Unsung America. Prerna Lal

      Contents

       Foreword

       Introduction

       The Promise and Peril of Citizenship

       Deporting Dissent

The Immigrant History of Sexuality

       The New Age of Resistance

       Afterword

       Acknowledgments

       Suggested Contributions

       Glossary

       Sources

       About the Author

       About Mango

Foreword

      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 Liberty’s 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 Liberty’s 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 Okoumou’s demonstration and other more recent protests to the long and still unfolding history of immigrant resistance—one 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 country’s “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, Lal’s 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 here—this brutality is not a rare deviation but a defining characteristic of this country’s 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

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