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Nineteenth-Century Roots

In N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), the Native American protagonist, Abel, is brutally beaten without provocation by a Chicano policeman named Martinez. Richard Rubbio, the Chicano protagonist of José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), first learns about racism by observing the way his friends discriminate against a Japanese boy named Thomas. And midway through John Okada’s No-No Boy (1946), a young Japanese American veteran named Kenji realizes that instead of finding ways to unite to achieve common goals, America’s minority cultures continually find ways to discriminate against one another and even against their own members:

the Negro who was always being mistaken for a white man becomes a white man and he becomes hated by the Negroes with whom he once hated on the same side. And the young Japanese hates the not-so-young Japanese who is more Japanese than himself, and the not-so-young, in turn, hates the old Japanese who is all Japanese and, therefore, even more Japanese than he.

Kenji tries to find a “pattern” that can be “studied” so that “answers” can be “deduced,” but all he is able to conclude is that “the world was full of hatred.”¹ What he does not manage to articulate is the fact that the dis-unity of America’s marginalized cultures evident in these three novels is no accident. It is, instead, the result of a divide-and-conquer strategy of comparative racism, in which racial and ethnic groups are measured against not only the gold standard of Anglo-Saxon “whiteness” but also against one another, so that they can be assigned positions of relative inferiority. These positions shift over time depending on the threat that these groups are seen to pose to the mainstream. For example, from the mid- to the late nineteenth century, the Chinese were seen as a “degraded” race while the Japanese were held in relative esteem; by the end of World War II, these positions had been reversed. Comparative racism has been an abiding feature of popular discourse and (until relatively recently) of legislation in the United States, and nowhere more evident than in the late-nineteenth-century debates and acts surrounding the question of which non-white immigrants and resident aliens should be allowed to become citizens of the United States.

The writer Frank Chin’s autobiographical essay, “Confessions of a Chinatown Cowboy” (1972), opens with a description of one of his cultural heroes, an old-timer named Ben Fee: “His hometown, Chinatown San Francisco, has forgotten the name of Ben Fee and the man he was, for its own good. In New York he’s what he was in Frisco, but more so, a word-of-mouth legend, a bare-knuckled unmasked man, a Chinaman loner out of the old West, a character out of Chinese sword-slingers, a fighter. The kind of Chinaman we’ve been taught to ignore and forget if we don’t want America to drive Chinatown out of town”² Eager to assimilate into mainstream U.S. culture, Chinese Americans, according to Chin, traded in heroism for humility. They have forgotten the role that their ancestors played in the heroic settling of the American West. Vilified from the late nineteenth century until World War II as unassimilable aliens, Chinese Americans would be cast in the role of the “model minority” after the war, in contradistinction to those minorities—particularly African Americans and Chicanos—who were growing increasingly militant in their calls for social equality. According to literary scholar Elaine Kim, Asian Americans were portrayed by the white mainstream during the 1960s as “restrained, humble, and well-mannered, a people who respect law, love education, work hard, and have close-knit, well-disciplined families.”³ For Chin, the price for this acceptance was exorbitant: it meant the feminization of Chinese American men, who are depicted by mainstream U.S. culture as obedient, passive, and effeminate. “We are the Uncle Toms of the nonwhite peoples of America,” writes Chin, “the despicable Shortys, a race of yellow white supremacists, yellow white racists. We’re hated by the blacks because the whites love us for being everything the blacks are not. Blacks are a problem: badass. Chinese are not a problem: kissass.”⁴

Chin’s writing is all about transforming yourself from a kissass into a badass. His general strategy is twofold. First, Chin achieves a style that is often violent and jarring by drawing on the models provided by the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Describing Chin’s first two plays and his collection of short stories, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong writes that Chin’s “verbal pyrotechnics impressed even as its hybridity baffled mainstream critics and outraged some Chinese readers.”⁵ Second, Chin—like the natives manipulating the Westerner’s Bible in Homi Bhabha’s famous essay “Signs Taken for Wonders” (1994)—takes the dominant tradition of U.S. liberal individualism and shifts its meaning.⁶ In describing himself as a “Chinatown Cowboy” and using archetypes of rugged individualism drawn from the literature of the American West, Chin not only reasserts the vitality of Chinese American masculinity, but also roots that masculinity deep within a cherished archetype from U.S. cultural mythology. By focusing on the image of the Chinese worker building the railroad and opening up the American West, Chin argues that Asian American masculinity has been a crucial aspect of U.S. history all along.

