JAEH Archive / Vol. 38, No. 4, Summer 2019

Journal of American Ethnic History
Vol. 38, No. 4, Summer 2019
Special issueMulti-ethnic Immigration and the US South
Table of Contents
ARTICLES
By: Sarah McNamara
Abstract
This article examines the intersections of gender, labor, and political organizing in Tampa and Ybor City, Florida from 1935 to 1937. By following the personal and professional evolution of labor leader Luisa Moreno in the US South, this article explores the reciprocal relationship between Latina tobacco workers and Moreno’s approach to labor unionism and political mobilization. While Moreno arrived in Tampa prepared to unite workers across ideological and physical barriers, what she encountered was a borderland, a space where multiple groups asserted ultimate authority over place and people. Although the laws and legislation of the US government applied to those living in the city, their regulation depended on the actions of people who lived in the region and independently competed for influence and power. As a result of ethnic and racial boundaries in the city (not only between Anglos and people of color, but also between Latina/o and African American communities), Moreno adapted her strategy of traditional class-based unionism to the realities of this borderland and adopted a Latina-centric approach to labor organizing that joined international radicalism and grassroots interests to challenge the control of de jure and de facto Jim Crow exclusions.
By: Yuri W. Doolan
Abstract
Military prostitution has been a staple of US–Korea relations since the 1940s, contained in the so-called camptown communities surrounding US military bases in South Korea. But during the 1970s, as the US military steadily reduced its troop presence in Asia, camptowns were thrown into a chaotic state. Facing tremendous social disorder and economic upheaval, establishments that depended upon GI patronage began sending their madams and sex workers to domestic military sites through brokered marriages with US servicemen. These women arrived in the US South, a region housing the vast majority of America’s military. Consequently, southern bases like Fort Bragg in Fayetteville (NC), Fort Campbell in Clarksville (TN), and Fort Hood in Killeen (TX) saw the proliferation of military prostitution, which took form in illicit massage businesses catering to the sexual needs of local troop populations. By the 1980s, the Korean American sex trade would spread from these southern military towns to elsewhere in the United States. Highlighting the transpacific circuits among camptowns in South Korea and military bases in the United States since 1945, this article develops a portrait of the US South as a transnational militarized terrain, the camptown as a transpacific phenomenon, and Korean immigrant community formation as deeply intertwined with the happenings of US militarism abroad. In doing so, it explains how the proliferation of illicit massage businesses witnessed by southern military communities in the 1970s was a transnational outgrowth of military prostitution encouraged by the US military in South Korea.
By: Uzma Quraishi
Abstract
Highly educated Indian and Pakistani immigrants arrived in boomtown Houston in the 1960s and 1970s, readily securing employment as engineers or other white-collar professionals. At the same time, they faced racism in housing, the workplace, university campuses, and restaurants. Asians were “conditionally included”—that is, accepted for their economic value but often, socially outcast. The racial calculations made by Indian and Pakistani immigrants in a rapidly internationalizing city were fraught with contradictions. They sought places and spaces where they felt tolerated, even if not completely welcomed into the fold. At the same time, they wielded their class status and ethnicity as tools by which they could both distance themselves from other racialized minorities and attempt to bypass their own racialization altogether. The experiences of immigrants of color reveals the racial architecture–-that is, those norms that upheld the structure of white privilege–-of a changing American South.
By: Cecilia Márquez and Perla M. Guerrero
REVIEWS
By: Hajer Al-Faham
By: Laura D. Gutiérrez
By: Brenden W. Rensink
By: Patricia Kelleher
By: Robert F. Zeidel
By: William B. Kurtz
By: Sandra I. Enríquez
By: Michael K. Brown
By: Melissa Ziobro
By: Eliga H. Gould
By: Yukari Takai
By: Rubén G. Mendoza
By: Adam Chill
By: Amy M. Tyson
By: Hannah Noel