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On Tuesday, April 8, Annelise Orleck, professor of History at Dartmouth College, will give the third and final lecture in the series "Storming Caesars Palace: What Happens When Poor Mothers Demand a Share of the American Dream?" at 5:00 pm in Seelye Hall 201. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Americans briefly turned their attentions for the first time in 40 years to the problem of persistent poverty in our country. That attention was all too short lived. Within weeks, syndicated news columnists like George Will were returning to time-honored traditions of blaming the victims for wasting taxpaper dollars. My talk focuses on a group of poor mothers in Las Vegas, all originally from the regions devastated by the Hurricane, who created their own response to poverty -- a community effort including health clinics, day care centers, job training programs, nutrition education, alternative energy and much more run "in the poverty community, by the poverty community for the poverty community." What happens when poor women run their own poverty programs? They work really well. Come find out how and why. Annelise Orleck teaches history and women's and gender studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the U.S. (1995); Soviet Jewish Americans (1999) and the book from which this talk is drawn, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. (2005.) She is also co-editor of The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right (1997).
Each year, professors from the Program for the Study of Women and Gender create a consortium of three courses to develop a thematic link that shapes the theme for the Women, Race and Culture lecture series. This year's invited speakers are focused on how hemispheric migrations (human and conceptual), political activisms (national and transnational) and community-making (regional, national, transnational) interpolate raced and gendered versions of "America" and therefore the underlying notions (or overt expressions of) American borders as sites of belonging or exclusion: national, political, economic and social. The talks generate new ways to integrate public lectures into ongoing class discussions and readings. In addition, the series works to build broad-reaching conversations around these vital issues that spread beyond the porous borders of women and gender studies classes.
The series began on Thursday, March 6. Erika Lee, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, spoke on “Border Crossing / Border Wars: Asian Immigration and America's First Illegal
Immigration Debate” at 4:30 p.m. in Neilson Browsing Room. The contemporary debate over illegal immigration, border enforcement,
national security, and national politics has divided the nation in recent years and promises to be a major issue in this year's presidential election.
Professor Erika Lee (University of Minnesota) took us back in time to
discuss the little-known history of Asian illegal immigration and border
regulation in the early twentieth century. As the targets of racially
discriminatory exclusion laws, Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigrants
were among the first to test the weaknesses in U.S. immigration policy by
entering the country undetected across the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican
borders. This talk explored why and how Asian immigrants sought these
dangerous and expensive routes into the country, the multiracial business of
illegal immigration, and the U.S.'s first attempts at border regulation. Erika Lee is the author of the award-winning book At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and several
articles on the history of immigration policy. She is currently writing two
books: The 'Yellow Peril' in the Americas: A Transnational History of
Migration and Race, 1850-1945 and Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America
(co-authored with Judy Yung and sponsored by the Angel Island Immigration
Station Foundation.)
The spring lecture series continued on Tuesday, March 11 at 5:00 pm in Seelye Hall 201 with a lecture by Tanya K. Hernandez,
Leroy Sorenson Merrifield Research Professor of Law at
George Washington University Law School: "The Legal Regulation of Race in Latin America." She will discuss the contemporary efforts to institute race-based affirmative
action policies in Latin America, and how they are supported as a mechanism
to remedy the historical role of the state in the regulation of race in
Latin American countries populated with persons of African-descent.Tanya K. Hernandez, is the Leroy Sorenson Merrifield Research Professor of
Law at George Washington University Law School. She earned an A.B. in
sociology from Brown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has
been a law professor for over a decade, and presently teaches Employment
Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, Property, and Trusts & Estates. Her
scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations. Her work
in that area has been published in the California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review, Yale Law Journal and many other publications. Hispanic Business Magazine selected
her as one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics of 2007.
All events are free and open to the public.