Chin has devoted his writing to refuting the idea that Asian Americans are necessarily the victims of an “identity crisis” in which they are forced to choose between two opposed and incompatible identities—the Asian and the American. Chin’s stories and plays depict a Chinatown that is dying because it provides no models of “manhood” for its younger generation. Chin’s dramas of beseiged Asian American manhood look back to a more heroic era in which Chinese men were men. Asserting that the cultural mythologies of China, with its “sword-slingers,” and the United States, with its gunslinging loners, are fundamentally alike, Chin claims a place for Asian American men within the archetype of the American rugged individualist. In denying the opposition between American and Asian forms of masculinity, Chin moves away from the choice implicit in the idea of an “identity crisis” toward a conception of cultural hybridity in which the Asian and the American fuse into a seamless whole.

The problem, however, is that this account of identity is still a drastic oversimplification. For Chin, the only identities that matter are the “American” and the “Asian,” and he vilifies those Asian Americans who try to assert the primacy of other categories such as gender or sexuality. Chin’s aim is not to reconceptualize American identity but simply to reconfigure it, to enable it to accommodate his vision of Asian masculinity. Not only has Chin accepted the general premise of binary thinking, but he has also accepted some of the particular premises of the opposition he is seeking to refute, namely its misogyny and homophobia.

I invoke Frank Chin’s writing here to serve as an emblem of the fact that the roots of many of the problems and strategies that mark U.S. emergent literatures from the 1960s on lie in nineteenth-century U.S. cultural dynamics. The task of showing what nineteenth-century U.S. history looked like to those pushed to the margins of U.S. culture was central to the project of late-twentieth-century U.S. emergent writing. For example, in describing his “first impulse” in writing the young-adult novel Morning Girl (1992), which portrays the lost Taino tribe, Michael Dorris argues that “if we concede the explication of our past, on any level, to those who have no investment in its accurate and sympathetic portrayal, we are giving up much more than the exploration of roots. We are abandoning the future to which we are uniquely entitled.”⁷ The project of creating the emergent, which by definition is all about the future, turns out also to be very much about the past.

The Origins of “Homosexuality”

Ironically, the image that Chin chooses as a counterweight to the portrayal of Asian American men as “effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan” or “homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu” may not be as free from associations with same-sex desire as he thinks. In his study Queer Cowboys (2005), Chris Packard argues that the association of the cowboy with a certain kind of “ruggedness”—“unrestricted freedom, crafty self-reliance, familiarity with wilderness and horses, good with guns”—is primarily the effect of Hollywood’s recreation of the archetype. “If you look a little closer” at the image of the cowboy, Packard writes, “you’ll see another figure, the cowboy’s sidekick—his partner and loyal friend,” and in nineteenth-century representations of the cowboy, the relationship between partners is frequently marked by erotic affection: “Before 1900, that is to say before the modern invention of the ‘homosexual’ as a social pariah, cowboy narratives represented male-male affection quite a bit more freely than Westerns produced after 1900, when male-male sex was classified as abnormal.”⁸ Packard cites Badger C. Clark’s cowboy poem “The Lost Pardner” (1915) as an example of this kind of male-male affection:

We loved each other in the way men do

And never spoke about it, Al and me,

But we both knowed, and knowin’ it so true

Was more than any woman’s kiss could be.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The range is empty and the trails are blind,

And I don’t seem but half myself today.

I wait to hear him ridin’ up behind

And feel his knee rub mine the good old way.

He’s dead—and what that means no man kin tell.

Some call it “gone before.”

Where? I don’t know, but God! I know so well

That he ain’t here no more!

The poem tries to capture an unspoken aspect of the relationship between the narrator and his partner, Al, something that was “more than any woman’s kiss could be,” yet captured in the feel of knees rubbing together.⁹

The term “homosexuality” first appeared in 1869 in a pamphlet entitled “An Open Letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice” by the Austrian-born Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Benkert. Writing under the pseudonym “Karl Maria Kertbeny,” Benkert urged that sodomy be decriminalized in the penal code that was about to come into force in the North German Confederation and, two years later, in a unified German state, the so-called Second Reich. Although what we would today call “homosexuality” existed in the ancient Greek world, classical Greek has no word for “homosexual.” Ancient Greek culture understood sexuality as a matter of preference rather than orientation, liable to change from occasion to occasion—at least as far as men were concerned. Describing the sexual practices of ancient Greece in The Use of Pleasure (1984), Michel Foucault argued that “the notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate as a means of referring to an experience, forms of valuation, and a system of categorization so different from ours. The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior.”¹⁰

The idea of “homosexuality” is also inadequate to describe the sexual practices of many Native American cultures whose languages contain words that express sexual categories for which there are no equivalents in European cultures. The term berdache has been used by anthropologists to describe morphological males who do not play the traditional male roles within their tribes. In his study of sexual diversity in Native American culture, the anthropologist Walter L. Williams writes that a berdache has

a clearly recognized and accepted social status, often based on a secure place in the tribal mythology. Berdaches have special ceremonial roles in many Native American religions, and important economic roles in their families. They will do at least some women’s work, and mix together much of the behavior, dress, and social roles of women and men. Berdaches gain social prestige by their spiritual, intellectual, or artistic contributions, and by their reputation for hard work and generosity. They serve a mediating function between women and men, precisely because their character is seen as distinct from either sex. They are not seen as men, yet they are not seen as women either. They occupy an alternative gender role that is a mixture of diverse elements.

Williams concludes that “berdachism is a way for society to recognize and assimilate some atypical individuals without imposing a change on them or stigmatizing them as deviant.”¹¹

In contrast, the history of the term “homosexual” indicates that it was used precisely to stigmatize some people as deviant and to attempt to impose change on them. The course of Western scientific research into the nature of homosexuality was profoundly influenced by Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s treatise Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), which depicted homosexuality as a pathological condition. Krafft-Ebing devoted a hundred pages in the first edition of the treatise to a discussion of “antipathic sexual instinct”; he would adopt Kertbeny’s term homosexualität in subsequent editions. Rejecting the contention that homosexuality was in any way “natural,” he argued that the only “natural” sexuality was procreative, heterosexual sexuality. A prominent dissenter from Krafft-Ebing’s position was Sigmund Freud, who wrote in his “Letter to an American Mother” (1935) that “homosexuality assuredly offers no advantage[,] but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest in development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.).”¹² Freud never formulated a coherent, fully developed theory of homosexuality, and the fact that the homosexuals who came to him for treatment were suffering from mental illness led many of his followers to ignore his belief that “homosexual persons are not sick,” a statement written in 1903 in a letter to the Viennese newspaper Die Zeit.

One such follower was the immigrant novelist and literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955), who was a champion of Freudian approaches to literature. In his memoir, Up Stream: An American Chronicle (1922), Lewisohn described his assimilation into U.S. culture, which he criticized for its “Neo Puritan barbarism.”¹³ In his critical work, Lewisohn sought to reinterpret the U.S. literary tradition through a Freudian lens, which led him to describe “the whole of our modern literature” as “a single act of rebellion” against Puritan doctrines.¹⁴ A Jewish American scholar, Lewisohn argued strenuously for the transformative impact that immigrants should and would have on U.S. culture, declaring in Up Stream that “the notion of liberty on which the Republic was founded, the spirit of America that animated Emerson and Whitman, is vividly alive to-day only in the unassimilated foreigner, in that pathetic pilgrim to a forgotten shrine.”¹⁵ And yet, in formulating his canon of great American literature seven years later in Expression in America (1929), Lewisohn saw fit to exclude Whitman’s poetry, which he described as “enervating … and unendurable,” primarily on account of what he took to be its author’s immorality:

I, at least, range myself morally—if not aesthetically and philosophically—with those who out of a sound and necessary instinct, the instinct after all of life and its continuance, rejected the barren homosexual and his new-fangled manner of neither speech nor song. ¹⁶

For Lewisohn, rebellion against Puritanism had its limits, and these were marked by homosexual practice. Lewisohn’s objections anticipated the cultural situation of the late twentieth century, in which U.S. culture largely accepted the tenets of multiculturalism except when it came to gay culture.

Occupied America

The first U.S. Naturalization Act (1790) enabled “free white persons” who had been in the United States for as little as two years to be naturalized in any U.S. court.¹⁷ Immigrant blacks—and later immigrant Asians—were not intended to be naturalized, and the act made no citizenship provisions for non-whites who were born in the United States. Whether or not a free black could be a citizen depended upon the state in which he or she was living, until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 established uniform national citizenship.

