Immigration and Popular Culture

Reading Hollywood 1930: Jewish Gangster Masquerade; Monterary, 1967: The Hippies meet Ravi Shankar; Broadway, 1957: Westside Story and the Nuyorican Blues and Chelsea 2006: Wandering Pop Culture opened my eyes to the realities and complexities many immigrants face upon arrival to America. The writers did a wonderful job articulating the role and impact popular culture has played within immigrant communities, namely Puerto Rican, Indian, and Jewish communities. It highlights ways in which America has evolved over the years as we have interfaced with new immigrant communities moving to this country. Popular Culture has played a key role in familiarizing Americans with culture (as well as vice versa) through theater, cinema, artifacts, fads, and icons. Popular culture offers a level of safety that does not require major shifts in beliefs, practices, and ways of living important to every culture.

Personally, some of the information presented in the chapters was new. This new and challenging information evoked within me the need to challenge and rethink what I have learned about immigration and the history of this country. One might think my age (the ripe old age of 35) one might have increased awareness of the immigration experiences of “foreigners” to America. But how is this taught? How does one come to understand the experiences of immigrants, or the early developmental years of this country? Many of us have grown up in American schools learning the history of our country and the World yet leave with limited understanding of the diversity of our nation and our collective experiences of being brought to, or migrating to this country and how this has impacted our daily lives and this country. Not to mention the multitude of contributions made to this country by individuals and groups who allow us to live as we do today. Emphasizing the connection between past and present, I think, is fundamental to developing informed, critically aware young people.

In many cases the stories, experiences, and perspectives of immigrants are lacking from our school curriculum often created from the perspective of European males, or curriculum developers. Youth development programs are also affected by the lack of access to these stories as we engage a young person after the school day ends. The richness of these stories, even in the format presented, was to me very powerful and pieces of this information (offered in small doses overtime) can be useful to educational and youth development settings. Popular culture can be a medium to teach and learn many, if not all, of the themes I identify above. Growing up in the 80’s in the St. Paul Public School district I remember immigration happening in my school and community as an influx of Asian-American (particularly Hmong and Cambodian) immigrants joined my school community. I remember interactions with Mai Ti, a recent immigrant from Cambodia, who shared her countries cuisine and candy with me during lunch time. This experiences, as innocent and informal as it was, could have been amplified within the classroom in so many unique ways through the use of pop culture approaches and do not have to be limited to our lunch rooms and playgrounds.

Overall common themes (among some or all of the chapters) I discovered include: immigration, assimilation, bi-cultural identity, commercialism, America’s fascination with the “other”, economic inclusion/wealth creation, and the vilification of “brown” young people, boys/men in particular, and the use of “us and them”—to name a few. Another concurring theme (in absence) is the invisibility of the African and Native American (immigration) experiences in this country, although this absence is mentioned in a couple of the chapters. As an African-American woman I am appalled at this absence. I was pleased to discover during early development of Westside Story that a discussion occurred about which race/cultural groups to include in the story and that the African-American culture was considered, but did not make the cut, to me a confirmation of existence. While the authors in two of chapters recognize this absence do not name the why which I believe is rooted in racism and injustice, yet the fact remains this was the thinking and practice of exclusion our country practiced. I additionally charge that forms of exclusion similar to his still exist today.

Now that I have shared my general reaction to and have highlighted themes of the chapter, my goal is to bring to first expound on the use of “us and them” as a power construct and share my “immigration” stories of African and Native Americans to honor and validate their existence, create awareness, and offer a more inclusive look at groups living in America during the timeframe highlighted in these chapters, understanding the inclusion of their stories do not offer a complete story nor do I think was this the intent of these authors. Then I will share some personal experiences I have had with young people related to the impact of invisibility—the visibility of self and culture. Additionally, I share some thoughts on steps educators can take to liberate ourselves through the truth and engage young people through the use of popular culture approaches

“Us and Them”--a Power Construct

The first theme I would like to expound on a bit is the implicit and explicit use of “us and them”. I intentionally use the word foreigner in quotes above to demonstrate code words we use day to day, without thinking, to describe and/or categorize groups of people. Code words such as “foreigner”, “illegal alien”, and “red line” were developed to perpetuate the notion of the “other”, one of the themes of the above chapters. In Monterey, 1967: The Hippies meet Ravi Shankar it states: “Shankar became a star—a “superimmigrant” of sorts—an idealized version on the new “Brown” immigrant.” Please note here the use of the word superimmigrant, suggesting superiority to other immigrant groups already in this country which I will expand on later. Use of the word new here proves brown folks already existed in American society, but had not truly penetrated into the American mainstream, but why? These “new brown” immigrants while viewed at “them” or “the other” were seen as promising contributors to American society. The operational form of “us and them” serves a purpose that perpetuates superiority, division, power that ultimately affects access to, for example wealth, by certain groups. Historically, it has also been used to pit one group against the other to create division among cultural groups and maintain status quo.

No Longer Invisible

It is my opinion that one can not teach immigration without giving homage to the experience of African and Native Americans, they have served as our “immigration” example of hope. I use immigration in quotes here to bring to light the unique (un)immigration story of each. The story of Native Americans is simple, they were already inhabitants of American land, thus did not immigrate. The African “immigration” story is not at all about immigration, but of being brought to this country against their own will for the sole purpose of economic development. Both stories intricately tied to immigration and the history of this country. Despite how we all arrived, each story is equally significant and what connects us is the experience of assimilation, acculturation, and bi-cultural identity. W.E.B Dubois, in his historic 1903 book entitled: The Souls of Black Folk, describes the bi-cultural identity/experience of African-Americans best:

…the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world- a world which yields him not true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks in assumed contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness- an American, a Negro, two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being born asunder.”

Bi-cultural identity is informed through popular culture. Each part of the identity in this case, the African and American, are equally important. Both must be considered and nurtured. Identity development is paramount to understanding and articulation of self, self-esteem, and achievement. The lack of nurturing, in schools, family, and community can be devastating to a young person’s development which I delve deeper into in the next section. As my wise grandmother’s used to say: “if you don’t know from where you came, you won’t know where you’re going”.

The Impact of Invisibility

Initially, after reading and digesting the chapters, I felt enlightened yet a bothered and unsettled. I struggled to find the exact source of this discomfort, but knew in part it was a result of information I took in, not necessarily the words themselves but the meaning this information produced for me personally. I settled on the reality that after reading over 200 pages of assigned reading, I discovered a lot of new and interesting information about immigration and popular culture, but little of which included the experience of African-Americans, important to me as an African-American parent, educator, and learner. This invisibility hurts to my core and is the inspiration for this assignment and has contributed an increase in value with the use of wiki and blogs. I have come to discover that these tools can be used therapeutically, to journal, reflect, sort through, and grapple with new ideas as well as vent and get things off my chest.

These small steps, in and of itself, offers the opportunity to counteract the impact invisibility has played in my life as a young person now an adult. Invisibility comes in many forms and is perpetuated in many ways. The form these chapters highlight is invisibility through theatre and cinema as demonstrated in Westside Story and Jewish Gangster movies. Overtime invisibility-- in the cinema, in school textbooks, in print form like magazines can begin to impact the psyche. Innovative research is currently underway to examine this impact and offer solutions. Once internalized this can be very damaging and can impact various aspects of life including the job, school, parenting, achievement, and self worth.

One example of the pervasiveness of this invisibility became clear to me while meeting with a teen I have worked with for about five years now. Our relationship has evolved through a youth development context from leading experiences with her while in grade school (as a youth worker) to a mentoring type relationship sustained primarily through email. Leading up to this meeting she sent a series of emails explaining a friend shared with her the fact she did not like being African-American and was choosing to not identify with African-American culture based on bad values, negative images, and bad behaviors of African-Americans. So essentially she was seeking advice on how to approach this friend to help, as she perceived this as an issue. After inquiring more about the situation, I discovered this friend was actually her. Soon after, we met to discuss her feelings and experience further. What came out of this is was a commitment (after talking two hours over ice cream) to seek out and explore African-American’s from a historical perspective to explore identity and how it relates to her existence today in St. Paul, MN. She lacked information about herself based on access and inclusion.

To highlight another example I recently meet with a group of frustrated high school students who were told that images of slaves could not be used in marketing/promotional materials for their school’s annual Black History Month celebration and events. They wanted answers so met with the school administration to be told that images of slaves could only be used in classrooms as teaching tools, but not outside the classroom. As if keeping these images invisible in the school building meant they did not exist in the hearts and minds of these African-American students.

What Role can Popular Culture Play to Make the Invisible Visible?

Popular culture education, as a teaching approach, has the unique ability not only to the conduit to teach history and socio-political realities encompassing many of the themes I highlight at the beginning of this paper. It can offer an emotional connection to the subject matter (as I experienced) that “traditional” teaching approaches are unable to do and is supported by research on experiential education and learning. I see pop culture education as a way to engage today’s learner and equalize the educational/societal inequities many groups of young people in America are faced with daily. I want to emphasis that this reality of invisibility is not something I have thought up in isolation, but is in fact the experience of many African-American students (as the stories above reveal) as well as other students that they have become all to familiar with.

Before engaging students through popular culture education around these often hard and emotional topics, we as educators must first make the commitment to educate ourselves and our students through truth, regardless to the content offered through curriculum, given the limits our schools and classrooms sometimes offer. As a way to start, we must do our research not only through books, the library, and the internet but through direct contact with individuals, communities, and cultures other than our own to hear their immigration stories and perspectives. I am lucky in that I have been afforded the opportunity to start this quest through teaching in community based settings for some ten years now. The environments are often less restrictive and not bound to standards and mandated curriculum formal educators often come up against. But whether we work in formal or nonformal learning environment we all take part in making the invisible visible. As Senator Obama’s vision for America clearly emulates: We are a nation of hope.