Spanish
The next Spanish book club started! I got myself a copy of Nos Llamaron Enemigo (in print this time, since there’s no instant lookup benefit to a graphic novel ebook anyway), and I’ve read the first 50 pages of it for the club. Talked about that some here.
Here are some extended thoughts that are more personal and which don't really relate specifically to that book:
Reading this story in Spanish hit me a lot harder than I was expecting it to. My own family is white and I’m not personally at risk of getting deported or sent to an internment camp or anything like that, but I live in a city with a very large population of immigrants, and I have many friends who are immigrants, some of whom have spent a big portion of their lives in California.
ICE raids have already started happening in my city, and people are getting detained even if they’re legal citizens. It’s a really scary time, and I’ve been trying to do what I personally can to help others.
I actually read this book right after I went to a protest. Maybe that’s part of why it hit so hard, because I can see this kind of stuff affecting the lives of people around me as we speak.
A few years ago, I read a local history book that actually got translated into Spanish (I read the Spanish version), and I learned a lot of really unsavory things about the city I live in…
I learned, for instance, that there were many Chinese immigrants living here before the city officially became a city, and in the late 1800s, the city literally drove out all the Chinese residents and passed a decree that wouldn’t permit Chinese people to live within city limits.
Some other cities, like Seattle and Olympia in Washington, actually managed to prevent these efforts from happening in their own cities, because local citizens would come out on the streets to protect Chinese residents from the mobs. But that didn’t happen in the city where I live, so ultimately Chinese people were forced out.
Then Japanese immigrants started settling in the city at the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, and the white people of course had a very racist reaction and ruled that they would “discourage” Japanese immigrants from settling here. This was decades before WWII.
As you can imagine, things only got worse after Pearl Harbor, and Japanese people living in the city that I live in now were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Most of them never returned to live here.
Starting in the early 20’s, Filipino people moved here, too, but racist white mobs physically threatened them repeatedly, and most of the Filipinos who lived here ended up leaving in the years that followed. It was driven by the same racist garbage you see today directed against other groups of immigrants, like a fear that Filipinos were stealing white people’s jobs.
As a result of all of this, the population of Asian people in this city has never made up more than 1 percent of the population.
It’s really hard not to see echos of this in the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, which in the present day is directed largely at Mexican immigrants in the community as opposed to Chinese, Japanese, or Filipino people, but it’s the exact same garbage, and the racist white people are using the exact same tactics.
Personally, I’m determined not to let history repeat itself.
I want to study more ways that communities in America resisted these racist attempts to drive immigrants out, as well as ways that white individuals were able to help Japanese people, like the family described in this article that nopenopenope linked in the club thread.
Arabic
Don’t really have much of an update regarding language learning, but I found out that the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem got raided by police and the owners were arrested and a whole bunch of books got confiscated.
I’m mentioning this here because the only book I own in Arabic actually came from there! A friend got me a copy of it last year through a Jewish Voice for Peace connection. Someone was able to visit the store and bring back a bunch of books for the rest of us, so I was able to get a copy of Spring Is Here: Embroidered Flowers of the Palestinian Spring, which is a very difficult book to find if you live overseas.
I had an ebook copy of it, but since it’s an image-heavy parallel text book in English and in Arabic, the ebook format isn’t very good for that kind of thing, so I really wanted a print copy. The Educational Bookshop didn’t have it listed in their online catalog, but when we asked about it, they were able to somehow find me a copy, which is really kind of them.
So please support the Educational Bookshop if you can! There is a fundraiser for them here to help them recoup some of the costs.
