[It’s not the
Boston area, and it’s not quite the
Berkshires, so the rest of Western Massachusetts tends to get short shrift
in our images and narratives of the state. Well, no longer! In this week’s
series, I’ll highlight five Western Mass. histories and stories, examples of
how much this part of the state has to offer our collective memories. I’d love
to hear your thoughts on these and other connections!]
A reminder of a
great historical novel, and a couple other thoughts about its contexts.
As part of last
summer’s Beach
Reads series, I highlighted Karen
Shepard’s wonderful historical
novel The Celestials (2013). Shepard’s
novel fictionalizes the historical experiences of a group of Chinese immigrant
workers who were brought in as strikebreakers to work in a shoe factory in the
small valley town of North Adams,
Massachusetts (which is, contra my series introduction above, close to the
Berkshire Mountains, but is I would argue not generally included in the region called
The Berkshires). I can’t recommend Shepard’s novel strongly enough, for all the
reasons I traced in the post hyperlinked under “historical novel The Celestials.” Here I wanted to complement
that post and the novel with two other AmericanStudies contexts, one likewise
part of Massachusetts history and the other further afield but deeply resonant
as well.
For one thing, I
believe those arriving Chinese workers could be productively compared to the
young women who had come to work the
Lowell Mills about half a century earlier. The Chinese workers were all
young men, and certainly that gender difference contributed to distinct
attitudes toward and treatments of both communities; but in many other ways,
the two groups were very similar: very young, many experiencing their first
time away from home and first shifts into the world of work; immigrants,
dealing with culture shock and linguistic differences along with that new stage
of life and work (many of the Lowell workers
were Irish immigrants, so not as much of a language gap but a contrast
nonetheless); and outsiders immersed in a new world, not a longstanding part of
that community but living, studying, and socializing as well as working within
that world. Far too often, as I
argued at length in my last book, we have treated Chinese immigrants as
fundamentally different from (for example) Irish arrivals—but the parallels are
at least as strong as the distinctions, and a comparison of the North Adams factory
workers to the Lowell mill ones illustrates the point nicely.
When it comes to
what differentiated the Chinese workers from their Lowell counterparts, I would
especially emphasize not culture, nor even gender, but rather the Chinese
arrivals’ status (one I’m quite sure, as Shepard likewise argues, they did not know
when they arrived) as strikebreakers. That difference reflects in large part
the very
different histories and realities of labor and activism in the 1870s than
had been the case half a century earlier. And if we want to understand how that
status and those histories might have impacted the Chinese community’s
experiences in North Adams, I would recommend another work of American historical
fiction, this one a visual text: John
Sayles’s film Matewan (1987). In
one of its main plot threads, Sayles’s film depicts the arrival to its West
Virginia mining community of groups of African American and
Italian immigrant workers brought in as strikebreakers; like the Chinese arrivals,
these new workers are both cultural outsiders and occupying that complex middle
ground between labor and management, and they experience initial violence and
hostility as a result. Yet over time, both new groups become part of the
broader community of mine workers in Matewan, changing the identity and culture
of that town as a result—an effect I’m quite sure the Celestials produced in
North Adams as well.
Next history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Histories and stories from your home you’d highlight?
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