Overview of The Beautiful Country [video]

One result of the Vietnam War was that “tens of thousands of children left Vietnam after 1975, rejected by Vietnamese society and dreaming of their unknown father and his land.” (Levi, 2003, p. 414) The Beautiful Country set in 1990 takes the viewer into an artistic portrayal of the story of Binh, an Amerasian who leaves Vietnam as a young adult. The movie contains the most carefully written dialogue. The movie’s concisely written dialogue and carefully placed visual messages contain layers of complicated meaning. Layers of meaning also can be evoked by attaching the film to a wider milieu of Amerasian experiences.

To provide the plot summary with brevity, Binh journeys to find his father, a White U.S. serviceman who about twenty years earlier had married his mother, Mai in Vietnam. One minute this father was present in Binh and Mai’s lives and the next was gone. After growing up an orphan in the countryside and then reuniting with his mother and sibling in the city, Binh takes his younger half-brother on an arduous trip to the U.S. and on the way meets and befriends Ling, a woman forced into prostitution. All of them have become entangled as victims in the web of the trafficking and smuggling of humans. The film is a story of an Amerasian experience while exploring questions of national and global society’s crafting of beauty and ugliness.

As a viewer, you can follow the way ideas of “beauty” and “ugliness” shapes the story. Amid the extensive and breath-taking landscapes, the backdrop for the film, exists hardships and hard labor to survive. Amid the non-recognition of the social factors causing the very existence and rejection of Amerasians, the Amerasian person faces and experiences the blame and persecution for his or her own existence (with a few meaningful exceptions). Amid the greed in human smuggling and the persecution of outcasts peeks tiny gestures of human connection and hope. Hope is considered beauty especially senses of hope in a future or past place, in relationships, and in human kindness. When I showed a class of students this video, we never did get to directly discuss this aspect of the film as it is buried deep into the film’s structure and may require multiple viewings to make sense of this underlying current of meaning.

Beyond these aesthetic themes, what is needed upon the viewing of this film is more context about Amerasian experiences. (Although the film does make some effort at context by providing at the introduction of the film a caption defining “bui doi” the term used for Amerasians in Vietnam that means “less than dust.”) Though many might find the artistic features of the film appealing, I worry that the recognition of multiple experiences of Amerasians may be lost (as well as the realization that social structural “ugliness” and certainly human trafficking still continue). Using the video in the classroom, I tried hard to fill in those gaps, knowing that films may provide a small entry-point or a tiny door into greater social issues. I will excerpt and close with some of my class handout for the movie (relying heavily on the work of Robin S. Levi from the Stanford Journal of International Law anthologized in the book Mixed Race America and the Law though it would be best to use more sources), so if and when you get to view the movie, you can be thinking in larger terms about Amerasian experiences as well, and if you don’t get to view the movie right away you can still have some background.

• Most Amerasian children resulted from long term relationships.
• The U.S. government served in tandem with local Vietnamese governments as “state as pimp”* (in South Korea and Philippines as well) providing and regulating sex workers for U.S. soldiers. “Most of the U.S. servicemen did not take responsibility for the children born from their relationships, whether short or long-term, with sex-workers.  Furthermore the U.S. government failed to instruct its servicemen regarding possible parental responsibility.  Instead, the government focused on teaching servicemen to avoid venereal disease.” (Levi, 2003, p. 414)  Many reasons exist for why children and wives and partners were left behind: “ government bureaucracy, confusion, or indifference” (p.414)
• “Vietnam does not accept Amerasians either legally or socially and subjects them to mistreatment that leads to severe emotional trauma.” (p. 415)  The explanations for this include 1) the children represent and resemble  bad memories of “the enemy”  and are persecuted by peers and authority figures (such as with names  bui doi [less than dust], My Lai [American half-breed]  or My Phuong [Vietnamese American], and some were sent to re-education camps as punishment for existing.  2) darker skinned children face the burden of being considered unattractive due to standards of beauty and also are racialized through the influence of ideology brought in by foreign soldiers 3) cultural ways of being recognized through the family unit and a father is impossible for Amerasian children 4) the father’s role in Vietnam is necessary: “the father registers the birth in the family registry, claims paternity, registers the child for school, and procures employment for the child. Without a father to perform these essential functions…a child will have difficulty becoming a functioning part of Vietnamese society.” (p.415) Simultaneously, mothers of Amerasians are viewed with shame and assumed to be “prostitutes” by society. 5) “Mixed race ancestry is easily noticed, and Vietnamese society considers people with mixed ancestry as contributing to ‘racial impurity in the nation.’ An official from Ho Chi Minh City’s Department of Social Welfare stated, ‘Our society does not need these bad elements….’” (p. 415)
• Amerasian children who are born to parents not married have a more difficult time relocating to the United States [note that Binh’s parents were married]. They need to find a relative to sponsor them and face more difficult regulations. It is even harder when the documentation of the birth and marriage have been destroyed by the mother in order to hide evidence from Vietnamese government officials of “consorting with the enemy.”
• “Although the Vietnamese government officially denies discriminating against Amerasians, it prevents many mothers from participating in certain governmental programs.  Mothers of Amerasians are often rejected by their families due to the humiliation the mother has caused the family. A significant percentage of mothers, refusing to live under these conditions, give up their ticket to the United States, or simply abandon them.  Many Amerasians have ended up in orphanages. Since Vietnamese orphanages are often run badly and have severe overcrowding problems, most Amerasian children have ended up on the streets, and many have turned to prostitution.” (p.416)
• The U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Vietnam, and this impacts the ability for children to emigrate from Vietnam to the U.S. Several laws (at least five acts) implemented programs to relocate Amerasians to the United States.  Vietnam already considers Amerasians United States citizens so Vietnam has been accused of manipulating programs intended for Vietnamese Amerasians and used them to relocate non-Amerasians, instead. Amerasians continue to press for legislation supporting their relocation. Amerasians still seek to reunite with their family members while bringing family members with them.
• Sometimes Amerasians find it difficult to survive in the U.S., and they may revert to street living and criminalization (pp. 421-422). The Vietnamese American community in the U.S. also may snub Amerasians (this is not to say that some people from a variety of groups may be secretly or openly supportive of Amerasians and their accomplishments and unique challenges, as well). Due to low levels of education in Vietnam (being taunted into dropping out of school), some Amerasians may struggle in the U.S. According to Levi’s sources, they hold a higher risk of suicide, drug abuse, and being involved in criminal activity.
• Many were promised help in finding their fathers, but this help was not provided, except by private organizations.

*This term "state as pimp" is from the work of Sheila Jeffreys, and refers to many types of state-supported prostitution and trafficking that occurs or has occurred world-wide.

                                                                         References

Jeffreys, S. (2009). The industrial vagina: The political economy of the sex trade. London & New York: Routledge.

 Levi, R. S. (2003). Legacies of war: The United States’ obligations toward Amerasians. In K.R. Johnson (Ed.), Mixed race America and the law. (pp.413-423). NY & London: New York University Press.

Moland, H. P. (Director). (2004). The beautiful country [Motion Picture]. Norway: DinaSun Productions.

Some Ethnic Studies Themes in The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam graphic novel

Ann Marie Fleming’s graphic novel blends into a film on the page telling sophisticated stories in a family memoir with themes that resonate with Ethnic Studies. The book literally turns filmic with the quick flipping of the pages at the lower right-hand corner where a tiny acrobat swings, leaps, cartwheels and handstands. Fleming makes films as well as writes. Her filmic insight creates a collage out of the old and new photos, performance announcement flyers, newspaper clippings, comic-style drawings, letter excerpts, and magic book illustrations. The reader is given much power to read deeply or provide a surface reading of the book, for example, choosing between skipping over, briefly skimming, or deeply pondering the news articles incorporated into the text. Throughout the book, a timeline globally contextualizes Long Tack Sam’s life, and narrator Stickgirl keeps the reader on track through the visual and narrative spectacle. The book also is a family memoir. Davis (2007, Fall) describes this type of memoir as focusing on “‘relational lives,’ or ‘multigenerational’ or ‘intergenerational auto/biographies.’ Family memoirs focus as much on members of one’s family as on oneself, typically blurring the boundaries we tend to draw between autobiography and biography…[and] function as historical narratives” (p. 491). I place this graphic novel among “relational lives” that not only are trans-national but “trans-graphic” through how it uses a more layered, creative and visual format to make an ultra-graphic and inter-textual piece of art.*

As a family memoir, the text sets out to search for Long Tack Sam and to identify who he was and why he has been forgotten (in contrast to, say Harry Houdini, who has been memorialized).  Long Tack Sam should be a name with which all of us should be familiar. He was a twentieth-century,  internationally successful and persistent acrobat/magician and entertainment business figure before the popularity of movies. Born in China, he achieves a cosmopolitan existence as he navigates (and often quite cleverly though still being controlled by the national situations of the time) the borders and visa and citizenship restrictions of nations. He married Poldi, an Austrian woman; and over time their two daughters (Mina and Neesa) join the family performance business while their son (Bobbie) remains behind with other family members. The story interweaves the lives of Sam, Poldi, Mina (Fleming’s grandmother), Neesa, and Bobbie, with Fleming’s own life and the lives of her familial cohort. The confusion and challenge of borders in Long Tack Sam’s life reflects mirror-like through Fleming’s life as well. She further navigates borders as she searches across the world for glimpses of Long Tack Sam to piece together his life to make this collage-like text. Not only has Long Tack Sam been forgotten by the world, but she finds her own extended family has drifted away from remembering him and being together as a family unit. Her journeys, time spent in searching archives and interviewing, the completion of a film on Long Tack Sam and this graphic novel allows Long Tack Sam to indirectly bring everyone back together again. As in Minal Hajratwala’s family memoir Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, Fleming provides different versions of certain stories or speculates on what it might have been like for family members when she does not have access to records filling in complete details. Fleming writes that “History is Relatives” (near the book’s end) serving as a powerful and beautiful reminder to all readers (p. 162). History certainly is a key theme in Ethnic Studies as a field of study, including histories told from the viewpoints of those oppressed, forgotten or marginalized. The “othering” processes, exercised across history and the present-day is also evident upon a close scrutiny of the text.

In this book, the othering can be juxtaposed with “Orientalism,” the both positive and negative preconceived notions (ideas, both hazy and solidified, about the character, lifeways, personalities, and habits of another group) held by Westerners (Europeans and North Americans) about “the East,” including China. Long Tack Sam drew on and manipulated the Orientalizing entertainment structures so much sought after by “Western” audiences in his magic and acrobatic shows. The shows were based on the expectations possessed by the Western audiences in Europe and North America about China and Chinese magic and mystery, not on the actual lived politics and multiple cultures of China. The exoticism, opulence, and richness of the sets and costumes, the mystery of his magic and talented showmanship, and the talent and representations of Mina and Neesa also helped to sell the performances. Orientalizing entertainment structures are delivered consistently throughout and within Sam’s career.  For example, in a news article on “Why Chinese Magic is the Real Thing” Sam provides an explanation that draws on East and West as distinctly different places with the East as a place of authentic magic and spirits. (p. 35) In a performance poster with a picture of a posing and regal Neesa, the caption reads, “Supported by his entire company of Oriental Mystery Makers, and China’s most beautiful girl….Miss Nee Sa Long.” (p. 119) Neesa herself is commodified here as being a product of China. At certain points of the book this Orientalizing becomes more transparent and even semi-critiqued such as when Fleming wrote of the visit of Sam and Poldi to China, “Sam returns to China as much as a tourist as a performer…with a foreign wife. And this is the first time Poldi has experienced the culture she married into as something besides an exotic stage act.” (italics added, p. 57) This is about the “positive” stereotypes of China and Chinese “mystery” crafted through the world of magicians, acrobats, and theater. With a closer look a reader sees the combination of global influences on Sam’s life and his shows. Long Tack Sam exerted agency over the representations as much as he could.  He refused to participate in the Hollywood business because of the extent of negative stereotyping occurring in the movie industry and stated,

Chinese are always cast as bad characters of some sort—opium smokers, villains, or figures of the  underworld.  There are good people in China, too, but people seeing your American movies must suppose we are all despicable.

 It wouldn’t be so bad if China were not a young republic just trying to get on its feet.  Showing our people in a bad light hurts.  If I can’t do my people any good, I don’t want to do them any harm. So, I won’t play those roles. (p. 113 in the news article)

Long Tack Sam asserted his agency when he carefully manipulated some imagery for his shows while rejecting other caricatures and negative stereotypes from the film media industry.**

Many other acts of agency appear in the book to sketch out a multidimensional personhood. At the same time that Sam draws on more positive imagery in Orientalism for his shows, he lives as a cosmopolitan person and adapts new global popular culture into his shows, incorporating performers and performance elements from all over the world (pp. 96, 103, 151).*** This also adds a layer of complexity to him as a multi-dimensional person. Fleming writes about a man who must adapt to global and individual aggressions, “Revolutions, racism, rival magicians…Long Tack Sam adjusts. That’s show business.” (p. 49). This multi-dimensionality sketches a profile of Long Tack Sam as complex person: a lover of magic; a person who breaks social norms, but when his children do that he has a difficult time accepting it; a person who has friendships and professional networks across national and racialized and cultural lines; a person who adapts new items to his show’s repertoire; and a person who becomes mis-recognized by the public as from another ethnic group or nation (including being a Chinese impersonator); a person victimized by racism (including having a trick patented by Harry Houdini so that Sam could no longer use it) and virulent nationalism; and a person held in high regard by many of his contemporaries of the time (pp. 26, 49).**** Long Tack Sam constantly negotiated his identity and influenced the negotiation of his family’s identity as it was perceived by others in various national, gendered, and racialized spaces.

