To Be An American

Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation

Bill Ong Hing

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814773246
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Minority Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The impetus behind California's Proposition 187 clearly reflects the growing anti-immigrant sentiment in this country. Many Americans regard today's new immigrants as not truly American, as somehow less committed to the ideals on which the country was founded. In clear, precise terms, Bill Ong Hing considers immigration in the context of the global economy, a sluggish national economy, and the hard facts about downsizing. Importantly, he also confronts the emphatic claims of immigrant supporters that immigrants do assimilate, take jobs that native workers don't want, and contribute more to the tax coffers than they take out of the system.

A major contribution of Hing's book is its emphasis on such often-overlooked issues as the competition between immigrants and African Americans, inter-group tension, and ethnic separatism, issues constantly brushed aside both by immigrant rights groups and the anti-immigrant right. Drawing on Hing's work as a lawyer deeply involved in the day-to-day life of his immigrant clients, To Be An American is a unique blend of substantive analysis, policy, and personal experience.

chapter 1
A Superior Multicultural Experience

Our experiences, from childhood through adolescence, young adulthood, and beyond, inevitably shape our views of race, assimilation, and a multiracial society. I grew up in Superior, Arizona, a copper-mining town of about five thousand people in the east-central part of the state. The youngest of ten children in one of three Chinese American families (or one extended family, since their members were my uncles, aunts, and cousins), I spoke mainly Cantonese to my immigrant parents,¹ and English to my American-born siblings. We had a small grocery adjacent to our house. Since Superior was predominantly Mexican American, I spoke Spanish to our older customers and a combination of Spanish and English to the other children in the neighborhood and at school. Speaking Spanish on school grounds was prohibited. Some of our customers and my classmates were Native American, mostly Navajo and Apache. With them I spoke English.

I learned a lot about Mexican American culture growing up in Superior. I spent a good deal of time at my friend Leonard Martinez’s house, eating and talking with Leonard and his grandmother, who was from Mexico. I learned about hunting from his grandfather and uncles by listening to their stories and sharing in the celebration when they returned from trips with deer, rabbit, wild boar, or quail. The father of my friend and next-door neighbor Ray Ramirez taught me how to sing and play several Mexican corridos (folk ballads) on the guitar. My friend Diana Viramontes was great at sandlot baseball and at cracking open piñatas (candy-filled figurines) blindfolded at birthday parties. She once even introduced me to her Girl Scout friend Mary Rose Garrido, on whom I had a crush for several years afterward. It was not uncommon for some Mexican children to taunt me because I was Chinese. But I was good at defending myself, and often my Mexican friends joined in on my side.

Growing up, I was especially close to a Navajo classmate, Margie Curley, and an Apache, Joe Thomas. Both read everything they could find, wrote interesting stories, and had beautiful handwriting. Margie was soft-spoken and we often had long conversations about our families and interests. Joe, one of my Little League teammates for four years, was one of the most popular children in school. I lost track of Joe and Margie after high school, although I heard later that Margie settled on a reservation and makes jewelry; neither had the funds to go on to college. I came to know another Navajo family that traded at our store, the Bendles. The parents were terrific with the children—always exercising the right amount of discipline, but spoiling them with candy on occasion and consistently assigning responsibility and displaying trust. Hugh Bendle, Jr., became a fine tennis player, and with the help of loans, grants, and Mr. Bendle’s savings from his wages as a copper miner, all three of the Bendle children went to college.

After school each day, I played games with Mexican, Anglo, and Native American schoolmates and friends: baseball, basketball, football, marbles, tops, and yo-yos. From the ages of seven to fourteen, I played Little League and Senior League baseball in the summer. When I was fifteen, I decided to spend the summer in California with one of my older sisters, and was quite envious of the fact that Superior’s Senior League All Star team, comprised of many of my friends, won its way to the Senior League World Series in Louisville, Kentucky. In Kentucky, local families provided housing for the team. One of my Anglo friends, Billy Joe Walker, told me that when the team arrived in Louisville, the family that was assigned to him was chuckling on the drive to their house. He asked them why, and they explained that with a name like “Billy Joe,” they were expecting him to be African American.

Little League baseball meant ballpark food. Even before I played Little League, much of the fun of going to the games as a kid was in the small concession stand where I could buy hot dogs, corn-on-the-cob, burritos, and tacos. End of the season all-star games were particularly rewarding because our local Little League parents’ group always budgeted money for meals after regional and state games. After one Little League all-star game played twenty miles away in Miami, Arizona, we returned home victorious to feast at my favorite restaurant in town, the Triple X Café, a Mexican restaurant. Coincidentally, the Senior League all-star team that my brother Johnny was on was also celebrating a victory at the Triple X. I recall a friendly argument between our coaches over which Hing kid was the better ball player. The Triple X was owned by the Nuñez family and one of the sons in the family, David, was one of my best friends. Whenever I ate there, I got the royal treatment.

Summer also meant horseback riding for my brother Johnny and me. Although we never owned a horse, Johnny had a knack for talking horse-owning neighbors and local ranchers into lending us theirs. One of my mother’s store customers—Tony Banda—used to ride his pinto horse to the store when he needed to pick up a few items. He gave me my first real horseback ride when I was two or three years old. My brother Johnny was a great rider. After we moved into a bigger home, on the main highway through town, he often rode in our yard and in front of our house. I remember coming out the front door one hot summer afternoon to find four carloads of vacationers parked in front of our house (probably traveling to or from Phoenix). Cameras were clicking and the kids were screaming, “A real cowboy! A real cowboy!” The subject of their excitement was my brother Johnny, with a cowboy hat, grinning widely, horn-rimmed glasses and all, showing off on one of our neighbor’s horses.

I received the best lesson in how to present a book report from another of my Little League baseball teammates, Manuel Silvas. Manuel had a tough-guy side but was always very nice to me. Until our freshman year in high school, he was a mediocre student. But our freshman English teacher, Rudy Burrola, and Manuel seemed to make a connection. Burrola recommended Catcher in the Rye to Manuel for an assigned book report. When it was Manuel’s turn to present an oral presentation in class, he absolutely blew everyone away. He read a moving passage from the book as part of his presentation, and acted out another scene. In the end, the entire class understood Manuel’s interpretation and we were all quite affected. This was a stressful time in Manuel’s life, to say the least. A year earlier, his father—who had murdered his former girlfriend—was executed in the Arizona gas chamber (the last death sentence execution in Arizona in almost thirty years). I can never forget Manuel’s grief. He is now a lawyer in the Phoenix area.

High school also provided opportunities for a number of extracurricular activities. I played freshman basketball and four years of tennis. At the beginning of my sophomore year, there was a good deal of excitement over the fact that the girls’ tennis team was getting two new members, both immigrants. Both were attractive and blue-eyed, with light brown hair, one from Canada, the other from Spain. While the hair of most of my Mexican friends was dark brown or black, many also had light brown hair. Among them were Marcella Rodríguez, whose father Leo also owned a grocery store, and Carol Woods, who had sisters with dark brown hair.

I also played the guitar in a couple of rock-and-roll bands in high school. One band, which we named “The UNs” for the United Nations, became quite popular in Superior and a couple of other little towns in the area. We decided on the “UNs” because of our composition: a Chinese American lead guitarist, a Mexican American singer and saxophonist, a rhythm guitarist of Scandinavian descent, and a drummer of German extraction. Our music ranged from Chuck Berry and the Beatles, to some Motown, Richie Valens, and many Spanish-language Mexican songs. We performed mostly at high school dances, but also got hired at weddings, birthday parties, and civic and social club dances. After high school, the lead singer Armor Gomez performed as a lounge singer in Las Vegas for many years.

Most families in Superior had someone who worked for the copper mine, then owned by Magma Copper Company. The mine was open twenty-four hours, with three eight-hour shifts a day. The work was dangerous, containing the deepest shaft mine in North America. People were killed; there were fires. You could hear the loud whistle blow once, long and steady, at the end of each shift. When the whistle blew differently, my classmates would look worriedly at one another. This sound meant that an accident had occurred; friends and classmates who realized that their father was not working that particular shift looked relieved; the others could not calm down until they went home to see if things were all right. The mine-mill labor union was active. My parents extended grocery store credit to union members during lengthy strikes, thus earning their loyalty, even though my parents also traded with wealthier management families.

