Japanese Immigration to the US PDF

While the frontier was being declared closed in 1890, America was receiving a new group of immigrants: the Japanese. Like the Irish and the Chinese, the Japanese were pushed toward the United States by forces that made life difficult in their homeland. In the middle of...

While the frontier was being declared closed in 1890, America was receiving a new group of immigrants: the Japanese. Like the Irish and the Chinese, the Japanese were pushed toward the United States by forces that made life difficult in their homeland. In the middle of the nineteenth century, America’s influence reached across the Pacific. US naval ships had entered Tokyo Bay in 1853 and forcefully opened Japan’s doors to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Western powers were busy colonizing China. To prevent the same thing from happening in their country, Japan’s leaders established a strong central government in 1868. The Japanese government launched programs to develop the country’s industrial and military might. Heavy taxes on the people paid for these programs. Bearing the burden of taxation, Japanese farmers suffered severe economic hardship during the 1880s. Thousands of farmers were forced to sell their land to pay their taxes and debts. Hunger stalked many parts of the country. Searching for a way out of their plight, impoverished farmers were seized with emigration fever. Fabulous stories of high wages abroad stirred their imaginations. A plantation laborer in Hawaii could earn six times more than in Japan. In three years, a worker in Hawaii might manage to save as much as he could earn in ten years in Japan. Stories about wages in the mainland United States seemed even more fantastic. No wonder young men begged their parents to let them go to America. They exclaimed, “In America, money grew on trees.” Between 1885 and 1924, hundreds of thousands of Japanese left their homeland. About 200,000 Japanese went to Hawaii, and another 180,000 went to the US mainland. One migrant captured their excitement in the traditional Japanese form of poetry called haiku: Huge dreams of fortune Go with me to foreign lands, Across the ocean. Like the Chinese, the Japanese crossed the Pacific driven by dreams of making money. But there was a significant difference between the two migrations. Most of the Chinese immigrants were men, but the Japanese flow to America included an abundance of women. By 1920, women made up 46 percent of the Japanese in Hawaii and 35 percent in California, compared with only 5 percent for the Chinese. Why the difference? Unlike China, Japan was ruled by a strong central government that could regulate emigration. Hearing that the mostly male Chinese community in America had problems with prostitution, gambling, and drunkenness, the Japanese government hoped to prevent the same problems among its own emigrants by promoting the emigration of women. Men with wives and families, government leaders reasoned, would be more likely to lead settled, productive lives and not give the Japanese people a bad name. The Hawaiian government shared these views and encouraged married couples and women to immigrate. In addition, Japanese women were less bound by tradition than Chinese women. Japan’s move toward an industrial economy had brought women into the workforce as construction workers, coal miners, and laborers in textile factories. By 1900, three-fifths of Japan’s industrial laborers were women. And because Japan’s new government required girls as well as boys to attend school, Japanese women were more likely than Chinese women to be educated and to know how to read and write. Starting in 1876, many learned English in school. These factors may have paved the way for women to consider working in America. A loophole in American immigration policy also favored Japanese women. Under a 1907 arrangement called the Gentlemen’s Agreement, the United States allowed Japanese immigrants to bring their family members to join them. Some sixty thousand women came to America this way. Many of them were “picture brides,” women who had been joined through arranged marriages to men they had never met. Arranged marriages were an established custom in Japan. Marriage was considered not an individual choice but a family concern, and parents consulted go-betweens to help them select partners for their sons and daughters. After the invention of photography, the exchange of pictures became part of this practice. When a potential bride and groom did not live near each other, they would exchange photographs before they met. This custom was well suited to the needs of Japanese migrants. Men who had gone to America could exchange pictures through the mail with women in Japan. Their families would arrange long-distance marriages, after which the new brides would be able to enter the United States to join their husbands. As they prepared to leave for Hawaii or the US mainland, many women felt anxious about separating from their homes in Japan. One woman remembered that when her husband’s brother said farewell, he added, “Don’t stay in the States too long. Come back in five years and farm with us.” “Are you kidding?” her father quickly said. “They can’t learn anything in five years. They’ll even have a baby over there.... Be patient for twenty years.” Her father’s words shocked her. Suddenly she realized how long the separation could be. Hawaii was a kingdom until 1900, when it became a territory of the United States. Even before 1900, American planters had developed a successful sugarcane industry in the Hawaiian Islands, producing sugar for export. Between 1875 and 1910, land under cultivation in the islands increased from 12,000 to 214,000 acres. To work this land, the planters needed laborers. Their chief source was Japan, but it was not their only source. “The planters paid attention to the nationalities of their workers. They systemically developed a labor force that was ethnically diverse, so that they could create divisions among the workers. This kept the workers from uniting and made it easier for management to control them. A plantation manager told how to avoid workers’ strikes: “Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any, cases of Japs, Chinese, and Portuguese entering into a strike as a unit.” Planters also imported laborers from Korea and the Philippines in order to pit them against the Japanese, hoping that this would keep Japanese workers from making demands. To strengthen their authority over this ethnically diverse workforce, planters created a status system of tasks based on race. Whites occupied the supervisory and skilled positions. Asians did unskilled fieldwork. In 1904, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association passed a resolution saying that only US citizens, or people eligible to become citizens, could hold skilled positions. This ruled out Asians, because only white people were allowed to become naturalized US citizens at that time. “I haven’t got a chance,” one Japanese worker told an interviewer, explaining his frustration with racial discrimination. “You can’t go very high up and get big money unless your skin is white. You can work here all your life and yet a haole [white` person] who doesn’t know a thing about the work can be ahead of you in no time.” On the plantations, Japanese workers found themselves in a regimented world, not an organized world. Early in the morning they were jarred out of sleep by the loud scream of the plantation siren. Foremen strode through the camps, knocking on doors and shouting at the workers to get up. In gangs of twenty to thirty, the workers were marched to the fields. Some gangs were made up of just one nationality. Others included Japanese, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese, and Hawaiian laborers. “There were gangs of women workers, too. In 1920, 14 percent of the plantation labor force was female, mostly Japanese. Women were concentrated in certain kinds of fieldwork: hoeing, stripping leaves from the canes, and harvesting. Although they were given many of the same assignments as male workers, women were paid less. Female field hands received an average wage of fifty-five cents a day in 1915, compared with seventy-eight cents for male hands. Around the neck of each worker was a chain with a small brass disk. On each disk was a number, or bango. Field bosses, or lunas, called the workers by this number. In the old country, names had connected these men and women to family and community, but in the cane fields they became numbers. A luna, often on horseback, surveyed the whole scene. “If we talked too much the man swung his whip,” one Japanese laborer recalled. “He did not actually whip us but just swung his whip so that we would work harder.” Fieldwork was punishingly difficult. Hoeing weeds was both boring and backbreaking. Workers moved for hours in a straight line without talking. Harvesting the cane with mechanical swings of a machete was dirty and exhausting. It resulted in blistered hands and arms scratched by the saw-blade edges of the cane leaves. Twelve feet tall, the cane enclosed the workers, who sweated from the terrible heat and humidity. Surrounded by red dust, they covered their faces with handkerchiefs. A song summed up a woman worker’s experience in the field: My husband cuts the cane stalks And I trim their leaves With sweat and tears we both work For our means. After collecting the cane stalks, the workers tied them into bundles and loaded them onto railway cars. A train carried the stalks to the mill, where they were crushed and their juices were boiled. Inside the mill, laborers worked amid heat, steam, and the constant loud clanking and whirring of machinery. “Contrary to the stereotype of Japanese immigrants as quiet and ready to accept anything, Japanese laborers in Hawaii aggressively protested against unfair labor conditions. They often engaged in strikes. At first, laborers of different groups tended to think in terms of ethnicity, rather than seeing that workers of all ethnic groups shared the same struggle. Japanese workers, for example, organized themselves into “blood unions” based on their ethnic identity. The most important action of the blood unions was the Japanese strike of 1909. Pointing out that Portuguese workers received $22.50 a month while Japanese workers got only $18 a month for the same work, the Japanese called for higher wages and an end to racial inequality in pay. Several thousand Japanese plantation laborers halted work on the island of Oahu. Fellow Japanese on the other islands sent support in the form of money and food. Japanese businesses also aided the strikers, and the Japanese Physicians Association gave free medical care to the strikers and their families. The strike showed that the workers were beginning to think of themselves as permanent settlers, not temporary visitors. They were becoming Japanese Americans. In their demand for a higher wage they explained that they wanted to “unite our destiny with that of Hawaii, sharing the prosperity and adversity of Hawaii with other citizens of Hawaii.” The planters responded by pressuring the government to arrest the strike leaders for conspiracy. Then they hired Chinese, Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Filipino workers as “scabs”—laborers who would break the strike by doing the strikers’ jobs. The strikers held out for four months before they were forced to return to work. The Japanese strikers had won a victory, for soon afterward the planters raised their wages and ended the system of different wages for different races. Yet after the strike was broken, the planters began importing massive numbers of Filipino workers. By 1920 the labor force was 30 percent Filipino and only 44 percent Japanese. “Workers of both nationalities began to realize that the labor movement in Hawaii would have to be based on working-class unity across ethnic lines. When the Filipino union went on strike in 1920, the Japanese union joined the strike. This work stoppage by eight thousand people—77 percent of the plantation workforce on Oahu—brought sugar production to a standstill. The Japanese union questioned the wisdom of having separate, ethnic labor organizations. It proposed one union for “laborers of all nationalities. “Divide and Control Confronted by the prospect of workers uniting, the planters turned to their time-tested strategy of divide and control. They promoted distrust between the Filipino and Japanese communities and offered a bribe to Filipino union leader Pablo Manlapit. Both Filipino and Japanese workers were surprised when Manlapit suddenly called off the strike, calling it a Japanese action to cripple Hawaii’s economy—even though the Filipino union had been the first to strike. Many Filipino union members defied Manlapit and continued to strike. The planters stepped up their attack with propaganda claiming that the Japanese strikers were puppets of the Japanese government, which planned to “Japanise” Hawaii. The planters hired Hawaiians, Portuguese, and Koreans as strikebreakers, and they evicted the striking workers from their homes on the plantations. Forced to take shelter in Honolulu’s vacant lots, homeless during the height of a flu epidemic, thousands of workers and their family members became ill. One hundred and fifty died. Tired, hungry, and sick, the strikers gave up their struggle in July. The planters claimed a victory—but three months later they quietly raised wages by 50 percent. “Ethnic Communities  On the plantations, workers of different nationalities were usually housed in separate camps. The early camps were generally crowded and unsanitary, with as many as fifty workers living under one roof. But over time, as planters replaced single workers with married men, the barracks were replaced by cottages for families. The planters had learned that it was in their own best interests to make the workers more comfortable. “Pleasant surroundings, with some of the modern comforts and conveniences,” said one plantation official, “go a long way to make the worker healthier and more efficient in his work.” Meanwhile, the workers were turning their camps into ethnic communities. On every plantation, Japanese immigrants established Buddhist temples and Japanese-language schools for their children. They held traditional celebrations such as the midsummer obon, or festival of souls, when they dressed in kimonos and danced in circles to the beat of taiko drums to honor the reunion of the living with the spirits of the dead. At first, the laborers of each ethnic group spoke only their native language. This gave each group a sense of community within its camp, letting members maintain ties with each other and with their “culture as they shared memories and experiences. Soon, though, workers of different groups began to acquire a common language. Planters wanted workers to know basic English, the language in which commands were given. A plantation dialect called “Pidgin English” developed—simple English that also included Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Chinese phrases and rhythms. Pidgin had begun as a language of command, but it soon became the language of community. “The language we used had to be either Pidgin English or broken English,” said a Filipino worker, explaining how different groups communicated with each other on the plantation. “And when we don’t understand each other, we had to add some other words that would help to explain ourselves. That’s how this Pidgin English comes out beautiful.” As Pidgin English became the language of the camps, it let people from different countries communicate with each other, helping them create a new identity that was tied to Hawaii. The use of a new language reflected a deeper change in how they saw themselves and their place. They had come to Hawaii planning to earn money and then return to Japan, and many did return. Of the 200,000 Japanese who entered Hawaii between “1885 and 1924, about 110,000, or 55 percent of them, went home. What is significant, though, is that almost half stayed. A New Generation Gradually, over the years, Japanese workers found themselves establishing families in their new Hawaiian home. In 1920 nearly half the Japanese in Hawaii were just nineteen years old or younger. The immigrants were planting roots through their children. Some immigrants with children considered returning to Japan but found themselves unable to do so. In a letter to his brother, Asakichi Inouye explained that he had decided not to return to Japan because his children were settled in Hawaii, and so was his grandson Daniel (who would later be elected to the US Senate). Inouye feared that he and his wife would not find contentment in their old home in Japan. “Something similar happened to Shokichi and Matsu Fukuda. They had emigrated from Japan together in 1900 to work on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Twenty years later they decided to go back to Japan and take their Hawaiian-born children with them. Their teenage son, however, refused to go. Hawaii was his home, the only world he knew, and he wanted the family to stay there. Seeing their parents suffering from backbreaking work, low wages, and discrimination, many second-generation Japanese Americans refused to be forced into plantation labor. Education, they believed, was the key to job opportunities and freedom from the plantation. They wanted to be something more than field laborers. The planters did not want the immigrants’ children to receive too much education. They needed the second generation as plantation laborers. Sixth or maybe eighth grade, they felt, was enough. Young people stayed in school, however, and learned about the American ideals of democracy and equality. Returning from school to their camps, they saw whites on the top and Asians on the bottom, and they began to question the plantation system. “Japanese immigrants had labored to build the great sugar industry in Hawaii. Their sweat and tears had watered the cane fields. As they learned Pidgin English and watched their children grow up in the camps and attend American schools, they realized that they had become settlers, and that Hawaii had become their home. With one woven basket Alone I came Now I have children And even grandchildren too. Transforming California During a visit to California in the 1920s, a young Japanese man from Hawaii was shocked by the strong anti-Japanese hostility he encountered. Although he had heard rumors about how badly whites treated Japanese on the US mainland, reality was a shock: But I didn’t realize the true situation until I had a personal experience. In one instance, I went to a barbershop to get my hair trimmed. On entering the shop, one of the barbers approached me and asked for my nationality. I answered that I was Japanese, and as soon as he heard that I was of the yellow race, he drove me out of the place as if he were driving away a cat or a dog. In Hawaii, 40 percent of the population was Japanese in 1920. On the mainland, however, the Japanese were a tiny racial minority. They totaled just 2 percent of the population in California. Scorned by white society, they had become the targets of hostile and violent white workers. Most of the immigrants had been farmers in Japan. For centuries their families had cultivated small plots, irrigating the land and relying on intensive labor to make it productive. To become farmers in America was their dream. Although Japanese immigrants also worked at first as field hands, on railroad construction, and in canneries, many became farmers. They raised crops for white landowners, rented land, and, once they had saved enough money, bought land of their own. “The Japanese immigrants entered American agriculture at a time of change. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the rise of industry and the growth of cities had created a demand for fresh produce in the nation’s urban centers. At the same time, irrigation expanded greatly in California, opening the way for intensive agriculture—orchards and gardens as opposed to vast wheat fields or pastures that required little water. Two important technological developments—railway lines and the refrigerated railway car—made it possible for California’s farmers to ship perishable fruits and vegetables to almost anywhere in the United States. Japanese farmers came onto this scene at the right time, and they rapidly flourished. In 1900 California’s Japanese farmers owned or rented twenty-nine farms, totaling 4,698 acres. Within five years the acreage farmed by the Japanese had jumped to 61,858. By 1920 Japanese farmers were cultivating nearly half a million acres, growing large percentages of the strawberries, onions, tomatoes, celery, snap beans, and green peas that were produced in the state. That year the production of Japanese farms was valued at $67 million, about 10 percent of the total value of California’s crops. “Workdays on the farms were long and demanding—especially for women, who had the double duty of fieldwork and housework. Still, driven by their dreams of rich harvests, these pioneering Japanese men and women turned the dusty Sacramento Valley and the deserts of the Imperial Valley into lush and profitable fields and orchards. One of the most successful Japanese farmers was Kinji Ushijima, better known as George Shima, who came to California in 1887. He worked as a potato picker, then a labor contractor, and then a farmer. Shima leased and bought undeveloped swamplands, then built dams and ditches to drain them, turning them into fertile farmlands. A fleet of steamboats and barges carried Shima’s potatoes from the delta of the Sacramento River to San Francisco. At the time of his death in 1926, the “Potato King,” as he was called, had an estate worth $15 million. Yet success had not protected Shima from racism. When he bought a house in an attractive part of the city of Berkeley, close to the University of California campus, a professor led a group of protesters with the message that Shima should move to an “Oriental” neighborhood. But Shima refused to move to an “Oriental” neighborhood. But Shima refused to move. At Shima’s funeral, the chancellor of Stanford University and the mayor of San Francisco showed their respect by helping to carry his casket. “Many Japanese immigrants believed that their success, especially in agriculture, would help them become accepted into American society. They had failed to recognize the depth of the belief that America was meant to be white. In fact, their very success as farmers sparked a backlash against them. In 1907, in an arrangement known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement, the federal government had pressured Japan to limit the immigration of laborers to the United States. Six years later California passed the Alien Land Law, which said that no foreigner who was not eligible to become a citizen could buy land. This law was aimed at Japanese immigrants and was based on race. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act said that only “white” persons could become naturalized US citizens, California’s Alien Land Law kept the Japanese from buying property in the state. Takao Ozawa challenged the federal law in 1915 by filing an application for citizenship. He had arrived in the United States twenty years earlier, had graduated from high school and attended college, and had worked and raised a family in Hawaii. When his application for citizenship was turned down, Ozawa fought the decision all the way to the US Supreme Court. In 1922 the Supreme Court ruled against Ozawa, saying that it was clear that he was not Caucasian, or white. Race-based immigration limits grew tighter by 1924. That year Congress passed a general immigration law that denied entry to any foreigners who were not eligible to become citizens. Neither the Japanese nor any other non-white immigrants could enter the country. A Japanese American newspaper scolded Congress for betraying America’s ideals and dishonoring its best traditions. The immigrants’ decades of hard work seemed to be for nothing, as reflected in a haiku: America... once “A dream of hope and longing, Now a life of tears. Nisei: Americans by Birth Laws prevented the Issei, the Japanese immigrants, from becoming citizens and buying land. Their future in America lay in their children, the Nisei, or second generation. The Nisei were a rapidly growing group within the Japanese community. In 1920 more than a quarter of the Japanese population of the mainland United States had been born there. Twenty years later nearly two-thirds of the Japanese population was American-born. “Because they had been born in the United States, the Nisei were citizens. Citizenship together with education, the immigrant generation believed, would give their children opportunities that had been closed to them. Many parents were willing to give up their own comforts, even necessities, for the education of their children. But citizenship and education, the second generation discovered, did not prevent racial discrimination. Even the Nisei, born in the United States, were called “Japs” and told to “go back to Japan.” Japanese American schoolchildren dodged rocks thrown by white children. When they grew a little older they were complimented on their English and asked how long they had been in America. “The Nisei also had trouble finding jobs, even though most of them graduated from high school with good grades and had completed college. The average educational level of the Nisei was two years of college, well above the national average. Still, they were denied opportunities. Their situation was made worse by the fact that many Nisei came of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time of massive unemployment in the United States. Young people who had dreamed of becoming lawyers or doctors found themselves working in small Japanese businesses such as laundries and fruit stands. A disappointed Nisei who worked in a produce stand explained, “I would much rather it were a doctor or lawyer... but... I am only what I am, a professional carrot washer.” Growing up in America gave the Nisei a sense of twoness, which Monica Sone described in her autobiography Nisei Daughter. As a child in Seattle she was surrounded by two cultures. At home she ate traditional Japanese dishes such as pickled radishes and rice, as well as ham and eggs. She studied Japanese odori dance as well as ballet. “Monica’s family attended Japanese theater, sumo wrestling matches, and picnics where the city’s Japanese American community sang the songs and feasted on the foods of their homeland. At the same time, Monica was a member of the Mickey Mouse Club and a kid in American society. While she enjoyed many of her parents’ activities, she knew she was not just Japanese. The biggest problem for Monica and other Nisei was job discrimination. After Monica graduated from high school, she applied to secretarial college and was told that only six Japanese American girls could be admitted, because the school had so much trouble finding jobs for them after they finished their training. “Yet the problem was deeper than employment. It was a profoundly cultural question: What did it mean to be an American? In their hearts, the Nisei did not wish to be completely assimilated, to become American only. They felt they were a complex combination of two cultures, and they wanted to embrace both of them, to be both Japanese and American. Jews from Russia began their immigration to the United States in the 1880s. Like many other groups, they were pushed into immigrating by unbearable conditions. But unlike the Chinese and Japanese workers who had at first planned to be temporary workers in America, the Russian Jews came as permanent settlers. They knew there would be no going back. Jews were a persecuted minority in Russia. In an important sense, those who fled to the United States were political refugees, because the Russian government itself encouraged acts of violence against the Jews by the Gentiles, or non-Jews. Repression was everywhere. Jews were confined to a special area called the Pale of Settlement in western Russia. The law prevented them from owning land, forcing most of them to live in urban areas, towns or villages called shtetls. They earned their livings as merchants and craftspeople. In 1879 almost 40 percent of the Jews worked in manufacturing or crafts. This created economic hardships for them, as an immigrant explained: “It was not easy to live, with such bitter competition as the congestion of the population made inevitable. There were ten times as many stores as there should have been, ten times as many tailors, cobblers, barbers, tinsmiths. A Gentile, if he failed in Polotzk, could go elsewhere, where there was less competition. A Jew could make the circle of the Pale, only to find the same conditions as at home. Life in the shtetls was intensely insecure. Anti-Semitic violence, or violence aimed at Jews, was a constant reality. Most dreaded were the pogroms, bouts of persecution in which Jews were massacred and their shops and synagogues (temples) destroyed. “I feel that every cobblestone in Russia is filled with Jewish blood,” an immigrant bitterly recalled. “Absolutely every year, there was a pogrom before Pesach [Passover]. In big cities during the pogroms, they used any reason to get rid of you. As many Jews as they could kill, they did; but there were some Gentiles who would save you.” The pogroms made Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe realize that they had to leave. Many of them looked west, to America. By the time World War I began in 1914, a third of all the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe had emigrated. Most went to the United States. In the old country, the air around them had been full of stories about the freedom and better life they could have in the United States. People read letters from America aloud in shops, markets, and synagogues. Children played games, pretending they were emigrating. America stirred people’s hope and dreams of a Promised Land. Fears of persecution, together with grand visions of a new life, gave the Jews the courage to uproot themselves and leave their birthplace forever. On the streets of the shtetl, women sold their beds, chairs, kitchen tables, and other belongings to raise money for the passage to America. Taking only their personal possessions, the Jews left the familiar little towns of cobbled streets and crowded marketplaces. Like many other emigrants over the centuries, one man realized only at the moment of departure how long his journey would be. “This was the point at which I was cutting myself off from my past, from those I loved,” he later recalled. “Would I ever see them again?” “When they boarded ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the voyagers were herded into crowded compartments below deck, often dark and dirty. Some emigrants traveled on cattle carriers that had been turned into passenger boats. As often as possible the passengers went up on deck to breathe fresh air. They sang Russian folk songs and shared stories.  