I come from a place where everybody stays. An old couple sits at the same booth in the same diner every Saturday night. They each order a coffee - for two years, I was the one who brought it to them. An older man walks down the same street every morning, listening to music on a Walkman, dangerously thin with leather skin and never enough clothing on to protect it. The elementary school principal greets as many students as he can by name at morning dropoff. The high school guidance counselor had meant to retire in 2008, but still drives his red pick-up to school every day. The rumor is that he forgot he retired, and no one has the heart to tell him.
Nobody leaves, and very few people come. My town and my childhood were static. We moved once, from one end of town to the other and it felt monumental to me. We took a single yellow shingle from the side of our old house before we drove away for the last time, to remember it by. As if we wouldn't be driving past the house with all the rest of its yellow shingles every day after that. Driving anywhere in town guaranteed me to pass at least three of my friend's houses, a minimum of one person I know driving in the opposite direction, always the old man and his Walkman, the couple down the street and their three Great Danes, the head of the PTO. I believed for many years that this was the stuff of life: repetition and routine. Every face I came across in a day was familiar to me. Every day.
It is easy, in a place like that, to feel like you are the center of the universe. It is easy to feel that way in America. Neighbors and politicians rattle off about immigrants and refugees trying to come here. Some posit that "they dream about it," they come from war and famine and horror, and they give everything they have to come here. Others, that "they are trying to invade," to steal, to overthrow, to change.
My early education focused heavily on American origins - The Revolutionary War, The Boston Tea Party, etc. I assume this was in part because I lived near the places where it all happened, but I'm sure some of it is standard. One of the things I remember being taught - and I mean remember the day, my seat in the class, elements of what I was wearing, the way you remember learning things that confuse and fascinate you in important ways, like how tectonic plates work - was about the Declaration of Independence. In particular, that the American principle we memorize so young, as it is officially emblazoned in that document, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," was adapted from an earlier concept of "life, liberty and property." I remember, as a child of acceptable intelligence, not being able to wrap my head around it. Happiness and property? How is the one at all related to the other? It was a mystery that resided unsolved in my mind for many years, though eventually I resolved to forget it and simply be pleased with the choice. Happiness does seem much more vital than property. Maybe they didn't have to be connected, maybe we just liked the former elements of Locke's principle and revised the third completely. Improved it. Investigation closed.
But my American public school education taught me that in the 5th grade. Long before I could think or vote or fulfill citizenship in an active way, my conceptions of American ideals were expanded beyond that sweet pocket of hope, the "pursuit of happiness." Remember kids, America lilts, that was once property. It still is. The continental congress may have published "pursuit of happiness," but we have saved a space for property between the lines. Our approach to discussing this particular clause has unwittingly blended the two concepts in the minds of most Americans. Property is happiness, happiness is property. Ownership, possession, protection. The American concept of mine.
After all, the white picket fences are the most insidious aspect of our conception of the American Dream. They are the most memorable aspect, the one to which the American Dream is most often reduced. Wasn't there a nuclear family, a dog, and a house in the picture too? If I talk about white picket fences alone, you'll know what I mean. Aesthetically, they embody both purity and simplicity. Because vital to the portrayal of the American Dream is a portrayal of achievability. Functionally, they are a tool to keep people out. Because the heart of the American Dream is that what you have is desirable to others. You live in Small Town Center of the Universe, USA. Who wouldn't want what you have? But others can't have it, certainly not if it's yours.
The Declaration of Independence is a symbol. There are no laws that expressly protect a person's pursuit of happiness. The fourteenth amendment restricts state governments from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." A Reconstruction amendment, one which only passed because former confederate states were not represented in the Congress that passed it, as the south was under military rule. The fourteenth amendment was crucial to expanding rights for formerly enslaved people and black men. But there it is - life, liberty, property. The things America truly holds dear, no conception of happiness in sight. Nor any conception of pursuit. A protected right to pursue happiness is a protected right to pursue better; to move, grow, and learn. To decide where and when and what that would look like for oneself.
When people did move to my hometown, it was so rare and exceptional that it warranted great public discussion. As a sophomore in high school, I was excitedly informed by a network of gossip that our school was getting new kids. And for once, they weren't coming just from the town over, but from Saudi Arabia. The details circulated through my class and the entire school quickly. My friend told me that their coming from Saudi meant they had money money. This warranted someone else to ask "Why would they want to come here?" We hated our hometown, because the American Dream is not immune to teenage angst. Maybe it fosters it. And this was a crowd-pleaser of a question, encapsulating what we were all thinking. If they had money, and had known somewhere cool and distant and foreign, why would they want to come to our stupid little town? Just like our neighbors and politicians, we were projecting fantastical stories onto them, singular possibilities of who they were and where they came from.
American politics approaches discussions around immigration much in the same way we did. We were kids, products of a town designed to embody the American Dream, not realizing that in our angst we perpetuated the attitudes and language we wanted to rebel against. But it was all we had known. As Africa was reduced to a place of poverty with no other facets or dimensions, and the American Revolution was made the noblest and most incredible feat in history, immigrants were people whose motivations and backgrounds we were allowed to invent.
One of the first US Supreme Court cases I read was that of Gitlow v. New York, one of the famous seditious libel cases. The court delivered its opinion in this case in 1925, establishing that the fourteenth amendment's protection of liberty includes those liberties of speech and the press granted by the first amendment. In other words, freedom of speech and the press were protected both from Congress and state legislatures. The court also ruled that Mr. Benjamin Gitlow's claims to free speech and press were insufficient, and upheld his conviction. Though the Supreme Court is set up to make decisions only about law, this case is believed to be highly influenced by the political atmosphere of the time. The lengthy paragraph in which the court presents the undisputed evidence about Mr. Gitlow's actions contains no descriptions of illegal activity. Rather, it indulges in describing his involvement in the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, an organization whose membership, the court particularly notes, "is open to aliens as well as citizens."
The court upheld Gitlow's conviction because he was a socialist. All of the seditious libel cases established malleable precedents employed to limit the speech of socialists, a growing political party whose opinions were in dissent from generally accepted public opinions. Socialists were a relatively new fear of organized government. Immigrants, however, had been villainized for so long, so thoroughly, that they were mentioned in this decision for no reason other than to firmly establish this new group as associated with evil. Immigrants have been kept so distinct, so distant, from naturalized American citizens that the high court of the land can use petty language like "aliens" and no one blinks an eye.
Of course, this was not the first or worst instance. One year before the Gitlow decision, Congress had passed the Immigration Act of 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act. This act limited the number of people allowed to immigrate to the United States. Section 14 established that "Any alien who at any time after entering the United States is found to have been at the time of entry not entitled under this Act to enter the United States, or to have remained therein for a longer time than permitted under this Act . . . shall be taken into custody and deported." Section 23, further, "Whenever any alien attempts to enter the United States the burden of proof shall be upon such alien to establish that he is not subject to exclusion under any provision of the immigration laws." The bill's author associated it with a "desire to keep America's people from being diluted by a stream of alien blood" (Spickard).
In Small Town America, Center of the Universe, "aliens" are the subject of science fiction films. "Illegal immigrants" are the people you have to worry about bypassing your white picket fences. I didn't hear much of the word alien growing up. Law by nature displays its bias outright, small town folk like to keep it just under the surface. Their term is simply the truth, they argue with feigned politeness. When the new kids, my soon-to-be good friends, were rumored to come sophomore year, in between childish musings about a perceived decrease in their quality of life were full-grown adult speculations about legality. Our gossip circle informed a teacher that there were going to be new students moving here from Saudi Arabia. He replied, "don't we have enough of those already?" There was one student from Syria and one from Pakistan in the school at the time. The process, people, and worlds involved in immigration to the US were alien to us in my hometown. Even the people authorized to educate us couldn't keep their countries straight, or their biases out of the classroom.
***
I come from a place where everybody stays. But it is equally a place where many were not allowed to stay. It was built on the land of the Wampanoags. The first and bloodiest war between indigenous people and colonists, King Philip's War, we were taught - a name which both Anglifies and blames an indigenous leader - was fought in our backyards. This was delivered to us as a fun fact in history class, and not expanded upon. We were never taught the history of the land we learned on. In middle school, we all gathered around on the baseball field and watched a white man carve an indigenous face into a stump of wood. It was intended to be a display of his exceptional wood-carving skills and school pride; our mascot, the Warriors.
We have made ourselves at home on land that isn't ours. We have commodified it, and crafted legal and aspirational dimensions of "property." The poet Natalie Diaz, a Mojave woman, emphasizes indigenous perspectives on land and water: that "body and land are the same... Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care, which has vanished." The members of small town America view themselves as true Americans, but have never viewed the American land as their body. They have injured it with picket fences. They have put no care into it, but have taken every precaution to keep others off of it.
Natalie Diaz says, "Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian in a red dress, over a real native." Similarly, Americans prefer an immigrant in crisis, an immigrant impoverished, or a refugee traumatized, over a real immigrant. We prefer a story. Because a story can be easily discredited and cast aside. But a real person, who has been forced off of the land we inhabit or who wants a spot on it, cannot. Immigrant and indigenous bodies mourn as the land does. In small towns, where white picket fences puncture skin and ground every day, they often mourn in silence.
My hometown doesn't feel like the center of the universe to me anymore, nor does America. I do not assume that anyone is after "my space," and I am not fooled by the carefully manufactured repetition I grew up with, posed as organic. The town is still static, my life no longer is, and yet I have not escaped. In a week I will be back there for the holidays and it will still be exactly the same. I'll pick up shifts at my high school job, catch up with our regular customers. On the drive there, I'll pass the old man with his Walkman, at least one person I graduated with, and the head of the PTO. Nobody will have come and nobody will have left and there will be mail at my parent's house with my name on it and I will wonder if anyone ever leaves anywhere, really.
Diaz, Natalie. "The First Water Is The Body." Orion, orionmagazine.org/article/women-standing-rock/.
"Gitlow v. New York." Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/268us652.
Spickard, Paul. Almost All Aliens. 2007."The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act)." Office of the Historian, history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act.
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