Mexican Americans, however, had already learned that mere citizenship did not guarantee the protection of rights for those who are non-whites. As a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexico ceded all of its territories north of the Rio Grande to the United States—territories that spanned the present-day states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and half of Colorado. Although approximately 2,000 of the area’s Spanish-speaking residents chose to relocate to Mexico, more than 80,000 remained on their lands and automatically became American citizens, though they were allowed to maintain their language and cultural traditions. Article IX of the treaty guaranteed Mexicans remaining in the Southwest “the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution; and in the meantime shall be maintained and protected the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction.”¹⁸ Commenting on the signing of the treaty, the Mexican diplomat Manuel Crescion Rejón gloomily predicted that “our race, our unfortunate people will have to wander in search of hospitality in a strange land, only to be ejected later. Descendants of the Indians that we are[,] the North Americans hate us, their spokesmen depreciate us, even if they recognize the justice of our cause, and they consider us unworthy to form with them one nation and one society.”¹⁹

The Mexicans who stayed to become American citizens were treated as second-class citizens: they constituted an ethnic minority within American national culture, and they were soon victimized by unscrupulous white Americans. “A pre-Civil War type of carpetbagger moved into the territory to make his fortune,” writes the Chicano fiction writer and scholar Américo Paredes, “preying upon the newly created Americans of Mexican descent. The Mexican’s cattle were killed or stolen. The Mexican was forced to sell his land; and if he did not, his widow usually did after her husband was ‘executed’ for alleged cattle rustling. Thus did the great Texas ranches and the American cattle industry begin.”²⁰ Naturalized Mexicans in California also found themselves treated as second-class citizens. Though they outnumbered Anglos in the territory at first, the discovery of gold near John Sutter’s mill led to a massive influx of migrants to California. In 1849, the Mexican population of California was 13,000, while the Anglo population had ballooned to 100,000. As a result, Anglos were able to control the state legislature and enacted discriminatory laws aimed at Mexicans. An anti-vagrancy act popularly referred to as the “Greaser Act” defined as “vagrants” all persons “commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish or Indian blood … and who [were] armed and not peaceable and quiet persons”; a foreign miner’s license tax of twenty dollars per month was in effect a tax on miners perceived to be Mexicans, since the bulk of the fees collected were taken from Spanish-speaking miners, including those who were in fact U.S.-born citizens of Mexican extraction.²¹

The roots of twentieth-century Chicano literature lie in the tradition of resistance that originated during this period as a response to what Mexican Americans still consider to be the “occupation” of America by the U.S. government. The period that began with the Texas uprising and closed with the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was the heyday of the Mexican American corrido, a form of folk song that came to dominate the popular culture of the Southwest. The corrido is a narrative ballad, usually anonymously composed, and sung or spoken to musical accompaniment. Related to ballad forms such as the copla, the décima, and the romance, which had been brought by the Spanish to Mexico, the corrido flourished during the hundred years that followed the Texas uprising, particularly in the border region south of Texas where relations between Mexican and Anglo-Americans were particularly troubled. In contrast to earlier ballad forms, which generally dealt with incidents from daily life, the corrido emphasizes drama and conflict, particularly the resistance of an individual to forces of oppression.

True to its name, which is derived from the verb correr, “to run,” the corrido generally offers a swiftly paced story, most often told in stanzas of four eight-syllable lines. In his groundbreaking study of the corrido, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), Américo Paredes argues that the “balladry of the Lower Border [was] working toward a single type: toward one form, the corrido, toward one theme, border conflict; toward one concept of the hero, the man fighting for his right with his pistol in his hand.”²² Paredes’s study, which is often cited by the first generation of Chicano writers as a major influence, focuses on the most famous of these ballads, “El corrido de Gregorio Cortéz,” which attacks the racism and lawlessness of Anglo-Americans by recounting the story of a Mexican American cowboy—a vaquero—who avenges his brother’s murder at the hands of an Anglo sheriff. These verses demonstrate the way in which this representative corrido contrasts the intelligence and courage of the vaquero with the stupidity and cowardice of the Anglo cowboy:

In the ranch corral

they managed to surround him.

A little more than 300 men

and there he gave them the slip.

There around Encinal

from all that they say

They had a shoot-out

and he killed another sheriff.

Gregorio Cortéz said,

with his pistol in his hand,

“Don’t run, you cowardly Rangers

from one lone Mexican.”

