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dagas_isaSo it seems like it's between this and the WTF museology (which will probably be a couple posts, as Random Collections Factoids could be a cool post in and of itself) for the meme. The neat thing was that I found out that my Aunt Bird is actually very good with remembering things, and so I ended up having a lot more family history facts than I thought I would.
When I refer to my family as ‘invisible immigrants’, I’m relating to a very specific line and members in my family. They are my Nan (grandmother), my mother, my Aunt Bird, and my Uncle Mike, plus my cousins and I who are the second-generation immigrants. This is not my complete lineage, which would include both the histories of my biological father (whom I don’t remember) and my stepfather (who is my “Dad”), but this is the “known quantity” in my background and the one that I’ve been raised to identify with.
Also, to speak of the elephant in the room ahead of time: What makes us invisible, both in the sense of passing for USians and receiving the associated privileges and in the sense that my family’s immigration story is getting erased even from our own history is the fact that we 1) are white, 2) come from a “first world” country (England), and 3) speak English as our native language, and while Nan had a British accent (I’m told, she sounded like Nan to me) my mother, aunt, and uncle did not. *
In fact, until I posted a question to my Aunt Bird on Facebook, I wasn’t sure when, how, or why my family came to the U.S. But now I know because she remembers, even if my mom doesn't. The when was 1976. My mother, the oldest, would have been 13, Aunt Bird 10, and Uncle Mike either 8 or 9. The how was by plane, landing in Chicago and then moving to Southern Illinois so Nan’s then husband could attend SIU, which is where my family mostly settled, until my mother and I moved up to the Chicago suburbs. The why, which seems to follow from the how, is that my Nan married an American man who was stationed at a nearby Airforce Base. Yeah, that all came from Facebook today. So, I’m not sure that counts as being part of my consciousness growing up.
Nothing about this is immortalized in oral history or used as an example in a museum. I didn’t really understand that my family didn’t go through Ellis Island, even though the history books and stories told us that that’s where the (European) immigration happened. I really didn’t identify with U.S. history too much either, since no one in my family that I knew was a part of it, so there was no sense of learning about my (individual) ancestors when discussing our (mostly-white classroom group) heritage. Nor did we really speak of England itself, or them coming over to the United States very much. A lot of the family discourse related to our background was about the quality of being “English,” rather than details or traditions or family history.
I do remember a few things and a few stories about being an immigrant/moving to America from my mother. First that my family was not ‘American.’ I remember thinking Egyptian for a bit, because of that song “Walk like an Egyptian” and that I confused Egyptian for English when I was very young. I also recall a few stories about them being kids in England, particularly about the unusual school they attended (Summerhill, which is both famous and was run by a friend of Nan’s, so that my mom and her siblings could attend as day students, even though they were pretty poor), and their dogs. The dogs were English Sheepdogs named Abigail (Mom), Moses (Aunt Bird) and Bandit (Uncle Mike). I also recall my mom telling me that she had to have the scruffy looking dog because she was the oldest and chose last. I didn’t know that the dogs ended up coming to the U.S. with my family, or that they were not only purebred, but had papers and long fancy names as well. My Nan had this way of meeting interesting people and collecting interesting things, although she was materially poor throughout her life.
Since my mother ended up moving from Southern Illinois (read away from the rest of my family) to the Chicago suburbs, most of the family get-togethers happened about twice a year. Once in the spring/summer and then once at Thanksgiving, which was like the family Christmas for us.
We really didn’t eat a lot of ‘English food’. Sorry, no fish and chips or bangers and mash. Shepherd’s pie was the one traditional dish I do remember and even that was made with beef instead of lamb. Yeah, I didn’t know until very recently that Shepherd’s pie was traditionally made with anything other than beef. I do recall that mashed-potatoes were like the holy grail in our family, and that merely liking them instead of loving them made one “less English.” The other thing that stands out as being particularly “English” in my family’s way of thinking was a love of vinegary or sour stuff. My cousins can apparently drink bottled lemon juice straight up. I prefer my lemons fresh. Oh, and my mom eats her French fries with mayo, not ketchup, and we kept a bottle of malt vinegar in the cupboard for fries at home as well.
And although English was our native language, and my family is still English, they don’t speak with the accents. They also use the American words for apartment (not flat), trunk (not boot), and diapers (not nappies). As far as the language goes, we had a few quirks of pronunciation. Breakfast sounded like ‘breakfrist’ and ‘ant’ and ‘aunt’ were never homophones. Or as a joke we told went: Ants are what spoil your picnic. Well, I guess your aunt can too. We also use American spellings, although I do know that all three of the kids were held back a year in school when they first arrived either because they could not spell or speak “properly” Nan had an accent, but to me at least, it sounded like a normal Nan voice, and she smoked a lot, so it was hard to tell if it was an accent or her throat being sore. Aunt Bird assures me that Nan had an accent.
I should also say, neither my cousins nor I have been to England. I’ve talked to my Great-grandmother perhaps once or twice in 25 years, and she never visited us because she hates flying on airplanes. I had a passport issued when I was about 10 or so, but at that time my mother lost the physical copy of her green card, and couldn’t get a U.S. passport, so she ended up getting one through the British Government. If I recall, she is technically a British citizen living abroad, even though she is culturally U.S.ian. My Uncle Mike was deported in 2003, but my mother and aunt returned to England for the first time in January 2009 to spread my Nan’s ashes on what would have been her 62nd birthday.
To my knowledge, no one in my family is a naturalized U.S. citizen. They were all here legally. My mother, I know, is considered an expatriate. She can vote in English elections, but not in U.S.ian ones. She jokes about telling her conservative friends not to vote on election day, and that cancels out her inability to vote. My uncle was basically deported as a convict non-citizen. Also, it’s become harder to become a U.S. citizen since 9/11, and my mother has complained to me about the fee and the extra steps involved.
But no one knows any of that history unless it’s told to them. And no one guesses that there is a history to tell. Seriously, my mother had been attending Christmas dinner with some of my Dad’s relatives for 10-15 years before they ever found out she wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and the only reason they found out was because a conversation about becoming president came up, and I said something about mom being ineligible. “Why? Because I’m too young?” (She wishes) “Well, because you’re not a U.S. citizen.”
“You’re not?”
And that’s pretty much how it went. And realize that we had known these relatives for a fairly long time and were actually pretty close to them.
But mostly when people rail against immigration, it’s not the faces of my family they have in mind. Never mind that there’s nothing about us as people besides our skin ethnicity, our country of origin, or our language that’s different from any other immigrants. No one suspects that when they talk about ‘those people’ stealing jobs or taking up resources that they might be talking about my mother, my aunt, or my grandmother. Nor when they talk about immigrants being deported back to where they belong, that they’re talking about my uncle (who, by the way, probably wouldn’t have been deported, except that he was in prison).
And that stupid, racist law that’s proposed in Arizona right now, my family would slip through that. After all, most of us are blond-haired and blue-eyed white people, the “All-American” phenotype. No official would think of asking any of them for their papers.
I think we’re relieved of a lot of the external prejudice, but we do know who and what we are and I think we internalize it to, to some extent. I don’t think our language and whiteness erases all of that. I know after my Uncle Mike left the country, Nan wondered if she should follow since the same attitudes that applied to him applied to her as well, since she was living off of disability and social security income, which makes her one of “those immigrants.”
One last thing, to close on something of a funny culture-shock moment. I told my mother about my potentially becoming a dual citizen. Her response: “You don’t drink enough to be English!” My Aunt Bird agreed, though she did say that perhaps my tea consumption was high enough. Apparently, when she and my aunt were in England last year, some bloke offered to buy her a drink. My mom asked for a Diet Coke only to be told my by Great-grandma Miriam that it was not only rude to refuse someone’s offer to buy a drink, but it has to be a ‘real’ drink. So some etiquette there, courtesy of my English relatives.
Notes
[*] The picky linguistic anthropologist in me wants to say that everyone has an accent. My mother has a Midwestern American accent (she picks accents up quickly), and my Aunt and Uncle sound like U.S. Southerners.
When I refer to my family as ‘invisible immigrants’, I’m relating to a very specific line and members in my family. They are my Nan (grandmother), my mother, my Aunt Bird, and my Uncle Mike, plus my cousins and I who are the second-generation immigrants. This is not my complete lineage, which would include both the histories of my biological father (whom I don’t remember) and my stepfather (who is my “Dad”), but this is the “known quantity” in my background and the one that I’ve been raised to identify with.
Also, to speak of the elephant in the room ahead of time: What makes us invisible, both in the sense of passing for USians and receiving the associated privileges and in the sense that my family’s immigration story is getting erased even from our own history is the fact that we 1) are white, 2) come from a “first world” country (England), and 3) speak English as our native language, and while Nan had a British accent (I’m told, she sounded like Nan to me) my mother, aunt, and uncle did not. *
In fact, until I posted a question to my Aunt Bird on Facebook, I wasn’t sure when, how, or why my family came to the U.S. But now I know because she remembers, even if my mom doesn't. The when was 1976. My mother, the oldest, would have been 13, Aunt Bird 10, and Uncle Mike either 8 or 9. The how was by plane, landing in Chicago and then moving to Southern Illinois so Nan’s then husband could attend SIU, which is where my family mostly settled, until my mother and I moved up to the Chicago suburbs. The why, which seems to follow from the how, is that my Nan married an American man who was stationed at a nearby Airforce Base. Yeah, that all came from Facebook today. So, I’m not sure that counts as being part of my consciousness growing up.
Nothing about this is immortalized in oral history or used as an example in a museum. I didn’t really understand that my family didn’t go through Ellis Island, even though the history books and stories told us that that’s where the (European) immigration happened. I really didn’t identify with U.S. history too much either, since no one in my family that I knew was a part of it, so there was no sense of learning about my (individual) ancestors when discussing our (mostly-white classroom group) heritage. Nor did we really speak of England itself, or them coming over to the United States very much. A lot of the family discourse related to our background was about the quality of being “English,” rather than details or traditions or family history.
I do remember a few things and a few stories about being an immigrant/moving to America from my mother. First that my family was not ‘American.’ I remember thinking Egyptian for a bit, because of that song “Walk like an Egyptian” and that I confused Egyptian for English when I was very young. I also recall a few stories about them being kids in England, particularly about the unusual school they attended (Summerhill, which is both famous and was run by a friend of Nan’s, so that my mom and her siblings could attend as day students, even though they were pretty poor), and their dogs. The dogs were English Sheepdogs named Abigail (Mom), Moses (Aunt Bird) and Bandit (Uncle Mike). I also recall my mom telling me that she had to have the scruffy looking dog because she was the oldest and chose last. I didn’t know that the dogs ended up coming to the U.S. with my family, or that they were not only purebred, but had papers and long fancy names as well. My Nan had this way of meeting interesting people and collecting interesting things, although she was materially poor throughout her life.
Since my mother ended up moving from Southern Illinois (read away from the rest of my family) to the Chicago suburbs, most of the family get-togethers happened about twice a year. Once in the spring/summer and then once at Thanksgiving, which was like the family Christmas for us.
We really didn’t eat a lot of ‘English food’. Sorry, no fish and chips or bangers and mash. Shepherd’s pie was the one traditional dish I do remember and even that was made with beef instead of lamb. Yeah, I didn’t know until very recently that Shepherd’s pie was traditionally made with anything other than beef. I do recall that mashed-potatoes were like the holy grail in our family, and that merely liking them instead of loving them made one “less English.” The other thing that stands out as being particularly “English” in my family’s way of thinking was a love of vinegary or sour stuff. My cousins can apparently drink bottled lemon juice straight up. I prefer my lemons fresh. Oh, and my mom eats her French fries with mayo, not ketchup, and we kept a bottle of malt vinegar in the cupboard for fries at home as well.
