In 1975, as thousands of Vietnamese men and women fled Southeast Asia, more than fifteen hundred individuals chose repatriation rather than resettlement in the United States. Waiting in Guam, repatriates entered a terrain defined by American empire, and their stories complicate Cold War narratives of Vietnamese immigration. In this contingent and colonial space, repatriates engaged in collective civil disobedience, political jockeying, and even violence and vandalism in their quest to return to Vietnam. Providing no easy answers, this article argues that the history of the Vietnamese repatriates emphasizes the dynamics of contingency alongside the tenacity of American empire.
This article analyzes the origins of the Krome detention center, an immigration prison that has its genesis in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1980 Mariel boatlift. I argue that the history of Krome maps the transformation of a single site from a Cold War nuclear launching pad to an ad hoc refugee camp to an institutionalized immigration detention center, or more precisely a jail. This site's transformation underscores a Cold War shift from fear of a Caribbean-based nuclear attack to fear of an invasion of undocumented and undesirable Caribbean migrants. In addition, this paper explores the forgotten experiment of removing and detaining Haitian refugees on an isolated military base in Puerto Rico, as an alternate location to Krome. In this vein, Krome's history maps military and migratory circuits between the United States and the Caribbean, and it underscores a longue durée of US militarism and colonialism in the Caribbean.
The history of Americans' treatment of newcomers has proven especially fraught in the case of black immigrants who remain categorized as part of black America, a community that, from Frederick Douglass to Black Lives Matter, has consistently had to fight for the rights and recognition of U.S. citizenship. 1 Unlike Latinx and Asian migrants, black immigrants may more readily "look" American, and yet they look like black Americans, with all the risks that incurs. What does acceptance mean for black immigrants? Does it mean acceptance as black Americans, and if so to what extent do they remain outside the parameters of full citizenship? 2 When I think about these questions, I immediately turn to Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (2007). 3 Like many memoirs of migration, Danticat introduces us to her family divided between Haiti and the United States and her fraught journeys between the two. It is a memoir filled with ambivalence, controlled rage, trauma, and anticipation. On the one hand, Danticat herself represents the possibility of inclusion for new immigrants in the United States. She is the author of multiple novels, including the Oprah Book Club selection Breath, Eyes, Memory, and she received a McArthur Genius grant in 2009. She is among the most visible Haitian Americans in the United States. On the other hand, her memoir traces her father's fatal diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis and her uncle's senseless and cruel death in the Krome detention center outside Miami after fleeing political violence. For the last several years, I have chosen to end my U.S. immigration survey classes with Danticat's memoir precisely because it illustrates the tension immigrants often find between acceptance and opposition in the modern United States. I also want my students to feel shock and horror at Joseph Dantica's brutal and seemingly unnecessary death. Dantica possessed a multiple entry visa into the United States, but when he arrived at the Miami airport, he uttered the word "asylum." The bureaucratic and punitive machinery began to crank, and he died in U.S. custody soon afterward. The book's tragedy rests in Danticat's powerlessness to save him. Each time I re-read the book preparing for class, I find myself in tears, and to be honest, I hope Danticat provokes an equally emotive reaction in my students. I want them to be moved. 4
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