John S.W. Park
I am a Korean immigrant scholar in the United States. This means that I have lived and built a research career in the country whose settler-colonial government funded the civil war and benefited from the conditions that displaced my family from our birthplace. And like Professor Leisy Abrego, I’m from a working-class background, I appreciate that feeling of being “out of place” in more elite circles. Professor Abrego has described it so well in her essay, “Research as Accompaniment.” As always, her work and her research have helped me to understand my own, and her stories have resonated deeply—I’ve long felt that Professor Abrego has been among the most important ethnographic social scientists in law and society and in comparative ethnic studies, and in this short response, I’m so pleased to explain why.
Legalized Violence, Lawful Forms of Cruelty
I’ve been familiar with Professor Abrego’s work for many years, particularly her work on “legal violence” and “legalized violence” against immigrants of colour. Professor Abrego came to this country as an undocumented child, her parents had fled with her from the “dirty war” in El Salvador, and for most of her professional life, she has studied how American public law has criminalized and marginalized families like hers. After 1980, instead of empathizing or understanding why so many people were fleeing from Central America, political majorities in California and in the United States have voted to keep them away and to limit their opportunities here. They have supported politicians who’ve cut off public services to immigrants and then made lawful forms of family reunification and asylum nearly impossible. New public rules have also empowered public officials to coordinate their activities in order to “remove” more people than ever before, while also disenfranchising people who’ve lived and worked here for years. With her colleagues and on her own, Professor Abrego had described the conditions created by such a regime as a form of “legalized violence.” And in detailed, compelling ways, she has shown us what it’s felt like to suffer from this “legal violence.”
Her work has become more relevant over time, it will remain so for the foreseeable future: candidates for public office in the US and elsewhere still campaign to build more walls and fences, to separate and to incarcerate families seeking asylum, and to enact other heinous forms of legalized cruelty. We will need more ethnographic social scientists to record and to measure the ongoing impact of all that violence here and everywhere, and our youngest scholars will likely study novel forms of trauma arising from the cruellest of laws and policies. For example, in the mid-2010s, when Professor Abrego was publishing her most influential work, immigration law and policy were horrible, but public officials were not yet ripping apart tens of thousands of migrant families through “zero tolerance” policies. Before the Trump administration, families and children were detained and paroled together; afterwards, they literally could not find one another for weeks, months, and now years.
Some scholars and journalists have attempted already to describe what these policies have done, but we will have to wait for careful, long-term ethnographic studies to help us understand just how awful and irreversible some of the damage may have been. How was it to have been incarcerated in a “tender age shelter”? How was it to be torn away from your own parents for several months or years? Study these questions seriously and they will likely break your heart.
Accompaniment is Hard
My own work depresses me. I’ve been an archival historian and political theorist, I’ve published work about the origins of immigration law, and my first book was about how Asian immigrants had responded to, and coped with, the early federal rules restricting them from coming to the United States. Asian immigrants had also suffered from “legalized violence,” they were the objects of “legal violence”. They did not respond in any singular way: some sued and said that the United States was denying them equal protection and due process, while others claimed that these rules should rather not apply to them at all because they were “white.” Asians who were Christians, Asians who were highly educated, Asians who were lighter skinned, Asians who’d distanced themselves from other people of colour, including their own families, and Asians who’d had white friends and neighbours—they’d said to the federal courts, “Surely, you don’t mean to exclude me. I am white.” I’ve wondered which had been the more depressing—the white majorities who’d excluded and othered Asian immigrants, or the Asian folks who were still, nevertheless, running to join those white supremacist majorities.
Power is attractive: I suppose that no one wants to be the butt of harsh public laws, no one wants to be powerless and marginal, and no one wants to be the object of law and never its author. Perhaps it’s understandable, even forgivable, for some to leave a group that the powerful have rendered pariahs and to join the powerful instead. Most people were resigned to being “unassimilable.” And a relatively small number organized, petitioned, sued, and fought back, despite the tremendous obstacles against them. If “research as accompaniment” is “a disposition, a sensibility, and a pattern of behaviour,” if “it is a commitment based on a cultivated capacity for making connections with others, identifying with them, and helping them” (p 38), then researching and revisiting the hurt—to be with and to study professionally the people who’ve been harmed by law and policy and then fought back—that may be the rare scholar who would choose to do that.
On the cover of Professor Abrego’s first book Sacrificing Families (Stanford University Press 2014), a woman is crying, and it didn’t occur to me until reading her essay that this image could have been a self-portrait. In expressing her grief so openly and so honestly, Professor Abrego reminded me of how she’s so unlike so many of my colleagues, as well as my friends and family. They never cry when they’re on nice vacations to Europe; many avoid Korea, there are too many traumatized Korean relatives there. Most of the ones who’ve been through college and graduate school are making a decent living now, and they’re not reading endlessly about American imperialism, nor the displaced people driven from Korea (or from El Salvador) to America. It’s too draining.
“Research as Accompaniment” takes a toll. This does not make the scholars who do it better people; it may, in fact, reflect a certain oddness, that we’ve circled our lives around painful topics, as it’s simply true that most of my colleagues and friends do not find their work as emotionally exhausting as I’ve found mine. I understand completely the feelings that Professor Abrego has described so well: many times, in the archives or in the secondary literature, I have come across a passage that reminds me of my late mother or her mother or our family, and I often feel a sorrow, sometimes an anger, and I think of how nice it might be to be a scholar of something else, perhaps Shakespeare or biostatistics. I have younger students, as well as three grown children now, and I’m not exactly pushing them to spend their professional lives in the same ways that I’ve spent mine. When they lean toward a life like mine, I’ve gently warned them of the emotional toll of my topics.
Fighting to Belong
I tell them that dispassionate perspectives can help. In college and in graduate school, I learned how to assess the condition of immigrants like my mother from intellectual points of view, from “objective,” social science, and historically situated approaches. I was both surprised and pleased that people like us were objects of such inquiries. Asian American Studies was a growing field in the 1990s, and I remain grateful that senior scholars had been carving out already this space in American academic life for younger people like me. It wasn’t just that these scholars were studying Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, it was also that they were offering one another an important new audience: they were writing about people who were out of place to other people who were out of place. Through my own twenties, I’d been writing mostly about white folks to older white folks, including my teachers and then my professors, but then this emergent field offered a new way of writing and thinking. It was almost like a new way of being.
Professor Abrego has also explained how she’s also been writing about and for “my own immigrant community.” I would stress, especially to younger scholars, how truly liberating it’s been to write about the people whom we’ve loved, and for the sake of those who’ve experienced those same “unsettled” feelings that we’d experienced. Of course, the research can be depressing and sad, but I’ve long felt honoured to be able to tell these important stories, whether they’re about resistance to white supremacy, about surrendering to it, or about the many other forms of coping and adapting in a country where feeling “out of place” has been a common condition. This research is clearly about people like us, but it has broader lessons, too: “We wrestle with words on the page to weave together stories that will make evident for readers the ways that their own lives, too, are framed within legal structures” (p 54).
Her words take me back. In the late 19th century, in California, white folks were a minority of people in 1850, they were far outnumbered by Native Americans, and then they also feared being outnumbered further by Asian immigrants. In the three decades after 1850, white majorities were at their most genocidal, horrible, and exclusionist—most of these white people had just arrived in California, they had just arrived in the state, and yet they behaved as though they should own the place, that they should be the only citizens, and that this state should belong to them, even if that meant murder and exclusion. They had reinforced their own sense of belonging in the most horrible ways imaginable, they had legalized their violence throughout. By 1890, if white folks in California were comfortable in their sense of belonging here, there was hardly a moral basis for it.
In certain spaces, I still feel out of place in California, and yet after years of working in legal history, I’m much more comfortable stating that this place should never belong to white folks only. That thin piece of time between about 1880 and 2000, when white folks were the majority in California, and when only they could vote and participate fully—that was an aberration. It’s easier to see that now. White majorities had asserted their domination, but it had been “framed within legal structures” and within political practices that no person could now defend as moral nor legitimate. It certainly wasn’t peaceful. After many decades of comparative ethnic studies, we are all more aware of that painful history, even though, before 1970, senior white scholars had buried and ignored it, intentionally or unintentionally, thereby reinforcing the horrible lie that California had always been a “white man’s republic.” Long after 1970, as Professor Abrego and I both know, senior professors often behaved as though the students of colour should feel grateful for being “included” in its core institutions, including its major research universities. It feels like a sick funny now, thinking of how we’d had to deal with such racist nonsense.
In some of her best work, Professor Abrego has shown how law can shape legal consciousness. For example, younger people who’d been excluded from college felt empowered when California and other states changed their rules to make college possible: in the early 2000s, students who were out of status became some of our best students at the University of California. That change, in turn, changed how they’d felt about themselves, their families, and their common future here. Professor Abrego has described how, having once been shadowed by fear and by the stigma associated with being “out of status,” these young people, “powerfully informed by meritocratic principles, [reinterpreted] their lives and their social standing in U.S. society” (p 721). They came to see that they and their families were not “problems”—rather, their hardships had been shaped by harsh public rules that had harmed them and that had held them back unfairly. Indeed, they’d come to see themselves as more deserving of the Americans who’d done nothing for the right to citizenship: “We have worked three times as hard as any other students” (p 722). Professor Abrego had shown how inclusive, progressive rules could alter how we see the world, just as racist, exclusionary rules could harm our sense of self.
We live in contentious times, in a moment when white supremacy might be beaten back or when it might suddenly revive again in all of its violence and terror. I suppose that many white folks have already felt “out of place” in California and in the United States, that those dangerous and desperate feelings have underscored their desires to “make America great again.” They’ve been voting in record numbers in favour of contemporary forms of legalized cruelty, against “others” who look like me or Professor Abrego. The Republicans in America have refused any “amnesty” for people out of status, not so much on moral grounds, but rather to keep these people from voting against people like them. Their anti-democratic tendencies have never been more obvious.
For progressive folks in this moment, including the Salvadorans and the Koreans who were pushed here by American imperialism, it’s now more imperative than ever to form political coalitions to assert our sense of belonging, our own right to this place. Of course, we should do this inspired by love and empathy for other people like us, and in solidarity with progressive folks of every background. We should also do this to remedy current injustices: I think that it’s unconscionable that some of our best students can finish college and yet still can’t vote. For them and for all of us, Professor Abrego has done work that’s been so important, and her research, her insightful analyses, and the very stories that she’s brought to our attention have been among the most necessary. Her fine ethnographic work has underscored that urgent need for us to work and to struggle together for our sake and for the sake of this country so that we might build together a more inclusive and responsive legal culture of a kind that has yet to exist in California or in the United States.
John S.W. Park has been a professor of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara since 2002. He’s published four scholarly books and two edited volumes on immigration law and legal history in the United States.
Feature Image: Durba Sen, Hidden Secrets.
This is part of a book round-table on Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (CUP 2024). Read the other posts here.
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