A Western Family Reunion
Immigration legends aren’t true, says scholar
The negative suburban legend of "nameless, faceless people scurrying
across the border remains a popular media and political image,but it’s false."
Vicki Ruiz, Chicano Studies chair, Arizona State
University
By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Every family has its story. Whether encouraging, disheartening or amusing,
those stories inform us about who we are, and where we might be going. If a
multidisciplinary group of scholars and writers who gathered at Elkhorn Resort Friday and
Saturday are correct, the same holds true for a very large and diverse family - the people
of the American West.
Organized by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, the two-day Western
Issues Conference -- a metaphorical "family reunion" -- addressed Western
historical, social, political, environmental and cultural issues, past and present.
With about 190 participants and 16 speakers, the conference was the second
in a two-part symposium initiated last year to engage the local and regional community in
dialog about what it means to be a Westerner.
Each morning and afternoon session began with a theme-setting lecture -
"The Welcoming Committee," "Family Stories," "Land Values"
and "Inheritance" - followed by panel discussions and small, informal workshops
during which participants and speakers brainstormed the pre-established themes.
The list of heavy-hitter speakers included two Pulitzer Prize finalists -
Seattle Times columnist Mark Trahant and University of Idaho Professor Kate Barnes - and
virtually enough Ph.Ds to fill a university.
Speaker Vicki Ruiz, chair of Chicano Studies at Arizona State University,
set a sobering tone early Friday morning with a poem. Written anonymously about Mexicans,
the poem was distributed widely in Sacramento, Calif. by Assemblyman Peter Knight, Ruiz
said, and it went like this:
We have a hobby
It’s called breeding
Welfare pay for baby feeding.
Ruiz spent more than an hour painting a different picture, primarily by
dissecting "historical memory and historical entitlement" that figures
prominently in such negative thought.
The negative suburban legend of "nameless, faceless people scurrying
across the border remains a popular media and political image," she said, but
it’s false.
What are the true dimensions of immigration?
The barrage of statistics Ruiz unleashed, augmented by on-screen,
projected computer analysis, was daunting.
An overwhelming majority, 77 percent, of the undocumented population
enters by the "front door" with legal visas, Ruiz said. "Most undocumented
immigrants are visa overstays."
According to Ruiz’s figures, the total number of undocumented
immigrants in the U.S. each year is 400,000, which amounts to a total of three to five
million, or less than two percent of the total U.S. population.
Of legal immigrants who entered the U.S. from 1986 to 1991, Ruiz said, 12
percent were Mexican, 26 percent were from other Latin countries, 45 percent were Asian
and 17 percent were from other countries, primarily Europe and Canada.
The proportion of foreign-born population today, Ruiz said, compared to
100 years ago is lower—eight percent compared to 15 percent.
And, she said, immigrants pay taxes of $133 billion annually.
"In contrast to the poem distributed by California Assemblyman Peter
Knight," she said. "The Institute of Women’s Policy Research found that
only five percent of aid to families with dependent children recipients were foreign-born.
And, furthermore, in 1990, two percent of Mexican legal immigrants received public
assistance, even though their incomes only averaged $9,000."
Ruiz’s talk also covered the repressed socio-economic status of
Mexican women and similar topics, creating an image of the West—for Hispanics at
least—as a place that rolls out an "unwelcome wagon," one spectator said.
A group of four panelists, echoed Ruiz’s theme and expanded on it.
Lorraine Sakata, a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA School of the Arts
and Architecture, said she was "dismayed" by the lecture, "because there
were so many attitudes and behaviors that my family experienced in the early part of the
20th century. And to hear the talk this morning, a lot of those attitudes are
still with us. It seems we really haven’t learned."
Sakata recounted the story of her family being interned in California
during World War II.
The Chinese and Koreans who where not interned, she said, "felt it
necessary to identify themselves as Chinese or Koreans, so they would not be mistaken for
Japanese."
The Chinese and Koreans put signs in their windows declaring their ethnic
background, she said. "Now, if the Japanese had had a chance to put signs in their
cars or businesses, I’m sure they would have put, ‘I am an American.’
"This just goes to show that color coding is a way of separating
others from yourself."
The speakers’ dialog had begun in December when four of the lecturers
and panelists gave a series of free talks around the valley over a period of several
months.
Those talks, in turn, rekindled a dialog on the American West that was
started in Sun Valley in the late 1970s when a similar group converged here as part of the
Institute of the American West.
In her program note, conference organizer Heather Crocker said that
questions raised in talks earlier this year quite often "outlasted the length of the
lecture itself."
For example, she wrote, one person asked, "How can we use this
information and take it to the next step?"
"One of the most obvious answers was that the conference would enable
local and regional community members to come together to discuss just that," Crocker
wrote, " - taking the next step in continuing conversation."
Last week’s conference allowed attendees to "engage topics on a
deeper level" than they had several months ago, Crocker said.
