Posts from — August 2010

“There were no places like this when we started,” said Margie Struble, of San Jose, who has been a volunteer and guiding force at Sisterspirit for 24 of the 26 years it’s been open. “Many people met their partners here.”

But now, after a quarter of a century, Sisterspirit will be closing its doors for good, another victim of online sales and mainstream bookstores.

Founded in 1984 as a collective by four women who dreamed of a more involved women’s community in the South Bay, Sisterspirit quickly developed a core group of supporters and at one time had 40 volunteers. For the first two years, the founding mothers arranged “coffee houses” in other locations. Then, the bookstore became a physical reality when it rented a large space in the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center. Just over a year ago, the center received a grant for a youth group and Sisterspirit was asked to move upstairs to a space barely 200 square feet, a move Struble saw as the beginning of the end.

via Story continues at San Jose Mercury News.

New book forthcoming by Erika Lee and Judy Yung.  Dr. Yung is scheduled to talk about her work on the book October 5 at 6 pm at SJSU King Library. Flyer here:  www.sjsu.edu/faculty/kathryn.blackmerreyes/AngelIsland.pdf

The immigration station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, in use from 1910 to 1940, has often been called the Ellis Island  of the West. But to what extent is the Pacific gateway a junior version of the storied immigration station that sits next to the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor?

If Ellis Island remains the iconic symbol of American immigration, Angel Island represents a more complete history of America’s diverse origins and the government’s diverse policies that welcomed some and excluded others.

That fascinating history is the subject of “Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America,” by historians Erika Lee and Judy Yung, both descendants of Angel Island immigrants, and published on the occasion of the station’s 100th anniversary. Lee and Yung offer a kaleidoscope of immigrant portraits that bring history alive, and, in the process, demolish many myths and stereotypes about Angel Island and American immigration in general.
Readers who already know that Angel Island differed from Ellis Island because the former was built to process Chinese immigrants and the latter for Europeans will be surprised to learn that non-Asians comprised fully one-third of those seeking entry through Angel Island before the 1920s.

According to the authors’ research, about 1 million people passed through the Angel Island station: foreigners and citizens, arrivals and departures, immigrants and deportees. “Angel Island” tells the stories of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and South Asians, as well as Mexicans, Russians, European Jews and Filipinos who were processed through the station. Their stories testify to the great diversity of American immigration.

Story continues at SFGate

As California educators wait anxiously to hear whether the state will be awarded funds from the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition today, the nation’s leading civil rights organizations have attacked the race for funds as undermining the civil rights of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged children.

So far, California has lost out in two contests for education stimulus funds, as I have noted in previous blog posts.

In a highly critical broadside [PDF] issued last month against many aspects of the Obama administration’s education agenda, seven civil rights groups, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, singled out the Race to the Top competition for its fiercest criticism:

If education is a civil right, children in “winning” states should not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn to learn in high quality environments. Such an approach reinstates the antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal support to states that civil rights organizations fought to remove in 1965.

Story continues here

As the proud granddaughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, nothing disheartens me more than the current wave of anti-immigrant hysteria.  I find very heartening, on the other hand, this article by economist Masao Suzuki discussing how current anti-immigrant legislation crosses racial and ethnic lines.

These anti-immigrant forces try to argue that undocumented immigrants today are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. This is the same argument that the anti-Chinese movement used 100 ago years to try to strip Wong Kim Ark of his birthright citizenship, saying that Chinese immigrants, who were banned from naturalizing by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But the 1898 U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument, pointing out that the only exceptions are children of diplomats (who are immune from U.S. law) and the children of a hostile occupation force in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark extended fundamental civil rights won by African Americans to Asian Americans. Later this case was cited in the 1982 Plyler v. Doe U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas state law that tried to exclude unauthorized Mexican immigrant children from public schools.

This move by anti-immigrant forces to target native-born Americans shows that this movement is not about the legality of immigrants. The anti-immigrant movement is a right-wing movement that is all about stripping away the right to go to public schools and to be citizens. These rights were won by African Americans through struggle – like the Civil War – and later extended to Asian Americans and Latinos.

See full article:  Anti-Immigrant Movement to Target Native Born