An American dilemma: 'Points of Entry: Nation of Strangers.' (photography, various artists, various galleries, United States)

Eds. note: Each of the following three reviews - by Jesse Lerner, Andrea Liss and Terri Cohn, respectively - examines one part of "Points of Entry," a three-part exhibition that was organized collaboratively, though curated individually, by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ; and The Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco, CA. Grants of $400,000 from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and $100,000 from the Metropolitan Life Foundation enabled the museum consortium to publish a catalog for each part of the exhibition (distributed by the University of New Mexico Press), prepare a curriculum resource kit for teachers and tour the exhibition both within the consortium and nationally. The national tour of the full "Points of Entry" exhibition is as follows:

International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House Rochester, New York April 12-September 13, 1996

Center for African American History and Culture Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. November 1-December 31, 1996

The Jewish Museum New York, New York May 15-July 15, 1997

Center for the Fine Arts Miami, Florida September 15-November 30, 1997

Points of Entry: A Nation of Strangers The Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, California September 12-November 5, 1995

Center for Creative Photography Tucson, Arizona November 15, 1995-January 7, 1996

The Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center for Photography San Francisco, California January 17-March 10, 1996

Only a few generations after the ancestors of Pat Buchanan and Phil Gramm arrived in the New World, their ambitious descendants are hoping to win office by advocating increased restrictions on immigration. Their appeals reflect, intensify and display a desire to profit from a broader public sentiment, one intimately linked to a right-wing distaste for what some in the mass media have dubbed "the browning of America." It is this current climate of nativism and xenophobia that makes the exhibition "A Nation of Strangers," one section of a three-part photography show on immigration collectively entitled "Points of Entry," particularly timely. The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego organized the exhibit, curated by the Museum's director Arthur Ollman and New York times photography critic Vicki Goldberg.

"A Nation of Strangers" aims to provide a historical context for these current debates about immigration. The curators insist that "immigration" should be defined in the broadest possible sense. Nomadic groups that crossed the Bering Straits in pre-historic times, Africans brought by Europeans as part of the slave trade (euphemistically dubbed "unwilling immigrants"), and nineteenth-century Mexicans who simply stayed in one place as the borders of the United States moved progressively southward and westward - are all considered immigrants. Immigration is posited here as central to the American experience and common to all Americans. Some immigrants, arriving in bondage or in servitude, may have had a harder time of it than others, the exhibition suggests, but all have made valuable contributions to this nation.

The curators chose a starting point that precedes the invention of photography by centuries and the earliest arrivals to North America are represented in lithographs and popular illustrations, depicting idealized Indians greeting equally idealized European colonizers, and Africans being sold in the marketplace as chattel. But the bulk of the immigration portrayed takes place after the 1839 arrival of the daguerreotype and is documented in photographs, although cartoons and posters are well-utilized to contextualize some of the photographic images. Ellis Island, as we might expect, figures prominently in the exhibition. Augustus Sherman, who was employed as an immigration inspector and clerk at Ellis Island, contributes an insider's view of the process of receiving and appraising new arrivals. The immigrant is always a potential threat to the established social order, and Sherman shows through his photographs the elaborate screening processes that sought to identify and exclude those morally or physically unfit for entry.

Goldberg's essay in the exhibition catalog notes that the "success" photograph, a picture sent back to the old country as a testimonial to prosperity achieved in the new land, is a recurrent type of image. Andreas Larsen Dahl worked as both a member of and photographer for a transplanted Norwegian community in southern Wisconsin, and many of his exhibited images are of this genre. In contrast to the evident prosperity of the immigrants in Dahl's photographs, the more familiar images by Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis show lives in the New York City tenements, boardinghouses and sweatshops where many of these new arrivals landed.

Responding to California's Proposition 187(1) and the rising chorus of nativism, "A Nation of Strangers" is a polemic exhibition not at all shy in making its intentions known. "If we examine the full contribution made to the nation by immigrants and their offspring," one wall panel states, "there can be no doubt as to the profitability of generous immigration policies. How else can we explain the enormous success and wealth of the U.S. over its entire history as the most receptive nation for immigrants in the world?" If we are all immigrants, as the exhibit would have us believe, then this statement is tautological, for any success or wealth is necessarily the accomplishment of immigrants. Nor is this argument at all novel - no newer than those used against immigration. Franklin Roosevelt annoyed the Daughters of the American Revolution by reminding them of their immigrant heritage, and John F. Kennedy made much the same case in his book, A Nation of Immigrants (1964), which championed the elimination of the quota system. What is meant by the curatorial statement is that because we are familiar with the experiences of immigration, either firsthand or through our ancestors who inevitably came from elsewhere to settle in the U.S., then we should be more inclined to empathize with the plight of immigrants and aspirants. But how similar are the immigrant experiences of these diverse groups, and to what extent are they comparable?

Although immigration is essential to the American experience, and one might state hyperbolically that we are all immigrants, the opposite can also be argued - that the immigrant is profoundly "other," suspicious and threatening, a potential source of contagion and immorality, the embodiment of all that we are not. The exhibition makes it clear that xenophobia and nativism are as much a part of the "American way of life" as immigration. The text that accompanies Rufus Anson's exquisite daguerreotype portrait of Rebecca Jackson Noah (Mrs. Mordachai Manuel), a member of the small nineteenth-century Jewish community in the U.S., tells of 23 Jews who petitioned to relocate from Brazil to New Amsterdam (later New York) in 1654. Governor Peter Stuyvesant fought to stop these early Jewish immigrants, although Dutch authorities eventually overruled his objections. One of the many differences in the immigrant experiences of the diverse groups depicted in the exhibit is that these restrictive policies have been exercised selectively - effectively excluding Chinese for decades, for example, while other nations, such as England, had quotas much higher than the number of applicants. The targets of restrictive policies may have changed, but the exhibition traces the continuity of these exclusionary policies, sentiments and practices from Stuyvesant to the presidential hopefuls of today by including nineteenth-century anti-immigration posters and caricatures and photographs of contemporary nativist groups.

As a rejoinder to exclusionism, the exhibition takes a liberal position, explicitly stating the "profitability" of immigration and implicitly connecting qualities that are common to old and new arrivals. By universalizing the immigrant experience to the commonalities of the trauma of arrival, the preservation and inevitable transformations of traditions from the "old country," and the assimilation and success of subsequent generations, this exhibition suggests that the familiar narratives of earlier immigrant waves will always be echoed in the experiences of more recent immigrant groups. Despite many parallels, the experiences of new immigrants differ from those of earlier groups; the exhibition does not adequately situate contemporary immigration within the global context of transnational capitalism. Unlike the industrial era that ushered in a huge European migration to the U.S. at the end of the last century, contemporary immigration in our postindustrial era can be characterized as "the site of the implosion of the third world into the first."(2) How might this global transformation be shaping the experiences of immigrants today? Both academics and documentary photographers have explored this theme, but this is not evident in the exhibition.(3) Instead, "A Nation of Strangers" assures us that today's Asian and Latino immigrants, just like earlier waves of Italians, Poles or Jews, seek to escape persecution, and desire to improve their lot and provide for their children.

Another difference that strongly shapes the experiences of many recent immigrants and distinguishes them from those of earlier European immigrants is the persistence of deeply ingrained systems of racial exclusion, leading us to doubt the power of assimilation as a universal solvent. History shows that these constructions of race and the restrictions associated with it are fluid; Jews, for example, were long categorized as non-whites, but were subsequently granted an acceptance in U.S. culture that allowed them to follow a prescribed path of assimilation.

Whether this will be true for future groups of immigrants is unclear, but as James Clifford has noted, "the 'immigrant' process never worked very well for Africans, enslaved or free, in the New World."(4) Not all groups have melted into the proverbial pot, in part because admission does not imply acceptance. One such instance well documented in the exhibition is the experience of Japanese Americans in World War II "relocation camps"; the exhibition includes one photograph from Ansel Adams's "Manzanar" series (1943-44), an anonymous 1942 image of the F.B.I. searching a Japanese American family's house for evidence of subversion, and a 1945 group portrait of second-generation Japanese American women in the military stationed at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, who were permitted to leave the World War II-era internment camps to enlist. One government propaganda image from the Manzanar camp depicts a young woman sewing a U.S. flag. The curatorial statement asks rhetorically if her activity should be read as "proving her loyalty to a doubting government" or being "forced to sew a flag for the government that imprisons her." The internment camps, ambivalently represented in these provocative images, suggests that some Americans will always be viewed as hostile foreigners even if they are natural born citizens generations away from their immigrant ancestors, principally by virtue of their ethnicity, skin color or national origin.

Encapsulating these tensions, the exhibition's final image is a 16x20[inches] close-up photograph of a newborn infant's face by Pok Chi Lau, titled Tyler Kakeru Lau, son of the photographer, first day as an Asian-American, Lawrence, Kansas (1988). Next to the picture the museum has placed a caption that concludes: "Tyler Kakeru Lau's face is American." After all, we are all immigrants - all Americans. Unfortunately, there are few places Tyler Kakeru Lau could visit or live in this country and be accepted fully as an American. The history of American policies toward immigrants and their descendants (specifically the internment of Japanese Americans) gives lie to the claim that anyone can be "just an American." To be so would imply a kind of pluralism that the U.S. is only now beginning to contemplate, in the face of open hostility from many sectors of society.

NOTES

1. Voted into California law last year, Proposition 187 bans undocumented immigrants from receiving any public benefits. Its legality is currently being disputed in the courts.

2. Renato Rosaldo, "Ideology, Place, and People without Culture," Cultural Anthropology, III, no. 1 (1988), p. 85.

3. I am thinking of Sherri Grasmuck and Patricia R. Pessar, Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Roger Rouse. "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism," Diaspora, I, no. 1 (1991), pp. 8-23; and the photography of Eniac Martinez.

4. James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthropology, IX, no. 3 (1994), p. 311.

JESSE LERNER is a writer and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles.