Prerna Lal - Unsung America: Immigrant Trailblazers and Our Fight for Freedom

This book is dedicated to all migrants, emigrants, and immigrants, to the deported and departed, to those who have left their homes in search of a new one, and faced numerous challenges in order to make a better life for themselves and their loved ones. Thank you for making our world a bet ter place.

Immigrant
Trailblazers
and Our Fight
for Freedom

Prerna Lal

Co ral Gables

Copyright 2019 Prerna Lal

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover, Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni
Endsheet Art: Julio Salgado

Mango is an active supporter of authors rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

Uploading or distributing photos, scans or any content from this book without prior permission is theft of the authors intellectual property. Please honor the authors work as you would your own. Thank you in advance for respecting our authors rights.

For permission requests, please contact the publisher at:

Mango Publishing Group
2850 S Douglas Road, 2nd Floor
Coral Gables, FL 33134 USA

For special orders, quantity sales, course adoptions and corporate sales, please email the publisher at or +1.800.509.4887.

Unsung America: Immigrant Trailblazers and Our Fight for Freedom

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2019944135
ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-112-4, (ebook) 978-1-64250-113-1
BISAC: SOC007000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration
POL070000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Immigration

Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

The Dream the Dreamers Dreamed

Allegra M. McLeod

On July 4, 2018, Therese Patricia Okoumou scaled the Statue of Liberty in protest of US immigration enforcement tactics, decrying that in this purported democracy we are holding children in cages. Earlier that week, close to one million people took to the streets across the country condemning the brutality of immigrant detention centers, and earlier that same morning, on the Statue of Libertys pedestal, the group Rise and Resist had unfurled a banner reading Abolish ICE. As the afternoon wore on, Okoumou, a forty-four-year-old woman born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, sat upon Lady Libertys robes, and while police helicopters circled overhead and park officials began clearing thousands of tourists and visitors from the site, Okoumou insisted that she would not come down until all the children are released.

In this brilliant and stirring book, Unsung America , Prerna Lal connects Okoumous demonstration and other more recent protests to the long and still unfolding history of immigrant resistanceone that has for more than a century sought to expose the viciousness of immigration enforcement in the United States while calling for its reformation and imagining a different future for America. Just as the poet Langston Hughes decried this countrys stupid plan [o]f dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak while exhorting another ethos also present in America, so too do Lal, Okoumou, and the many others whose visionary stories are introduced in Unsung America lay bare the truths of racialized violence in the very foundations of the United States, while giving life to an incipient alternative borne of the struggles of those who resisted slavery, indigenous genocide, and immigrant exclusion.

Unsung America reveals that the shameful and dehumanizing treatment of children at the border are not exceptional but emblematic of the brutality of immigration enforcement and US nation-building since its inception. Through the stories Lal recounts, we learn that the violence manifested in the caging of immigrant children was honed in the separation of millions of other families, with the detention and deportation of mothers, fathers, and siblings over the course of decades. These practices were cultivated earlier still through the incarceration of mostly indigent youth deprived of the second chances afforded to their more affluent peers. And before that, through the internment of the Japanese, the removal of Native American children from their homes and of indigenous peoples from their lands, and in the kidnapping, shackling, and enslavement of Africans to build private wealth in America. Beyond the borders of the United States, too, Lals protagonists expose how the imperial quest for exploited labor, land, and political control has wrought immiseration and instability around the world while precipitating new waves of migration to this country. In other words, the most egregious violence, degradation, and hypocrisy involved in contemporary immigration enforcement have long been in practice herethis brutality is not a rare deviation but a defining characteristic of this countrys history and its persistent legacies.

Yet, Unsung America also holds open the possibility that, as Langston Hughes writes, America will be!that the radically diverse assembly of people on this land, including formerly enslaved people, immigrants from across the globe, and indigenous inhabitants, could come together to create a more just and peaceful world. It is this struggle against US nationalist violence and to make a better world possible that animates the poignant life stories that Prerna Lal lifts up in Unsun g America .

This struggle for a more just world is manifested most recently in the contemporary movements that understand immigration justice as connected necessarily to the unfinished work of abolition. But Lal makes plain that abolition should be understood not simply as the abolition of the government agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), nor even as the end of immigration enforcement more broadly. Instead, abolition entails working to create a more equitable society, without militarized borders or immigration chokeholds, and with universal access to a dignified, sustainable form of collective life. This is the egalitarian societyopen, democratically reconstituted, inclusivethat was the unfulfilled hope of black abolitionists in the nineteenth century and ultimately the unrealized promise o f America.

The first stories in Unsung America are those of black abolitionists and others who fought the horrors of slavery, and from their struggles we learn that after the end of the Civil War, the dismantling of the institution of slavery was accomplished, at least in part, with the prohibition of chattel slavery, but the positive goal of abolitionists to constitute a new, more equitable social order remained unfulfilled. Untold numbers of black people were lynched or criminalized for minor or nonexistent offenses, and then forced to return to labor on the plantations where they had worked as slavesa history recorded by W.E.B. DuBois and others. Lal reveals further that among the earliest known deportation plans were efforts to remove emancipated black people from the United States. For example, more than one hundred emancipated black people perished in the course of their removal to the desolate island of Ile-a-Vache in the Caribbean. Lal recognizes a shared struggle for abolition and a more just social order to have commenced with black people who resisted kidnapping, forced migration, brutal unfreedom, and with Native Americans who fought against their forced removal from th eir lands.

The object of Lals account, however, is not to claim any likeness between immigration and slavery, or indigenous dispossession and slavery. Instead, this history serves to deepen our understanding that exclusionary and restrictionist immigration measures originate in the institutions of slavery and indigenous genocide, and to recognize the work on the part of African Americans and Native Americans to challenge and expand the meaning of citizenship and to resist exclusionary conceptions of America. Importantly, too, this history shows that the struggles of immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans may be more closely connected than is sometimes ack nowledged.