In the reading “A Part and Apart” by Erica Lee I got a sense of the treatment immigrants had while living in the US. She gives insight on both the Asian and the Latino community in this article which I thought was pretty interesting. Both immigrant groups were viewed differently in their own way and treated differently as well. She wanted it to be known in fact that some laws had a different effect on immigrants themselves rather than the Europeans. She defined the process of “push and pull” in which the immigrants made hard decisions in order to get the that “better life” they sought here in the US. Lee was trying to portray is that what we had to do was “step into their shoes” in order to truly understand their experiences. We would never get to the understanding point if we didn’t actually put ourselves into their real-life situations. I enjoyed this reading because it made me gain knowledge on how life for immigrants it was back then and how it is still going on till this day as well. With the situations I’ve dealt with as being Hispanic really made me feel like I somehow could make a personal connection in some odd way.
In the reading of the “Nations of Migrants” by Adam Goodman I got the understanding that the term “nation of immigrants” was myth set to give insight on the various different groups of people have come to the US and have broken their backs to give their children a better life or future. He believed that instead of it being called “immigration history” it should be referred to as “migrant history” while it is being evolved overtime. He wanted people to study all the different migrant groups. He explained how the US used the stereotype “the melting pot” and the “migrant paradigm”, In which they failed to include to the African Americans, as well as, the native Americans all together even though they were forced to move. Nevertheless, the incorporation of Asians and Latin American have become the centric idea in U.S history and the immigrant’s paradigm is being broadened even through the language itself. It really gave me a lot of insight of migration itself and what groups were apart of that which was pretty mind opening.
In the reading “Globalizing Migration History” by Bruno Ramirez, he gave us insight on the completely different migrant cases then from the ones in the other readings. He brought up key points of the Italian and Canadian immigrants. He claimed that Canadians tend to move from point A to point B. As stated in the lecture the other day, they were chain migrators that go from two specific places back and forth. Whereas Italian migrators moved globally to the extent where it was later had become internationalized. It was explained that Diaspora is what drove the involuntary mass of dispersion of the Italians worldwide. I thought this was pretty interesting because of the different migrant groups that were not seen in the other two readings were brought up.
2 thoughts on “Weekly Readings Part 1”
I definitely agree that Lee tried to provide an almost first hand account of the immigrant experience, as she herself was an Asian Americanist. Her inclusion of the push-pull theoretical framework reinforced our class-time learning, and gave me another example of how this could be used in a real-life situation. As for the second article, I had not thought about the disparity between representation of immigrant groups until reading this as well; it was quite mind-opening. Similar to the first article, the Global Migration History article reinforced my learning of the meaning of Diaspora and how the Italians embodied this concept.
I also learned a lot particularly about the experiences of Asian and Latino immigrants in the Americas. It made me more aware of the fact that my understanding of U.S. history and the history of the Americas in general still has major gaps. It made me equally excited about this class to understand more of how this nation came to be what it is today.