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E. San Juan, Jr. Balikbayang Mahal: Passages from Exile (Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2007).

Daniel Cassidy, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Petrolia, California: CounterPunch, 2007).

Daniel Cassidy’s How the Irish Invented Slang is a specialist work of linguistic scholarship, but it cuts across many academic disciplines. This explains its particular power, for it cannot be reduced to linguistics, Irish studies, American studies, ethnography or cultural theory, and yet none of these disciplines can remain the same as a result of his work.

Not long after arriving in the Dominican Republic, Gérard married a Haitian woman whom he had known in Port-au-Prince. They rented an apartment in the capital, and soon afterward his wife gave birth to a son. Since Dominican authorities did not issue birth certificates to children of Haitian parents, Hassim was stateless. To resolve this problem, Gérard paid a Civil Registry official US $500 for a false birth certificate for himself, which he then used to obtain a cédula, a driver’s license, and other documents in support of his identity as Máximo Gómez.

Today, more human beings are migrating from countryside to city, from city to city, and from country to country than at any time in human history. Controversy swirls about the impact of immigrants on everything from labor markets and wages, crime and public morals, electoral outcomes and public spending, to awareness about race, ethnicity, and national identity. Nativistic responses, in the US and elsewhere, have led to restrictive practices against immigrants. Sharp debate has arisen over where to draw lines between “aliens” and “citizens” across a broad range of social policies.

These poems of loss, anger, hope, and memory were written by Chinese immigrants. In the classical style (four lines, seven characters per line), mostly, they are carved into the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. Between 1910 and 1940, nearly 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and processed at Angel Island. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the island served more as a detention and deportation site than an immigration processing center.

Probably the largest and most sustained anti-war movement in the US since the Vietnam War was the grassroots mobilization that has come to be known as the Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement (CAPSM).1 It arose in the 1980s in response to President Reagan’s foreign policy initiative toward El Salvador, where he sought the military defeat of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas.2 In large part because of the CAPSM, the administration was never able to quell public opposition to US intervention, despite spending millions of dollars and significant

The sycamores are leafing out
on west fourth street and I am weirdly old
yet their pale iridescence pleases me

as I emerge from the subway into traffic
and trash and patchouli gusts—now that I can read
between the lines of my tangled life

pleasure often visits me -I have less
interfering with my gaze now
what I see I see clearly

and with less grievance and anger than before
and less desire: it is not that I have conquered these passions
they have worn themselves out

Marcella Bencivenni is an Assistant Professor of History at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York, and a member of S&D editorial board. She has written several articles and book reviews on issues related to Italian American history and American radicalism, and is currently completing a book entitled Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Sovversivi in the United States, 1890s-1940s for New York University Press. <mbencivenni@hostos.cuny.edu>

Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. -- Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass.

Introduction