Immigrati e deportati

The essay examines the economic and political proceedings which culminated in the miserable and infamous experience of the “Trail of Tears”, that is the long journey whereby large sections of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chicasaw, and Seminoles – the Five Civilized Tribes living in the Southeastern United States – were “removed” to the Western territory of present-day Oklahoma. Indians had to be deported to make room for the expanding domain of “King Cotton”. By closely looking at the experience of the Cherokees, the author shows both the immediate, divisive effects the pressures to relocate had on the tribe, the tragedy of the journey itself, and the long term destructive consequences of that experience.  

New Mexico and Arizona had recently become states in the United States (1912) and the country had just entered World War I (1917) when labor strife swept the American Southwest. In 1917, over one thousand IWW members and other mine workers were deported from the copper fields of Bisbee, Arizona, to an abandoned army camp in New Mexico. The Bisbee deportation of 1917 was among the most dramatic and famous episodes in the labor history of those troubled times. The article shows how New Mexican public opinion reacted to the event, and how the deportation’s impact was felt far beyond the strategically important copper mines of southern Arizona.

Between 1882 and 1924 all US immigration laws attempted not only to enforce restrictions on the entrance of ‘undesirable’ aliens, but also to establish the criteria whereby immigrants could be expelled from the United States whenever American authorities so desired. Immigrants’ involvement in radical politics and, later, the simple sharing of radical opinions were sufficient reasons to set in motion the deportation machine. This essay explores the wave of deportation efforts during the so-called ‘Red Scare’ of the post WWI period (aimed primarily at alien anarchists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and Communists), the roles different members of the Wilson cabinet had in it, and the legal resistance to mass deportations.

The author examines the various ways in which nationals of Italy, Germany, and Japan resident in the United States were treated during World War II. The essay first discusses the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans - more than two-thirds of them native-born American citizens - and differentiates that lawless process from traditional internment. It notes the internment of some 2,300 Germans during W.W.I and then traces the pre-W.W.II preparations for internment and shows how that process began with German and Italian merchant seamen and a few artisans from the Italian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 (Germans) and 1940 (Italians). The bulk of the essay analyzes the internment of 8,000 Japanese, 2,300 Germans, and a much smaller number of Italians after the US went to war in December 1941. As this preliminary sketch shows, this is a topic that merits further study in both the US and in the countries whose nationals were interned.

The author draws on his own experience to delineate a picture of the cultural development in post-war Germany, wherein an intense “Americanization” was opposed to the problematic heritage of a tradition deeply influenced by the recent national past. The German intellectuals of the period looked at the “American novelty” with ambivalent feelings of fascination and suspicion. It is symbolic the case of Thedor W. Adorno who, albeit far from conservatism, refused all possible contaminations between high art and popular culture. The essay examines how American mass culture (as expressed through the cinema, jazz, and rock music), art movements (such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop-art), and literary models (derived from the works of W.C. Williams and Frank O’Hara) influenced the German intellectual scene, infusing new vigor to German culture.