Finally, after a long crossing, the passengers sighted land. It was a moment of high emotion. “Everybody was on deck,” said Emma Goldman, who was seventeen years old when she arrived from Russia. “[My sister] Helena and I stood pressed to each other, enraptured by the sight of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty suddenly emerging from the mist. Ah, there she was, the symbol of hope, of freedom, of opportunity!” Who were these newcomers searching for a door to America? In general, they were educated: 80 percent of the men and 63 percent of the women who came between 1908 and 1912 could read and write. Most were poor, but two-thirds of them were skilled workers such as craftspeople. And unlike most other European immigrants, they planned to stay. Sixty percent of the southern Italian migrants returned to their homeland. For Jews, in comparison, the rate of return was only 3 percent. Another difference was that the Jews immigrated as families. Almost half of them were women, compared to about 20 percent for southern Italians, and a quarter of them were children. They had come to make America their new home. From the immigration station on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, most of the immigrants headed for New York City’s Lower East Side. During the early nineteenth century German Jews had settled in this neighborhood. As massive waves of Russian Jews began arriving in the 1880s, a new Jewish community blossomed there. By 1905 half a million Jews lived in the Lower East Side. Unlike nearby Chinatown, with its high population of single men, the Jewish colony had throngs of children. In this community, Jews seemed to live the same way they had in Russia. They dwelled and worked within a small area, meeting only people like themselves. Yet life moved at a faster pace, with more emphasis on business, bustle, and making money than in the old country. The atmosphere was one of energy and ambition. “From the immigration station on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, most of the immigrants headed for New York City’s Lower East Side. During the early nineteenth century German Jews had settled in this neighborhood. As massive waves of Russian Jews began arriving in the 1880s, a new Jewish community blossomed there. By 1905 half a million Jews lived in the Lower East Side. Unlike nearby Chinatown, with its high population of single men, the Jewish colony had throngs of children. In this community, Jews seemed to live the same way they had in Russia. They dwelled and worked within a small area, meeting only people like themselves. Yet life moved at a faster pace, with more emphasis on business, bustle, and making money than in the old country. The atmosphere was one of energy and ambition. From the immigration station on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, most of the immigrants headed for New York City’s Lower East Side. During the early nineteenth century German Jews had settled in this neighborhood. As massive waves of Russian Jews began arriving in the 1880s, a new Jewish community blossomed there. By 1905 half a million Jews lived in the Lower East Side. Unlike nearby Chinatown, with its high population of single men, the Jewish colony had throngs of children. In this community, Jews seemed to live the same way they had in Russia. They dwelled and worked within a small area, meeting only people like themselves. Yet life moved at a faster pace, with more emphasis on business, bustle, and making money than in the old country. The atmosphere was one of energy and ambition. Jewish success in America depended on more than energy. The Jewish immigrants brought useful skills, especially in the sewing trades. Their arrival was timely, because they were needed in New York City’s growing garment industry. “In earlier times, individual pieces of clothing had been tailor-made and measured to fit the buyer, but the Civil War had changed that. To meet the Union Army’s demand for clothing, tailors had established standard sizes and measurements. This let them mass-produce clothing in factories using new inventions such as the sewing machine and the buttonhole machine. The number of garment factories increased rapidly, and the center of this new industry was New York City. By 1910 nearly half the city’s factories and industrial workers were producing clothing. At first, German Jews had dominated the garment industry. Then the Russian newcomers entered the business, and together they produced good-quality machine-made clothing that could be sold at moderate prices. The Lower East Side became an industrial beehive, block after block of small, busy workplaces called sweatshops, humming with the sound of thousands of sewing machines. “Most sweatshops were small, with fewer than thirty workers, although some were much larger. They were usually run by contractors who rented the space and equipment and who sold the finished garments to larger manufacturers and distributors. Contractors were paid by the piece of finished clothing, so there was pressure to make as many pieces in as little time as possible. Laborers worked in teams, with members given specific tasks such as cutting cloth, operating sewing machines, making buttonholes, or pressing the garments. The team received a group wage based on the number of garments they produced, with each member getting a percentage based on his or her task. This system drove everyone to work hard, because each member wanted to speed up the team’s pace of production. Performing the same tasks over and over, skilled tailors and seamstresses felt like slaves. Sweatshop work was physically punishing: hot, noisy, and dangerous. Accidents such as stitching fingers with sewing machines were common. The workday was long, from eleven to fifteen hours. “My work was sewing on buttons,” one sweatshop employee said. “While the morning was still dark I walked into a dark basement. And darkness met me when I turned of the basement. “Thousands of the garment workers were young women. Many had come to the United States on their own, before their families, because they possessed sewing skills. They could get work, save money, and help the other family members. These young Jewish women made up more than a third of the garment industry’s workforce in 1910. In the sweatshops they were packed together elbow to elbow, operating sewing machines at rows of long tables, so crowded that there was no way to escape in case of emergency. Disaster struck on March 25, 1911, when a fire suddenly broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Eight hundred workers, mostly young women, were trapped in the burning building. Screaming, struggling, they jumped from windows, some from the ninth floor, their bodies smashing onto the sidewalks. Jumping from the higher floors, the girls came down with such force that they tore the nets from the firemen’s hands. A hundred and forty-six workers, mostly Jewish and Italian, died. There were so many dead and injured that they could not all be taken away in ambulances and patrol wagons. Grocers and peddlers offered their carts. Mothers rushed to the scene, where they saw their daughters’ blackened bodies laid out on sidewalks. News of the horror rapidly spread to the shtetls of Russia, causing a panic. Families feared that their own daughters or granddaughters or cousins were among the dead. One reporter wrote, “I looked upon the dead bodies and I remembered these girls were shirtwaist [blouse] makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which the same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. Their dead bodies were the answer. “The “great strike” that the reporter mentioned had taken place in 1909–1910, when workers at three factories—including the Triangle Shirtwaist Company—had walked away from their machines and demanded better working conditions. They asked the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to call for a general strike in the entire shirtwaist industry. But the ILGWU had just been founded, and it lacked the resources to organize such a massive strike. The power to do so had to come from the people themselves. The women strikers organized a mass meeting at Cooper Union, a private college on the Lower East Side. Thousands of people came to show support for the strikers and to criticize the factory bosses—and also the police who were arresting strikers and the hired thugs who were beating them. Inspired by the meeting, the next morning fifteen thousand more shirtwaist workers went on strike. The strike eventually involved twenty thousand workers, overwhelmingly Jewish. Their demands included a fifty-two-hour workweek, overtime pay, and recognition of their union. “During the strike, the Lower East Side was a seething mass of excited demonstrators. Whole neighborhoods burst into applause when word came that another boss had settled with the strikers. By February 1910, more than 300 of the 450 or so shirtwaist businesses in New York had been forced to make some kind of settlement. One was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Tragically, although the company agreed to most of the strikers’ demands, it did not make safety improvements in time to save the lives of those who perished in the fire a year later. The Jewish community was proud of its brave and determined strikers, who were commemorated in a poem called “The Uprising of the Twenty-Thousand”: In the black of the winter of nineteen nine, When we froze and bled on the picket line, We showed the world that women could fight And we rose and we won with women’s might. Chorus: Hail the waistmakers of nineteen nine, Making their stand on the picket line, “Breaking the power of those who reign, Pointing the way, smashing the chain. Several months later another strike erupted when fifty thousand cloak and suit workers walked off their jobs. This strike ended with a compromise between strikers and bosses, in which the strikers received some of the benefits they had demanded. These labor struggles were a landmark in Jewish American history. They launched a decade of strikes in the garment trades and a period of union growth. “By the end of World War I ,” writes labor historian Susan A. Glenn, “clothing workers were among the best-organized members of the American labor force.”  The garment strikes were a movement for workers’ rights, but they were also an ethnic movement. The great majority of strikers were Jewish, and their struggle held the attention of the Jewish community in America. The labor triumphs sharpened a shared sense of ethnic identity, and in turn Jewish Americans took a continuing interest in the labor movement. When Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States, they were foreigners in their dress, language, and thinking. They called themselves “greenhorns,” newcomers who did not yet know their way around. Eager to assimilate into American society, the greenhorns wanted to become modern, to blend in. To blend in, however, they had to give up certain customs. They had to abandon the clothes they had worn in the shtetls, for example, and dress in the American style: hats instead of caps, collars and neckties for men, bright-colored shirtwaists and jackets for women instead of brown dresses and shawls. Language was also a mark of assimilation. In Russia the Jews had spoken their own language, Yiddish. Few of them made any effort to learn the dominant language, Russian. As immigrants in America, though, they were eager to learn English. In a letter to a Jewish newspaper in New York, a mother complained about her daughter: “During the few years she was here without us she became a regular Yankee and forgot how to talk Yiddish.... She says it is not nice to talk Yiddish and I am a greenhorn.” “The quest to become American led some Jewish immigrants, perhaps many of them, to change their names. Bochlowitz became Buckley, Stepinsky became Stevens. First names changed, too. Rivka became Ruth, Moishe became Morris. As successful Jews adopted American habits, they celebrated American holidays. To some, exchanging presents at Christmas—which is not a Jewish holiday—was one of the first signs that one was not a greenhorn. Jewish people also began taking vacations, favoring resorts in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. Married women withdrew from the workforce. To have the luxury of not working meant that the wives and their families were economically and socially successful. “As unionized workers and businesspeople, the Jewish immigrants acquired the means to educate their children. They were driven by a determination to have the second generation be professionals rather than laborers or merchants. This determination, however, benefited mostly the sons of the immigrants. Many daughters worked in the sweatshops, contributing their earnings to the family to help pay for their brothers’ schooling. In 1910 the income of working daughters amounted to nearly 40 percent of the average Jewish family’s earnings. “Meanwhile, young Jewish men were going to the colleges and universities of New York City and other places along the East Coast. By 1916 nearly half the students at New York’s Hunter College and almost three-quarters of those at City College were Jewish. Around that time Jews also began to enter Harvard in Massachusetts, which many considered to be the most elite and prestigious college in the country. A fifth of Harvard’s student population was Jewish by 1920. But the increasing presence of Jewish students at Harvard led to a backlash. In 1923 a magazine writer complained that ambitious and upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants sent their children to college a generation or two earlier than other immigrant groups, which meant that there were “more dirty Jews and tactless Jews in college than dirty and tactless Italians, Armenians, or Slovaks.” Anti-Semitic grumbles swept across the campus. Some students resented the Jewish students because their grades were so high that they made other students look bad. “Abbott Lowell, president of Harvard, announced that the college had a “Jewish problem.” He led efforts to reduce Jewish enrollments. One of his arguments was that keeping the number of Jewish students to a minimum would prevent anti-Semitic feeling on campus. New admission guidelines at Harvard placed emphasis on “well-rounded” applicants rather than simply on grades, and called for more students from areas other than New York City. Applicants were also required to submit photographs because many people believed it was possible to identify Jews, even if they had changed their names, by their facial features. Not everyone agreed with Lowell’s views. Mayor James Curley of Boston, an Irish American, spoke out against discrimination aimed at Jews. “All of us under the Constitution are guaranteed equality, without regard to race, creed, or color,” Curley declared. “If the Jew is barred today, the Italian will be tomorrow, then the Spaniard and the Pole, and at some future date the Irish. “The anti-Jewish restrictions at Harvard were part of a larger movement of nativism, a way of thinking that favored the established inhabitants of a region or country over newcomers and immigrants, and that placed “native-born” people’s interests ahead of the interests of others. This surge of nativism led to a strict new Immigration Law of 1924 that Congress passed. The law was designed to reduce immigration from southern and eastern Europe. It established quotas, or limits, on the number of people who could enter the United States from each nationality. Each quota was equal to 2 percent of the total number of people of that nationality who had “been in the United States in 1890. In other words, the quota system adopted in 1924 was based on population figures that were already more than thirty years old. Because large-scale Jewish immigration did not occur until after 1890, the number of Jews in America in 1890 was not great—and the number now permitted to enter the country each year was just 2 percent of that number. The same held true for other nationalities. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had introduced the idea of limiting immigration by nationality. The law of 1924 applied that principle to many immigrant groups, not just one. “The German Jews who had arrived earlier had been welcomed in US society. What made the more recent wave of Russian and Eastern European Jews seem threatening to Americans? They were culturally more different from Americans of English, Scottish, and Irish descent than the German Jews had been. They arrived in much bigger numbers, making people fear an “invasion” of ambitious foreigners who seemed highly successful. In addition, the Russian Jews’ involvement in the labor struggle and their participation in strikes seemed threatening. The more the Jews succeeded, the better they assimilated, the more American nativists disliked them. Hostility sharpened as the Jews began moving out of the Lower East Side, closing the distance between themselves and Gentile America. When Jews tried to buy homes in more middle-class neighborhoods, they often encountered rules that specified that property could not be sold to Jews. Still, during the 1920s more than a hundred thousand Jews left the Lower East Side, spreading into more distant parts of New York City, such as Brooklyn and the Bronx, and beyond.” “Years earlier, as refugees, Jews had fled the shtetls of Russia to what they saw as the Promised Land of America. Now they, or their children, were migrating again, embracing the possibilities of life in the United States, striving to assimilate and become Americans. Unlike the immigrants from Asia and Europe, Mexicans lived in a country that bordered the United States. For a long time, entry was easy. “All you had to do,” said Cleofás Calleros, who immigrated with his family from Mexico in the early 1900s, “coming from Mexico, if you were a Mexican citizen, was to report at the immigration office on the American side... give your name, the place of your birth, and where you were going to.” Most of the immigrants, however, did not even bother to report to the immigration office. They simply walked across the shallow Rio Grande, and then put on American-style hats and shoes in place of their Mexican sombreros and sandals. “Like the Japanese immigrants who arrived at about the same time, Mexicans saw the United States as a land of opportunity. They called it El Norte, the North. People who had gone north wrote home to tell about the good life there, or bragged about it when they came home to visit. This led more and more Mexicans to head for El Norte. “If anyone has any doubt about the volume of this class of immigrant,” wrote an American reporter in 1914, “a visit to South Texas would reveal the situation. In a day’s journey by automobile through that region one passes hundreds of Mexicans, all journeying northward on foot, on burroback and in primitive two-wheeled carts.... When questioned many of them will tell you that they fled Mexico to escape starvation. “The pull of El Norte was only one force behind this wave of immigration. Mexicans were also pushed from their homeland. Large landowners had been taking over small farms and uprooting rural families. Forced to become tenant farmers and sharecroppers, the peasants were exploited in the countryside, but when they moved to the cities, they suffered from periods of unemployment as industries first grew, then shrank. Poverty was not the only problem. There was also the danger of violence. The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 and lasted for years, forcing thousands of refugees to flee northward. One of them was Jesus Moreno, who arrived in Los Angeles with his family in 1915. “We came to the United States to wait out the conclusion of the Revolution,” he said. “We thought it would be over in a few months.” The movement northward was accelerated by developments in transportation. In 1895 a railroad company built a line nine hundred miles into Mexico, linking the Texas border town of Eagle Pass with the Mexican city of Durango. The railroad triggered a mass migration. “There is not a day in which passenger trains do not leave for the border, full of Mexican men “who are going in gangs to work on railroad lines in the United States,” reported a Mexican newspaper in 1904. Traveling by train overnight, the men covered a great cultural distance as well as a great geographical one. One of their songs told what it felt like to cross the border by train: The fleeting engine Can’t do anything good Because at dusk it is at home And at dawn in a strange country. Most of the immigrants were from the agricultural labor class, and they were mostly young, between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Married men either brought their wives with them or migrated first and then sent for their families after they had found work.  Between 1900 and 1930, the Mexican population of the Southwest swelled from an estimated 375,000 to 1,160,00. The majority of these people had been born in Mexico, not the United States. They settled in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, but some spread out as far as Illinois and Michigan. Their first concern was to find work. Sprinkling the Fields with Sweat In the early twentieth century, Mexicans were drawn across the border because the United States needed their labor. “ They worked in a wide range of jobs. Some became urban industrial workers, serving the construction and railroad industries. But although three-quarters of the construction workers in Texas by 1928 were Mexican, they were kept in low-level manual labor jobs. Supervisory and skilled positions were reserved for whites. In Los Angeles, El Paso, and other cities with a large Mexican population, the majority of Mexicans worked in garment factories, canneries, or food-processing plants, or as janitors and gardeners, not in banks and offices. A federal official explained why a Mexican made a good railroad worker: “His strongest point with his employers is his willingness to work for a low wage.” Most Mexicans, however, worked in agriculture. In California, farmers turned to Mexican labor after immigration laws ended the flow of workers from Asia. At least two-thirds of the state’s two hundred thousand farm laborers in the 1920s were Mexican. In Texas, the percentage was even higher. The state employment service estimated that 85 percent of Texas’s agricultural laborers were Mexican. Many of them were hired for the backbreaking work of picking cotton all day under the hot Texas sun. Farm work was seasonal and migratory. Packed into old trucks and cars,laborers followed the crops. Their location at any given time was determined by where the jobs were. An immigrant named Anastacio Torres recalled picking cotton in California in 1919, then, when the cotton season ended, working in a paper plant in Los Angeles, and after that returning to agricultural work in the Imperial Valley, where he picked lemons.” “The migrant laborers lived in squalid camps with crude shelters, often made of canvas or even palm fronds. The growers felt no responsibility for the health or comfort of their workers. One farmer bluntly stated, “[When] they have finished harvesting my crops, I shall kick them out on the country road. My obligation is ended.” Feeling that they were entitled to dignity as well as better working conditions and higher wages, Mexicans took part in labor struggles, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Between 1928 and 1933, Mexican farm laborers in California had had their wages cut from 35 to 14 cents an hour. In response, they supported strikes led by a variety of labor unions. By actively participating in the labor movement, Mexicans challenged the stereotyped image of people from their country as passive and easygoing. Growers reacted with alarm to the formation of Mexican unions, and to their militancy. “One of the most powerful Mexican strikes occurred in 1933. Twelve thousand laborers in the San Joaquin Valley struck to resist cuts in their pay. To break the strike, growers kicked the workers out of their camps, dumped their possessions on the highway, and used the local police to arrest strike leaders. A deputy sheriff told an interviewer: “We protect our farmers here in Kern County. They are our best people.... But the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd them like pigs.”  The Mexican strikers refused to back down. Women were especially active. They came to the picket lines every day, and they called out to strikebreakers, urging them to join the strike. A worker named Lydia Ramos explained why she would not cross the picket lines as a strikebreaker: “Well, we believe in justice. So I want everything that’s good for me and I want everything that’s good for somebody else. Not just for them... but equality and justice.” In the end, the strikers reached a compromise with the growers and received a wage increase. “The strikes represented a deep discontent with life in El Norte. One of the strikers, Juan Berzunzolo, had come to the United States in 1908 and worked on the tracks of the Southern Pacific railway and in the beet fields of Colorado. “I have left the best of my life and strength here,” he said, “sprinkling with the sweat of my brow the fields and the factories of these gringos [Anglos]. Tortillas and Turbans Working in the fields alongside the Mexicans were immigrants from India. At the beginning of the twentieth century, workers from the Punjab, a region of northern India, started arriving on the West Coast of the United States. By 1920 some 6,400 had entered the country. Nearly all of them were men, and most of them were Sikhs, members of a religion that had originated in India in the sixteenth century. They wore turbans, a piece of cloth wrapped around their heads. The Sikhs had been farmers in the Punjab, so they gravitated toward farm labor in America. Like the Mexicans, the Sikhs followed the harvests of different crops. Sikh men and Mexican “women met each other while working in the fields and orchards. They formed relationships that sometimes led to marriage. Love was not the only reason for Sikh men to marry Mexican women. Sikhs were not considered white by American courts. Therefore they could not become naturalized citizens. The Alien Land Law of 1913 said that foreigners who were not able to become citizens could not buy land. Sikhs could, however, acquire land through their Mexican wives if they bought it in their wives’ names. “Two years ago I married a Mexican woman,” said Inder Singh, a Sikh farmer in the Imperial Valley in 1924, “and through her I am able to secure land for farming. Your land law can’t get rid of me now; I am going to stay.” “In Sikh Mexican families, two cultural traditions met and blended. Foods were interchanged—Mexican tortillas and the flat Indian breads called rotis; jalapeño peppers and Punjabi chillis. Languages were mixed as well. Mexican wives usually understood some Punjabi, but English and Spanish were spoken in the home, and the Punjabi fathers learned to speak Spanish with their children. In most cases the children were baptized as Catholics, like their Mexican mothers, and raised under the compadrazgo (godparents) system of the Catholic Church and the Spanish culture. The number of Sikh Mexican marriages was not large. Still, these couples—and the families they produced—added one more flavor to the multicultural mix of American society. “Mexican laborers were allowed to be in the United States as laborers, but they were kept from becoming full members of society. They could shop in Anglo parts of town only on Saturdays, and they could get food in Anglo cafés only by sitting at the counter or taking their food out. Mexicans lived in segregated neighborhoods called barrios. In many towns the barrios were located on the other side of the railroad tracks from where the Anglos lived.  Schools were segregated, too. One educator said, “There would be a revolution in the community if the Mexicans wanted to come to the white schools. It is based on racial inferiority.” In their segregated schools, young Mexican Americans were trained to become obedient workers. Like the Hawaiian sugar planters who wanted to keep the American-born generation of Japanese on the plantations, Anglo farmers in Texas wanted the schools to help reproduce the labor force. The sugar-beet growers worried that if every Mexican got a high-school education, there would be no one to pick their beets. “Educated Mexicans,” one farmer said, “are the hardest to handle.... They make more desirable citizens if they would stop about the seventh grade.” One Mexican American student remembered his sixth-grade teacher advising him not to go to high school, with these words: “Your people are here to dig ditches, to do pick and shovel work. I don’t think any of you should plan to go to high school.” Some teachers, though, gave Mexican American children a sense of dignity and self-respect. In his autobiography Barrio Boy, Ernesto Galarza fondly recalled his school principal and teachers who never punished children for speaking Spanish on the playground. “Becoming “a proud American,” Galarza said, “did not mean feeling ashamed of being a Mexican.” Beginning in the 1920s, Mexicans found that they were no longer wanted in the United States. Nativists had grown alarmed at the large number of Mexican immigrants. Referring to the mixed-race background of many Mexicans, one nativist said: “From the racial point of view, it is not logical to limit the number of Europeans while we throw the country open without limitation to Negroes, Indians, and half-breeds.” Magazines and newspapers published hysterical articles about the “Mexicanization” of the United States. Anglo workers spoke out against the Mexicans who competed with them for jobs, and the American Federation of Labor, one of the country’s labor unions, complained about the use of Mexicans as cheap labor, which was putting white men out of work. “Then came the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment skyrocketed. Thrown out of work, and blamed for the loss of white workers’ jobs, Mexicans became targets of a program called repatriation, which meant returning them to their country of origin. In fact it was deportation—forcing people to leave the country they were living in. Private charities and government agencies used a variety of tactics to encourage Mexicans to go back to Mexico. They threatened to cut off welfare aid, they offered free transportation by train (which sometimes meant being crammed into a boxcar), and they used police raids to pressure people into leaving or, in some cases, to physically remove them. Some four hundred thousand Mexicans were sent out of the country during repatriation. Many were children. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce estimated that about 60 percent of those children had been born in the United States and were US citizens. “For many Mexicans, the border was only an imaginary line between Mexico and the United States—one that could be crossed and recrossed at will. Living in El Norte, they created a Mexican American world called the barrio. “Barrios were ethnic islands. There Mexican Americans did not feel like strangers, as they did when they ventured across the railroad tracks into Anglo parts of town. Barrios were often slums, made up of shacks and dilapidated houses without sidewalks or even paved streets, but Mexicans could celebrate their national holidays there, eat the familiar foods of home, tell stories about Mexico, and play their traditional music in bands that displayed both the US and Mexican flags. What bound the people of the barrios together was not just their Mexican ethnicity but also their economic class. Everyone was poor, and everyone was looking for work. The barrios were networks of job information. They also served as places where new arrivals from Mexico could sleep, eat, and learn the ropes of life in America. People shared what they had, not as charity but as asistencia, help that was given and received on trust, with the idea that those who were helped would repay the kindness someday. As evening fell on the barrios, people sat in front of their houses and talked, just as they had done in villages on the other side of the border. They spoke of their love “for their homeland, and they complained about racism and discrimination in the United States. Yet despite their nostalgia and their complaints, most of them stayed. They were making El Norte their homeland. Although the word barrio was first used in the United States to describe these Mexican American communities, mostly in the West, these were not the only centers of Latino life and culture in America. In many cities across the country, Spanish-speaking communities formed, made up of immigrants not just from Mexico but from Central and South America and the Caribbean as well. One of the largest of these communities is Spanish Harlem, also known as El Barrio or East Harlem—a neighborhood in northeastern Manhattan, in New York City, that became home to Puerto Rican migrants as early as the 1920s. It has a large population of Nuyoricans, who are second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans, born in the United States.