In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

today I am thinking about: MIGRATORY CONSENT

Ariel

My grandparent (my granddad) and great-grandparents came to America in the 1910s and 1920s. They all came from parts of Russia and the Ukraine, as far as I know. They left because there were better opportunities in America; they left because things weren’t great for the Jews. They probably had some choice in the matter, but staying wasn’t great. They came here, and they made lives for themselves, and they made lives that were pretty good. Pretty much everyone in my family has been given all the advantages of a middle class upbringing, even if they haven’t always maintained the cash capital side of the equation.

Ever since Renee’s post about the slave door, I have been thinking about the difference between consensual and nonconsensual immigration. I have been thinking about what it means that my relatives had at least some choice in the matter when they came here; many people’s didn’t. I am thinking about what it means that even within the immigrant narrative, my family is not all “poor extrovert with ambition and no resources comes to America and makes good.” My people, generally speaking, had some money, and they had some class privilege. My grandfathers both went to some higher education — my dad’s dad to the Rolla School of Mines (he took over his father’s scrapyard) and my mom’s dad to college, to get a degree in chemistry. One of my great-grandmas was a dentist, even as a Jewish woman, which speaks to her fortitude but also her access to privilege and resources. My grandparents all grew up speaking English as well as Yiddish and probably Russian as well; none of them have accents to speak of.

I am no immigrant theorist, though; I’m not nearly well-read enough and I don’t have much personal experience. But I am an internet mapmaker, and an artist with a deep nerd for technology, and so I want us to make another map together. The first one was amazing. This one is a little more challenging material.

Here’s your task:

  1. Go to the Google Map below.
  2. Put on three points, with approximate dates of arrival if you have them:
    • Where you call home.
    • Where your parents call(ed) home.
    • Where your “people” are originally from.
  3. Connect them with lines:
    • Green if the move was consensual (ie, “I want to live here! Here I come, even if it’s hard or not fully my own choice for personal reasons!”);
    • Yellow if the move was not forced, but not fully consensual (ie, “I probably would not have made this move aside from very urgent personal or political need, but I did have SOME choice”);
    • Red if the move was nonconsensual (ie, “This move was made because I was either forced to leave or staying was completely and definitively unviable.”)
  4. Tell the story on the point about you — the most current point. (This is for clutter’s sake.)


    5. View Feministe: Migratory Consent in a larger map

    So, for example: I call New York home. A green line connects me to Seattle, where my parents call home. A yellow line connects them to Russia; my people came to America more or less freely, but under the pressure of Jewish persecution.

    I am not strict about rules here, folks; the map should meet your needs, not force you into a box that you don’t fit into. I know that a lot of us come from more than one place — my friend who is half-Argentinian, half-German; my other friend whose parents call two different places home; my friend who is from so many places that I imagine this map will stress her out even thinking about it. It is okay to make paths that diverge and come together, or put more than three points down, if that is what you need to make your map make sense. My story is pretty simple, all things considered, and I want us to make a map that shows and celebrates all of our complications, rather than one that tries to shoehorn us in. Where your parents call home may not be where they live. Where you call home may not be where you live. You may not know where your people are from. This is a structure; do what you need to do to make it work.

    I am also not going to argue about the color of line you use, and I ask that nobody else does either. There are different degrees of consent and nonconsent, and I can anticipate that some people’s “red” is going to be much more personal and less political than other people’s. For the purposes of this, THAT IS OKAY. Or rather, I should say, that’s okay by me and I leave it to everyone else to decide if it is okay by them.

    My ultimate goal with this is to animate it and turn it into some sort of moving story show. I am not yet sure how that is going to happen — Miss Sugardish, my head advisor, clued me into some interesting GIS/map animation software that might make this much faster than the stop-motion frame-painting I was anticipating. I do not think this will be done before I am done guest blogging, and I will post the project, but please only put stories here that you are comfortable having shared elsewhere in some form. I will give credit where credit is due, of course, and if by some bizarro possibility any money ever came to me (the odds of which are ridiculously low, but I know there is concern about who benefits from projects like this) I would donate it, although I am not sure to where. (Critical Resistance? People’s Justice? Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System Collective? Other ideas?)

