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By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Four decades of working in the United States has left Carlos Diaz-Nunez, 63, a shrunken man. His face is lined with wrinkles, his left leg crushed by a box of mushrooms six years ago.

This farmhand from Mexico, despite his shriveled frame, carries much on his shoulders: His life reflects how the United States has met its desire and need for low-wage, low-skilled workers through its immigration policy over six decades.

He came to the United States as a bracero, one of millions of Mexican laborers with temporary work permits who streamed onto U.S. farms from the days of World War II to 1964.

The guest-worker program President Bush proposed last week has stirred up memories for Diaz-Nunez, of how he came to pick cotton in Texas for 45 days and learned that the United States held the promise of cash for hard work. Some immigration experts say that the comparison is apt – and that the past program holds lessons.

“What the bracero program did, and what this new program undoubtedly would do, is create new patterns of migration that will continue even after it ends,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist and a fellow at the Toms Rivera Policy Institute, a think tank that studies issues affecting Latinos.

“As soon as it ended, the workers still had the contacts. They knew growers who would hire them,” he said. “You’d accustomed them to the idea that you could go to the U.S., work, and go back to have a relatively good life in their country. They just kept coming, even if they were illegal.”

That is what Diaz-Nunez did. Less than a decade after the bracero program’s end, he returned to the United States with the help of a smuggler, or coyote. A few times, immigration agents deported him. But he found his way back – to pick lettuce in California, assemble cars in Illinois, and pick mushrooms in Chester County’s Kennett Square.

In the mid-1980s, his wife and eventually his entire family followed him to this country. Today he lives in a white clapboard house in a Wilmington neighborhood in the shadow of Interstate 95. His house in the mountains of central Mexico – a house that U.S. dollars built on land that U.S. dollars bought – is empty these days. In fact, most of his village in Guanajuato state has given its sons and husbands, if not entire families, to the United States in a relationship that began with the braceros.

“A lot of Mexican Americans in the U.S. have family roots that go back to that program,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.

For many of those Americans, the term bracero conjures images of their forefathers crammed into barrack-like dormitories, paid too little, worked too hard, and subjected to racism – a system so exploitative that Lee G. Williams, the Labor Department official in charge of the program at the time it ended, called it “legalized slavery.”

That, Suro said, would not likely be the way Bush’s proposal takes shape in an America transformed by workplace regulation and the civil rights movement.

“We’re a very different country now,” he said.

Bush’s proposal, though thin on details, differs from the bracero program in other key ways. It would provide jobs in any sector of the economy, not just agriculture. It would provide visas for longer stints – three years, possibly renewable. And it would be available to workers from every country, not just Mexico.

One immigration expert, Rodolfo de la Garza, a political scientist at Columbia University, argues that Bush’s proposal would be, in fact, the reverse of its predecessor.

“The bracero program created illegal immigration,” he said. “This one is designed to respond to illegal immigration. Whether or not it [creates more in the long run] is irrelevant. They’re coming anyway. That’s already in place.”

“In the past, we used the INS in cahoots with bad employers to screw Mexican workers,” de la Garza said. “All of that stuff is behind us, I think.”

Diaz-Nunez, who became a legal U.S. resident through an amnesty for certain illegal immigrants in 1986, is not so sure.
He remembers his first stint on an East Texas cotton farm in the autumn of 1959. The money was good – he earned $200 for picking 115 pounds of cotton – until a freeze ruined the crop early in his contract. For more than a month, he hunkered down with 10 other braceros, two to a bedroom, and waited until it was time to go home.

“The proposal of Bush,” he said in Spanish, “is bad because it doesn’t give the opportunity to the workers [because employee sponsorship is required]. It’s the same situation as when we came as braceros.”

He came, he said, because “I had a hope to be better, to have a better life, but it wasn’t very good.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Two men, pinkies linked, strolled across the ruins of the old Portuguese fort. With the afternoon sun still overhead, the fort crawled with tourists. But it was easy to imagine the bayside setting – with evening spread out against the Bombay sky – transformed into the perfect spot for lovers and wooers. My eyes followed the male fingers delicately curled around each other.

“No,” said my friend, his eyes following mine, as they lingered over the fingers. “They’re not gay.”

Most likely, they weren’t. Men in India, despite the country’s mosquito net of modesties and taboos, hold hands as comfortably as they might in San Francisco’s Castro or New York’s Chelsea.

Never mind the “Ladies Compartments” on Bombay’s trains, set aside as a barrier against the aggressive gazes of men. Or the fat concrete benches along its most romantic promenade. Custom-made for chastity by the city’s conservative ruling party, they seat only one. And no matter that perched on a hill above Munnar’s center is a mosque whose threshold adult women cannot cross.

My great-grandmother left India in 1903 from the port of Calcutta. She climbed, pregnant and alone, aboard a ship bound for the Caribbean. And I – her descendant, an Indian-looking woman who grew up in the United States – was traipsing alone around the country she had relegated to her ancestors.

I knew, of course, that India was still a place with many rules for women, just as I knew that many of its women had challenged those rules with great passion. What I did not expect was the alienating force of those rules during my first trip ever to the country that had been calling to me – and indeed, had shaped me – from a distance.

You don’t walk down the street with a cigarette between your lips. That provokes sniggers. You don’t travel the country solo. That sparks gossip. And you don’t go to the cinema by yourself at night, even if you carry an American-bred sense that you can do what you want, when you want. That courts trouble.

*

The driver from the hillside resort near Munnar deposited me on a bus the color of dust.

“America,” he told the fare collector, with a thrust of his chin in my direction.

The other passengers – inky silhouettes, bundled against the predawn cold – stopped to look.

I was wearing an orange paisley churidar: pants tapered at the ankles, a loose tunic that flowed down to my shins and a long scarf over my head. It was the same one I’d worn on the beach the day that Ashok, a rickshaw driver, told me I looked “just like a regular Kerala girl.” (Kerala is the southern state where Munnar is located and where most of my time in India unspooled.)

Ashok had said it not to compliment but to explain his concern. Regular Kerala girls, he said, don’t sit by themselves on the beach – as I had for hours, just staring at the Viking-like fishing boats skimming the Arabian Sea. Unless, he added, they’ve had problems at home and are, for example, contemplating suicide.

Whatever the advantages of passing as a “regular Kerala girl,” I no longer had them on the bus in Munnar. As it hurtled along the twisting, one-lane mountain roads, swerving to avoid cars, buses and rickshaws going the opposite way, men kept turning back to stare at me.

For 10 motion-sick hours, I was an American on display. I’m not sure if that meant I was simply a curiosity, or worse. Either way, I didn’t like it.

I liked the role of tourist even less. But that was inescapable outside Bombay. I wanted to be recognized as an American when it suited me, but I didn’t want to be boxed in as merely a holder of American dollars. India was much more than a commodity to me, and I felt that I should have been more than a traveling buyer to India.

Those who make their living off tourists with roots in India know this schizophrenia well.

Take, for example, Ashok, who drove me around Fort Cochin. The island, one part of the city of Cochin, is so much a tourist hotspot that the Monte Carlo Internet cafe and its menu of masala tea and “seafood upon order” had a copycat on almost every corner.

Drivers such as Ashok mill around the hotels there in search of tourists to toot strategically around town. Many of them pocket commissions for steering customers to particular spice, jewelry and handicraft merchants, en route to the city’s 16th-century synagogue or the whitewashed church that claims to bear the bones of Vasco da Gama.

But Ashok also set himself up as my protector and guide. He stayed close while I read on the beach, in my churidar. And he emerged from the wings to shoo a group of men who had gathered around me, just standing and staring.

I was the only nonwhite guest at the Fort Heritage Hotel, and Ashok wanted to know my story. I told him I didn’t know exactly where in India my forebears were from. I only know they left four to six generations ago to work as indentured laborers on England’s sugar plantations in Guyana. I was born in that former colony in South America and grew up in Jersey City, N.J., a scrappy city with a view of the Manhattan skyline.

Ashok appraised my features and complexion and decided my family must have come from Kerala. Probably not, but it was sweet of him to answer so decisively the normally nagging question of identity.

If it weren’t for Ashok, I wouldn’t know how to interpret the abundance of colorful concrete houses set between the palm trees. (You can build three concrete houses with the money it takes to build one from wood.) I wouldn’t know that Yesudas, a Catholic singer, was the golden voice of Kerala. Or that the government banned rickshaw drivers from wearing lungis, the bright bolts of cloth tied at the waist and folded above the knee, a common alternative to pants in the south of India.

Still, when we stopped for dosas, crepes filled with spicy potatoes, and chai, he sat at another table, his back to me.

Before we parted, Ashok took me to his house. It was small and neatly kept. A Technicolor picture of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, stood on an altar above a small refrigerator and television set. Nearby hung a cross and rosary beads, left behind by Ashok’s landlord, a Christian who asked that they keep the icons in place.

Ashok’s daughters, Ahana in pigtails and Abhana with a boy cut, sat smiling shyly on the couch. His wife emerged from the kitchen with two glasses of milky, hot tea. Ashok gave me his e-mail address.

Keep in touch, he said.

When the time came, I paid Ashok what a teacher in Kerala makes in a month and a half for the two days we zigzagged around Cochin in his rickshaw. I liked him, and I do believe our encounter was on some level genuine.

After all, India had woven, from the distance of a century and nearly 10,000 miles, the cocoon I was raised in. It had warmed our New Jersey apartment with cumin-spiced split pea soup on Sunday mornings and the sweet crooning of its soundtrack diva, Lata Mangeshkar. It had tucked pictures of Ganesh, the god with the elephant trunk, in our bedroom closet.

But once I finally was in India, that intimacy became something much more complicated. The land of my forefathers shook my sense of self as though tectonic plates were smashing against each other, in the uncertain territory under the surface of my brown skin.

I felt this from my first hour there.

An immigration official, his rebuke as crisp as the khaki he wore, had demanded to know why I, a “regular Kerala girl,” was talking to a stranger, a tabla maestro from New York, so warmly. What I answered was an attempt to explain, to put my brown skin in its proper context. But it also contained the bristle and swagger of someone used to speaking to whomever she pleased, as warmly as she pleased.

“I am an American,” I said.

I can’t help but wonder if I paid Ashok so much, in fact, to transcend the role of tourist, to become more than just another American with cash. I had wanted to pass as an Indian – and, even if my churidar had failed me, I wanted to connect with Ashok, as two people who recognize themselves in each other do.

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Descendants of Immigrants Now Quicker to Intermarry
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Klezmer music cued Sunanda Ghosh’s entrance. She walked down the aisle in a white organza gown, arm in arm with her parents. Her mother, Krishna, wore a sari. In deference to the occasion, her father, Avijit, wore a black yarmulke atop his head.

Greeting her in front of the chuppah, the canopy that traditionally frames Jewish weddings, was her husband-to-be, Michael Poulshock.

Their wedding would unfold under the lace-fringed cloth woven by a family that had perished in the Holocaust, a reminder of the atrocity that raised alarms for Jews over their survival as a people. Now, intermarriage itself was raising alarms.

Michael, the great-grandson of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria, stole a short, quick breath. He smiled at his bride, the daughter of Hindu immigrants from India, and pressed her hand into his.

Unions such as theirs have become so common, a word has been invented to describe them: “Hinjew.” They signal a novel landscape of love and marriage for newcomers to this country. It no longer takes generations, as it did for turn-of-the-century immigrants, to marry into America.

Under the chuppah a week ago, two people, two traditions, two families joined in a deep reinvention that also contained elements of loss.

“Welcome to Mike and Su’s wedding,” Reconstructionist Rabbi Rebecca Alpert said to guests at the Top of the Towers, the 50th floor of a Center City conference center. She had agreed to marry the couple even though Sunanda is not Jewish. Most rabbis would not.

On one side of the chuppah stood Krishna and Avijit Ghosh, who themselves broke with custom to marry for love three decades ago in Calcutta.

They were delighted with Michael, 28, and could not wait to show him off to their relatives at a second ceremony, a Hindu one in their homeland.

On the other side stood Joe and Sally Poulshock. They, too, were beaming. Still, they could not help but wish they were now accepting Sunanda, 29, at their synagogue, Temple Beth Sholom in Cherry Hill.

“We know the policy,” Joe Poulshock, once a vice president at the Conservative synagogue, had said. “There’s no way we can celebrate this marriage there. It’s a little sad for us, because we can’t share this with [our congregation].”

Michael had wanted a Jewish wedding, even though he is not religious. He was doing it for his parents – and for himself.

“It’s to honor that [Judaism] is a part of my life experience,” he had said.

Some traditions were important to him. The wedding was taking place after sunset, so as not to violate the Sabbath. And the couple would drink wine from a kiddush cup.

There had been no “aufruf” at their synagogue, a ceremony on the Sabbath before the wedding to publicly recognize the union. And there would be no “ketubah,” or marriage contract.

Never mind, the Poulshocks had said.

“We could look at them and see they were happy,” Sally had said. “So, you know, you accept. You more than accept. You share the joy with them. . . . It’s some indescribable feeling walking your kid down the aisle.”

For a time, Michael had wondered whether the biggest gesture to the past that his parents wanted from him was the choice of a Jewish wife.

When he was in his early teens, his mother had left on his nightstand an article, clipped from a Jewish weekly. Intermarriage, he remembered it concluding, was responsible for the dwindling American Jewish population. As Michael began dating, his parents “would ask not: ‘What’s she like? Is she nice to you?’ but ‘Is she Jewish?’ ”

*

Nearly half of American Jews who have married between 1996 and 2001 have married non-Jews, according to the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey.

About 1970 – nearly a century after significant numbers of Jews arrived here – “is when the numbers really increased, and with that the communal hand-wringing,” said Beth Wenger, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania.

By contrast, it took only one generation of living in America for the most recent immigrants to intermarry at a high rate. About 30 percent of the U.S.-born children of Asian and Latino immigrants have married outside their ethnic group.

Some attribute the speed of that assimilation to the background of the immigrants and the timing of their arrival. Many were professionals able to bypass ethnic enclaves. And they came after 1965, when the country was being transformed by the civil-rights movement.

“One’s choice to marry and . . . have children is really the most intimate of human choices,” said Gregory Rodriguez, a fellow at the New America Foundation. “The ability to do this with people of different traditions shows we’ve reached a certain level of tolerance that was unimaginable 50 years ago.”

But some see a loss.

“We know that American Jews can survive under persecution, but there has not been a test of whether they can in a free and open society,” said sociologist Rela Geffen, president of Baltimore Hebrew University.

“Freedom is the freedom to leave: to go into the mainstream,” she said. “There is the sense with intermarriages, ‘Don’t give Hitler a posthumous victory.’ ”

*

Michael pulled his left hand out of his pocket to slip a platinum band on Sunanda’s finger.

“Ani le dodi ve dodi le,” Michael said in Hebrew. “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

Sunanda repeated the couplet from the Song of Songs.

“Ani le dodi ve dodi le.”

She had been nervous about the Hebrew. “I’m going to totally mess it up,” she thought.

She had been nervous about the whole ceremony, really. For a week, she had been bolting up at 5 a.m. Her mind would race with things to do: Call the florist; call the bakery; tally the lamb vindaloo and salmon dinners among the RSVPs. That morning, a last-minute hunt for stockings had precipitated tears in the middle of Lord & Taylor.

Then, as now, it was Michael who steadied her.

“Blessed, blessed, blessed is the sacred joy of lovers,” Rabbi Alpert declared, “now one with each other.”

Although the two grew up only 13 miles from each other in South Jersey, their backgrounds had kept them apart.

Michael, a Cherry Hill East graduate, went to Hebrew school until sophomore year.

Sunanda prayed before silver statuettes of the god Ganesh, now on an altar in a closet of the Ghoshes’ home.

He spent his summers at camp. She spent them in Calcutta, becoming fluent in Bengali, becoming close to relatives there and learning the elegant postures of Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form.

As a teenager in Medford, Sunanda had been taunted: “Hindu, Hindu.”

“It made me want to be more Hindu,” she said.

Her boyfriends, for the most part, had not been Indian. They had not been white, either. They were outsiders like herself.

As for Michael, only one of his girlfriends was Jewish.

He and Sunanda met three years ago at the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, both drawn by a shared commitment to peace and social justice.

“It was really interesting to me that I was falling in love with a white, Jewish man,” she said.

Before Michael’s grandparents died last year, they sat him down. Think hard before becoming committed to someone who is not Jewish, they said.

“I always thought, and maybe it comes from watching too many Hollywood movies, that I would just fall in love with whomever I fell in love,” he said. “I just had a romantic belief there was a soul mate out there, and why would she necessarily be Jewish?”

*

If Sunanda had wanted a Hindu husband, her father could have turned to the age-old tradition of arranged marriage.

“Let’s say she didn’t find Michael, and she was having a tough time finding the right person,” Avijit Ghosh said. “I wouldn’t brush it off as archaic. . . . Parents sometimes can be a better judge.”

Some Americans with roots in India return to find for their son or daughter a suitable match based on caste, educational background, and astrological chart. Others turn to “matrimonial ads” in newspapers such as India Abroad.

An array of ethnic “spouse markets” has cropped up in reaction to intermarriage. Web sites such as indianmatchmaker.com allow singles to arrange their own matches. A dating service called “Mera Pyar” – Hindi for “my love” – arranges speed dates for Indian Americans. And a college dance-party circuit, pumped up by hip-hop hits from Bombay musicals, hooks up young people from similar backgrounds.

But Avijit Ghosh does not believe in resisting change.

“There are some Indians who have lived here for 40 years and they still can’t get over the fact that they’re not in the same world. I decided that’s one thing I wasn’t going to be in life.”

“We can bend, we’re flexible,” his wife, Krishna, said.

Anyway, this would not be the end of their daughter’s relationship with India, the Ghoshes knew. Michael and Sunanda had traveled the Himalayan foothills together. And next month, they would all go – the Poulshocks and the Ghoshes – for the second ceremony.

Michael, dressed in a kurta – tunic and pants – would arrive on horseback with his entourage during a part of the ceremony called the “Baraat.” Then he and Sunanda, his kurta tied to her red sari, would circle a consecrated bonfire to seal their union once again.

*

At the Top of the Towers, it was time for the finale. Both Michael and Sunanda stomped on the glass wrapped in a white cloth. Their guests cheered the explosion of sound.

Then, the DJ cued up the supercharged song “Baraat” from the movie Monsoon Wedding.

“Is it a Jewish ceremony or is it not? Is it a traditional ceremony or not?” Michael asked. “Who’s to tell me when I’m a Jew or not a Jew? Who’s to say when tradition can or can’t be reinvented?”

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