Identity negotiation as an act of agency is clearly within the scope of this book in additional forms, as well. The negotiation of mixed-race identity appears in the book and connects family members together, even if one member was no longer living. Fleming and her grandmother’s Eurasian identity thematically thread the book together as they seek something close to a “border identity” finding themselves at the criss-cross of social ideas about race and culture (at different points in time and with differing social pressures) and embracing all dimensions of themselves (Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2002). Fleming explains through Stickgirl, “As long as I can remember, growing up, my grandmother always made a fuss about me being Eurasian and how special and wonderful that was—to be part of many cultures. Maybe that helped me when people—kids mainly--would ask me where I was from. What was I? I wanted to tell them. I thought it was interesting. I didn’t know Granny didn’t want me to have the complex she had from growing up in a world where, sometimes, it was seen as wrong.” (p. 106). The Author’s Notes section at the end of the book also indicated how mixed race identity influenced Fleming, “Being mixed-race, part of the diaspora of many cultures, really, I am always interested in people’s histories and choices.” (p. 164). In other words, and in my interpretation, Fleming is interested in people’s acts of agency. 

Through this graphic novel/family memoir, Fleming works her own magic (or conjuring) to bring the memory of Long Tack Sam back into existence. A careful reader may find layers of Ethnic Studies themes to juxtapose alongside the text and apply to the lives of Long Tack Sam and his extended family. I highlighted multi-dimensional identities, history, and agency among the “relational lives” of Ann Marie Fleming and Long Tack Sam, but many more thematic layers can be examined.

                                                                  Endnotes

* I use the term “intertextuality” here to mean drawing on various forms of pre-existing texts in order to make meaning.

 ** By agency, I am referring to the individual decision-making and actions that a person takes who is faced by a limited set of choices and avenues of action that are socially-embedded or defined by society’s practices and policies.

 ***Interestingly, “playing Indian” was part of Mina and Neesa’s entertainment act. One of the photos shows one of them dressed in a huge war bonnet and “costume.” (Fleming, 2007, p. 100) In a way they were “Orientalizing” other groups as well. (See Deloria, 1998 on “playing Indian”)  

 ****His fame is exemplified by a flyer that comes out after he retires on which his name is in bigger lettering than any other of the stars slated to perform at the special convention intended for other magicians (Fleming, 2007, p. 143). 

                                                                     References

 Davis, G. R. (2007, Fall).  Mediating historical memory in Asian/American family memoirs: K. Connie Kang’s Home Was the Land of Morning Calm and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow. Biography, 30(4), 491-511.

Deloria, P. (1998). Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University.

Fleming, A. M. (2007). The magical life of Long Tack Sam: An illustrated memoir. NY: Riverhead Books.

Hajratwala, M. (2009). Leaving India: My family’s journey from five villages to five continents. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Rockquemore, K. A., & Brunsma, D. L. (2002). Socially embedded identities: Theories,  typologies, and processes of racial identification among Black/White biracials. The Sociological Quarterly, 43(3), 335-356.

Globalization, Feminism, and Family Cultural Diversity in the book Marrying Anita

In Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India, Anita Jain envelopes her story with fresh insights into aspects of globalization, feminism, and within-group cultural diversity.  Jain leaves the U.S. to give herself a year to find a husband in Delhi (seemingly antithetical to older schools of feminism, but the author and her family use several “feminist” methods to meet this goal).  For a whole year, she immerses herself into working (as a journalist), playing, dating, and partying and is able to suspend the reader into her same experiences, even directly addressing the reader at times in the course of book.   A book like this, especially for those interested in reading about the “New India,” transnational identities, and dating practices from a single, thirty-something Indian American woman’s viewpoint,  is made to devour in a single or only a couple of readings.  This is a text to read in tandem with Purkayastha’s Negotiating Ethnicity: Second Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World that, unlike this book, focuses heavily on U.S. experiences, but introduces transnationalism, ethnic consumer culture, racialized ethnicity, and marriage both through arranged (which takes many forms not the stereotypical no-choice in the matter arrangement) and personally chosen mechanisms.

 To use Purkayastha’s terms, Jain comes from a family that categorizes closer to the pervious-ethnicity group in the U.S. and other locations (with a tendency to let daughters date and choose their marriage partners), while holding a tendency more related to the bounded-ethnicity  group (being more strict with dating practices) in visiting India, itself (pp. 103-112). This shift in attitudes depending on the place is something that is not considered in Negotiating Ethnicity, but fits within the rubric of its further directions for study.  Jain’s book, as a memoir/travelogue and not social science research, provides abundant examples of how families may differ while being in the same ethnic and religious grouping.

 An example of this diversity is how Jain describes her father as a feminist: “Given a background destined to turn a man into a brute, or at least one not especially attuned to his feminine side, my father managed to chart a personal philosophy predicated on the belief that women are equal to men and should be treated so accordingly, every day, in every conversation.” (p.63)  the different status of women is encased in the Hindi language, but not in how Jain’s father speaks.  Her father looks for this same quality and tests the men that show marital intentions toward his daughter.  He directly asks the suitors about how they would handle the situations in which Jain was unable to tend to housekeeping duties to identify who would take-over the cooking and housework.  At meetings with potential suitors, he models his own philosophy by running to the kitchen to fetch his daughter a glass of water at her request. Later they laugh at their “ingenious dramatics” (p. 242). Jain has a difficult time in finding any traces of feminism in especially men in India (in the social circles she is frequenting) who come from a generation younger than her.

 Turning to another topic, globalization works as a key force that brings Jain’s father to the U.S. and then Jain back to India.  The “g-word” constructs families with members that have divergent experiences as some remain in India and others leave, and some return numerous times for sojourns and others only visit occasionally.  Jain finds lifestyles settling into a more “homogenous” urbanscape with similar social norms as New York City (p. 295) while at the same time finding tremendous geographic ally and socially less globalized regions of India (including finding in a rural area married cousins who live under the watchful eye of a mother-in-law and a whole host of relatives). (p.233-235)  Surprisingly, the reader sees Jain, herself, as part of a globalizing influence bringing transformation to her maid Chandra’s life when she eventually leaves a work situation where she receives bad treatment to live full time with Jain.  Additionally, Jain evokes globalization when she coins the phrase “a nation of Hendrixstan” (p.83). This encompasses a diaspora of music lovers who live to listen and imitate the music of rock bands from the global North, including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix, even to the neglect of local music styles (p. 133).  Throughout the text, Jain takes a serious and sometimes critical look and sometimes accepting look at these phenomena.  Globalization, not monolithically always bad or always good, for she herself and the people around her simultaneously are created by global forces and craft those forces.

This description has not covered many other issues related to globalization such as her comments on the attitudes toward Indian workers who are part of the U.S. out-sourcing workforce who work hard (on a U.S. time zone schedule that separates workers from the schedule the rest of their family keeps) without the fruits of their labor being put toward developing India’s potential and viewed by some as an internal brain drain. I also have not gone into the racialization processes that Jain identifies and critiques regarding White Global North privilege.  She notices that White temporary workers coming to India receive many more opportunities on the basis of their skin color and novelty.

 In summary, feminism, globalization, and unique within-group cultural patterns thread as thematic undertones to Anita Jain’s explicitly drawn love-life as she depicts her processes of seeking love and companionship in Delhi.   As the reader takes in the book or reads this blog on a book about India, the largest democracy in the world, they too, suddenly become part of globalization.

                                                                           References

Jain, A. (2008). Marrying Anita: A quest for love in the New India. NY: Bloomsbury.

Purkayastha, B. (2005). Negotiating ethnicity: Second-generation South Asian Americans traverse a transnational world.  New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press.

Overview of documentary The Garden filmed by S. H. Kennedy

This documentary is described on the DVD box as a cross between the HBO television series The Wire (written and produced by David Simon) and the 1976 documentary Harlan County USA (filmed by Barbara Kopple).  The box description does not explain how the documentary is like The Wire or Harlan County USA, but leaves that to the viewers’ analysis. One theme that pervades all three of these texts deals with justice, and in The Garden, especially environmental justice. The Garden (2008) presents a group of predominately Mexican American urban gardeners. They work to prevent their fourteen-acre community garden (with 13 acres verdantly farmed—the largest community garden in the U.S.) in South Central Los Angeles (on 41^st and Alameda) from being bulldozed.  This is after the land was secretly sold back to the private land owner who the land had originally been taken through eminent domain.  The City wanted to use the lot for a waste incinerator site. The incinerator was never built because of environmental justice activism, and the city used the site for the community gardens. After a legal fight about the process of the land sale back to the former owner, the gardeners attempt to convince the landowner to sell the land to them. The community garden group eventually raise the money (including donations from Hollywood celebrities who join the cause), but then face more issues related to identity, power, and property that form a wall shutting out their means to meet the goal of keeping their community garden. The dynamics of socioeconomic class, local government politics, simultaneous divisiveness and solidarity among racialized groupings, and multicultural lives interweave. The garden symbolizes a world-wide challenge about what struggles matter to whom, how multicultural and multiracial coalitions develop and how difficult they can be to build, and that money and land accessible to racialized groups does not necessarily equal power. A useful environmental justice model to juxtapose alongside this documentary, both before and after the sale of the garden, is Schlosberg’s environmental justice framework that is made up of multiple dimensions of justice: distributive, recognition, participatory, and capabilities and functioning. I will describe these dimensions through pertinent examples from the film.

The City of Los Angeles provided the community garden lot as part of remedying racial and economic injustices brought to world attention in the early 1990s during the demonstrations against the acquittal of some L.A. police officers for police brutality. Violence erupted out of the impoverished social conditions and extreme social inequalities in South Central Los Angeles.  A place to grow food, be self-sufficient and inter-dependent while interacting in the outdoors, and build community relationships was provided in the form of land for a community garden. The community garden had the potential at providing justice in all aspects of Schlossberg’s environmental justice framework, but it turned out to be a precarious situation with the land being a loan not a solid cede of land space.  

The distributive aspects included provision of land to a part of the city that had little in the way of green amenities, certainly not a place to garden (distributing green spaces more equitably). Rufina Juárez, one of the leaders of the garden, refers to the lack of space in an urban area for gardens and describes it as "13 acres of people growing food.”

The recognition aspects (related to how different groups’ cultures are respected and influential in governmental and organizational decision-making) relate to the garden as a space where cultural forms of gardening and lifeways related to gardening flourish. The beginning of the documentary shows a performer from the community garden singing “Voy a Mandarte un Papel” (with musicians off-camera), surrounded by culturally-important plants and nutritious foods and a small audience of people relaxing in the garden and cheering her music.

Participatory elements reflect through the garden space as a symbol that the gardeners (many low-income) are part of the larger Los Angeles community and how the garden works as a group-run “in commons” organization. This democratic governance system continually gets ironed out and is not without controversy, but the commons model resonates with the democratically run Mexican American acequias or water basins in New Mexico or even the ejidos in regions of Mexico (lands worked and farmed in common but threatened or reorganized by privatization “reforms” beginning in the late 1800s and more current neoliberal, global trade pressures) [for more on acequias see  New Mexico Acequia Association, 2010 or for more on ejidos see Yetman (2000, Summer/Fall); Perramond (2008, July 1) and for more on privatization pressures see Gonzalez & Fernandez (2003)].  The participatory aspects become broken during the process of losing the gardens and the space for the community garden.  The lack of intergroup cohesiveness that arose during the struggle (as mediated through the documentary), when one environmental justice leader (who had been successful in an earlier battle over an incinerator site project) will not collaborate with the community gardeners, reminded me of the concept of “ethnic churning” (not sure if this is the best term to apply to the demographic change from one group to another) from an article on Metropolitan LA (Pastor, Sadd, & Morello-Frosch, 2005). It wasn’t exactly a “churning” situation—meaning a change of the make-up of the population from one ethnic group to another—but it was a situation where a blend of cultural and racialized groups merged and could have benefitted from working together more. The  power of systemic pressure and the city and judiciary’s sleight of hand contributed to cutting the Latino and African American community gardeners’ out of a participatory process, as well as creating divisiveness (with some exceptions). 

Capabilities and functioning refers to the future well-being and health and potential of community members. Certainly the garden provides mental and physical well-being for the farmers and their families and provides an important source of nourishment to individuals and families. In the words of Doris Bloch, one of the garden founders, “It’s a pretty simple idea: land, people, food. Happy days.”

 Eleven years later to many onlookers and the gardeners themselves, the community garden mitigation, literally was to be ripped out from underneath the gardeners. This therefore ripped away the continual layers and levels of justice provided through the community garden. To paraphrase one gardener’s words it is terrible to be viewed and treated as less valuable as a person and a group than the property itself. This seems to be a treatment toward racialized and low income individuals and groups repeated many times in the past and the present. The documentary encourages viewers to ask many questions about how a community garden becomes a larger symbol of justice and, then, injustice and how productive gains for a low-income and racialized, multicultural community can be lost in a matter of a decade’s time.

References

Kennedy, S. C. (producer and director). (2008). The Garden [DVD]. Los Angeles, CA: Black Valley Films.

Gonzalez, G. G.,& Fernandez, R. A. (2003). A century of Chicano history: Empire, nations, and migration. NY: Routledge.

New Mexico Acequia Association (2010). New Mexico Acequia Association. Retrieved from http://www.lasacequias.org/

 Pastor, M. Jr., Sadd, J. L., Morello-Frosch, R. (2005). Environmental inequity in Metropolitan Los Angeles.In R. D. Bullard (Ed.), The quest for environmental justice: Human rights and the politics o pollution.  San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Perramond, E. P. (2008, July 1). The rise, fall and reconfiguration of the Mexican ejido. The Geographical Review, 98(3), 356-371.

