Forwarded from Anthony (USA trip, part 3)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My trip to America Part 3

The San Francisco Bay Area has always been a stew of nationalities,
ethnicities, and cultural groups. The silicon valley boom has drawn new
human ingredients into the stew - from all over the world, but especially
from Asia and Latin America

The new immigration from Asia has changed the face of the Bay Area in
significant ways that are only just beginning to be registered in popular
consciousness.

You can find Thai, Japanese, and Indian restaurants in every town and
practically every neighborhood of the Bay Area. Once Irish, Italian and
black neighborhoods now have store signs in English ... and in Cantonese.
In East San Jose, once a Chicano neighborhood, I ran across a shopping mall
called Asian Plaza - with a dizzying array of stores selling only goods
imported from one or another Asian country - or produced in California
specifically for one or another Asian community.

Nearby was a store selling Indian and Mexican food.

There are now movie theaters in several cities and towns showing only films
in Hindi. These join the long existing theaters showing films in Cantonese,
Mandarin, Japanese, and Spanish. (Not to be confused with "Art" theaters
showing films from non-English speaking countries for English speaking
audiences.)

While the Bay Area?s television broadcast channels are limited to English
and Spanish stations - two in Spanish, cable television offers additional
stations broadcasting in Cantonese, Farsi, Italian, and possibly other
languages (I didn?t have time to thoroughly check out the different cable
providers and channels while I was there, nor did I check out the radio
stations.)

In San Francisco the newly elected school board includes the first ever
Chinese- American member, two Latinos - one of whom is gay and out of the
closet and a member of the Green Party. (The city?s gay community - another
immigrant group in fact, though its solidarity arises from sexual
orientation rather than cultural roots - emerged as the dominant electoral
power in the most recent election. Candidates supported by the gay
community?s political leadership defeated virtually every candidate
supported by the official Democratic party machine in November?s local
elections. For the first time the gay community cemented alliances with
immigrant community groups - resulting in the already mentioned school
board election results.)

Once part of Mexico, California has always had a significant Latino
population. That population has grown steadily, from Latinos born in the
USA, and from immigration.

Ever since the Transcontinental railroad was built after the Civil War,
Northern California has had a significant Chinese population. A smaller,
but also significant Japanese population came a little later. But
immigration from both countries stopped with the anti-Asian Immigration
Acts (Chinese Exclusion) of the late 1800?s ( I don?t remember the exact
date) championed by the Workingman?s Party of Dennis Kearney.

The only significant Asian immigration in the period from Kearney?s racist
victory to the end of the Second World War came from the Philippines -
where Filipinos deemed to be loyal to the US occupiers of their country
could obtain visas and even US citizenship by working for, or serving in,
the American military.

The Filipino model of immigration was extended after WWII to immigrants
deemed to be anticommunist and loyal to the US from South Korea and Taiwan,
and later to other countries with strategic military importance for the US
- notably Thailand.

The victory of the Vietnamese revolution produced a flood of this type of
immigration.

What actually happened was really a lot more complex than official
immigration policymakers could have anticipated. The undoubted majority of
immigrants from all of these Asian countries was composed of pragmatic
people looking for better economic conditions. Ideology was secondary, or
simply not important.

However, the political leadership of all of these immigrant communities was
- from the beginning, in the hands of the right wing - often combined with
or identical to highly organized militaristic criminal groups - of their
own countries of origin. (The "six families" of San Francisco?s Chinatown
being the classic examples, the Vietnamese gangs led by former ARVN
officers being the most recent and probably most vicious examples) .

This is in striking contrast to many of the 19th century immigrant
communities that came earlier from Europe and Asia, whose leaders
frequently were drawn from exiled leftists (This was true for sectors of
the Chinese, Japanese, Irish, German, Italian, Finnish, Russian, and other
communities.)

It is also in contrast to most of the new immigration. The new immigration
can be divided into two parts, one legal and privileged, the other illegal.

Illegal immigration from Latin America usually comes through Mexico. Most
undocumented Mexican workers have long standing family ties to Latino
communiteis in the United States, which provides some protection against
the most extreme forms of exploitation and repression. "Coyotes" ussually
have no control over immigrants once they have been delivered across the
border.

Illegal immigration from Asia comes through Mexico, through Canada, and
frequently directly to the West Coast by plane and by ship. Given the
barrier of the Pacific Ocean, illegal immigration from Asia is more
difficult, and more expensive. It requires more planning, and more
organization. Far more than illegal immigration from Latin America, it has
produced a new wave of indentured, and even enslaved workers in the United
States - working in factories, workshops, farms, and even hotels,
restaurants and retail shops.

The organization of the immigration routes is in the hands of the Asian
mafias - and much of the housing, and many of the businesses where these
immigrants work, are also in the hands of these mafias.

Undocumented Asians are divided between the lucky ones with hope of
escaping - and the doomed with no future. Like most undocumented Mexican
workers, the lucky ones have family connections living, perhaps legally, in
the USA and outside of the control of the mafias. The unlucky ones do not.

But silicon valley has also produced large scale legal immigration from
Asia- in the form of English speaking computer and soft ware engineers from
India, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. These privileged immigrants receive
special visas which allow them - but not their families - to live and work
in the USA.

Eventually they can become full fledged resident aliens with ?green cards?
or become citizens, giving them the right to bring family members along in
a slow painful trickle. But this legal flow has its illegal counterpart as
family members inevitably follow sooner than allowed by the legally
ordained processes. They often come on tourist visas - and stay to live
with their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, etc. (the great major of
those with work visas are men.)

The historic accident of the gold rush of 1849 jump started California?s
ethnic and national jumble. Miners from Sonora Mexico, from Wales, from
Alsace, and Chile swarmed into the gold fields along with farmers, stock
clerks, draft dodgers, etc. from anywhere a ship or wagon could reach San
Francisco.

Wages were high, labor was scarce. Ship crews jumped ship leaving hundreds
of scows and clippers stranded in the bay. Scarce labor and high wages
persisted long after the initial rush to the gold fields died down.

The stew has boiled and simmered over the century and a half since. Lots of
racial and ethnic conflicts, some verging on little civil wars, pockmark
the history of California - interwoven with the class struggle in complex
ways.

Now 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th generation Latinos often do not think of
themselves as Latinos, and culturally often are not. Intermarriage with
people from other communities, especially other culturally Catholic
communities like the Italians and Irish, has given the descendants of older
generations of Latinos a more "assimilationist" reality than is true for
either black people or Asians in California.

One demonstration of this fact is that the leadership of the Democratic
Party in California is more and more shifting from Irish, Jewish, Italian
and black politicians into the hands of Chicanos.

But USA born Asians are following the assimilationist path in a similar
manner. UC Berkeley?s largest single ethnic group now consists of people
born in the USA with Chinese last names. On the campus it is very common to
see ?white? and Asian couples walking hand in hand. This wasn?t so common
as recently as the 1970?s.

Racism and anti immigrant xenophobia seems to again be in decline having
reached a high point with the 1998 outlawing of bilingual education in the
state. Much of the anti-immigrant propositions and laws of recent years
have been overturned in court cases, or not strongly enforced.

California?s reality is that without immigrants, no electronics industry,
no farms, no fast food, no garment industry, no toy factories - no big
business.

California?s reality is that too much racism became bad for business.
(Needless to say, this is a great opportunity for the left and the labor
movement to make even further inroads against racism - though whether the
opportunity will be grasped remains to be seen.)

Where all of this is going is difficult to say, but one thing for sure is
that not much in California favors any sort of racial, national, ethnic or
even cultural homogeneity beyond the shallow social bounds of shopping
malls and consumerism.

Having said this does not in any way rule out a renewed round of racism,
and racial, ethnic, and national group conflict. Indeed, should the
recession which now seems to be on the way turn out to be deep or
prolonged, it?s virtually a certainty.

Louis Proyect
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