Almost All Aliens
Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity
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Book Description
Almost All Aliens offers a unique reinterpretation of immigration in the history of the United States. Setting aside the European migrant-centered melting-pot model of immigrant assimilation, Paul Spickard, Francisco Beltrán, and Laura Hooton put forward a fresh and provocative reconceptualization that embraces the multicultural, racialized, and colonially inflected reality of immigration that has always existed in the United States. Their astute study illustrates the complex relationship between ethnic identity and race, slavery, and colonial expansion.
Examining the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic, as well as those who crossed the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the North American Borderlands, Almost All Aliens provides a distinct, inclusive, and critical analysis of immigration, race, and identity in the United States from 1600 until the present. The second edition updates Almost All Aliens through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, recounting and analyzing the massive changes in immigration policy, the reception of immigrants, and immigrant experiences that whipsawed back and forth throughout the era. It includes a new final chapter that brings the story up to the present day.
This book will appeal to students and researchers alike studying the history of immigration, race, and colonialism in the United States, as well as those interested in American identity, especially in the context of the early twenty-first century.
Table of Contents
1. Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism
Beyond Ellis Island—How Not to Think About Immigration History
Not Assimilation but Race Making
The Immigrant Assimilation Model
The Transnational Diasporic Model
The Panethnic Formation Model
Race Versus Ethnicity: The Difference, and the Difference It Makes
Ethnic Formation Processes
Colonialism and Race Making
Words Matter
Some Terms the Reader May Want to Think About Differently
An Idea That May Be New
2. Colliding Peoples in Eastern North America, 1600–1780What Do We Celebrate?
In the Beginning There Were Indians
Diversity
Origins
There Goes the Neighborhood: European Incursion and "Settlement"
Spanish, French, and Dutch Encounter Native Peoples
English Immigrants Encounter Native Peoples
Resistance, Conflict, Genocide
A Mixed Multitude: European Migrants
English Immigrants
Immigration Policy Under the British
Other Europeans
Indenture
From English to American
Out of Africa
To Become a Slave
Dimensions and Effects
How "Black" and "Slave" Came to Mean the Same Thing
Variations on a Theme
From Igbo and Bambara to Negro
Merging Peoples, Blending Cultures
The End of an Age
Identity: Black, White, and Red
Assimilation
3. An Anglo-American Republic? Racial Citizenship, 1760–1860
Slavery and Antislavery in the Era of the American Revolution
Thinking About Freedom, and Not
Three-Fifths of a Person
Partly Free People of Color and One Drop of Blood
Africans and Indians
Free White Persons: Defining Membership
Playing Indian: White Appropriations of Native American Symbols and Identities
European Immigrants
Beginnings of US Immigration Policy
Immigration, but Not "Old" or "New"
British
Germans
Peasants Into City People: The Famine Irish
Sephardim and German Jews
Issues in European Migration
Individual Choice or Embedded in a Web of Industrial Capital?
Recruitment and Chain Migration
Changes in Transportation Technology and Travel Conditions
Nativism
Were the Irish Ever Not White?
Making a White Race
4. The Border Crossed Us: Euro-Americans Take the Continent, 1830–1900
US Colonial Expansion Across North America
Making Empire, Making Race: Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion
Indian Deportation to the West
Resistance and Genocide
The Remnant: Reservation Indians
Disappearing Peoples
Native American Panethnic Formation
Taking the Mexican Northlands
Forget the Alamo: Taking Texas for Slavery
Expanding Aggression
Incorporating Mexico’s People, and Not
Making Race in California
Racial Replacement
East from Asia
Chinese Immigrants
The Anti-Chinese Movement
Slave and Citizen
Colonialism and Race Making
5. The Great Wave, 1870–1930
From New Sources and Old, to America and Back
Still Coming From Northwest Europe
New Sources of Workers in Southern Europe
From Eastern Europe, Too
Northeast Europeans
Making a Multiethnic Working Class in the West
Chinese
Japanese
Mexicans
Filipinos and Other Asians
Expunging Native Peoples
Interlocking Discriminations
6. Cementing Hierarchy: Issues and Interpretations, 1870–1930
How They Lived and Worked
The Immigrant Working Class
Not All Were Working Class
Leading the Poor
Gender and Migration
Angles of Entry
Making Jim Crow in the South
Making Racial and Ethnic Hierarchy in the North
Whiteness of Several Colors
Beginnings of Black Migration
Empire and Race Making
Making War on Our Little Brown Brothers
Queen Lili`uokalani Loses Her Country
Law, Race, and Immigration
Race and Gender Before the Law
Legal Whiteness
Racialist Pseudoscience and Its Offspring
Pseudoscience Becomes Popular Knowledge
Perfecting Humans
Anti-Immigrant Movements
The Anti-Japanese Movement
The Americanization Campaign
The Campaign for Immigration Restriction
Interpretive Issues
Orientalism
Ethnicity on Display: Ethnic Festivals, World’s Fairs, and Human Zoos
Racializing Religion: Jews as White and Not
7. White People’s America, 1924–1965
Recruiting Citizens
Second Generations and Third
Recruiting Guest Workers
Mexicans
Filipinos and Puerto Ricans
Indians or Citizens?
World War II
Rooting Out the Zoot
Neither an Accident, Nor a Mistake
European Refugees and Displaced Persons
Cracks in White Hegemony
The Cold War: Competing for the World’s Peoples
The Black Freedom Movement
Racial Fairness and the Immigration Act of 1965
8. New Migrants From New Places: Since 1965
Some Migrants We Know
From Asia
Fleeing War in Vietnam and Mainland Southeast Asia
Draining Brains From the Philippines
From Korea
From South Asia
From China
A Model Minority?
From the Americas
Perhaps a Model Minority: Migrants From Mexico
Migrants or Exiles? From Cuba
From Other Parts of Latin America and the Caribbean
From Europe
From Africa
Continuing Involvements Abroad
9. Redefining Membership amid Multiplicity: Since 1965
Immigration Reform, Again and Again
Panethnic Power
The Chicana and Chicano Movement
The Asian American Panethnic Movement
Native American Political and Cultural Resurgence
African Americans After Civil Rights to President Barack Obama
Disgruntled White People
Not the KKK: White Ethnic Movements
Fighting Affirmative Action
New Issues in a New Era
Changes in Racial Etiquette
Multiculturalism
The Multiracial Movement
Forever Foreigners: Asians and Arabs
September 11, 2001, and the Racialization of Middle Eastern Americans
National Security and Borders
10. The Return of White Supremacy?
Hate in the Time of COVID
Triumph of the New Nativism
Epoch of Hate: Nativism, the Alt-Right, Anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia
Racist and Anti-Immigrant Policies During the Trump Presidency
Racism and Etiquette
Immigrants
By the Numbers: Not Enough Immigrants
The Rise and Fall of Mexican Migration
Central Americans
Islamophobia
Militarizing the Border
People Without Papers
Refugees and Asylum
Babies in Cages
Political Swings and Resistance
11. Epilogue
Projecting the Future
Some Issues to Consider As We Look Ahead
What Do Immigrants Cost?
How Shall We Deal With Inequalities That Have Been Shaped by Generations?
Who Is an American?
Reprise
Hope for the Future?
Appendix A
Author(s)
Biography
Paul Spickard is Distinguished Professor of History and several other fields at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has held positions at 15 universities in the United States and abroad. Among his many books are Race in Mind: Critical Essays and Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity.
Francisco Beltrán is Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK. Previously, he taught at San Francisco State University, the University of Michigan, and Reed College. His teaching and research interests include Chicanx and Latinx history, race and ethnicity, immigration, borderlands, and oral history.
Laura Hooton is Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, San Angelo, TX. She taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point for three years, where she founded the Black History Project. Her work appears in Farming Across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West and California History.
Reviews
Praise for the first edition:
"Placing race at the center of his story, Spickard offers an important corrective to dominant immigrant narratives about European huddled masses and bountiful golden doors. As immigration debates rage, Almost All Aliens provides vital historical perspective.
―Thomas A. Guglielmo, Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies at GWU
"Almost All Aliens is simply stunning. Spickard powerfully connects the study of immigration to the histories of race, slavery, and the displacement of Native peoples. In doing so, he revises both immigration history and American history."
―Erika Lee, author of At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 and The Making of Asian America or America for Americans.
"With Almost All Aliens Paul Spickard again demonstrates that he is one of our most skillful and innovative interpreters of race and ethnicity in American life. He challenges most of the assumptions made about the topic since Crèvecoeur asked his fateful question and provides an exciting analytic narrative of our immigrant past."
―Roger Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cincinnati
"Almost All Aliens is a stunning achievement! By combining the insights of the massive recent literature on immigration, race, and colonialism, Paul Spickard has produced a masterful new narrative of U.S. immigration history for the 21st century. Immensely readable and thoroughly provocative, it will delight students and scholars of immigration alike."
―George J. Sanchez, University of Southern California, author of Becoming Mexican American and Boyle Heights
"With this book, Paul Spickard has produced the best single-volume study of American immigration history available today."
― K. Scott Wong, Williams College