Fw: H-ASIA: "Yellow hordes" query - response

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Conlon" <conlon@U.WASHINGTON.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2011 4:50 AM
Subject: H-ASIA: "Yellow hordes" query - response

> H-ASIA
> April 23, 2011
>
> Further response re: query on "yellow hordes"
> *********************************************************************
> From: Linda Dwyer <dwyer@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> In response to the Yellow Hordes query and its subsequent discussion:
>
> One important book regarding the changing legal status of immigrants from
> Asia throughout US history is by Bill Hong Ing. _Defining America through
> Immigration Policy_. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2004. ISBN:
> 1592132332
>
> Ing documents that racial identification for immigrant groups has
> sometimes changed based on the dynamics of political forces at any time.
> For example, immigrants from India were variously classified racially
> based on the pressures for cheap labor and the countervailing forces
> against immigration---including white, black, and Asian statuses at
> various times.
>
> Regarding "yellow" as a racial category,I believe the idea of the "yellow
> peril" began as a term in late 19th century, and emerged in the
> competition among immigrant groups during an economic downturn. As with
> any immigrant group, this competition for work was accompanied by fears
> about racial purity that was made manifest not only in discriminatory laws
> but in violent reprisals against "Asians." I believe that this period
> aslo saw the appearance of the popular comic "yellow kid," which
> dramatized in comic form the racial tensions of the period. Some of these
> comics can be found online:
> http://cartoons.osu.edu/yellowkid/index.htms
>
> The complexity, and the often overlooked transnational linkages, of Asian
> America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been addressed in
> the research found in Asian American Studies as a discipline. Chen Da was
> generations ahead of us in the 1930s when he documented transnational
> linkages with coastal Chinese communities.
>
> World War II, despite the discrimination against Japanese Americans, was
> nonetheless an opportunity for Chinese Americans to break out of the
> restrictive urban Chinatown environs that too many had found themselves in
> and into better paid factory work in technological jobs related to the war
> effort---eventually leading to a migration to suburbia after the war.
> This was documented in Melford Weiss's 1974 ethnography _Valley City: A
> Chinese community in America_. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkmann.
>
> Best,
> Linda Dwyer
> Salisbury University
> ******************************************************************
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