    A final note: I am travelling over the next few days, visiting my grandma. Moderation and tech support will be slower. I’ve asked some of the other Feministe folks to keep an eye on the queue, and if you are having technical trouble or want to request an anonymous login please EMAIL ME at interestingtwice AT gmail d0t communism so that I can get back to you quickly.

24 thoughts on today I am thinking about: MIGRATORY CONSENT

  1. Pingback: today i am thinking about: MIGRATORY CONSENT « things to think about

  2. It was difficult! I chose my family’s first migrations to the U.S. And my parents’ childhood homes, as well as my homes, are many more than that. It really made me think- do most people live in one place for their whole childhood? I think I have military brat bias. šŸ˜‰

  3. I put on my points. I don’t really have “people” so I skipped them.

    I know a bit about my maternal grandmother’s genealogy, although I do not know when or under what circumstances the family made the big move to the US. Even that’s only 1/4 of my ancestry, the rest is unknown to me. I feel no strong affiliation to any culture or region besides the one I live (and have always lived) in.

  4. After much wrangling with the line/point system, I added a rather truncated version of my family’s history, omitting anything before my grandparents for lack of concrete geographical information. On my father’s side, I have ancestors who were Tatars and ancestors who were forcibly converted to Christianity after the Ottoman Empire was pushed out of the former Yugoslavia, but understandably we don’t have much information on either of these branches of the family – similarly, my mother’s side of the family has Turkish origins, but far enough back so that we have no idea where in Turkey they were from, so I didn’t think it warranted a point. Hopefully it adds something to this discussion!

  5. The interface confused me mightily, and I can’t get the lines to work.

    Mine would do an interesting full circle. Much of my family is Irish, my father’s father’s family specifically Northern Irish. I don’t know how consensual or not the moving of my great-grandparents was. I imagine it was likely a search for economic opportunities. Three of my grandparents were born in Canada, the fourth in the States. I was born on the West Coast of Canada, moved across Canada, moved to the states, and am now living in Northern Ireland. Again for economic opportunity. My personal international moves have certainly not been coerced.

  6. I didn’t really put in anything about my father’s family. They never could decide on where they were actually ‘from’. One story had them coming from Ireland in the early 20th century, another had them coming over from Britain in the early 18th century, and host of other stories named at least a dozen other points of origin. Even his parents wouldn’t name a real ‘home’ or lineage that didn’t change almost hourly. So I’m leaving them out.

    I know my maternal history fairly well though. I was raised on stories of the ‘old country’ and the trials and tribulations of an Irish Immigrant in NY in the early 1900s, so that’s who is on the map.

  7. I didn’t understand how I was to obtain the tools, i.e. virtual push pins to mark my spot.

    But, here is my story: My people, as history goes, came from Africa, and were sold into slavery, in South Carolina. So, the ancestral family compound is in South Carolina. My parents migrated to CT in the early 1960s, were by brother and I were born, raised, and currently reside.

  8. Your distinction between consensual and nonconsensual immigration is interesting. I am also Jewish, and my “people” are from Russia/Eastern Europe and came in the late 1800s, early 1900s. But I have noticed differences and fault lines in the Jewish community between those whose families fled the pogroms (who I would consider green/yellow liners, depending) and those who escaped the Holocaust (who I would put as red, though depending on personal experience they might potentially be yellow). I had always chalked up those differences to the traumatic nature of the Holocaust, but the pogroms were traumatic too, and perhaps the forced immigration, with its attendant lack of choice and lack of the ability to save/control/deploy resources is itself a significant facet of the trauma experienced by those families.

  9. My family history is so scattered, I can’t claim to have a “people” as such – there’s a certain tribalism to my identification with Yorkshire as a home, but unfortunately I do not feel a strong affinity for some of the people there. There is still a significant element of racism involved and I can’t feel strong ties to that!

    My great grandmother on my father’s side was an Irish tinker, and she married a Romany. Their son married a true Yorkshirewoman and that is where my personal “ethnic identity” comes from. The son from this union is my father.

    On my mother’s side, I know that there is also a lot of Irish blood in the family tree. The other roots are less well-known to me, but there’s all sorts of intricacies there too, I believe.

    I stuck with the stories that I know well and that directly relate to my personal identity – my father’s place of origin, and my parents’ economic migration.

  10. >>My grandparents all grew up speaking English as well as Yiddish and probably Russian as well; none of them have accents to speak of.

    I think you mean to say that your family have US accents. My sister didn’t know until she was nineteen that people from the US, where we live, have accents at all, because we are the invisible standard.

  11. My ancestry makes the google map completely ridiculous and probably a project of several hours. Everyone is from somewhere different. But recently I happened to pick up a copy of The Jungle, and I realized that my great-grandfather was an immigrant to Chicago during the time the book takes place.

    I’m not sure if he was a child worker in the stockyards (he came alone at the age of 8 or 9 to live with distant relatives who had emigrated a couple years before*), but reading the book with an eye to what poor unskilled immigrants in that setting faced, I start to wonder at the difference between self-determined and forced immigration. Looking at the situation of someone who “chose” to emigrate to Chicago from Scandinavia at the turn of the 20th century and comparing it to my Cajun ancestors who were forced into exile during the 18th century, it seems to equal out in the end.

    The best my great-grandfather could hope for was escaping the city to become an impoverished dirt farmer living in a one-room shack the size of a mid-sized SUV. Which is not unlike the life he would have left behind in Sweden, anyway. Some people made good. Some people didn’t. Whether you were forced to emigrate or chose to doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor.

    *Which I suppose might put him in the “forced” category, since I’d guess that he was sent out of need (did his parents die? too many mouths to feed?). I mean, who sends their 8 year old on a six-month intercontinental trip to live with distant relatives, with no hope of ever seeing the kid again?

  12. I think I have the opposite problem of people who find their history too scattered for the map. Mine is too localised. My people have been more or less in the same area of North America for several thousand years. While my family hasn’t been non-consensual immigrants themselves (save for my grandmother’s family moving for work during the Great Depression), I’d say we’re irrevocably shaped by being on the receiving end of other people’s consensual migration (read: invasion).

  13. A very interesting project. From my own family history, I know that gender played a big role in how consensual migration was. My great-grandmother (Sephardic Jew from Turkey) was orphaned at a young age and grew up with many older brothers and sisters. Her brothers were friends with my great-grandfather. When my great-grandfather planned to immigrate to the U.S. (to escape poverty, I believe), her brothers offered him one of their sisters as a wife. He chose my great-grandmother because he thought she was the most beautiful. And so she was forced to immigrate to a new country and marry a man who she barely knew. So if I were to make this map, I would have to make two separate lines from Turkey, one yellow for my great-grandfather and one red for my great-grandmother. Yet the official records list them both as “immigrants.”

  14. But I have noticed differences and fault lines in the Jewish community between those whose families fled the pogroms (who I would consider green/yellow liners, depending) and those who escaped the Holocaust (who I would put as red, though depending on personal experience they might potentially be yellow).

    My great-great-grandfather was from a middle class Jewish family in Lithuania. He was drafted into the Russian Army. That meant 20 years of service and either converting to the Orthodox Church or being brutally tortured and killed sometime in the early years of his service. The family pooled its resources and bribed the right people and got him out of the country. I suppose, technically, he could have stayed and taken his chances. If the family had fewer resources, he would have had no choice but to go that route. But it might very well have been the end of him. I have a hard time not seeing him as a red-liner, even though he left 40 years before the Holocaust.

  15. Interesting question. But I think it’s worth unpacking what “some choice” really means. My paternal grandparents left their town in what was then Poland because they felt unsafe. They could have stayed. Most of their family did. Of course, those that stayed, died. So, choice? Or no choice? My parents left the Soviet Union. By the time they left, they had no choice–a few years as dissidents denied the right to leave meant that when they were allowed to go, they could go West or to go East (that is, to the labor camps). They made the choice to want to leave, but by the time they left, it wasn’t as though they could easily change their minds. And they took me with them. I was a kid. Did I come by choice, or not?

    These are, of course, rhetorical questions, and my point is that very few moves are really a matter of free choice, and it’s a sign of remarkable privilege when you can move or stay and be reasonably confident of a decent life either way.

    For what it’s worth, this discussion also plays into one of the problems with enforcing laws against trafficking of people. The person who is kidnapped and forcibly moved to a foreign country to do some sort of work is the easy case. The person who seeks opportunity and agrees to travel, only to find themself in a state of indentured servitude on arrival, is legally still a trafficked person in most countries, but far more likely to be treated simply as an illegal alien by law enforcement in many of the same countries. Their “choice” is what dooms them.

  16. another whole aspect of the eastern european jewish migration that gets little attention is the ‘push’ factors within jewish communities, in the shtetl in particular. these were communities under very very rigid control for several hundred years by a combined economic and religious elite – the wealthy, who picked the rabbis, whose religious authority was the basis of enforcing a deeply oppressive social system. this elite – what in yiddish is called the “laytn” – was often actively aligned with the (also oppressive) state surrounding them, and at best acted as a relatively benevolent subcontractor for it in everything from tax-collection to kidnapping young men into the army.

    sure, the pogroms were a factor in emigration, in the years immediately following 1881 and 1903 in particular. and certainly WWI was an even bigger one. but the main force behind the massive migration to the cities (especially those with a reputation for freedom of thought and culture, like varshe/warsaw, tshernovits/czernowitz/chernivtsi and odes/odessa) and later our of eastern europe entirely, was escape from the rule of the laytn and rabbis. this is what’s behind the large number of yiddish songs praising romania (“rumenye, rumenye” being only the most famous) – austro-hungarian romania (and romanian-speaking czarist bessarabia, now moldova) had less powerful rabbinates, and were seen as a center of freedom in eastern european jewish culture.

    less noted in song, though, is the coercion involved in migration off the shtetl: often, folks who dissented were driven out, or given no alternative but to leave. in my family, for instance, the only way to get out of an arranged marriage that went wrong was to leave the country. which is how my great-grandmother wound up in new york.

  17. What a great post! I think about this all the time, but I’ve never been able to put it into words like this. My grandparents fled Europe as children in a desperate, (and successful) “red line” attempt to escape the Nazis — it permanently traumatized them (in addition to what they saw and experienced on the way, of course). When they came from Israel to the US when my mom was a child, it was a “yellow line” move: they certainly had some choice, but I don’t think they exactly wanted to and they did if for job reasons. My mom’s immigration trauma is much less than her parents’, but still real. And I’m carrying around the confusion and alienation that happens in families when each generation is born in a different place, with a different mothertongue. I’m very much hoping the same disconnect won’t happen between me and my future kids.

    I’m not sure how to put myself on the map, because there are so many places and journeys, and I could go back hundreds of years. But I’ll try.

  18. Interesting question. I guess my ancestors had various degrees of consent. One set of great-grandparents came to the US with their 10-year-old daughter after two of their sons were killed in a pogrom. I guess that’s a yellow line? Then I’ve got other ancestors on that side of the family who came to the US between 1888 and 1910 from Russia (well, the towns they were from are now part of Poland, but were then part of Russia). I don’t really know much about why they came, but from the bits of information I do know, I’d probably put them as a green line, pending learning more about them. Then on my dad’s side of the family, my grandfather is definitely a red line — he’s a concentration camp survivor. My grandmother is probably a red line, too, though her family did make the decision to leave Germany — it was 1938, and they were lucky enough to have a very rich and powerful relative in the US who could get them through all the immigration hoops.

  19. And Iā€™m carrying around the confusion and alienation that happens in families when each generation is born in a different place, with a different mothertongue.

    Oooh, interesting thought. I just realized that, following my father’s paternal line, my sister and I are the first in three generations to be born in the same country where even one parent was born. (Well, I guess that gets a little iffy when you’re trying to define countries around the Austro-Hungarian Empire — does Vienna count as a different country than a town that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the people in question were born there, but was part of Poland when their child was born in Vienna?)

  20. I guess I am also too localized…being that half of my family is Native (Chippewa/Ojibwe however you want to call it) and have all lived in mostly the same place, and on the other side my grandparents immigrant parents (grandpa is Italian, grandma is Dutch) settled in Sault Sainte Marie and have stayed there as long as anyone can remember.

    I am about the only person who has left home, having joined the Navy, except my maternal grandfather who was also in the Army, but is back home now.

  21. Wow, do most people know where their ancestors are actually from? (I don’t mean vague guesses but actual areas, down to the country or even city) Or only those who are into genealogy and tracing the family tree?

    Heck, I don’t even know where my grandparents were from, what to say of any ancestors before them. I only know where my grandparents lived when I was a child (only one set of grandparents were alive) but have no idea where they were born or grew up. In retrospect I think I never cared about family stories like this due to a highly dysfunctional family (“must… distance… myself…”).

    Also, to repeat what several others have mentioned, my family moved around a lot when we were kids. Even my mother (now 75) moved around when she was a child even though that was apparently less common than it is now.

    I’ve never felt very attached to a place (eg, “home”) until after I was an adult and I chose where I wanted to live. Of course, my choice was constrained by being able to get a job there. I looked for a job and the place to live came out of that search, not the other way around. But I’m very happy with how things turned out.

    Anyway, good luck with the map. I hope you find contributors who know more about their family background.

  22. Huh. I’ve just had the “honor” of putting only the third red line on the map, to mark my mum’s paternal family’s flight to Canada during the American War of Revolution. They were Loyalists; I suppose they could have stayed, but they would have needed to either change sides or face some serious danger.

    (Also, I think it’s a little hilarious how obvious it is that I’ve been told the story by my Canadian relatives– according to my American schools, it was the War of Independence, and my ancestors were Tories (said with scorn), or at best, Royalists.)

    The whole story, as I attached it to my little “eloriane” marker:

    Even my dad doesn’t know much about his side of the family, so this is all about my mum.

    On my mum’s maternal side, her family came from Scotland to Canada in the 1880s. “I don’t know why, better opportunities, I guess,” was all she could say. I suspect it was probably mostly consensual. They ended up in an extremely Scots-dominated area where the men were priests for several generations.

    On her paternal side, her family is English all the way back. They came to America a loooong time ago, before it was America, probably mostly consensually again, and mixed a bit with some “Pennsylvania Dutch” (that is, Germans, “Deutsch”) about whom I can’t even speculate, but then in the American War of Revolution, they fled to Canada out of political necessity, since they were still loyal to the Crown.

    My mum met my dad at university in Canada, where they got married. They came to America in the 1980s to get PhDs in computer science. I don’t think they would have immigrated if they had been able to study in Canada instead, but since they could simply have chosen to study something else in Canada (or not study at all), the move was really a consensual one.

    They moved within the states several times as well– from North Carolina, where they studied, to Massachusetts, where I was born, to Kansas, where I grew up, to Arkansas, where they live now, but it was always in pursuit of a better job, not out of necessity.

    I’m at school in NC now but my “home” is still Kansas, which is why I placed my marker there.

  23. Pingback: Ariel inspires: migratory consent and the definition of “home” « Natalia Antonova

  24. Google hates me, so I’m just going to post.

    My adoptive father’s father is from Tennessee. I consider Tennessee to be where they are from, despite the fact my father grew up in Illinois.

    My mother’s parents grew up in Illinois, but they’re about two generations out from the deep south–Southern influences in speech, diet, and other little cultural markers are very strong in my family, although its been diluted by Midwestern culture.

    My mother’s family descends from the indentured servant Irish, almost-slaves that were eventually freed after a certain amount of years.

    My father’s family are Scotsmen, who came for gold and exploitation.

    I consider my home to be central Illinois, no particular town, but I lived in Arizona for six years as a kid and can’t wait to move back there.

Comments are currently closed.