Foreign Germs: The Stigmatization of Immigrants
The stigmatization of immigrants through the language of disease and contagion is as American as apple pie.
Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence
Southeast Asian Americans navigated evolving cultural norms while building grassroots organizations to combat violence against women.
The Tragedy that Transformed the Chicano Movement
In 1963, more than thirty Mexican guest workers died in a terrible accident in California. The fallout helped turn farmworkers’ rights into a national cause.
The “Mexican-Hindus” of Rural California
Anti-Asian immigration restrictions led male Punjabi farm workers in California to marry Mexican and Mexican American women, creating new cultural bonds.
Birth of the Corporate Person
The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.
Birth of A National Immigration Policy
Until the Civil War, regulating immigration to the US was left to individual states. That changed with Emancipation and the legal end of slavery.
Traveling Through Time and Space in the Richmond Night Market
A night market in suburban Vancouver originated with Chinese immigrants, but its structure and management have raised questions over its supposed authenticity.
The End of Asian Exclusion, the Beginning of Caribbean Exclusion
The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act allowed first-generation Japanese American immigrants to become US citizens while keeping African Caribbean immigrants out.
From Bond Maid to Pioneering Chinese Businesswoman
Raised as a servant girl, Lai Ngan grew up to become a cigar maker, own a boarding house, and run grocery stores in the American Southwest.
How Arab-Americans Stopped Being White
With the emergence of the US as a global superpower in the twentieth-century, anti-Palestinian stereotypes in the media bled over to stigmatize Arab Americans.