And although English was our native language, and my family is still English, they don’t speak with the accents. They also use the American words for apartment (not flat), trunk (not boot), and diapers (not nappies). As far as the language goes, we had a few quirks of pronunciation. Breakfast sounded like ‘breakfrist’ and ‘ant’ and ‘aunt’ were never homophones. Or as a joke we told went: Ants are what spoil your picnic. Well, I guess your aunt can too. We also use American spellings, although I do know that all three of the kids were held back a year in school when they first arrived either because they could not spell or speak “properly” Nan had an accent, but to me at least, it sounded like a normal Nan voice, and she smoked a lot, so it was hard to tell if it was an accent or her throat being sore. Aunt Bird assures me that Nan had an accent.
I should also say, neither my cousins nor I have been to England. I’ve talked to my Great-grandmother perhaps once or twice in 25 years, and she never visited us because she hates flying on airplanes. I had a passport issued when I was about 10 or so, but at that time my mother lost the physical copy of her green card, and couldn’t get a U.S. passport, so she ended up getting one through the British Government. If I recall, she is technically a British citizen living abroad, even though she is culturally U.S.ian. My Uncle Mike was deported in 2003, but my mother and aunt returned to England for the first time in January 2009 to spread my Nan’s ashes on what would have been her 62nd birthday.
To my knowledge, no one in my family is a naturalized U.S. citizen. They were all here legally. My mother, I know, is considered an expatriate. She can vote in English elections, but not in U.S.ian ones. She jokes about telling her conservative friends not to vote on election day, and that cancels out her inability to vote. My uncle was basically deported as a convict non-citizen. Also, it’s become harder to become a U.S. citizen since 9/11, and my mother has complained to me about the fee and the extra steps involved.
But no one knows any of that history unless it’s told to them. And no one guesses that there is a history to tell. Seriously, my mother had been attending Christmas dinner with some of my Dad’s relatives for 10-15 years before they ever found out she wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and the only reason they found out was because a conversation about becoming president came up, and I said something about mom being ineligible. “Why? Because I’m too young?” (She wishes) “Well, because you’re not a U.S. citizen.”
“You’re not?”
And that’s pretty much how it went. And realize that we had known these relatives for a fairly long time and were actually pretty close to them.
But mostly when people rail against immigration, it’s not the faces of my family they have in mind. Never mind that there’s nothing about us as people besides our skin ethnicity, our country of origin, or our language that’s different from any other immigrants. No one suspects that when they talk about ‘those people’ stealing jobs or taking up resources that they might be talking about my mother, my aunt, or my grandmother. Nor when they talk about immigrants being deported back to where they belong, that they’re talking about my uncle (who, by the way, probably wouldn’t have been deported, except that he was in prison).
And that stupid, racist law that’s proposed in Arizona right now, my family would slip through that. After all, most of us are blond-haired and blue-eyed white people, the “All-American” phenotype. No official would think of asking any of them for their papers.
I think we’re relieved of a lot of the external prejudice, but we do know who and what we are and I think we internalize it to, to some extent. I don’t think our language and whiteness erases all of that. I know after my Uncle Mike left the country, Nan wondered if she should follow since the same attitudes that applied to him applied to her as well, since she was living off of disability and social security income, which makes her one of “those immigrants.”
One last thing, to close on something of a funny culture-shock moment. I told my mother about my potentially becoming a dual citizen. Her response: “You don’t drink enough to be English!” My Aunt Bird agreed, though she did say that perhaps my tea consumption was high enough. Apparently, when she and my aunt were in England last year, some bloke offered to buy her a drink. My mom asked for a Diet Coke only to be told my by Great-grandma Miriam that it was not only rude to refuse someone’s offer to buy a drink, but it has to be a ‘real’ drink. So some etiquette there, courtesy of my English relatives.
Notes
[*] The picky linguistic anthropologist in me wants to say that everyone has an accent. My mother has a Midwestern American accent (she picks accents up quickly), and my Aunt and Uncle sound like U.S. Southerners.
