LOSS AND RECUPERATION OF IMMIGRANT IDENTITY

Ethnic Vision: A Romanian American Experience. By Joanne Bock. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997. xxiii + 317 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. $49.95.

Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Culture. By Richard Teleky. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997; Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997. xv + 217 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. $18.95.

Alpana Sharma-Knippling
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The notion that there is such an identifiable thing as "the immigrant experience," while it is convenient and well intentioned, is nonetheless misplaced. Immigrants come in all forms and colors, carrying with them luggage of different shapes and sizes: both the bulky, overfull suitcases of their national histories and the small, tightly packed carry-on baggage of their intimate, personal histories. Too, we must remind ourselves of the irrevocable aspect of one's skin color and the ways in which race has relentlessly marked the fact of its existence over and over in the history of United States immigration (even as race as a category, about which we can say or presume to know anything, has simultaneously emerged out of this very history). I am thinking, of course, of the discriminatory, often overtly anti-miscegenetic laws, which withheld from Asians the benefits of immigration and American citizenship: the Naturalization Law of 1790 (reserving naturalized citizenship exclusively for "whites," in effect until 1952); the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; the 1922 Cable Act (taking citizenship away from American women who married aliens ineligible for citizenship); the National Origins Act of 1924 (prohibiting the admission of nearly any Japanese and preventing the formation of many Asian American families by withholding entry from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian wives of United States citizens), etc. By virtue of their bodied difference, Asians have had to wear what Robert E. Park so aptly termed "a racial uniform": it is forever donned and simply cannot be taken off and it has for all time withheld from them the possibility of "passing," which is precisely the option available to—and at times availed of—by immigrants from western, central, and eastern Europe.