Caution: Don’t Stereotype Immigrants

Dreamers poster

Although many in the GOP favor comprehensive immigration reform, Republican legislators are now informing us that there will be no bill this year. The bipartisan Senate compromise may be favored by business interests, conservative evangelicals, and party leaders worried about further alienating Latinos, but as long as the right wing has Speaker John Boehner’s ear, the Senate bill will not be brought before the House, where virtually all of the Democrats and a fair number of Republicans would vote for it. The stakes are huge: if the bill were to pass, deportations would cease to tear apart families, 11 million people would come out of the shadows, and there would be a path to citizenship.

Anecdote is playing a significant role in the debate. Different people characterize the undocumented immigrants differently, some calling them drug smugglers with “calves the size of cantelopes” (Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King), others seeing them as hardworking individuals seeking the American dream. In “Dedication for a Plot of Ground,” William Carlos Williams shows how problematic any generalizations are.

Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky alerted me to the poem in his Slate poetry column. Here’s what he had to say about it:

One thing I like about this poem is the way it is hard to follow. I recognize not only the immigration story, but the confusing, disorderly, partial nature of that story as well. Williams’ account of his grandmother’s life involves not only the quirks of displacement, but a messy cloud of marriages and separations, custody struggles and dislocations, betrayals and persistence, all compounding one another. That is, this poem’s story, and its abrupt, condensed manner of telling the story, resembles most of the American family stories I know, and the way I have heard them. Specifically, personally, the poem reminds me of the difficulty I had, as a child, following the knotted, fragmentary narratives of my grandparents and their parents, siblings, mates, children.

And here’s the poem:

Dedication for a Plot of Ground

By William Carlos Williams

This plot of ground
facing the waters of this inlet
is dedicated to the living presence of
Emily Dickinson Wellcome
who was born in England; married;
lost her husband and with
her five year old son
sailed for New York in a two-master;
was driven to the Azores;
ran adrift on Fire Island shoal,
met her second husband
in a Brooklyn boarding house,
went with him to Puerto Rico
bore three more children, lost
her second husband, lived hard
for eight years in St. Thomas,
Puerto Rico, San Domingo, followed
the eldest son to New York,
lost her daughter, lost her “baby,”
seized the two boys of
the oldest son by the second marriage
mothered them—they being
motherless— fought for them
against the other grandmother
and the aunts, brought them here
summer after summer, defended
herself here against thieves,
storms, sun, fire,
against flies, against girls
that came smelling about, against
drought, against weeds, storm-tides,
neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens,
against the weakness of her own hands,
against the growing strength of
the boys, against wind, against
the stones, against trespassers,
against rents, against her own mind.

She grubbed this earth with her own hands,
domineered over this grass plot,
blackguarded her oldest son
into buying it, lived here fifteen years,
attained a final loneliness and—

If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.

Are we excited or not that Emily Dickinson Welcome came to the United States? She’s neither the villainous immigrant of the right or the heroic immigrant of the left. She is, simply, one of our ancestors.

Did these ancestors bring anything more to this country that their carcasses? Are we prepared to give up our citizenship if they didn’t?

Her descendants don’t have much standing to tell today’s immigrants to “keep out.” Pass the bill!

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