Three generations of immigrant history have led up to my personhood. I’ve inherited the struggle of my mother and my grandmother before her, who have worked themselves to the bone to provide me security. This inheritance is the driving question in my research project RATSKIN, a theatrical play that is in development. How does one honor one’s immigrant history but also break free from the ideologies that were made to trap immigrants within a cycle of destruction? RATSKIN is my intervention. Incorporating literary and theatrical traditions with historical, archival research, the play is an exploration in how to weave together personal experience, genre, cultural theory, and history into a narrative that can be shared to a community in a productive, discussion generating way. RATSKIN draws inspiration and theoretical groundwork from Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Neo-Marxist theories by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Louis Althusser, Evelyn Nakano Glenn; Tacoma’s immigrant history; and my own family’s immigrant history. The plot and construction of the story itself is an attempt to physically manifest and represent racialization, assimilation, and the trappings of harmful ideology that is expanded upon in the theoretical foundations. With these lenses, RATSKIN is a presentation of immigrant history and how the theatrical and literary traditions can help reveal how families continue to be affected by immigration. How can this history be refracted within a single family? What are these effects? How have they evolved through generations? How can we make sure these effects don’t limit the growth of our families?

 The United States’ participation in “othering” is nothing new. Government policies for centuries, including executive orders, have long targeted minority populations living in or seeking refuge within the U.S. These populations are often the scapegoats in politically turbulent times and are treated as such in order to not deal with greater issues. During World War II, Japanese Americans—including citizens and legal residents—were sent to internment camps not knowing when they would return home. This was the “solution” to war hysteria post-Pearl Harbor. Similarly, current immigrants from non-European populations are targeted by ICE and taken away from their families with no promise of return. Although the rationale is complex, this rhetoric often revolves around jobs and criminality despite any significant statistical back-up. My presentation seeks to compare these two situations: what is currently happening with Latin American and Southeast Asian immigrants in the U.S. to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. These families, whether nearly 80 years ago or today, have and are being systematically stripped of their livelihood and humanity for the sake of political scapegoating. Through intensive archival research—including collecting historical photographs, first-person accounts, and government propaganda of and against those incarcerated in the Japanese Internment Camps and current U.S. detention centers—, I examine the similarities in these families’ plights, the situations’ causes, and their inevitable long-term impacts. Through this analysis, I seek to interrogate the broader structure of U.S. immigration policies and our place in these events as global citizens. It is only through such analysis that we can began to understand the cyclical nature of rhetoric and trauma and have a chance to stop it.

Unwanted Invaders. The “Others”. Deceitful Criminals. Victims of Injustice. These themes were not ripped from the headlines of newspapers describing immigrants today, but rather are found in newspapers from the 1880s and the 1940s to describe Asian-American immigrants to the United States during two separate times of crisis- Chinese Exclusion and Japanese Internment. This project explores how print media has constructed the accounts of immigrants by seeking the answer to the question: What rhetoric have newspapers used to portray Non-European immigrants to the United States? Articles from three time periods (1880s, 1940s, today) were selected and the rhetoric used within these sources were divided into four descriptive categories: Unwanted Invaders, The "Others," Deceitful Criminals, and Victims of Injustice. Quantifying the use of particular phrases within these categorical themes led to an analysis of the intersection between language and media, and how media repertoire has changed in regard to its identification and treatment of immigrants. Preliminary findings indicate that the description of immigrants by media sources has shifted over time, from "deceitful criminals" and "unwanted invaders," to "victims of injustice." This historical analysis of the common rhetoric used throughout these three separate times of crisis characterizes how media has continued to shape the lens that we view and have viewed immigrants through, which allows us to better understand and address the current state of the immigration crisis.