#48 - November 2008
Today, more human beings are migrating from countryside to city, from city to city, and from country to country than at any time in human history. Controversy swirls about the impact of immigrants on everything from labor markets and...
Immigration is clearly emerging as one of the defining issues of the 21st century. The United Nations has estimated that nearly 200 million people live and work outside their native lands today -– a number larger than at any other time...
Articles
Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. -- Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass.
Introduction
Americanization constituted a Nativist movement dedicated to...
Social scientists have developed various paradigms to explain what happens when different cultures encounter each other: assimilation, acculturation, cultural pluralism, the melting pot. Some of these paradigms are theoretical; some...
Introduction
Mass migration poses particular challenges and unique opportunities for the US Left. On the one hand, immigrants are being pitted against the native-born, especially African Americans, causing...
Not long after arriving in the Dominican Republic, Gérard married a Haitian woman whom he had known in Port-au-Prince. They rented an apartment in the capital, and soon afterward his wife gave birth to a son. Since Dominican...
In 2006, millions of immigrants filled the streets of hundreds of cities to march in opposition to House bill HR 4437 and to call for a fair and just immigration policy. SEIU and UNITE-HERE, along with several other unions, joined in...
In a recent attempt to outline a periodization for the history of Italian-American radicalism in the United States, Gerald Meyer and the late Philip V. Cannistraro have suggested that the pre-War War I era and the phase of the anti-...
Probably the largest and most sustained anti-war movement in the US since the Vietnam War was the grassroots mobilization that has come to be known as the Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement (CAPSM).1 It arose in the 1980s in...
Is immigration a problem? According to the media it is. According to certain political groups it is. In fact, in most of the rich countries of the world there are lobbies and blocs that oppose immigration on various grounds, in some...
Twenty years ago this month, I presented my credentials, in a sealed brown envelope, to the immigration officer on duty at Kennedy International Airport. After a brief interview, I was formally admitted into the United States as a...
Poetry
These poems of loss, anger, hope, and memory were written by Chinese immigrants. In the classical style (four lines, seven characters per line), mostly, they are carved into the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station...
The sycamores are leafing out
on west fourth street and I am weirdly old
yet their pale iridescence pleases me
as I emerge from the subway into traffic
and trash and patchouli gusts—now that I can read
...
Poetra
say french:
who knows what lebanese is?
or syrian? (serbian? siberian?)
protectorate is close to
protector
of course there’s your culture
a tradition of teachers and doctors
an elegant descent...
Manifesto
The earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was... The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man's business to divide it... -- Chief Joseph, NEZ PERCE
There ought...
Book Reviews
Daniel Cassidy, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Petrolia, California: CounterPunch, 2007).
Daniel Cassidy’s How the Irish Invented Slang is a specialist work...
E. San Juan, Jr. Balikbayang Mahal: Passages from Exile (Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2007).
A book of translations, Balikbayang Mahal or Beloved Returnee is about making history in unexpected...
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Marcella Bencivenni is an Assistant Professor of History at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York, and a member of S&D editorial board. She has written several articles and book reviews on...