“Giving Form To An Asian & Latinx America” [REVIEW]
In world maps used in the Americas and Europe, the Atlantic Ocean is typically centered as a space of connection, a shadow of pangean unity, while the Pacific splits into two disconnected and disconnecting blocks lying at the extremes of the geographic plane. This ruptured political realm has existed since 1500, when Juan De la Costa made the first world map to include the portion of the Americas explored by Europeans up until that point. In other words, the Atlantic, in the American imaginary, is a historical path, a passage, a space of voyage, forced and willing, between worlds. The Pacific, in contrast, exists as a horizon of discontinuity, mirroring the cultural, social, and historiographical gap that exists between Asia and Latin America. Recent essayistic and critical work, such as La casa del dolor ajeno (2015), by Julián Herbet; or Orientaciones transpacíficas (2019), by Laura Torres-Rodríguez, shifts the focal point of the world map to the Pacific Ocean to reconfigure obscured connections that have been fundamental to both regions since the early colonial period. In this intellectual tradition emerges Long Le-Khac’s Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America.
Published in 2020 by Stanford University Press, Le-Khac’s comparative study explores the situation of Latinx and Asian Americans in the post-1965 U.S., a context simultaneously defined by the exploits of the civil rights movements, the emergence of the Caribbean and Vietnam as key scenarios and targets in the imperial project of the second half of the Cold War, and the significant growth of immigration following the enactment of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that ended the restrictions to Asian, African and more generally non-Northwestern European immigration. The Act sought to reform the race-based (or völkisch) paradigm of immigration that had been in force since the eighteenth century, and that Adolf Hitler praised in Mein Kampf. Simultaneously, it imposed quotas on immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time in history and gave legal privileges to a professional class of immigrants. The result was the illegalization of an immigration flow that had been in motion through the U.S. southern border for many decades.
Additionally, Le-Khac situates his work within an interdisciplinary line of inquiry paved by scholars like Natalia Molina or Nicholas de Genova, who revise the self-congratulatory narratives of immigration and national formation. These stories turned into History (‘with a capital H’, as Édouard Glissant calls it)¹ need to overlook the relational (Molina) stratification of the immigration and labor system that has been achieved through legal and political constructs like deportability and illegality (de Genova). Following these critics, Le-Khac turns to Cold War imperialism and the political and economic interests of the U.S. as the main force shaping contemporary displacement from Asia and Latin America and emphasizes the “relational nature of racialization of Asian Americans and Latinx in an immigration system racially structured around degrees and comparisons between ethnic groups.”²
Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America pays attention to stories, genres, and, above all, narrative forms of the Latinx and Asian American literary archives. Le-Khac’s purpose makes him look both back at the past and further to the future. He examines the common history of Latinx and Asian American diasporas as targets in the trajectory of Cold War imperialism, as well as the overlooked interdependence of both groups, whose field of opportunities is mediated by an immigration paradigm structured as a zero-sum game. But his ultimate goal is an intervention on the collective imagination directed toward the possibilities for building interethnic coalitions on such mutual grounds.
The book begins by reviewing fiction from the 1970s and 1980s by Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Naylor, and Sandra Cisneros. Le-Khac argues that these works reconfigure the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman to respond to the profound changes and differentiated opportunities of socioeconomic mobility opened up by the immediate post-civil rights era. Iconically (or for some ironically)³ represented by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister saga (1777-1829), the Bildungsroman is the genre par excellence of the personal and social development of the bourgeois individual. This paradigm has been explored by scholars who, like Joseph Slaughter, trace its links to the evolution of the notion of human rights and a model idea of the human who is the subject of such rights. Le-Khac advances the idea that Kingson, Cisneros, and Naylor reconfigure this classic European genre in the context of the Chinese American and Mexican American communities, whose access to social mobility was largely conditioned by the unevenness of the ground on which personal development might occur. The structural constraints posed to whole groups of racialized people do not fit the mold of the traditional Bildungsroman, since acknowledging these social limitations challenge the narrative of the self-made individual.
Le-Khac then moves on to the work of Junot Díaz and Aimee Phan, members of a younger generation of Latinx and Asian American writers whose fiction deals with migration caused by U.S. interventions within the context of the Cold War. Through these texts, Le-Khac approaches the concealed historical connections between the Dominican and Vietnamese diasporas, illuminating the global reach of seemingly distinct conflicts that occurred in distant corners of the world: the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, two related events “whose violence and disruptive aftermaths displaced over a million Southeast Asians and hundreds of thousands of Dominicans to the United States.”⁴
In the last chapters, Le-Khac resumes his analysis of the emerging but stratified field of economic opportunities for migrants, but he now transposed to the neoliberal context of the early twenty-first century. Here, Rishi Reddi’s Karma (2007), Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005), as well as fiction written in the last decade by Cristina Henríquez (The Book of Unknown Americans; 2014) and Karen Tei Yamashita (I Hotel; 2010), allow Le-Khac to study and challenge the main trope separating Latinx and Asian Americans in the common imaginary: the mutually constructed paradigm of the successful, professional, middle to upper-class immigrant versus the undocumented and impoverished immigrant who performs manual work. Within this model, Le-Khac reminds us, immigrants from Asia and Latin America have been interchangeable throughout history: “The image of Latinxs as the quintessential ‘illegal immigrants’ is so entrenched today that few recall that they were not the first illegal aliens in U.S. history. Asians were.”⁵ A group of immigrant workers can be easily demonized as long as there is another one that either fulfills its labor functions or embodies the ideal paradigm against which the first one is turned into a political scapegoat. This is what happened when Asians were banned at the beginning of the twentieth century and Mexicans replaced them as exploited workers, and what happens today, as some highly educated and professionalized Asians are tokenized as examples of good immigration against which Mexicans and other Latin Americans are chastised as burdens.
Le-Khac wants his readers to see that, if the exploitation and persecution of these racialized groups at different times in history have been structured interdependently, then their liberation might also be achieved on common grounds. But first, this commonality needs to be seen and recognized as such.
Author’s Notes:
1. Glissant, Édouard. 1999. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia), p. 69.
2. Le-Khac, p. 13.
3. Hellmut Ammerlahn. 2006. “The Marriage of Artist Novel and Bildungsroman: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, a Paradigm in Disguise”, German Life and Letters (59)1.
4. Le-Khac, p. 3.
5. Le-Khac, p. 13.
Bárbara Pérez Curiel is a Ph.D. student at NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds an undergraduate degree in German by UNAM and a Master’s degree in Spanish by the University of Oxford. As a freelance journalist, she has collaborated with magazines and online media outlets such as Current Affairs, The Oxford Review of Books, Nexos, The Americano, Letras Libres, among others. She is a translator and proofreader for the Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica.