Asian Americans in Dixie

Race and Migration in the South

Khyati Y. Joshi, Jigna Desai, Khyati Y. Joshi, Jigna Desai

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252095955
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black-white relations, this interdisciplinary collection explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South. Avoiding the usual focus on the East and West Coasts, several essays attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region, reintroducing the South within a historical web of global networks across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic. Contributors are Vivek Bald, Leslie Bow, Amy Brandzel, Daniel Bronstein, Jigna Desai, Jennifer Ho, Khyati Y. Joshi, ChangHwan Kim, Marguerite Nguyen, Purvi Shah, Arthur Sakamoto, Jasmine Tang, Isao Takei, and Roy Vu.

PART I

_________________________

Disrupting Race and Place

CHAPTER 1

Selling the East in the American South

Bengali Muslim Peddlers in New Orleans and Beyond, 1880–1920

Vivek Bald

Over the past two decades, while South Asian American Studies has begun to coalesce as a field, the broad historical narrative of South Asian immigration to the United States has changed little. Most of the work in the field has focused on the decades of migration and settlement that unfolded after passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act. This work was initially centered on the immediate beneficiaries of the 1965 Act—the doctors, engineers, and other professionals who arrived by the thousands over the course of the 1970s and ’80s. Since the mid-1990s, scholars have turned their attention to newer migrations from the subcontinent and to a “South Asian America” that is conceived much more broadly along differing lines of class, gender, religion, sexual orientation/identification, generation, and regional and national origin. Pre-1965 histories are only now becoming the focus of renewed interest and inquiry. For years, scholarship on this period has centered primarily on Punjabi migration, settlement, and activism on the North American West Coast in the two decades between 1904 and 1924. Work on the period follows the lives of Punjabi farm and mill workers in British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, and California; focuses on the expatriate nationalist politics of the San Francisco–based Ghadar Party; and charts both the violence and the lobbying efforts of anti-Asian citizen groups, labor leaders, and politicians on the West Coast that led up to the federal government’s barring of Indian immigration and naturalization. Scholars focusing on this period have produced crucial work, and newer research on the Ghadar Party and West Coast migration now promises to expand what we know and how we think about these histories.¹

However, another early history of South Asian migration to the United States, far from Pacific shores, has remained hidden, its traces scattered across a series of disparate archives for over a century. In the 1880s, Bengali Muslim peddlers began arriving in New York—passing through immigration at Castle Gardens on the Southern tip of Manhattan and then Ellis Island after its facilities opened in 1892. These men did not stay in New York, nor did they follow the patterns of migration that became common after 1965, to the cities of the North and Midwest. Instead, they headed for New Jersey’s beach boardwalk towns—Asbury Park, Atlantic City, Long Branch—and then turned southward to New Orleans, Charleston, and a series of other cities below the Mason-Dixon line. They came in small numbers at first, but many of the earliest arrivals married and settled within local communities of African descent, establishing a network that was firmly rooted in the U.S. South. Bengali peddlers not only moved throughout the region to a constellation of Southern cities, they traveled outward from New Orleans across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba, Belize, Honduras, and Panama. Their network expanded and flourished over the years that anti-Asian xenophobia grew to a fever pitch on the West Coast and Jim Crow was imposed in the South, and it continued to operate, albeit in different and diminished ways, even after Indian exclusion was formalized through the Asiatic Barred Zone provision of the 1917 Immigration Act.

Recovering the history of this peddler network enlarges the existing picture of early South Asian migration both geographically and conceptually. It challenges our understanding of when immigration from India to the United States began: which groups were migrating to the United States; where they were headed upon arrival in the United States; if, when, and where they were settling; and for what purposes. The choices that Bengali peddlers made and the paths they traveled prompt us to consider the importance of the Southern States in South Asian American historiography. Moreover, the lives they fashioned give us a glimpse of the interstices within which some South Asian migrants continued to work during the exclusion period. In the pages that follow, I explore the history and context of this forgotten migration. First, I consider the context in which Bengali peddlers were able to operate: a fashion for “Oriental” goods and entertainments that swept the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which fancies and fantasies of “India” took a central role. Then, I examine a series of archival sources—ships’ logs, marriage and birth records, Census enumerations, and local news items—to piece together the record of this peddler network, from its origins in West Bengal to the U.S. South and beyond. The documents reveal a history that is important for the same reason it has thus far remained invisible—because these migrants followed a different and unexpected path, one that diverged sharply from later, normative patterns of South Asian immigration to the United States. Most chose not to settle permanently, and those who did stay integrated into working-class African American communities.

Fancies of India

How was it that at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States—and at a time when Asian immigrants were being singled out by xenophobic politicians and citizens—a group of Muslim migrants from India was able to establish a peddler network that extended through New York, New Jersey, and New Orleans and across the U.S. South? The answer to this question lies in what the men were selling. At the most literal level, they were selling a range of compact and readily transportable “Oriental goods”: embroidered cotton, silk kerchiefs and tablecloths, small rugs, wall hangings.² Just as importantly, however, these men were selling ideas about, and access to, India and the East. They were selling the exotic. They were selling worldliness and cosmopolitanism to the working- and middle-class customers who bought their wares.³ The value of the peddlers’ wares stemmed from the cache of meanings and status that these goods provided, as a craze for “India” and “the East” overtook elites in New York and Chicago and then spread across geographic and class lines into the growing spaces of American mass consumption, tourism, and leisure that marked the end of the nineteenth century—beach boardwalks, resort towns, and traveling shows.

The fashion for “Oriental” goods and entertainments was not new. John Kuo Wei Tchen has argued that U.S. popular ideas about and attitudes toward China were in fact constitutive of the American national identity as it developed from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. American ideas about this Far Eastern “Orient” changed over the course of the period, however, progressing through a series of distinct phases as the U.S. relationship to Chinese commodities and labor shifted. In the late 1700s, during a phase of what Tchen terms “patrician Orientalism,” the possession of Chinese luxury goods such as porcelain and silk became a marker of social status for America’s newly independent “elite and striving elite” classes. The early to mid–nineteenth century saw a broader popularization of the trade in and desire for Chinese things, ideas, and people as U.S. consumer culture rapidly expanded. In this phase of “commercial Orientalism,” the middle and working classes joined elites in the clamor for Chinese goods and became the audience for circuses and exhibitions featuring Chinese performers and human “specimens.” Finally, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, American ideas about China and the Chinese had turned to “fear and loathing” as an increasingly established population of Chinese immigrant workers came to be regarded as an economic and cultural threat. In this phase of “political Orientalism,” Tchen writes, “Chinese laborers … became the center of a national political debate” and the target of xenophobia and racial violence.⁴

Period sources suggest, however, that while U.S. attitudes toward China and the Chinese turned xenophobic, the popular trade in the signs, cultures, and objects of “the Orient” showed no signs of abating. Instead, as the nineteenth century came to a close, American Orientalist desires seem to have shifted from China to “nearer” parts of the East; as the fascination with “the Orient” grew more widespread and commodified, India and the Middle East increasingly took center stage.⁵ In this case, the phases of “patrician” and “commercial” Orientalism were virtually simultaneous. At the turn of the century, the “patricians” of New York, Chicago, and other major U.S. cities were abuzz over new translations of the Rubaiyat—the verses of the seventeenth century Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Elite women tackled Khayyam’s work in their clubs and reading circles. The British composer Liza Lehman penned a musical version of the Rubaiyat that made the rounds of theaters and opera houses from New York to St. Louis, Missouri, while the choreographer Isadora Duncan performed her own dance “interpretation” of the poet’s work for the matrons of New York society.⁶ Performances, music, and imagery based on the Old Testament story of the dancer-temptress Salome became so popular in this period—from Broadway to burlesque halls to Black vaudeville—that the press started referring to the phenomenon of “Salomania.”⁷ Arab horsemen and acrobats, in the meantime, traveled with Barnum and Bailey’s, Forepaugh’s, and other U.S. circuses, passing from one small town to the next across the Midwest, South, and Southwest.

Images and ideas of “India” pervaded U.S. popular culture at this time. Southern growers marketed tobacco under brand names like Hindoo, Mogul, and Bengal with labels that depicted Maharajahs, hookahs, and dancing girls. Tin Pan Alley songwriters churned out show tunes, such as “My Hindoo Man,” “Down in Hindu Town,” and “Down in Bom-Bombay,” that middle-class Americans then sang to amuse themselves in the piano parlors of their homes. While Swami Vivekananda had first introduced Americans to the philosophy of the Hindu Vedas at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, Vedantism only grew in popularity after a handsome young colleague of Vivekananda, Swami Abhedananda, came to New York in 1897. Within weeks of his arrival, Abhedananda filled a meeting hall in Midtown Manhattan to capacity three times a week, and reports of his “sermons” circulated in newspapers across the country.⁸ The sexualized figure of the Indian “nautch” dancer became a staple of American burlesque in these years, and by 1906, the modern dancer Ruth St. Denis was performing in Indian nautch style on Broadway, bedecked with jewels and wrapped in a colorful silk sari.⁹ In 1904, the owners of Coney Island’s Luna Park turned fifteen acres of the park into a replica of the city of Delhi, filling its “temples,” market stalls, and “native homes” with three hundred Indian men, women, and children “imported” to Brooklyn for the summer season.¹⁰ By 1909, even the Wild West showmen “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Gordon “Pawnee Bill” Lillie joined in, touring a “Far East Show” across the U.S. Midwest and South that featured Arabian horsemen, a troupe of Sinhalese dancers, a “Hindu fakir,” and a “nautch dance ballet.”¹¹

The American desire for “Oriental goods” grew within this context, as “Eastern”-themed entertainments spread. As the nineteenth century came to a close, Victorian propriety and restraint were giving way to mass consumerism, while the United States became an increasingly far-reaching imperial power. In this moment, historian Kristin Hoganson has argued, “Oriental goods” came to convey a range of different meanings. For American men of this era, items like hookahs, animal skins, rugs, and weapons from “the Orient” became markers of an imperial white masculinity, their possession and display simultaneously conveying the conquest of far-off lands and conjuring the fantasy world of the Eastern harem.¹² Meanwhile, the consumption and display of Eastern fabrics, jewelry, decorative items, and interior furnishings became a means through which women of the era could stake a claim to cosmopolitanism, independence, self-definition, and ultimately, a liberated, post-Victorian sexuality.¹³ While the sale of oriental goods had once been limited to high-end department stores and suppliers, by the end of the century a broad array of importers and department stores provided such goods to the middle-class market. In New York, this included Macy’s, Lord and Taylor’s, and A. A. Vantine, a specialty retailer offering everything from rugs and silks to teas, coffees, dinner gongs, teak furniture, and perfumes with names such as “Java Lily,” and “Delhi Heliotrope.”¹⁴ Oriental goods also began to circulate, via peddlers and gift shops, within the spaces of middle- and working-class leisure and tourism.¹⁵

From Atlantic City to the Crescent City

The first mention of Bengali peddlers in the United States, dating from 1891, places them in just such a tourist site—in the New Jersey seaside resorts of Atlantic City and Asbury Park. At the turn of the twentieth century, these resorts drew hundreds of thousands of working people from Philadelphia and New York City. The resorts made their money by encouraging and catering to this group’s desire to regard itself as class-ascendant; as historian Charles Funnel puts it, “the values expressed in the resort’s entertainment were those of citizens vigorously striving for the good life which … they imagined the upper middle-class and rich to enjoy.”¹⁶ “Oriental” items such as silks, embroidered cloth, and small trinkets and curios were accessible and affordable markers of this good life, and the demand for them in Atlantic City and Asbury Park was significant enough that both resorts not only featured permanent “Oriental gift shops” along their boardwalks but became fertile ground for individual fancy goods peddlers from “the East.” By 1891, the number of Bengali peddlers in New Jersey was sufficient to warrant a mention hundreds of miles away; the Chicago Tribune published an item describing a population of “very interesting” “dark skinned Hindoo peddlers” who had, in its reporter’s words, come to “infest the seaside resorts of the Jersey coast in summer.”¹⁷

Shipping and census records confirm the presence of Bengali peddlers in New Jersey at this time, but they do not suggest that these men were settling in significant numbers in the area. The records point further south to New Orleans, Charleston, and elsewhere. Indeed, ships’ logs show that the Indian peddlers who entered the United States through the port of New York in the 1880s and ’90s came to follow a regular pattern tied to the seasonal movements of American tourists. A group of peddlers arrived from India once a year, in the early weeks of the summer resort season, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• “Honeysuckle, Georgia”
• Introduction: Discrepancies in Dixie: Asian Americans and the South
• Part I. Disrupting Race and Place
• Part II. Community Formation and Profiles
• Part III. Performing Race, Region, and Nation
• Contributors
• Index