Roots and Reflections
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Roots and Reflections

South Asians in the Pacific Northwest

Amy Bhatt, Nalini Iyer

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eBook - ePub

Roots and Reflections

South Asians in the Pacific Northwest

Amy Bhatt, Nalini Iyer

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About This Book

Immigrants from South Asia first began settling in Washington and Oregon in the nineteenth century, but because of restrictions placed on Asian immigration to the United States in the early twentieth century, the vast majority have come to the region since World War II. Roots and Reflections uses oral history to show how South Asian immigrant experiences were shaped by the region and how they differed over time and across generations. It includes the stories of immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka who arrived from the end of World War II through the 1980s. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHjtOvH0YdU&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=3&feature=plcp

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Information

Year
2013
ISBN
9780295804552

1

ā€œFINDING TRACES OF OUR EXISTENCE HEREā€

PRE-WORLD WAR TWO SOUTH ASIAN MIGRATIONS
We earnestly wish that the leaders of our country, especially of the Punjab, will do their duty to the cause of the oppressed people with a united effort, like men, not cowards and slaves.
ā€”Taraknath Das in Free Hindusthan, April 1908.1
I try to envision my mother's life before I arrived. I marvel at her survival as the family trekked around California and Oregon, living as they could wherever my father found work.
ā€”Kartar Dhillon, ā€œThe Parrot's Beakā€2
ON the evening of September 4, 1907, several Indian3 men were settling in for the night after putting in a long day at the local lumber mills in Bellingham, Washington. Close to the Canadian border in the northwestern corner of Washington State, Bellingham was then a bustling mill town and seaport and the county seat of Whatcom County. Although the sky was clear, a feeling of uneasiness was palpable in the evening air. The mostly Sikh workers had been living and working in the community for some time now, but they kept to themselves socially. Nonetheless, their presence was the source of mounting tension between white workers also employed in the mills and the mill owners, who were paying the Indian workers lower wages.4
At the city's Labor Day parade a few days before, several white workers used the town festivities to voice their disapproval of the foreign newcomers. Informal leaders levied an ultimatum to the mill owners: fire the ā€œHindoos,ā€5 as the Indian men were commonly known, after the Labor Day holiday passed or trouble would ensue. While there had been small skirmishes since the town's parade, nothing could prepare the Indian workers for the sight of nearly five hundred seething white men gathered outside of their ramshackle homesteads perched precariously near the city's waterfront. The mob pulsed with an angry energy as Indian workers were dragged out to the street to watch as their meager belongings were destroyed and their bunkhouses lit on fire. Some of the men in the mob turned violent and began to beat the shocked Indian men shivering in the streets. In an attempt to restore order and provide a semblance of safety to the Indian workers, the beleaguered Bellingham chief of police herded some two hundred of them into the basement of City Hall for the night, while others were rounded up and locked in the city's jail, purportedly for their protection.
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The next morning, three of the men, Nand Singh, Attar Singh, and Sergent Singh, appeared before the city council to register their grievances. The council recognized that the Indians had a right to stay in the town, as long as they did not break any laws. But many of the Bellingham residents did not want the Indians to remain and the anger began to foment anew. No longer welcome by their neighbors, acquaintances, or employers and fearful of a reprisal of the previous evening's atrocities, the Indians gathered their belongings and boarded trains heading south to California.6 As the men peered out of the train windows at the town that had been their home and place of livelihood since arriving in America, the white residents of the town gathered at the station to cheer and celebrate their departure.
Today the memory of the Bellingham riots has long faded in the Pacific Northwest, and yet they represent an important moment in the history of South Asian migration to the region. As deplorable as the riots were, the anti-immigrant racism faced by South Asians was far from an anomaly in that period. In the 1880s, the denizens of the same city had driven out all the Chinese immigrants following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. After the 1907 riots, South Asians stayed away from Whatcom County for most of the twentieth century. Even as late as 1986, only about ten South Asian families lived in Whatcom County and most of them were farmers. Though there are traces of these early South Asian workers in archives housed at county museums and regional historical societies, there are several questions that remain about the lives of these pioneers: How did these early immigrants conceive of their place in American society? Did they maintain cultural and religious practices? Did men and women experience and negotiate immigrant life differently? In some cases, we stretch our imaginations to visualize what their lives were like as we view photographs of unnamed individuals pursuing the most ordinary of tasks, or read newspaper reports that document the horrors of racist violence. Otherwise, we are left to piece together answers to these questions by examining fragments of memoirs, reading between the lines of publicly recorded statements, or combing narratives created by their descendants.
The paucity of information on early South Asian immigrant life is in part a problem of historiography. Records from the 1880s and early 1900s in the Pacific Northwest are scarce and incomplete; minority populations are even less likely to appear as subjects of official histories. Although the substantive immigration reforms in the latter half of the twentieth century dramatically increased the numbers of South Asians entering the United States, the history of early South Asian immigrants to the Pacific coast is often overshadowed by the stories of immigrants who were more widely recognized and welcomed to the area. While some ethnographies and histories of South Asian American immigration do discuss this region, these studies tend to see the Pacific Northwest as a port of entry, rather than as an important site of settlement. Instead, the experiences of the communities residing in California or other places around the United States are profiled.7 However, when looking more closely at historical and contemporary archives, it is clear that immigrants in the Pacific Northwest have played a very significant role in South Asian community building regionally and nationally, sparked revolutionary political activity in the United States and across the Indian subcontinent, and helped shape the discourse on immigration spanning from the early twentieth century through the contemporary moment.
The period between the 1880s and the 1960s is often considered by immigration historians to be a period of restriction and dormancy.8 The passage of several laws including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which was subsequently renewed until its repeal in 1943) and the Immigration Acts of 1914, 1917, and 1924 created what was known as the ā€œAsiatic Barred Zoneā€ and effectively prevented migration from Asian countries. Although these measures were intended to curb the so-called ā€œyellow tideā€ or the increasing numbers of immigrants coming from China, Japan, South Asia, and the Pacific Rim to work on the West Coast, populations of Asians grew as the rapidly expanding railroad, timber, fishing, and farming industries demanded large numbers of cheap laborers. It was not until the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943 was sponsored by Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington State that the period prohibiting Chinese migration ended and citizenship was offered to some Chinese who were already residing in the United States. The Luce-Cellar Act of 1946 was a further step toward full recognition of Asian communities, stating that South Asians and Filipinos were also eligible to become citizens. Still, race-based country of origin quotas in place during that period meant that only one hundred immigrants from the Indian subcontinent were eligible to enter the United States in any given year. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, formally recognized citizenship rights of Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians, but it was the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, or the Hart-Cellar Act, that finally repealed the country of origin quotas and established new criteria for immigration that prioritized education and training, American labor needs, and family reunification.
Because of the long interlude of restriction that characterized American immigration policy in the early to middle part of the twentieth century, studies of South Asians in the United States tend to presume that community formation stagnated before 1965. In the Pacific Northwest, however, events such as the riots in Bellingham demonstrate that while immigration may have been curtailed, South Asians were very much part of a tense and xenophobic environment in which anxiety about wages and job security translated into the demonization of minority races and foreign nationals. At the same time, they were also instrumental in laying the groundwork for the thriving communities that populate the Pacific Northwest today.
FROM SOJOURNERS TO SETTLERS: EARLY SOUTH ASIAN IMMIGRATION
So how are early South Asian immigrants and contemporary communities connected? While small in number, early immigrants left an indelible mark on the communities already existing in the Pacific Northwest. Local events had national repercussions, as newspaper coverage of the Bellingham riots in 1907 and other anti-Asian demonstrations were instrumental in shaping anti-immigrant discourse in the region and reflected sentiments brewing around the country.9 Ironically, while there were far fewer South Asians residing in the area than there were Chinese or Japanese immigrants at the time, they were nonetheless central to the debate over Asian immigration in the early twentieth century.10
These migrants were young men primarily from the Punjab region, which spans the border of modern-day India and Pakistan. The Punjab is home to ancient civilizations and boasts some of the most fertile farmland in the world. Although many Punjabi families flourished as agriculturalists, the growing unrest caused by British rule over the Indian subcontinent created dismal economic conditions and younger sons of large families began to migrate out of the area to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Many of these men joined the British military and took postings that brought them all over the globe as subjects of the Empire. Many Sikh veterans who could not find agricultural work in their villages, and young men in search of adventure, migrated to British Columbia, Canada. As another British colony, Canada was an easier port of entry than the United States or Europe, and many Sikhs came initially to North America via Vancouver. New opportunities and proximity to the expanding American western territories drew these Sikh pioneers south toward Washington, Oregon, and California. In 1903, only twenty Indians entered the United States; however, by 1906, this number had jumped to six hundred.11 By the fall of 1907, several hundred immigrants had arrived in Bellingham, Washington, and began working in the lumber mills. Companies such as Bellingham Bay Company, Whatcom Falls Mill, and the Larson Lumber Company employed many of these men.
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As photographs from this period show, the lumber mills were nestled in the bucolic landscape provided by the Cascade Mountains to the east and the lush forests to the west of Bellingham. Amid the serene snow-capped mountains and placid lakes, darker currents were coursing through the town. While these photographs document the growing industrialization of the region, they do not reveal the tensions seething among the people of the region.12 The South Asians were hard workers and eager for employment and the mill owners turned a blind eye to the men's national origin as they hired them at cut-rate wages. In return, the mill owners got cheap, reliable, and steady labor. However, organizations such as the Asiatic Exclusion League began to target the new immigrants. The Asiatic Exclusion League was formed in San Francisco in 1905 and traveled north in 1907 under the leadership of A. E. Fowler. Initially called the Japanese-Korean Exclusion League, the organization quickly expanded to target the religious and cultural traditions of the Sikhs. The physical differences between the South Asians and the local populations of mostly white workers were pronounced: a photograph in the Whatcom Museum depicts three unnamed Sikh men in a typical studio shot. These men were likely workers at the lumber mills and the photograph was perhaps intended to be sent back to family in India. Each man is sharply dressed in a suit and tie, wears an elaborate turban, and projects a proud and dignified gaze into the camera. Their clothing marks both their acculturation (the suits and ties) and their adherence to their cultural customs, as they also sport the turban and facial hair mandated by the Sikh religion. A South Asian viewer of this photo would have likely interpreted the photograph as signifying economic advancement and a strong commitment to religion and culture in the three men. The people of the Northwest might have felt differently. As an editorialist in the Seattle Morning Times noted, it was ā€œnot a question of men but modes of life; not a matter of nations, but of habits of lifeā€¦. When men who require meat to eat and real beds to sleep in are ousted from their employment to make room for vegetarians who can find the bliss of sleep in some filthy corner, it is rather difficult to say at what limit indignation ceases to be righteous.ā€13 In many ways, the tension between the white population and the immigrants was not just a matter of race, but of class and culture.
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In general, the Bellingham riots and the migration of Indians to the Pacific Northwest produced a complex response from the rest of America.14 Some who opposed the ā€œTide of Turbansā€ (a term coined by San Franciscoā€“based writer Herman Scheffauer) were concerned that money flowing out of the Pacific Northwest and into South Asia would hurt the economy of the region, while others argued that South Asian laborers were physically feeble aliens who, despite their claims to being Aryan,15 were inassimilable. Still, others were sympathetic to the difficult conditions in South Asia that led to emigration and saw the new arrivals as vital sources of labor. While the Bellingham Herald tacitly condoned the riots,16 journalists such as Will Irwin harshly criticized the violence. In a 1907 article in Collier's Weekly, Irwin tells a different story of the events leading to the Bellingham riots. Declaring the tussle over wages a ā€œscreaming farce,ā€ Irwin argued that the South Asian men were attacked by mill workers who were looking for any excuse to drive them out of town. Recounting an incident that took place a few days before the riots, Irwin notes that there had been a ā€œsmall disturbanceā€ when two white women were pushing babies in strollers down a street where some Indian immigrants were resting on the sidewalk. When the women asked the men to move, they apparently simply smiled in ā€œtheir childish way,ā€ according to Irwin, and remained by the roadside. Some mill workers who saw this interaction claimed that the men were acting disrespectfully toward the women. The mob attacked the tenements of the South Asian workers that evening, Irwin noted, because the workers were enraged by the idea that these men were not appropriately obsequious to the white townsfolk. Irwin argued that the chief of the Bellingham police, Chief Thomas, housed the victims of the attacks at the police station not to protect them, but to imprison them in order to prevent a Sikh uprising and to ease the collective ousting of all South Asians from town the next morning. After locking away the men who survived the mob's attacks, Chief Thomas had deputized two thousand men to hunt down and find the one hundred South Asians still at large. Irwin wrote:
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Three cheers rent the Bellingham fog, the mob scattered to hunt Hindus. The victims lay down like rabbits. Not one fought back. Two were running away. The first tried to scurry like a cat up a twenty-foot wall. Near the top he lost his hold and fell. The other running along a wharf in the dark tripped on his fallen turban and fell into the water. The rest were led like lambs to the police station. At eleven o'clock a boy in knee breeches brought in two six-footers, one in each hand. At midnight an interpreter called the roll. Every Hindu in Bellingham was safe at the station. Next morning the chief swore in deputies and sent them to accompany the Hindus back to their mills, from which they decamped and vanished over the border.17
Irwin was clearly opposed to the violence directed at the Indians and also critical of how the city authorities reacted. He did not hesitate to note the racial prejudices motivating the riots. However, his language also reveals that even the most liberal and pro-immigrant intellectuals of the time thought of the Indian workers as ā€œchildlikeā€ and not able to withstand the strength of a ā€œboy in breeches.ā€ Irwin's comparison of the Indians to small animalsā€”cats, rabbits, or lambsā€”reveals his own racial biases that would read the dark-skinned immigrants as closer to animals and in need of protection. Irwin's coverage exemplifies the undercurrents of racism that affected even the more liberal supporters of immigrant rights.
Foll...

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