Tag: immigration

River Valley Civilizations -> Digital Valley Civilizations

The History of the United States

I just finished listening to a Great Courses Lecture Series on American History. Over 48 hours of listening content aside, it meant I have been wondering and trying to piece together the deeper veins running through our history and why they are still relevant today.

Why is a leader still able to rouse such high levels of divisiveness around certain issues? Like immigration? I truly wanted to understand it.

I am no  political analyst. I am no historian. But even I know that immigration is an old wound. A scar tissue. A festering topic that never really leaves the American psyche. 

River Valley Civilizations to Digital Valley Civilizations

The strain of every bigoted immigration movement seems rooted in ‘Go-back-to-where-you-came-from’. This is an interesting perspective. Because if we go far back enough, that would mean all of humanity would still be clustering around the river valleys and deltas practicing agriculture with the annual flooding cycles.

The Egyptians eyeing the invading Greek with suspicion.

But here is the thing. We moved past that. We are no longer river-valley civilizations. We took to the open oceans. We found every nook and corner of land available for us to live on. We are now living in or moving towards digital valley civilizations.

We do not cluster around the primary vocation of those times – growing food. We cluster around the primary vocation of these times. Which is to earn livelihoods in increasingly complex domains using increasingly complex technologies. The prosperous have always attracted people from outside – whether as conquering hordes, or as people who simply were welcomed and came in to be assimilated.

So what seems to be the antidote?

Given this, two aspects occur to me. 

  1. Enable prosperity so high and peace so high in other parts of the world too, so that the immigrants who are flocking to America do not flock to America alone. This is harder, yes, but also the best path forward. It is what happened with the rise of the computer industry in countries like India and China. #EnableProsperity #EnablePeace.
  2. Immigrant workers have usually (willingly or otherwise) answered a call from America itself when human-power was limited. The Golden Triangle all those centuries ago, meant that America sought slave-labor from Africa and forcibly bought them to the United States to help with their cash crops and raising their families. When the railways needed building, America sought to bring in Chinese workers to do the work. When technical jobs needed doing, America legislated to have tech workers come in.
    So, the solution seems to be to raise the skillsets of what we need in our next generation. Prioritize science education, encourage research. Not the opposite. #EnableScience #EnableResearch

America took its time getting here to be the melting pot of civilizations. It has always dealt with changing demographics, but has also proved to be be best model for assimilation in the world. So why this turbulence?

What do you think? What are some of the solutions you can think of?

Enchanted Air

I read Enchanted Air by Margarita Engle, expecting to read a good memoir about two cultures and two wings one grows as a result of hailing from mixed origins. What instead happened is difficult to describe in words for it was not a reading, it was a feeling. A transformative one. 

It is a children’s book. Each chapter is a small poem that stands in and of itself, but also ties into the whole narrative. There were so many places in the book when I found myself stopping to savor a poem, reading it again, and swirling the feelings it evoked in my mind. Later, I found myself passionately explaining it in far less elegant terms to the husband and children, scurrying to get the book, and fumbling through the pages to find the right poem.

For instance when she writes of ‘The Dancing Plants of Cuba’, she captures the essence of an island: 

In California, all the trees and shrubs

standstill, but on the island, coconut palms

and angel’s trumpet flowers,

love to move around,

dancing.

..

Maybe I will be a scientist someday

studying the dancing plants of Cuba.

Dancing Plants

How can one not love the child then who is later to task by her teacher for inventing dancing plants, as plants are supposed to stay still aren’t they?

Her father’s family escaped from Ukraine, from a communist regime, not knowing whether those left behind survived or not. Her mother immigrated from Cuba.

Two countries

Two families

Two sets of words.

Her paternal grandparents’ recollections are therefore muted, brief and vague. How starkly, concisely, she sums up the human condition for survival? When she asks her Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma about her childhood, she gets nothing more than ice-skating on a frozen pond. 

Her maternal grandmother, on the other hand, regales her with richly detailed family stories, of many island ancestors, living their lives out on tropical farms.

In the poem, Kinship, she sums it up:

Apparently, the length 

of a grown-up’s

growing up story

is determined

by the difference

between immigration 

and escape.

This memoir is rich with details of her family, and her own dreamy self. 

She takes us along with her on her journey of growing up, and how her personality rows with ‘The Geography of Libraries’.

Spoken stories are no longer enough

To fill my hunger

I crave a constant supply 

Of written ones too.

As she grows, the mistrust between USA and Cuba, grows too. Their family is suspect simply for holding a Cuban passport, a part of her heritage cut off by souring diplomatic relations and the Bay of Pigs invasion. She first writes about the state of reality in the poem, Communications.

Abuelita writes letters in code,

inventing poetic metaphors,

to prevent the island’s censors

from understanding her words.

When she says Tio Dario 

is working hard in the garden,

Mom somehow knows that it means 

he’s been arrested and sent to a prison or forced labor camp.

In Secret Languages we learn

Right wing or left wing tyrants always

try to control communication

They always

fail.

The books ends with the poem, Hope.

It is no wonder that the book has won a string of awards. Looking at the history of the world, its themes are timeless too.