At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the 20th century the American West was home to nearly half of America's immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story—of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built communities, added to the region's culture, and contended with discrimination and the lure of Americanization. The mark of the outsider, the alien, the nonwhite passed from group to group, even as the complexion of the region changed. The region welcomed, then excluded, immigrants, in restless waves of need and nativism that continue to this day.
Elliott Robert Barkan is Professor Emeritus of History and Ethnic Studies at California State University. He is author of Our Multicultural Heritage: A Guide to America's Principal Ethnic Groups and And Still They Come: The Immigrant in American Society, 1920s–1990s. He lives in Corona, California.
Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsNote on Translation and TransliterationIntroduction: Defining Themes—The West, Westerners, and WhitenessPrelude: Western Immigrant ExperiencesPart 1. Laying the Groundwork: Immigrants and Immigration Laws, Old and New, 1870s - 19031. Immigrant Stories from the West2. The Draw of the Late-Nineteenth-Century West3. Where in the West Were They?4. Targets of Racism: Chinese and Others on the Mainland and Hawaii5. The Scandinavians and Step Migration6. The German Presence7. Proximity of Homeland: The Mexicans8. In the Year 19039. Foreshadowing Twentieth-Century PatternsPart 2. Opening and Closing Doors, 1903 - 192310. Immigrant Stories and the West in the 1900s11. Who Came?12. The Dillingham Commission and the West13. The Continuing Evolution of Immigration and Naturalization Issues and Policies (Asians)14. Miners, Merchants, and Entrepreneurs: Europeans Compete with Europeans (Greeks and Others)15. Land, Labor, and Immigrant Communities: Hawaii and the Mainland (Asians, Portuguese, Armenians, and Scandinavians)16. Newcomers, Old and New (Italians, Basques, French, and Mexicans)17. The First World War and Americanization18. State and Federal Laws and Decisions, 1917 - 192019. The Early 1920s: Threshold of Momentous ChangesPart 3. "Give me a bug, please": Restriction and Repatriation, Accommodation and Americanization, 1923 - 194120. A World of Peoples: The 1920s and 1930s21. Demographic Trends: A Changing West and Changing Westerners22. Institutionalizing the Quota System: 192423. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Rural West24. Filipinos: The Newer Immigrant Wave Bridging the Rural and Urban West25. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Urban West in the Interwar Years26. Urban Landscapes and Ethnic Encounters27. From "Reoccupation" to Repatriation: Mexicans in the Southwest between the Wars28. Darker Turns during the Interwar Years: Workers and Refugees29. Aliens and Race Issues on the Eve of the Second World War 30. Interwar or Interlude? Twilight and Dawn in the WestPart 4. America's Dilemma: Races, Refugees, and Reforms in an Age of World War and Cold War, 1942 - 195231. Voices from America on the Eve of War32. War: Against All Those of Japanese Descent33. The Second World War's Other Enemy Aliens: Italians and Germans34. The Homefront in Wartime: Preface to an Era of Change35. Wartime and Postwar Agricultural Issues: Land, Labor, Growers, and Unions36. Immigrants and Ethnics in the Postwar Years37. The Cold War Heats Up: The Politics of Immigration, 1950 - 195238. Dora and the Harbinger of Coming Events39. Looking Back on America's Immigrant WestAppendixNotesSelect BibliographyIndex
This richly detailed history of immigrants in the 20th-century American West rewards the reader with close attention to individual voices of immigrants. Encyclopedic in coverage, loaded with personal stories of real people, this book is unparalleled in its coverage. Finally the West becomes a full part of American immigration history.
Walter Nugent
This richly detailed history of immigrants in the 20th-century American West rewards the reader with close attention to individual voices of immigrants. Encyclopedic in coverage, loaded with personal stories of real people, this book is unparalleled in its coverage. Finally the West becomes a full part of American immigration history.
