The Archaeology of Citizenship (American Experience in Archaeological Pespective)
Stacey Lynn Camp
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0813044596
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Elegantly and thoughtfully written and expands the notion of citizenship and its implications for archaeological inquiry to include types of scholarship and topics that are not traditionally considered under such an analytical rubric.”—Jane Eva Baxter, author of The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture
“An engaging book that makes an important contribution to the study of citizenship and its manifestation in the archaeological record. It is a fine and timely example of the way that archaeologists can make the past meaningful in relation to the present.”—Carolyn White, editor of The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives
Since the founding of the United States, the rights to citizenship have been carefully crafted and policed by the Europeans who originally settled and founded the country. Immigrants have been extended and denied citizenship in various legal and cultural ways.
While the subject of citizenship has often been examined from a sociological, historical, or legal perspective, historical archaeologists have yet to fully explore the material aspects of these social boundaries. The Archaeology of Citizenship uses the material record to explore what it means to be an American.
Using a late-nineteenth-century California resort as a case study, Stacey Camp discusses how the parameters of citizenship and national belonging have been defined and redefined since Europeans arrived on the continent. In a unique and powerful contribution to the field of historical archaeology, Camp uses the remnants of material culture to reveal how those in power sought to mold the composition of the United States and how those on the margins of American society carved out their own definitions of citizenship.
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Imposing new meanings on the material world, effectively redefining what it meant to be American. By providing a clearer understanding of how material culture is implicated in the process of forging an American identity, she illuminates an essential dimension of the American experience. Michael S. Nassaney Series Editor Preface and Acknowledgments In one of my most memorable experiences as a Southern California high school student, our social studies instructor decided to tackle what was then.
Below the image explains, he is a “coolie dressed as a Mexican Peon to be smuggled unto the United States.” This man was born in China, which made him ineligible for citizenship or admission into any American ports of entry beginning in 1882. Like other Chinese migrants seeking work or hoping to reunite with family in America—Erika Lee estimates the number of people to be somewhere in the ballpark of 17,300 (2002, 55)—this man used the symbols of another ethnic group—Mexican nationals—to gain.
Pattern that mirrors that of “rural poor classes in Ireland” (Brighton 2011, 41). Such wares were visual signposts to middle-class Americans, helping to uphold the belief among middle-class Americans that the “Irish poor 62 · The Archaeology of Citizenship were uncivilized” (41). Socially and financially alienated from consuming goods, Five Points’ Irish immigrants failed to pass the test of American respectability, one that would preclude them “from gaining the benefits of American.
Lynn Camp (2013).
And house cleaning for Mexican girls and women, and training in lower-class trade- and service-oriented professions for Mexican boys and men. Dreams dashed, many Mexican migrants headed home only to endure additional marginalization from Mexican nationals who took issue with “Americanized” Mexicans or who saw Mexicans who migrated back to Mexico from America as disloyal to the Mexican nation. Data mined from archaeological research at one site of Americanization instruction, a Mexican railway.