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 Unsung 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 society—open, democratically reconstituted, inclusive—that was the unfulfilled hope of black abolitionists in the nineteenth century and ultimately the unrealized promise of 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 slaves—a 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 their lands.
The object of Lal’s 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 acknowledged.
Unsung America locates a common impulse to justice in the civil disobedience of over ninety thousand Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century. Chinese immigrants associated with the Chinese Six Companies organized in the late 1800s to oppose the forced registration of Chinese immigrants, predominantly called the “Dog Tag Law.” This massive Chinese American civil disobedience effectively crippled the efforts of the government to surveil and remove Chinese peoples from the United States en masse. We learn as well of the stories of immigrants like John Turner, Emma Goldman, Marcus Garvey, Harry Bridges, Carl Hill, and Prerna Lal (the author) who fought their own deportation cases and while doing so sought to advance their respective ideals of greater freedom in this country, ranging from anarchism to socialism to black economic independence to queer liberation.
These struggles for social, racial, and economic justice continue today in the twenty-first century work of certain immigrants who have organized to advance the proposition that there are millions of people who are Americans in all respects but legally. Lal recounts the stories of the courageous youth who have infiltrated detention centers to organize for the release of incarcerated people there and crashed the border to demand an end to inhumane border restrictionism. The abolitionist struggle for a new beginning in America reverberates as well, we learn, in the solidarities between contemporary movements for immigration justice and racial justice—the call for “Not One More Deportation” that accompanies the Movement for Black Lives demand to “End the War on Black People”; and the dreams of Therese Patricia Okoumou and others—that principles of liberty might one day be realized in a “homeland of the free” leading “all the children to be released.”
But how will America become America, how will it move from our vicious and inequitable present to a freer and more just future? Lal offers us the crucial beginnings of an answer by helping us to see and understand more deeply the common bonds that compose already an alternative assembly of peoples. We might think of Unsung America as the prehistory of how a better world may come to be. The collective struggles and individual stories Lal lifts up clarify the scope of what we must oppose together and ultimately what we must build. Unsung America will leave you transformed and inspired to build this world together.
This is not a book about heroes.
This is a book about courageous people who sometimes made mistakes. People in difficult situations that they often did not choose. People who decided to act despite grave risk and uncertainty. People who were not in the right place at the right time. Through their stories, they tell a history of exclusion, bravery, resilience, and perseverance.
This is a book about immigrant trailblazers. Some passed on after making rich contributions. Many are still alive and continue to battle on for their freedom. The trailblazers in this book are unsung and have been ignored in favor of a narrative that either portrays immigrants as heroes or as villains.
When I was first approached to write a book about awesome immigrants, I thought I was the wrong person for the task, though not because I don’t think immigrants are awesome. We definitely are.
Most of us speak multiple languages. We leave our homes and embark on dangerous journeys and come to America seeking freedom and opportunity. We have lost our homes and yet work to create new ones. We have introduced the world to some of their favorite foods—tacos and curry and adobo and kimchi and injera. We create jobs as entrepreneurs, clean homes and office buildings, care for the ill as doctors and nurses, and feed the country through our work in agriculture. We have amazing, complicated names that are hard to pronounce and actually mean something. We make this country the rich, vibrant, diverse, and multicultural place that it is.
A whole encyclopedia could be written about immigrant entrepreneurs or valedictorians. But I did not want to only profile successful immigrants, the ones who made it in the United States. I am tired of that narrative. I am exhausted from how many times I have been asked to play respectability politics, asked to propose a model minority narrative. I have learned the hard way that perfect grades, perfect resumes, and perfect behavior did not prevent us from being the target of legal, political, or immigration enforcement efforts to forcibly remove us from our homes.
After the end of the transatlantic slave trade, American and British industry leaders scoured the world for a cheap source of labor. The British found it in East Indians and brought 60,965 people, including my great-great-grandparents, to the islands of Fiji to work on sugar cane plantations as indentured servants. After indentured servitude ended forty years later, many Indians decided to stay. Although indenture had been brutal, they had lost all semblance of caste, acquired a new language, and built new lives in Fiji. It became home. When the British colonial experiment ended in 1970, the Indian and indigenous population struggled to live in harmony in a post-colonial era.
Fortunately, my grandparents and parents were not born into any kind of servitude, and they were able to build successful lives for themselves in an economy that promised upward mobility. Therefore, it came as a complete shock to my system when my father asked me to pack my bags for the United States in 1999. He had an urgency to move that I could not understand.
I was almost fifteen years old when we came to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spent the next decade of my life trying to make sense of where I was and why he had brought me here. Who leaves golden
