History

Chair: Henry Yu ([email protected]) Committee members: Barbara Posadas, Xiaojian Zhao Winners: At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882 1943 by Erika Lee Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History by Catherine Ceniza Choy Honorable Mentions: Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States 1848–82 by Najia Aarim-Heriot, American Workers, Colonial Power by Dorothy Fujita-Rony [End Page 222] Catherine Ceniza Choy's Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History is an original study that successfully reconceptualizes Asian American and Filipino American history through a broad, transnational approach to studying Flipina American nurses. By using sources in both the Philippines and the United States to trace the educational training and networks of migration of nurses from the Philippines to the United States, Choy has created a nuanced and theoretically sophisticated account that offers insights not only on the intersections of race, gender, class, and nation, but also on the legacies of U.S. empire on both the Philippines and the United States. Placing the mass migrations of Filipino nurses and medical technicians within the structures built by colonial power, Choy explains how these flows were not an arbitrary accident of history but the consequence and manifestation of U.S. empire. A richly researched, intelligent, and compelling study, Empire of Care is an exemplar of a truly transnational study that breaks new ground by being cognizant of the ongoing, unequal relationship between the United States and the Philippines, yet remains sensitive to the aspirations, experiences, and difficulties faced by Filipina nurses as they have practiced their profession in the United States. She brings the history of Filipina nurses alive with oral history interviews, providing a model for how archival sources and analyses of government policy can be powerfully engaged with methods such as oral history developed by Asian Americanists. Erika Lee's precise and thorough mining of a wide range of archival sources in At America's Gate: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 enables her to argue convincingly that the enactment and enforcement of Chinese exclusion altered United States immigration policy in a way that has been foundational until today. In doing so, she demonstrates the centrality of Asian American history to United States history. Although subjects such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its enforcement have been studied at length, Lee's superb achievement lies in her meticulous research and brilliant insights on the creation of new institutions and processes that controlled the border crossings of Chinese migrants and eventually transformed the movements of all migrants into the United States. From registration papers that tracked only Chinese bodies, through the mechanisms invented to control their migration, Lee's story traces how ubiquitous institutions in the lives of migrants today such as the INS and the Border Patrol had humble origins in the attempts to police Chinese migrants. Lee's poignant attention to the migrants themselves as they struggled to enter the United States despite discriminatory exclusion laws, adds an important corrective to previous scholarship that only focused on the enforcers and the law. In [End Page 223] particular, Lee's study of Chinese attempts to cross the Canada-U.S. border, and their subsequent switch to the Mexico-U.S. border after the U.S. federal government stepped up policing, shows how crucial the enforcement of anti-Chinese legislation was to the creation of modern border control regimes in the United States, and also how inventive the Chinese were in evading what they considered unfair exclusion. Wonderfully well written and persuasively argued, Lee's study shows how Asian American history has been a central strand of United States history rather than a marginal thread. Both Aarim-Heriot's and Fujita-Rony's books were singled out for honorable mention by the committee for their significant contributions to the field of Asian American history. Aarim-Heriot's study lucidly connects issues of race and immigration, persuasively connecting ideas and representations about black-white distinctions to

Ancient history · Asian americans · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Ethnic group · History of Asian Americans · Immigration · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy