the free play of her individual personality or by her “days of affluence in Russia,” that is, by class origins and outlook? The discussion can help students understand how Antin’s text embodies key elements of American individualistic ideology: the joy of consumption, the emphasis on individual freedom as the measure of value, the attribution of her sister’s need to work and her father’s lack of success to fate, destiny, or individual shortcomings rather than to the existing organization of society.

Other elements of Antin’s story also raise questions about what is characteristic of immigrants. Are they, like Antin (and like Jake in Cahan’s Yekl) desperately afraid of appearing to be “greenhorns,” determined to assimilate at the earliest possible moment? Or is that a characteristic particularly of those, like Jews, who have long lived as “strangers in a strange land”? What role do the police, the schools, and the social welfare agent play? Are they friends, as Antin sees them, or enemies, real or potential? How is that determined? And what of prior immigrant generations and different ethnic groups? Do they offer helping hands, as in Antin’s narrative, or are they sources of contempt, fear, and exploitation?

At some point in the discussion I like to introduce the question of whether this text or Edith Eaton’s “In the Land of the Free” is a more “representative” immigrant narrative. This is usually an interesting move because so few of my Anglo students think, even now, about Asia as a source of immigration. Eaton’s story concerns the return of Lae Choo, a Chinese mother and wife, to America after a two-year absence in China. She had gone to her homeland to give birth to a son, and then to take care of her husband’s sick parents. Now, returning with the child, her papers are in order, but her son’s are not; he has no papers, of course, and is taken from her to await clearance from the proper authorities. As the “Little One” waits in a church school, Lae Choo and her husband Hom Hing struggle to get that clearance, “helped”—for a considerable price—by an American lawyer. Clearly, the conflict in the story is over the child, that is, the next generation; it pits the Chinese parents against a variety of American institutions and their representatives. These include the customs agents; the legal system, represented by the lawyer James Clancy from an earlier generation of immigrants; and a missionary school, which combines the social functions of education and religion.

In Eaton’s story, the cultural values of the Chinese couple are represented not only by the wife’s return to the home country to have her child and to care for elderly parents, but also by her subservience to her husband and, symbolically, by the jewels she has brought from China, which she must sacrifice to pay the lawyer enough to get his help in restoring her child to her. The tensions and submerged conflict between husband and wife—she obediently hands the child to him and he to the customs officers—provide an opportunity to discuss how gender shapes different immigration experiences. Taking into consideration other texts we have read, we ask: Are women the carriers of older cultural traditions? Do married women remain less assimilated to the new society in which their husbands, like Cahan’s Jake, try to play the role of entrepreneur? Does the “Little One’s” rejection of his Chinese mother represent a pattern of immigrant life? In short, in what ways does Eaton’s story capture aspects of “the” immigrant experience that are not available in Antin and Cahan?

It is also useful to ask how, in its small details, the story portrays the experience of the Chinese couple as distinctive. Why must Hom Hing wait until all others are gone to enter the steamer and greet his wife? Why is it that their neighbors seem only to be “bachelor Chinamen”? Why is the “Little One” renamed “Kim” at the school where he “was the pet of the place”? Here I introduce some of the text of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Students are often startled by provisions of the act, making it unlawful for Chinese laborers “to remain within the United States” (Section 1), or requiring that “no State court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship” (Section 14).

In this context, it can be worthwhile to introduce other elements of the history of Chinese laborers: the 1871 lynchings in Los Angeles; the 1885 murders in Rocky Spring, Wyoming; the origin of the phrase “he didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance.” One can also ask where students have mainly encountered men of Chinese origins, which often leads into a discussion of the laws and customs that restricted them to “women’s work” in laundries, cooking, and valet services.

Students rapidly see that there are parallels and differences in the immigration experiences of various ethnic or “racial” groups. I often point out that, for the period 1899-1924, Jews and Chinese constituted the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of percentages who returned. One estimate is that only 5.2 percent of Jews departed the United States, whereas 129.2 percent of Chinese did—that is, more Chinese returned to China during this time than emigrated to the United States (5).

Nevertheless, there are deep similarities as well as distinctions in the clashes of culture that characterize immigration and urbanization. One can chart these in the stories through work, the places people live, their clothing, their language, and the relationships—of a new generation to parents and of the immigrant generation to the institutions of the New World. Thus, texts such as Antin’s and Eaton’s offer a means for translating into the lives of historical agents the details and trends embodied in charts of migration and remigration, in legal documents, in occupational statistics, in the empirical particulars necessary for historical analysis.

There are also parallels and differences in the responses to immigration of those “native” to America. Jewett’s story “The Foreigner” can be helpful in this connection since it is told entirely from the perspective of an older New England woman, Mrs. Todd. At the behest of her mother, she befriends the “foreigner,” a Frenchwoman recently married to a Yankee ship captain and then quickly widowed. The community’s responses to Mrs. Captain Tolland suggest not only New England provinciality but the widely held suspicion of long established Americans for those different by virtue of religion, language, and even cooking. The story thus raises questions about whether assimilation is really possible, as well as about the extent to which Americans can, or did, change in response to what “others” brought to them.

Narratives like these provide gateways to a more contemporary story like “The Cariboo Café,” by Helena Viramontes. This is a difficult story technically because it shifts points of view from a small girl, the daughter of “illegals,” to the owner of a seedy Los Angeles luncheonette, to a female refugee from Central America. But it is a story that rewards the work necessary to read it, for it captures the heart-wrenching experiences of those at the bottom of society, caught up by the large historical forces that we read about in textbooks. In this story students discover not “illegal immigrants,” but small children frightened and lost in a huge, unfamiliar city; they meet not an “angry Anglo man,” but a lonely, defeated, bitter Vietnam veteran, who is as without hope as the illegals he betrays; they experience not the textbook “victim of Central American repression,” but a loving mother driven over the edge by her son’s disappearance.

The texts of a century ago provide a useful “gloss” for reading Viramontes’s narrative, for they offer a set of parallels students can quickly grasp regarding the reasons why immigrants come, what kinds of jobs and educational opportunities are or are not available to them, and the ways in which native-born Americans respond to strangers in their midst. But the differences are also powerfully instructive about the dissimilarity of today’s immigrant world from that of a century ago. It is not, of course, that contrasts between “In the Land of the Free” and “The Cariboo Café” exhaust an exploration of distinctions between late-nineteenth- and late-twentieth-century patterns of immigration. I would say, rather, that such stories, and the others on which I have touched, provide vivid jumping off points into the complex and differentiated lives of the real people often hidden beneath abstract labels such as “immigrant.”

Paul Lauter