He turned toward Laredo

without a single fear,

“Follow me, you cowardly Rangers,

I am Gregorio Cortéz.”²³

Taken together, the various variants of the Cortéz corrido have been described by the critic Raymund Paredes as “a kind of Mexican American epic that pulls together the basic themes of contemporary Mexican American writing: ethnic pride, a forceful rejection of unflattering Anglo stereotypes, and, through celebration of Cortéz’s marvelous vaquero skills, an affirmation of the Mexican American’s rootedness in the Southwest.”²⁴

In 1876 Porfirio Díaz engineered a coup and became president of Mexico. In order to help finance the industrialization of agriculture, mining, and transportation, the Díaz government encouraged investment by North Americans, who were benefiting from the expansion of the U.S. economy during the decades after the Civil War. Industrialization and in particular the building of 15,000 miles of railroad track between 1880 and 1910 transformed the Mexican economy, bringing about the decline of the communal village and forcing many peasants to become migrant workers; increasingly these workers—called braceros—traveled across the border to work in the United States. These braceros often competed with freed slaves for work, and like the Chinese, they were identified by white Americans as equivalent to blacks and treated in a similarly discriminatory fashion. In addition, they shared with Chinese sojourners the sense that they were merely transient residents of the United States: according to Américo Paredes, “the Mexican immigrant’s sense of continuing to ‘pass through’ after twenty years or more of residence in the United States contributed to his problems, since he remained a perennial visitor in a foreign country, without children born in the Uiteed States in his own way of thinking.”²⁵ The sufferings of the bracero were also captured in the stanzas of the corrido, which began to bear titles like “Los Deportados” (“The Deported Ones”), “La Discriminación,” “Los Enganchados” (“The Work Gang”), and “Tristes Quejas de Un Bracero” (“A Bracero’s Complaint”).

The outbreak of the Revolution of 1910 produced what Paredes calls “the Greater Mexican heroic corrido,” but the theme of border conflict continued to dominate Mexican American balladry. What the Mexican Revolution did produce was a massive influx of new braceros who would fill the need for cheap foreign labor created after the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, 1892, and 1902 and the U.S. government’s “Gentleman’s Agreement” with Japan in 1907—all of which combined to curtail the flow of working-class Asians into the Western states.

It is thought that as many as 100,000 Mexican immigrants entered the United States during the years surrounding the Mexican Revolution; with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, a second wave of immigration began that would bring over one million Mexican immigrants to the United States by the end of the 1920s.

I’m going to tell you, gentleman,

all about my sufferings.

Since I left my country,

to come to this nation.

It must have been about ten at night,

the train began to whistle.

I heard my mother say,

“There comes that ungrateful train

that is going to take my son.”

“Good-bye to my beloved mother.

Give me your blessings.

I am going abroad,

where there is no revolution.”²⁶

These lines from the corrido “El Deportado” (“The Deportee”), recorded by Los Hermanos Buñuelos in 1929, are typical of the shift that occurred in the border ballad during this period of immigration. Throughout this period, as its subject shifted from the vaquero to the bracero, the corrido remained the primary cultural form through which the suffering of Mexicans in United States found expression. “El Deportado” concludes with these verses addressed to the people of Mexico:

Oh my beloved countrymen

I suffered a lot.

The light skinned men are very wicked.

They take advantage of the occasion.

And all the Mexicans

are treated without compassion.

There comes a large cloud of dust,

with no consideration.

Women, children and old ones

are being driven to the Border.

We are being kicked out of this country.

Good-bye beloved countrymen,

we are being deported.

But we are not bandits,

we came to work.

I will wait for you in my homeland,

there is no more revolution.

Let’s leave my dear friends,

we will be welcomed

by our beautiful nation.

Taken together, what “El corrido de Gregorio Cortéz” and “El Deportado” demonstrate is that the abiding theme of the Mexican American corrido is the racial oppression suffered at the hands of Anglo-Americans who sought to deny Mexican American citizens their rights and to exploit poor Mexicans seeking to better their fortunes in the United States.

Detribalization

In 1871 the federal government passed the first in a series of laws designed to assimilate Native Americans by weaning them from their tribal orientation, a process that would lead to the conferral of citizenship rights by the Dawes Act sixteen years later. What Congress did in 1871 was to endorse a policy that treated Native Americans as individuals and wards of the government, and ceased to recognize the legal standing of tribes. The weaning process continued in 1883 when the judicial powers of chiefs were dissolved and transferred to a system of federal courts. Finally, in 1887, the Dawes Act, which Theodore Roosevelt described as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass,” formally dissolved tribes as legal bodies and redistributed tribal lands among families and unmarried individuals.²⁷ Heads of families were allotted 160 acres, individuals eighty acres, with the stipulation that the lands were to be held in trust for twenty-five years without taxation, so that the Native Americans could learn to profit from the land and to assume the responsibilities that land-holding entailed, including the payment of taxes. Once the twenty-five years had elapsed, the Native Americans would become full owners of their allotments, free to sell or lease them, or—if they could not pay their taxes—to lose them.

The Dawes Act was passed in response to the efforts of reformers like Helen Hunt Jackson, whose 1881 tract, A Century of Dishonor, and 1884 novel, Ramona, had publicized the unjust treatment of Native Americans. Most reformers had decided by 1887 that the only alternative to assimilation for the Native American was extermination. The Dawes Act was intended to speed that process of assimilation by bringing to an end the Native tribal system, with its economy based on hunting and gathering, and introducing Native Americans to an individualistic conception of social life and a capitalistic understanding of land use and agriculture. Addressing the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indians in 1886, the president of Amherst College, Merrill E. Gates, argued that “to bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we can make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants…. Discontent with the teepee and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars.”²⁸ During the debate over the Dawes Act, Texas senator Samuel Bell Maxey objected to the bill’s provision for Native American citizenship: “Look at your Chinamen, are they not specifically excepted from the naturalization laws?” Maxey hoped that the treatment of Chinese immigrants might serve as a precedent for reining in the rights of Native Americans. The provision stood, however, because natives—unlike the Chinese—were considered capable of eventual assimilation. According to the historian Frederick Hoxie, the Dawes Act was “made possible by the belief that Indians did not have the ‘deficiencies’ of other groups [such as the Chinese]: they were fewer in number, the beneficiaries of a public sympathy and pity, and [were considered] capable of advancement.”²⁹ In other words, like African Americans, Natives were considered re-educable. Being capable of advancement means being capable of learning the lessons of individualism and laissez-faire capitalism necessary for assimilation into mainstream U.S. culture.

The ultimately devastating effect of the Dawes Act upon Native American tribal culture is dramatized in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks (1988), the third novel in the tetralogy that includes Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1987), and The Bingo Palace (1994). Tracks is a “historical novel” in the conventional sense of the term: the dated chapters carefully establish the time of the novel as the years 1912–1924 and the events of the novel correspond to documented historical occurrences: the outbreaks of tuberculosis that afflicted North Dakota from 1891 to 1901 and the battles over Native American land rights that erupted after the implementation of the Dawes Severalty Act. Unlike Kingston, Erdrich never names the pieces of legislation that set in motion the events of the novel. In China Men, Kingston discusses legislation explicitly in order to get across the idea that standard national history and ethnic self-history tell very different stories, and the book throws its weight behind ethnic self-history, by relegating its overtly historical material to a single interchapter. Tracks emphasizes ethnic self-history even further by suppressing standard national history, including it only by implication.

Like many novels written by Native American writers, Tracks dramatizes the collision of two different ways of understanding the nature of history and time. The dating of its chapter by season and year juxtaposes the Western linear sense of time that assigns sequential numbers to each year with the cyclical conception of time identified with the changes of season and stressed in many Native American cultures. In addition, the time period covered in each chapter is also described by its specific Native American name. Thus, the first chapter is called “Winter 1912: Manitou-geezisohns: Little Spirit Sun.” The opening paragraph also dramatizes the collision of these two conceptions of time and history:

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die. For those who survived the spotted sickness from the south, our long fight west to Nadouissioux land where we signed the treaty, and then a wind from the east, bringing exile in a storm of government papers, what descended form the north in 1912 seemed impossible.³⁰

Erdrich’s narrator, Nanapush, links each of the events he describes to traditional Native American creation myths, which stress the role played by the four directions, a link that proves ironic because what he is describing is the destruction of his tribe. The paragraph’s description of written materials such as “the treaty”’ and the “storm of government papers” points to another distinction between native and Western modes of historiography: Native self-history is transmitted orally through storytelling, while Western history is transmitted through written accounts. Moreover, Western history is to a large extent a history of the written word and of the ways in which writing has been used to effect cultural change. Tracks dramatizes the defeat of the native culture of storytelling by a Western culture of documents. Native historiography must give way to Western historiography, a pattern embodied by the use of the date “1912” at the end of the novel’s first paragraph to puncture the sense of mythical time with which the paragraph begins. Erdrich shares this understanding of the difference between Native American culture and U.S. culture with a great many other Native American authors. For example, Paula Gunn Allen argues that “there is some sort of connection between colonization and chronological time. There is a connection between factories and clocks, and there is a connection between colonial imperialism and factories. There is also a connection between telling Indian tales in chronological sequences and the American tendency to fit Indians into the slots they have prepared for us.” And she notes that she had difficulty with publishers because she “chose Indian time over industrial time as a structuring device” in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), her first novel.³¹

It is no accident that Tracks begins in 1912, twenty-five years after the Dawes Act, for though the novel does not mention the act by name, its plot revolves around the struggles of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa to maintain a sense of tribal identity and to keep their allotments from falling into the hands of timber companies. Tracks focuses particularly on the plight of Nanapush’s adopted daughter, Fleur Pillager, whose choice allotment on the banks of Lake Matchimanito is ultimately lost, in part through the connivance of “government Indians” like Bernadette Morissey who are eager to assimilate and to profit from the misfortunes of fellow tribe-members. Intended to bolster Native American land ownership, the Dawes Act ended up sabotaging it, inadvertently opening up areas previously reserved for Native Americans to white settlement. Many Native Americans, like Fleur Pillager, lost their allotments because they could not pay their taxes; others lost their allotments after pledging them as security for loans to buy goods, while others were conned into selling their allotments well below fair market value. The U.S. government abetted the erosion of Native American ownership with the 1906 Burke Act, which shortened the twenty-five-year trust period for Native Americans deemed “competent,” enabling them to sell (or lose) their lands that much more quickly, and in 1917 the ironically named Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Cato Sells, issued a “Declaration of Policy” stipulating that all Native Americans with more than one-half white blood would be automatically defined as competent, given U.S. citizenship, and required to pay taxes on their allotments. Linda Hogan’s first novel, Mean Spirit (1990), dramatizes the aftermath of the Dawes Act in Oklahoma, where white oilmen, acting in tandem with government agents, cheat and if necessary murder Native Americans whose allotments happen to have become valuable due to the discovery of oil. “They had ideas about the Indians,” Hogan writes about the government clerks distributing land royalty checks, “that they were unschooled, ignorant people who knew nothing about life or money.” The U.S. government has imposed the lessons of individualism and capitalism upon Native culture, but whites resent it when the Native Americans are not only willing but able to implement those lessons: “In the background, a surly clerk in a white shirt piped up and said to another one, out loud, ‘Hell, some of them buy three cars. We don’t have that kind of money, and we’re Americans.’” Hogan uses moments of magical realism to embody the wonder and power of Native culture, but these moments are no match for the realism that embodies the hypocrisy of white culture, whose mean spirit reduces the culture and life of Native America—quite literally—to “nothing more than a distant burning.”³²

It is estimated that between 1887 and 1934, when the Wheeler-Howard Indian Reorganization Act ended the policy of allotment and once again recognized tribal ownership of lands, more than 60 percent of tribal lands were lost to railroads, cattlemen, timber companies, and land corporations: before 1887, 139 million acres were held in trust for Native Americans in the form of reservations; by 1934 only 48 million acres of land were still under Native control, and many Natives were left landless.³³

Gold Mountain

When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1849, white Easterners and European immigrants began to flock to California, but they weren’t the only ones: 325 Chinese migrants arrived in California that year to participate in the Gold Rush, followed the next year by 450 of their compatriots. Starting in 1851, however, the number of Chinese emigrating to California began to rise dramatically, with more than 2,500 arriving that year and more than 20,000 arriving in 1852, bringing the total of Chinese immigrants to about 25,000. By 1870 there were approximately 63,000 Chinese in the United States, the majority of them (77 percent) living in California. By 1890, three years after the Dawes Act, there were 107,488 “Chinese” living in the United States.³⁴ (In the U.S. Census, “Chinese” was a racial definition that included both immigrants from China and their descendants.)

The Chinese men who first emigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century were known as gam saan haak, “travelers to the Gold Mountain,” and they thought of themselves as “sojourners.” Initially, these Chinese men were welcomed as visitors who could assist in fostering California’s economic growth; mid-nineteenth-century accounts referred to these Chinese migrants as “Celestials” (since China was often called the “Celestial Empire”). California’s leading newspaper, the San Francisco Daily Alta California, wrote in 1852 that “quite a large number of the Celestials have arrived among us of late…. Scarcely a ship arrives that does not bring an increase to this worthy integer of our population. The China boys will yet vote at the polls, study in the same schools and bow at the same altar of our own countrymen.” The governor of California, John McDougal, told the legislature at the beginning of 1852 that the Chinese constituted “one of the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens—to whom the climate and the character of these lands are peculiarly suited”—apparently failing to remember that Chinese were prohibited from becoming American citizens by the 1790 Naturalization Act, which restricted the privilege of naturalization to “white” immigrants. Throughout the 1850s, California’s popular press contained numerous articles presenting favorable portraits of Chinese immigrants.³⁵

These views, however, were not shared by white workers with whom the Chinese were competing for jobs. As early as the spring of 1852, there was considerable anti-Chinese sentiment among white miners, and their agitation led to the passage of a new foreign miners’ license tax, which appeared to apply to all immigrant miners but was in reality aimed specifically at the Chinese. It stipulated that a monthly tax of three dollars was to be paid by any miner who did not intend to become an American citizen; Chinese were prohibited from having this intent. “In California,” wrote Mark Twain in Roughing It (1872), a Chinese man “gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless—and then the officers come down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the broad, general name of ‘foreign’ mining tax, but is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen.”³⁶ This miner’s tax remained in place until it was theoretically abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1870.

In “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” from China Men (1980), Maxine Hong Kingston imagines the sojourner’s life that her grandfather Ah Goong led while working for the Central Pacific. It was one of Ah Goong’s “peculiarities,” Kingston writes, “that he heard the crackles, bangs, gunshots that go off when the world lurches; the gears on its axis Snap. Listening to a faraway New Year, he had followed the noise and came upon the blasting in the Sierras…. The Central Pacific hired him on sight; chinamen had a natural talent for explosions.” Chinese migrants had begun to work in greater and greater numbers for the Central Pacific Railroad when profits from mining started to decrease in the early 1860s. By 1867, there were 12,000 Chinese working for the line (representing 90 percent of its entire work force).³⁷

Kingston’s story depicts Ah Goong’s experiences during the strike of 1867, which took place after the railroad proposed to raise wages four dollars per month (to thirty-five) while requiring Chinese workers to work ten-hour shifts. Five thousand Chinese workers walked out, demanding wages of forty-five dollars (a raise of fourteen dollars) and a work-day equal in length to that of white workers: “Eight hours a day good for white man, all the same good for Chinamen” was their slogan. Because the white workers did not join the strike and because the railroad managed to cut off the strikers’ food supply, the matter was settled in nine days, and the final compromise was a four-dollar raise and the same eight-hour shift. “The China Men went back to work quietly,” writes Kingston. “No use singing and shouting over a compromise and losing nine days’ work.” What was a cause for celebration was the completion of the railroad in 1869; Kingston describes the scene at Promontory Point when the two tracks were connected at last: “A white demon in top hat tap-tapped on the gold spike, and pulled it back out. Then one China Man held the real spike, the steel one, and another hammered it in.”³⁸ Contemporary commentators noted the contribution made to the project by the Chinese: “The dream of Thomas Jefferson, and the desires of Thomas Hart Benton’s heart,” wrote one magazine writer in an essay called “Manifest Destiny in the West,” “have been wonderfully fulfilled, so far as the Pacific Railroad and the trade with the old world of the East is concerned. But even they did not prophesy that Chinamen should build the Pacificward end of the road.”³⁹ Ah Goong has misguidedly purchased worthless papers from a “Citizenship Judge,” but it is “having built the railroad” that makes him feel truly American.⁴⁰

Although Chinese workers were first hired by the railroad in February of 1865, Kingston places Ah Goong with the railroad in the spring of 1863, allowing her to write that Ah Goong was also hired “because there were not enough workingmen to do all the labor of building a new country” and to add wryly that “some of the banging” that Ah Goong heard “came from the war to decide whether or not black people would continue to work for nothing.”⁴¹ The link between Chinese and blacks here is not idle, for as Ronald Takaki has argued, racial characteristics previously associated only with blacks were easily transferred to the Chinese, because many of the Europeans and Americans who were coming to California from the East had never seen a Chinese person before. They therefore simply assumed that the Chinese were equivalent to the non-white peoples with whom they were familiar: Indians and blacks.⁴² After a change in editorial leadership, the Daily Alta California proclaimed in 1853, “we have a class here … who have most of the vices of the African and they are numerous in both town and country. We allude to the Chinese. Every reason that exists against the toleration of free blacks in Illinois may be argued against that of the Chinese here.”⁴³ White miners often referred to the Chinese as “nagurs” and described them along with blacks as savage, childlike, lustful—in short, physically and morally inferior. The black population in California in 1852 was approximately 2,200, less than a tenth of the Chinese population, and it is thought that the stereotypes of blacks found in the popular press were imported by white Southerners who moved to California during the Gold Rush and who represented approximately one-third of the total population of California at this time. But because anti-black racism had been a part of the national consciousness for so long, it provided a ready-made template for the description and judgment of other peoples of color.⁴⁴