IMMIGRANT MINORITES EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA

Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2009) (From the back cover: "The stories of seven young Arab and Muslim Americans who are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy").

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, ed., Go Home!, foreword by Viet Thanh Nguyen (New York: Feminist Press, 2018) (From the back cover: "Where is home? How do you get there? Does it exist? This anthology of Asian diaspora writers muses on the impossibility of the slur 'go home!").

Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (Classics of Asian American Literature), with introduction by Marilyn C. Alquizola & Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, and an introduction by Carey McWilliams (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1946, 1973, 2014). From Carry McWilliam's "Introduction": 

'It is hard to be a Filipino in California,' a countryman sadly warned Carlos Bulosan shortly after his arrival in Seattle from the Philippines. But Carlos, of course, had to find this out for himself. 'I came to know afterwards,' he wrote, 'that in many ways it was a crime to be a Filipino in California' (p. 131). That says it about as succinctly and accurately as it can be said. America Is in the Heart is a deeply moving account of what it is like to be treated as a criminal in a strange and alien society--one to which the immigrant has been drawn precisely because of the attraction of its ideals. 'I know deep in my heart,' he wrote, 'that I am an exile in America . . . I feel like a criminal running aways from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.'

Id. at vii. One should contemplate the parallels to certain immigrants in twenty-first-century America. Food for thought.

Elena Tajima Creef, Imagining Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York & London: New York University Press, 2004). From the back cover:

     As we have been reminded by the renewed acceptance of racial profiling, and the detention and deportation of hundreds of immigrants of Arab and Muslim descent on unknown charges following September 11, in times of national crisis we take refuge in the usual construction of citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of larger cohesive national community.
     Beginning with another moment ff national historical trauma--December 7, 1941, and the interment of 120,000 Japanese Americans--Imagining Japanese America unearths stunning and seldom-seen photographs of Japanese Americans by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Yoyo Miyatake . . . [Creef] then traces the ways in which contemporary representations of Japanese Americans in popular culture are inflected by the politics of historical memory from World War II, Creef closes with a look at the representation of the multicultural Japanese American body at the turn of the millennium.

Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017):

In this book I reveal how race and racism organize Iranian American lives and show that for liminal racial groups, whiteness is fickle and volatile--and, more, often than not, revoked in the mundane and ordinary interactions that make up the everyday politics of race. In contradiction to their official federal classification and the expectations of sociologists that in the second generation identities should melt away, Iranian American youth regularly feel skepticism and dissatisfaction with assimilation as a desirable--or even possible--cultural and psycho-social process and whiteness as a meaningful and reflective category that describes their live. In this way, second-generation Iranian Americans understand their status across a wide range of localities as more closely resembling that of other liminally radicalized non-white groups. Whether their preferred racial identity is 'brown' or 'West Asian' or "Middle Eastern' or 'other,' in a world of cowboys and Iranians, Iranian American youth are experts at navigating life at the limits of whiteness.

Id. at 13.

Toshio Mori, Yokohama, California (Classics of Asian American Literature), with introductions by Xiaojing Zhou, William Saroyan, & Lawson Fusao Nada (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1949, 1985, 2015) (From the back cover: "[T]he first published collection of short stories by a Japanese American. Set in a fictional community, these linked stories are alive with the people, gossip, humor, and legends of Japanese America in the 1930s and 1940s.").

John Okada, No-No Boy: A Novel (Classics of Asian American Literature), with foreword by Ruth Oozes, introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada, and afterword by Frank Chin (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1976, 2014). From the "Introduction":

     I knew that the War Department required Nisei males like Ichiro to fill out a questionnaire and answer two 'loyalty' questions:
     No. 27 Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?
     No. 28  Will you swear unqualified allegiance the the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?
But I didn't know that while many of the young men answer yes-yes to these two questions, some, like Ichiro, did not . . .
     And I didn't know that those who refused, the boys who answered no-no, were found guilty of draft evasion, arrested, and taken first to jail and then to a maximum security segregated detention facility for the final years of the war.

Id. at x-xi.

Mine' Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Classics of Asian American Literature), with introduction by Christine Hong (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1946, 2014) (the Japanese internment experience).

Bienvenido N. Santos, Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories (Classics of Asian American Literature), foreword by Jessica Hagedorn, and an introduction by Allan Punzalan Isaac (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1979, 2015).

Monica Sone, Nisei Daughtee (Classics of Asian American Literature), with introduction by Marie Rose Wong (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1953, 2014).

Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile (Classics of Asian American Literature), with introduction by Traise Yamamoto (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1982, 2015).