One of my brothers was an elementary schoolteacher for a while in a small agricultural town in Arizona named Eloy. He was also the school’s track coach. But he gave up teaching after a few years in order to manage a small grocery store in another small town nearby named Coolidge. When he went on vacation he needed someone to help run the store in his absence. I did this a couple of times for him when I was in high school, and I recall these occasions with great fondness. His customers were mostly agricultural workers: Mexicans, Native Americans, African Americans, as well as Anglos. His three or four employees were generally Mexicans, African Americans, and Anglos. They were a lot of fun to be around; after-hours I met their families and they showed me around Coolidge and took me to parties.

My whole family was exposed to and embraced these multiple cultures. My mother ran the grocery store, and spoke with customers, employees, salesmen, deliverymen, and repairmen in both English and Spanish. Unlike my mother, neither of my two aunts was fluent in Spanish or English; yet both worked in their own family stores and interacted with our non-Chinese neighbors and customers.

My family celebrated a variety of holidays—American, Chinese, and Mexican—and sometimes even traveled to Flagstaff for summertime Native American festivals. Similarly, we ate a variety of foods at home, mainly Chinese, American, and Mexican. My sisters still cook great Mexican cuisine. Our Mexican customers and neighbors often brought us dishes to sample and my mother reciprocated with some of her own. Every day with dinner, we ate Texas Long Grain rice especially ordered from a distributor. Another of our customers, a Syrian American family, did the same. A German immigrant couple who were also customers often spoke of their native culture and foods. When I was in high school, they even offered me their own homemade concoction for acne. Occasionally we would drive to Phoenix (about sixty miles away) for Chinese wedding banquets or Ong Family Association get-togethers. (As a child I learned that my family surname is Ong, not Hing. When my father immigrated, he stated his name in customary Chinese fashion—last name first—as Ong Chun Hing. The clueless immigration official wrote down Hing as the family name.)

Many of my high school classmates went to college. Others stayed in Superior and mined copper like their parents. Two of my nephews did not go to college, instead staying in Superior to run a large grocery store. The support of my parents (my father completed high school in China, my mother a few years of grammar school), my siblings, and our next-door neighbor Mr. Gonzales, motivated me to go to college. Mr. Gonzales was the most distinguished person I knew. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he worked for Senator Carl Hayden, but he came home a few times a year to visit his Mexican-born mother. When in Superior, he took the time to tell me about his work and encourage me to study hard and go to college.

Superior was in many regards a typical close-knit small town. High school sports were a central focus. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Knights of Columbus, and Rotary Club all had active chapters. My father was the first president of the Superior Rotary Club and during World War II served as the town sheriff. There was an active union. We attended the predominantly Anglo Presbyterian Church (without my Buddhist mother), although most of our friends and customers were Catholic. In fact, two of my sisters were christened as Catholics. Superior had other churches as well: Baptist, Episcopalian, Spanish-service Presbyterian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormon. At nineteen my brother Johnny married his high school sweetheart, a Mormon.

Although I left Superior after graduating from high school to attend college at U.C. Berkeley, my early life in Superior has profoundly influenced my thinking on multicultural, multiracial, and multireligious communities, class distinctions, and social values. Although life was not without strife, my family was part of a larger community that respected our Chinese American identity and culture. We learned about and respected other cultures and languages. I learned values and approaches to life from people of all backgrounds, from my Catholic Mexican American playmates to my Jewish high school history teacher, from Navajo and German customers to the chief administrator of the local mine. In retrospect, the opportunity to hear different perspectives was clearly an advantage.

My life after high school—at U.C. Berkeley, in law school, in Chinatown, at the Buddhist church, as a legal services attorney, immigration lawyer, academic, participant in community activities, spouse, and parent—has reinforced the values I began to develop in Superior. How could I not be influenced by my African American college roommate from Texas, the jazz band we formed, People’s Park, or the all-Asian American fraternity I initially spurned but ultimately joined? Or my experience as the president of a fledgling Asian American law student group in law school? Or the Chinese immigrant children to whom I taught American folks songs at the Chinatown YWCA? Or my wife’s five-generation Chinese American family and its eleven-year struggle to build a Buddhist church? Or the diverse group of clients I’ve represented beginning at a legal aid office?² Or the community activists I’ve met and worked with for over twenty-five years? My early life in Superior and all of these subsequent life experiences have created impressions—some would say biases—that lead to views about America and being an American that one might loosely call cultural pluralism. Since recognition of the potential biases created by one’s background is a necessary first step to wrestling with the challenge of a multiracial society, I continue to try to make sense of how that past affects my thinking today.

chapter 2
A Nation of Immigrants, a History of Nativism

“We are a nation of immigrants.” How many times do we hear this phrase? Most of us encounter it in positive terms beginning in elementary school. Take my daughter’s Fifth Grade social studies textbook America Will Be.¹ Chapter 1 is entitled “A Nation of Many Peoples,” and the first paragraph contains this passage: “From the earliest time, America has been a land of many peoples. This rich mix of cultures has shaped every part of life in the United States today.” The authors continue, as a “pluralistic culture, life is exciting. People work, join together, struggle, learn, and grow.”

Today the phrase—“we are a nation of immigrants”—is invoked on both sides of the immigration debate. On one side we are told, “We are a nation of immigrants, immigrants are our strength, they invigorate our economy, they stimulate our culture, they add to our society.” On the other, “We are a nation of immigrants, but times have changed; they take away jobs, they are costly, the non-English speakers make life complicated, new immigrants don’t have our values.”

As early as 1751, Benjamin Franklin opposed the influx of German immigrants, warning that “Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony; instead of their learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live as in a foreign country.” A couple of years later, he expanded this thought:

[T]hose who came hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation, and as ignorance is often attended with great credulity, when knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set it right; and few of the English understand the German language, and so cannot address them either from the press or pulpit, it is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain. … Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make modest use of it.

Responding to dramatic increases in German and Irish immigration in the first half of the 1800s, the Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis spoke out against further immigration and proposed a twenty-one-year residency requirement for naturalization. In his view,

[M]ost of those European immigrants, having been born and having lived in the ignorance and degradation of despotisms, without mental or moral culture, with but a vague consciousness of human rights, and no knowledge whatever of the principles of popular constitutional government, their interference in the political administration of our affairs, even when honestly intended, would be about as successful as that of the Indian in the arts and business of civilized private life. … The system inevitably and in the end will fatally depreciate, degrade, and demoralize the power which governs and rules our destinies.²

THE UNDESIRABLE ASIAN

These social and cultural exclusionist views were accompanied by economic concerns. For example, job and wage competition provided an early impetus for the anti-Chinese crusade of the mid-1800s. The Chinese worked for lower wages and seemed to make do with less; they were criticized for being thrifty—for spending little and saving most of their meager wages. At the Oregon constitutional convention in 1857, a proposal was made to exclude the Chinese because whites “could not compete” with Chinese working for $1.50 to $2.00 a day. The Chinese had frequently been politically exploited on labor issues. Mine owners threatened to let the Chinese take over the entire industry because white miners demanded $3 a day while Chinese workers asked only $1.50. During the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese workers were paid two-thirds the rate for white workers.³

The influence of economic nativism was quite apparent by 1870. Labor organizations—including plumbers, carpenters, and unemployed shoemakers—led a massive anti-Chinese demonstration in San Francisco that drew national attention. Labor groups held anti-Chinese rallies in Boston and New York as well.⁴

The hostile reception given the Chinese was of course due to race as well as to economic competition. Some parallels between the treatment of Chinese and African Americans can be drawn. For example, one of the earliest efforts to exclude the Chinese from California by state law was passed in the assembly as a companion to a measure barring entry to those of African descent. And certainly the major political parties stressed concepts of race superiority which excluded African Americans and by implication other people of color from the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. But in Congress’s 1870 deliberations over whether to liberalize the naturalization laws by extending them to all aliens irrespective of origin or color, the right to naturalize was extended to aliens of African descent and denied to Chinese because of their “undesirable qualities.”⁵

Republicans and Democrats alike tended toward nativism. In California, the antagonism between old stock and European immigrants subsided and coalesced. By 1876, both major political parties had adopted anti-Chinese planks in their national platforms, and the Workingman’s Party of California emerged as a leading force aga...