Schlosberg, D. (2007). Defining environmental justice: Theories, movements, and nature. NY: Oxford University Press.

Yetman, D. (2000, Summer/Fall). Ejidos, land sales, and free trade in Northwest Mexico: Will globalization affect the commons? American Studies, 41(2/3), 211-234.

Food and Farming Themes in Four Seasons on My Family Farm by David Mas Masumoto

“Dinner unites us all” Marion Nestle states in her introductory comments to Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (p. 7).  The origins of all those dinners, the access to enough food for dinner, the nutritional quality, and what consists of dinner differs from place to place and family to family.  Food serves as a basic requirement of life, and can also be a metaphor and actual feature for nourishing community-building and identity-building. David Mas Masumoto’s book, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on my Family Farm works as a multi-cropping of stories about practicing ecological citizenship, honoring and learning from community and family history, and explaining what it is like to be a less-valued part of food regimes and food systems. I briefly will cover each one of these themes to get at the blending of identity, social awareness, and the struggles of a farm and farmer to transform toward more ecologically responsible methods during the four season timeframe of the book (pertinent to this seasonal shift in which we now find ourselves).

Before getting to those themes, Masumoto (1995) presents several less-often considered ideas in the course of his book. I will move from thought-to-thought here in a rapid non-sequitur fashion. For example, in many cases, the farming year begins in autumn not spring. Food, a fruit, can become “obsolete,” when it does not meet the shelf life or outward aesthetics set by food brokers and marketers (such as his Sun Crest peaches). Being an organic farmer takes resources, money and the security to gamble.  Farmers can identify, rather than be at odds, with farmworkers, especially when that farmer has experienced racialized discrimination or when that farmer reflects on having a history of family and community oppression. Ecological citizenship consists of a journey of learning that requires rethinking some very taken-for-granted notions, such as changing the definition of weeds as the perfect process for ridding your fields of weeds, for suddenly those plants are no longer classified as weeds (p. 31).   Additionally, this book made me think about how farmers, farmworkers, and gardeners across the world hold commonalities and knowledge that can help bridge social gaps.  This is evident in the commonalities drawn between the Wisconsin farming of Marcy, Masumoto’s wife, and his own family of origin.

Masumoto works a family farm that was passed down to him from his father (a shorter generational history of a family farm because state Alien Land Laws prevented first generation Japanese in the U.S. to own land).  That farm provides a home place as well as a workplace though the farm is not the main source of income for the Masumoto family at the time of the book’s publication.  Masumoto is an environmentalist who [tries to] work for a living (White, 1996). Remembering and honoring those that came before him occurs in the book and on the farm, as well. “Bad timing and the wrong face.” (p. 107) His family, experienced incarceration at Gila River Internment Camp during World War II, and one family member died while in the U.S military. He writes, “As I dream and plan to make the farm my own, I have inherited this family history as my legacy, part of the baggage that comes with my land.  After hearing these stories, I can’t help but be aware of them each year and each season.  They have become part of the farm landscape.” (p. 109).  This family social history lives on the farm alongside the ecological inhabitants.

A farmer, especially an organic farmer, pays close attention to all the living neighbors of many kinds that have positive and negative impacts on his grapes and peaches and other crops.  Masumoto honestly recounts how he learns to adjust to this new approach of handling and interacting organically with the land, plants, insects, and animals, at times not living perfectly to the organic standard.  He adopts an attitude of learning and a view to “accumulate impressions” that bodes well for ecological citizenship (p. 37). By ecological citizenship, I am referring to ways of viewing belonging to a place and to the world at large in a responsible way, accounting for both the big and small other-than human beings and inorganic matter as well.  The connections to those life forms and life-supporting forms are recognized, formed, and cultivated.  It is very much the precautionary principle of doing the least harm, but in a way that still is productive. A crop is planned, tended, grown, harvested and sold (ideally) all in concert with a “chaotic” (in contrast to some styles of farming) and dynamic ecology and up against a powerful attitude that not being able to exert control means one has failed (p.64). Excerpts from the book exemplify this approach.

In the section, “As if the Farmer Died,” Masumoto (1995) writes,

I use to farm with a strategy of un-chaos.  I was looking for regularity, less variability. Ignoring the uniqueness of each farm year. But now…wildness is tolerated, even promoted. The farm becomes a test of the unconventional, a continuous experiment, a journey of adaptation and living with change.  I’ve even had to change my ways of counting. It’s no longer important how many pests I have, what matters is the ratio between good bugs and bad bugs.  I try to rely less and less on controlling nature. Instead, I am learning to live with its chaos. (p. 37)

This then opens up a whole new world that has always been around him, but that he suddenly has the time and lens to see as indicated in the following excerpts:

I’m trying to listen to my farm. Before, I had no reason to hear the sounds of nature. The sole strategy of conventional farming seems to be dominance. Now, with each passing week, I venture into fields full of life and change, clinging to a belief in my work and a hope that it’s working.

As I recall the past spring from my porch, the ringing of the furin [Masumoto describes this as a particular bell chime with a long flowing paper ribbon attached] helps me understand as it flutters in a subtle breeze.  For the first time in my life, I see the wind. (p. 66)

I read of a Japanese wood craftsman who spoke about freeing the soul of a tree. Like a sculptor, I too labor to free that soul.  But the souls of my trees and vines are alive and they respond to my actions. I live with them daily. (p. 76)

The human farmer may work as part of non-human “nature,” not separate and outside of an ecological setting.  The entire book gently interrogates the tidy separation of “wild” nature and the built environment, especially in a section that describes wild flowers that Masumoto plants, but that are seen by passers-by and neighbors as wild, the outcome of organic farming techniques.  The farmer’s life and work (as well as the larger food regime dictates and farming policy) leaves imprints on the landscape, and the wildflowers become one of the many metaphors of the inextricability of human labor, aesthetics, and cultivation within the parameters of ecological agency (meaning the ecological beings and elements take their own particular courses of action as humans take theirs).

A last theme of the book to unpack relates to the basic food supply system (also called a food regime) that impacts our everyday life and food choices. Masumoto writes graciously but critically about a system that he finds himself in, mourning the system that renders his Sun Crest peach fruit and orchard “obsolete,” at the same time he exerts his agency or individual decision-making or action plan to find ways to “save” and sell his poetically delicious peaches.  Though having a peach with a short shelf life and “wrong” coloring for mainstream markets, he finds upscale markets, such as a hotel, and an exclusive baby food market (giving him a one-time contract) which will provide profits for his peaches (Masumoto never covers up or romanticizes that he is running a business). This arrangement forced by market parameters does make this food product inaccessible to those with everyday incomes.  This brings home (literally) the idea that our food sources, our food system consists of more than the assumed personal choices made on a shopping excursion, but those foods on the grocery shelf  link back to the (made invisible) influences of businesses, markets, rules and regulations, and profit-motives that actually encourage a very limited pool of food choices and rules out the ability of low and even some middle-income homes from accessing healthy and high-quality food. (And this is just pertaining to the U.S., a whole series of issues arise when referring to other connected global contexts.) These peaches are not only organic, but can be considered in more current terms “locative foods” at least in reference to the area that surrounds the Masumoto Farm (Solomon, 2005, October 1).  Locative foods[i] or the eating of local foods have been described as an important approach to eating for some eaters (and maybe this approach can be more affordable for low-income families) (see Gary Nabhan’s Coming Home to Eat (2002) about local foods).

This book brings farming, ecology, and food regimes into an Ethnic Studies arena.  It does, however, require a discussion about representations of Native Peoples, as brief references occasionally are made to Native Americans throughout the book. In summary, after reading this text, one desires to revisit certain passages of the book and while doing so might visit a peach and grape family farm; certain seasons as lived out in Central California; a history and current account of racialized discrimination and its present day consequences; cultural presences and self-identified cultural meanings, and to visit certain questions about the connections of sources of food, family, belonging, history, ecology, and identity.

What food or food supply issues have been on your mind, or what food issues does this blog entry bring to your mind?

                                                                      References

Masumoto, D. M. (1995). Epitaph for a peach: Four seasons on my family farm. NY: Harper Collins Publishers.

Nabhan, G. (2002). Coming home to eat: The pleasures and politics of local foods. NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Nestle, M. (2007).  Dinner for six billion. In P. Menzel & F. D'Aluisio (Eds.), Hungry planet: What the world eats (pp. 7-9). Napa, CA: Material World Books.

Solomon, D, (2005, October 1). All I really really want is locative food. Retrieved March 20, 2010 from http://culiblog.org/2005/10/all-i-really-really-want-is-locative-food/

White, R. (1996). “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?”: Work and nature. In W. Cronon (Ed.), Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature (pp. 171-499, notes pp. 500-501). NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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[i] Locative foods are described as “food that tells me where I am and where it’s from by it’s [sic] very name and nature (without the use of an RFID tag). And all I really really want is to have one major train station and one major airport in one country that sells food that is not created by food product [sic] designers but by local people from local ingredients and reflecting the diverse local food culture already present.” (Solomon, 2005, October 1). Solomon’s blog contains interesting overviews of issues that actually fit into food studies.