The Heartland
Page 30
As border enforcement grew tighter in the late 1950s, the photocopies no longer sufficed, except among some Eagle Pass agents. By the 1970s, the Mexican Kickapoos had to obtain “parole papers” from the immigration officers at Eagle Pass. These papers identified the bearers as: “Parolee, Kickapoo Indian, pending clarification of status by Congress.”129 The federal officers insisted that “it’s not a criminal thing,” but the affected Kickapoos objected to the language of “parolee,” understanding this all too keenly as the status of being outside of a penitentiary on condition. Officials considered them to be U.S. citizens when in the United States and Mexican citizens when in Mexico, pending a determination of their status by Congress.130
Countering the local histories from the Midwest that declared the Kickapoos long gone, in the aftermath of the bracero program they traveled to Michigan and Wisconsin to work in the cucumber fields and to Illinois to pick tomatoes.131 In a reversal of traditional seasonal patterns, summer mobility enabled settled winters in the Nacimiento village. Yet in the 1980s all this was imperiled by even tighter border controls, which made it ever more difficult for Chicapoos (a term some Kickapoos adopted in jest to mean Chicano and Kickapoo mixed together) to circulate between the United States and Mexico.132 It was in this context that the Eagle Pass Kickapoos made their claims.
The Eagle Pass Kickapoos made it clear that they did not want to have to choose between the United States and Mexico—they wanted to be able to move back and forth across the border. Like their ancestors before them, they sought both place (a home) and space (the ability to move freely). The great irony of the hearings—one that went unremarked at the time—was that one of the Kickapoos’ witnesses cited the Mackenzie raid on behalf of their claims. The violent incursion that had devastated Kickapoos in the nineteenth century had become proof in the twentieth that the Eagle Pass Kickapoo did indeed hail from the United States and should be able to claim the rights that followed from that if they pleased.133
It may seem that in claiming U.S. citizenship, the Eagle Pass Kickapoos had come to accept the idea of territorially based identities and rights. After all, the hearings were called by the representative of the Texas district in which they lived. The executive director of the Texas Indian Commission testified on their behalf.134 A Michigan representative also took the stand, to speak of their ancestral ties to his state. All these speakers connected the Kickapoos’ citizenship claims to place—or rather, several places.
But these were not the only parties involved in the matter. Congressman Kazen worked with the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to perfect the bill. These agencies helped broaden the issue from district and state jurisdiction to the federal level. Kazen also consulted with the Department of Immigration and Naturalization—which had purview over border crossing—and the U.S. State Department, the agency in charge of international relations.135 In the course of the hearings, Dr. Oscar Arze Quintanilla, a Bolivian anthropologist, lawyer, and indigenous rights activist then serving as the executive director of the Inter-American Indian Institute, brought his hemispheric stature to bear on the Kickapoos’ case. Placing the Kickapoos’ struggle in a wider context, he argued that they should be able to cross the border in the same way that Indians along the border with Canada could, under the 1794 Jay Treaty. Representatives from several First Nations located within the United States also spoke on behalf of the Kickapoos, recognizing that modern border enforcement regimes curtailed the rights of all people of Native American ancestry.136
The participation of so many different parties in the citizenship hearings reveal that in the 1980s, the Eagle Pass Kickapoos placed themselves in a series of nesting political units that scaled up from the municipal level to district, state, federal, and hemispheric bodies; from tribal to indigenous affiliations, from members of particular Kickapoo groups to members of a larger Kickapoo diaspora and nation. Yet they also understood themselves in terms of lateral identities that overlapped along the edges: U.S. and Mexican; indigenous and citizens of federal nation states; Kickapoos in relation to other indigenous peoples. They were First Americans first, before being forced to choose between the United States and Mexico. Through their efforts to preserve their identity as a people—the very struggle that had brought many of their ancestors to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands in the first place—the Eagle Pass Kickapoos argued against the fixed conceptions of security that the heartland myth propounds.
In opposition to those who would pin security solely to place, they insisted that boundaries could cage people and sunder communities as readily as they could guard them. In arguing for the right to return—and to leave, and to come back again—they insisted that rights should adhere to people, even if they moved about. Arguing that place and space are always, inevitably, relational, they insisted that true security does not emerge from walling people in and out, but from extending human rights and justice. As seen by the heartlanders-in-exile under the International Bridge, the tribalists who had inherited their earth were far from securing both.
ARCHIVAL TRACES
The world is a pretty small place after all
Urbana Courier, 1906: A report on the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Champaign district of the M. E. Church, featuring an address by Mrs. Stephens of Poona, India. Participants from the town of St. Joseph came “in costume representing women of India, China and Japan.”1
Urbana Courier, 1908: Mrs. Ira N. Reed, “who has a warm spot in her heart for all Celestials because her daughter is a missionary in China, entertained a party of Chinese university students on Friday at her home.” Two of the guests were personally acquainted with Reed’s daughter.2
Urbana Courier, 1909: The eighteen-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. John Casdorf of Urbana who ran away to sea nearly four years ago “arrived home early this morning . . . Young Casdorf’s story is familiar to nearly everyone in Urbana. Since leaving his home he has had adventures in nine countries, having stopped in Australia, Japan, China, Egypt, Holland, Germany, England, Scotland, and Ireland.” Casdorf “tried the life of a sailor until he fell out of the rigging during a storm and fractured his arm. Then he tried other pursuits, finally enlisting in the Irish army. Becoming homesick he deserted twice, but was captured and imprisoned each time. Finally securing a discharge through the efforts of the American consul, young Casdorf hastened home, but says he doesn’t expect to stay.”3
David Kinley Papers, 1910: University of Illinois President David Kinley, once a professor of economics, served as a U.S. delegate to the fourth Pan-American Congress at Buenos Aires.4
Urbana Courier, 1911: Jessie Mae Keffer of Champaign married Miguel Espinosa, a Mexican student in mining engineering at the University of Illinois. Espinosa’s father, of Mexico City, is a millionaire mine owner. They left after the ceremony for Mexico City, so Miguel could help his father cope with the effect of “revolutionary troubles” on his business. “The groom is a handsome young fellow, due probably to the fact that his parents are Spaniards.”5
A Standard History of Champaign County, Illinois, 1918: Samuel H. Patton, the son of a Champaign farmer, worked as a civil engineer before taking up farming in the county. During his stint as an engineer, the U.S. government sent him to Haiti to build railroads. He subsequently worked for three years in El Salvador and Guatemala, “locating railways.”6
Urbana Courier, 1919: Captain Chester A. Morehouse of Mahomet (on the western edge of Champaign County), now in France, sent a letter to Champaign County Clerk Fred Hess, enclosing a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald that had Champaign news in it. “These familiar local items appearing in a foreign country bring realization that the world is a pretty small place after all, especially since the war.”7
CONCLUSION
THE NATION, AT HEART
The heartland myth insists that there is a stone-solid core at the center of the nation. Local, insulated, exceptional, isol
ationist, and provincial; the America of America First, the home of homeland security, the defining essence at the center of the land. This core may be threatened by outside forces, but stronghold that it is, it can be secured if locked down tight enough. By retreating back to a time of well-fenced fields and narrow paths, the nation can hold a fearsome and turbulent world at bay.
Though powerful as myth, the idea of the heartland as a kind of national safekeeping vault does not stand up well as history. It does not take much digging to discover the mesh of relationships, many not domestic in nature, lying at the center of the nation. Delving deep into this core reveals a heart alive with pumping valves in the center of a vast network of pulsing arteries and veins; a last local place thoroughly riddled with histories of foreign relations. The American heartland is as much a global heartland as a national one—not in the sense of being in the eye of the world but in the sense that it took an entire world to form it. National consolidation did not precede global integration; both proceeded simultaneously, along paths blazed in an age of empire. Rather than conceiving of the heartland as a fixed place—the kind of place that can be shored up by walls—we would do better to conceive of it as a more open place that has, from the start, been ensnared in a vast circulatory system. It would take an entire atlas of maps layered on top of one another, transparency style, to convey the far-flung relationships that formed it.
Despite the assumption that the heartland myth can tell us something about who Americans are, fundamentally, as a people, the answers it provides are more the glib commonplaces of valentine silhouettes than the real, bloody, beating thing. The heartland myth does not tell us how we came to be who we are. It does not help us understand our founding in settler colonialism, our history of national development, the ecological systems that underlie our land, the full range of our political commitments, the variegated scope of our worldviews, or the epic extent of our struggles for justice and freedom. It hides wellsprings of empire and mighty torrents of global power. It offers the pabulum of nostalgia instead of the kaleidoscopic banquet of the past.
However badly it stands up as history, the heartland myth does tell us something about who we are as a nation, as do all stories that people tell about themselves. As an assortment of hundreds of millions of people, fractured along all kinds of lines, the United States has relied on national narratives to hold itself together and to advance common interests in the vortex of an unruly world. The heartland myth reveals that the struggle to define the nation has been conceived as a contest between insiders and people on the margins. Whether the mythical heartland is celebrated or reviled, it fosters the perception that there is a gulf between the center and the edge, between the heart and the national body. By affixing political differences to a specific place, the heartland myth makes the figurative idea of national insiderdom literal, locating it squarely on the map. Love it or hate it, it is the baseline from which to measure the distance traveled or gone astray; the point of reference to brandish before the wayward or to define oneself against. The mythical heartland, in other words, emerged as a political tool, its capacity to bind balanced by its ability to divide.
And here’s the irony. No matter which competing purpose it has served, it has achieved the same result: exacerbating the fundamental challenge of comprehending the world by insisting on fixity instead of flux, insularity instead of interdependence. For people looking to understand their place in the larger scheme of things, mythology is easy. As a figment of our imaginations, it tells us what we want to believe, offering us certainty where there is none. Geography and history are more difficult because they rely on evidence, which can be pigheaded and confounding. Just as it can be hard to see the prairie for the tallgrass, it can be difficult to dig up buried sources and track down elusive leads, harder still to grasp what they mean.
Whether we look back in time or out in space, we cannot easily see that which lies outside our own narrow horizons. Take some of the most observant and curious people who have figured in this history: bird-watchers. Try as they did to understand connections across space, knowledge came in hard-earned increments. Even as ornithologists gained the ability to pinpoint seasonal homes on maps and to draw lines indicating paths of flight, they still could not grasp the full implications of what was happening on the ground, in real time: the mining, the smelting, the stock raising, the coffee growing, the refining, the burning, the planting, the plowing, the ditching, the harvesting of mahogany for the chiffoniers sold in town.8 If anybody noticed that all those ecological disturbances were somehow connected to the fate of the insectivorous birds of the tallgrass prairie, they did not say.
Their inability to comprehend the on-the-ground changes of their own day emerged from a flattened sense of the past. Before environmental history began to flourish in the 1980s, bird-watchers did not have the conceptual frameworks to understand how long-term ecological change, going back to the indigenous people who altered their environments well before Columbus, had affected what they saw as a God-given natural world. They could not grasp the ecological implications of the post-1492 demographic implosion, in which an estimated 90 percent of Native Americans died from the diseases introduced by Europeans, or the subsequent wilding of once densely populated places. Nor could they comprehend what happened after that: the centuries of lumber harvesting across the Americas; the clearing of forests for agricultural purposes; the impact of new crops and animals and farming methods to supply markets both near and unprecedentedly far.9 It could be tricky enough to spot a bird. To understand where it came from and where it was heading lay at the outer limits of available knowledge. As they began to put together their maps, dot by dot, the ornithologists of the late nineteenth century laid the groundwork for a broader understanding of causal connections. But the sense of distance between here and away remained too vast to truly see the world through the eyes of a bird: under the water, in the brush, at the edge of the canopy, above the once wet prairie, with hedges and fences merely faint little lines on the ground.
Not even such an avid ornithologist as the Arctic explorer Elmer Ekblaw grasped the long-distance relations between sky and ground. Upon his return to Illinois from the northern reaches of Greenland, Ekblaw spoke widely on the struggle to survive near the pole. Although other members of his expedition team recalled being offered trade goods such as tea, coffee, sugar, milk, and biscuits, Ekblaw claimed that his Inuit hosts subsisted on animal meat and bird eggs. The Eskimos ate every bird they could, he claimed, “from the little snow-bunting to the great northern raven.” Their hungriest times came in the early spring, before the birds returned. “Starvation would many more times have overtaken them,” wrote Ekblaw, “except for the timely arrival of the first birds.”10
After four years observing—and depending upon—migratory birds and the people they sustained, it might seem that Ekblaw would have grasped the connections between here and away. If anybody, surely him. But for all his professed sympathy with the Inuit, and all his identification with the North, Ekblaw still treated the polar region as a place apart. In his mind, geography was all about identifying and comparing discrete regions, not mapping the connections between them. In an essay titled “The Attributes of Place,” written well after his days eating bird eggs preserved in seal intestines, Ekblaw described geography as a field centered on the attributes that made each particular place unique. He found the study of matters such as the “routes of trade and travel” to be a distraction from the geographer’s core concern with specificity.11 The point was not to map paths of influence but to identify people’s inner essences and inherent selves—to figure out who they really were at heart.
For all his fascination with migrating birds and all his wandering with binoculars in hand, Ekblaw never managed to look out and in at the same time. For all his dependence on birds for survival, he could not really see the full scope of their true homes. Though the evidence was all around him, he did not note the ways that the drainin
g of midwestern wetlands may have affected wild birds—and the people so intimately connected to them—millions of wingbeats away. Though a widely acclaimed geographer, he still could not see the relations between place and space, because he did not think to look. If not Ekblaw, then who before our more globally self-aware age could have comprehended the intersecting contrails of connection? To do so would have been a feat akin to recognizing the Mexican Kickapoos’ claims on the heartland, the imperial power relationships behind assertions of exceptionalism, or the extent to which the Midwest’s fortunes depended on distant strangers. No wonder the heartland myth came to seem so commonsensical: its scaled-up localness was far easier to grasp than the vast complexity of the real world.
If not Ekblaw, then who now? Having the capacity is not enough: there must also be a desire to comprehend, to peer not only toward the horizons of space but also those of time. Though sustained by ongoing politics, the heartland myth derives its power from references to history. Depending on perspective, the heartland of myth enshrines tradition or stands for attributes better left behind. This national touchstone is less the future than the past, mapped onto place. But the heartland of myth can never be recuperated, much less preserved, because it never existed in the first place. The further we travel back toward the wellsprings of this heart, the closer we come to the past that binds us all: the global production of the modern world. Disavowal does not make this world any less real or pressing, it just walls us into a mythical land of once upon a place.