Pope Francis and President Barack Obama were among the many dignitaries who gathered at Washington’s Cathedral of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in September 2015 for the canonization of the Spanish-born Franciscan priest Junípero Serra, best known for his 18th-century missionary work in what would develop into California. “Father Serra’s sainthood has been controversial,” The Recent York Times noted, because “he’s seen by many Native Americans as a colonialist who helped establish a system of Spanish subjugation and helped carry disease into their communities.”
However, The Times added, “many Latino Catholics celebrated Father Serra’s canonization as a mark of legitimacy for all Hispanics.”
The intersections of history and ethnicity, and race and power, have since develop into only more fraught and more complicated, an evolution illustrated (sometimes unintentionally) in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s provocative Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.
Dunbar-Ortiz calls for all descendants of immigrants to acknowledge the far-reaching consequences of what she and others call “settler colonialism.”
To Dunbar-Ortiz, whose previous books include An Indigenous Peoples’ History of america (2014), the Serra canonization was an final result of “the technique of rooting the US founding with 1492,” in addition to of “the Roman Catholic Church in america [becoming] Americanized.” For hundreds of years, immigrants fell into an “Americanization process…that suck[ed] them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples,” she writes. Dunbar-Ortiz calls for “all those that have undergone the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge” the far-reaching consequences of what she and others call “settler colonialism.”
Dunbar-Ortiz’s variety of activist scholarship has catapulted her to a recent level of prominence in recent times. Her work was one in every of the inspirations behind Raoul Peck’s 2021 HBO documentary series “Exterminate All of the Brutes,” and it has been featured of late in media outlets starting from The Recent Yorker to Teen Vogue. In 2017, the Lannan Foundation, a family nonprofit “dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity,” awarded Dunbar-Ortiz its Cultural Freedom Prize, citing her work as an “activist with the worldwide indigenous people’s movement for national sovereignty,” in addition to her work with “social movements for ladies’s equality, and for the rights of oppressed nations in Central America.”
John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, serves as a springboard for Dunbar-Ortiz. Generations of readers have uncritically regurgitated not only Kennedy’s phrase but additionally certain underlying assumptions that, Dunbar-Ortiz writes, represented a “benevolent version of U.S. nationalism,” serving to justify each American diversity and white supremacy.
John F. Kennedy’s 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, serves as a springboard for Dunbar-Ortiz.
Sadly, much of the historical evaluation Dunbar-Ortiz offers up is difficult to dispute. Just 4 years before Kennedy’s celebration of immigrants, President Eisenhower launched the deplorable “Operation Wetback” to “round up and deport greater than 1,000,000 Mexican migrant employees.” It was merely the most recent indignity along the southern U.S. border within the wake of the “military invasion and annexation of half of Mexican territory” a century earlier.
Within the mid-Nineteenth century, in fact, slavery had develop into “the economic bedrock of america,” and desperate, ravenous European immigrants had begun arriving in unprecedented numbers. Constructing on the Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe’s concept of “settler colonialism,” Dunbar-Ortiz argues that as destitute and despised as these immigrants could have been, they ultimately were incentivized—by naturalization laws explicitly referring to “white individuals”—to bolster the American violent variety of imperialist capitalism across the continent and all over the world.
The implications, especially for people of color, have been not only awful but additionally enduring, as illustrated by newer U.S. misadventures in Central America and a refugee border crisis that endures to today.
While these parts of Dunbar-Ortiz’s book are compelling and convincing, others are more muddled.
In reality, long before the concept of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants “was hatched within the late Fifties,” as Dunbar-Ortiz puts it, the concept had its adherents—from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur to “The Melting Plot” playwright Israel Zangwill. Similarly, references to the “American Dream” as a “meme” or a “concept invented in 1931,” are prone to send some confused readers to Dunbar-Ortiz’s footnotes—or a minimum of to Google.
When Dunbar-Ortiz refers back to the infamous Recent York City draft riots, meanwhile, she not only gets their month incorrect but additionally overlooks a vital component of this violent episode. It’s true that many “Irish American Catholics engaged in riots” and that much “of their anger went into attacking and killing Black people.” However the July (not June) 1863 violence also coincided with annual celebrations of British Protestant victories over Catholics in 1690s Ireland.
Such toxic displays of upper-class Anglo chauvinism—transported from the Old World to the Recent—also accelerated immigrant rage, a few of which was aimed toward difficult the dominant culture fairly than reinforcing it. Scholars intent on analyzing immigrant complicity in American racism sometimes unwittingly reinforce cherished right-wing myths about past newcomers that they were generally docile, assimilable and never disruptive in any respect.
Dunbar-Ortiz also ignores the biases of past (so-called) progressives and even radicals whose presence on the “right side of history” deserve a bit more scrutiny. Not “A Nation of Immigrants” notes that even after the nativist Nineteenth-century Know-Nothing Party faded, its “ideological tendency continued in US politics, becoming dominant within the mid-twentieth century in opposition to the civil rights movement and immigration, including amongst white Catholics after they were not the goal.” This century-spanning sentence elides several crucial points, including the indisputable fact that the anti-immigrant Know Nothings were by and enormous absorbed into the anti-slavery Republican Party. This then pushed thousands and thousands of “white Catholics” into the arms of the pro-slavery Democratic party.
Dunbar-Ortiz ignores the biases of past (so-called) progressives and even radicals whose presence on the “right side of history” deserve a bit more scrutiny.
So, yes, one in every of the “unspoken requirements for immigrants and their descendents to develop into truly ‘American’ has been to take part in anti-Black racism and to aspire to ‘whiteness.’” But this process was actually exacerbated by anti-slavery Radical Republicans—the progressives of their day—who themselves refused to incorporate immigrant Catholics of their definition of what an American was.
The implications of this (in case you will) illiberal progressivism have been substantial. One could argue that they linger to today, including every time a U.S. senator asks a judicial nominee if she or he is now, or has ever been, a Knight of Columbus.
Additionally it is price noting that Dunbar-Ortiz’s disdain for “nation of immigrants” rhetoric is shared (for various reasons, in fact) by conservative groups comparable to the neo-nativist Federation for American Immigration Reform. In 2018, the Trump-appointed director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services even removed the phrase “nation of immigrants” from the organization’s mission statement.
The move was blasted by many activists, including devotees of America’s traditional commitment to diversity. These are the kinds of people that, in line with Dunbar-Ortiz, flocked to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, “Hamilton,” for its “immigrant story with an inspirational message to counter the toxic resurgence of nativism that will soon bring Donald Trump to the presidency.” However the Broadway musical was more chic than radical to Dunbar-Ortiz, who has harsh words for Miranda, “Hamilton” and Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant founding father.
“Multiculturalism,” she writes, is little greater than “the mechanism for avoiding acknowledgment of settler colonialism.”
Dunbar-Ortiz rightly notes, contrary to what many devotees of Fox News might consider—that it was actually Nineteenth-century immigrants who pioneered and benefited from “identity politics.” The top results of those politics gave us, in line with Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” “urban police forces [that were] virtually all white and mostly Irish American” as late because the mid Nineteen Sixties, in addition to “six of nine Supreme Court justices [who] were Catholic while two were Jewish” (as of 2019).
If nothing else, these issues actually produce strange bedfellows. In any case, one staunch critic of police departments that were “occupied by Roman Catholics” was Hiram Evans, leader of the Nineteen Twenties Ku Klux Klan.
To her credit, Dunbar-Ortiz holds rightward-drifting immigrants past and present to the identical standard. If America’s “settler colonial foundation is to be eradicated,” she writes, the “desire to alleviate the non-European migrant or descendants of enslaved Africans from responsibility is comprehensible, but not sustainable.”
But this raises essential questions on just how inclusive or broad-based a movement with the goal of “eradicating” America’s colonial foundation could be.
Perhaps immigrants who admire St. Junípero Serra (like, say, the immigrants who gave us Antonin Scalia or Samuel Alito) have been sucked into white supremacist complicity. Perhaps, also, they’ve legitimate questions on anticapitalist movements, especially those with well-documented hostilities to religion and faith-based activism.
Ultimately, Not “A Nation of Immigrants” is a fierce diagnosis of what continues to tear America apart. As for what can actually construct us up, perhaps we are able to look to the Gospel of Mark—“Whoever isn’t against us is for us”—for a subtle but essential variation on the antagonistic or inflexible discourse that prevails all across the political spectrum lately.
