Yongho Kim

Category: race

  • aphasic narrative in Spanglish

    Independent Project Paper
    January 28, 2005
    Yongho Kim

    In this paper I argue that the recently premiered film Spanglish, a documentary about the “integration” of a Mexican single mother into white U.S. society through the eyes of her daughter, represents a form of an essentialist reading of their social texts that can be analyzed using the notion of double consciousness.

    Spanglish is the story of Flor, a single household mother, and Cristina, her daughter, who come to the U.S. via the migrant trail and get established in California. The story progresses as a narrative in the past tense from Cristina’s perspective as she writes her college admissions essay to Princeton. (The essay is read aloud in the admissions office by an employee)

    The film starts off with an image of Mexico that self-consciously works around breaking the overused image of realismo mágico, a literary device in Latin American literature that emphasizes the supernatural in everyday life. The film shows some clear examples of such device (such as a big and long tear scene with Cristina), ridicules it, and the single family moves over the border to California.

    Once Flor starts working in California, she realizes that the pay is never enough, and decides to start working for a white family as a nanny. Pay is great, and the white family is full of little middle class problems – unmotivated children, weight-complexed daughter, combative husband-wife relationships – that Flor helps solve with her “Mexican wisdom”, a remix of age old European desires regarding the good old customs that can probably be traced back to Rousseau’s noble savage.

    It could be argued that Spanglish is just a comedy film, and that none of the stereotypes herein presented intend to represent the reality of white middle class family crises nor Latina nannys. The response is twofold: first, the director already presents us with well known truisms from White America towards Latin America, which is magical realism, and crosses it out after playing with it a while, as if saying: “this is what you have been hearing all along – now let me tell you what the real thing is like”. Second, the film takes on a documentary quality insofar as it takes the voice of Cristina, the daughter, looking back at the past.

    The second essentialist reading of social realities in the U.S. is through the main theme of Spanglish, which deals with the affectionate relationship between Flor and John, the white family’s father (whether this was a deep friendship or a love affair has been purposefully hidden from the public). The main point made regarding love in the film is that white women talk too much. Naturally, for the dialectical relationship to occur, brown women ought not to talk. And so it happens. Flor cannot talk, because she cannot speak English.

    The director, James L. Brooks, portrays the scene with tact, but what remains in the center is that what awakens a sense of longing and/or loving in John towards Flor is the fact that she is quiet and yet gets the job done (i.e. making children happy, “discussing” house problems with monosyllables and gestures, housecleaning). Although there is a crucial moment in the middle where Flor recourses to Cristina as her interpreter to settle down some misunderstandings between her and John, the occasion is an eventful scene focused around the viewer’s pleasure of seeing two women ramble in Spanish (and English)

    The point might be to suggest that relationships can develop without language, and the brown woman in her quality of undocumented immigrant might be simply a device for that rhetoric. It is of noting, however, that even giving this definition (that things go smooth when problems are not talked about) is given by the enligsh speaker, John, the master signifier, who claims that “we [John and Flor] have been communicating so well through silence all this time” in the movie itself. Thus, the film gives its viewers the sense that what Mexican immigrant women want is for the English speaking male, to speak for them, and tells them that former misconceptions such as magical realism were wrong.

    Finally, the entire narrative of the film takes place in Princeton’s admissions office, where at the end of the essay, after telling how Flor was fired from her nanny work by John’s wife after she found out about the relationship and Cristina was unwilling to let go the white privileges of going to a private school, Cristina decided her primary identity was being the daughter of her mother, a Mexican single household immigrant mother, but in front of white admissions office workers, in order to get herself accepted in another stronghold of whitedom in academia. Thus identity formation is used to please and reaffirm white expectations of how minorities should perform or self-identify in the United States.

    (some references, I ended up never using for lack of sleep)
    Reference
    Dávila, Arlene
    2001 Latinos, Inc: the Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press
    Dibango, Manu
    1994 “The Shortest Way Through”: Strategic Anti-essentialism in Popular Music. In Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. Pp. 51-66 New York: Verso
    DuBois, W.E.B
    1994 The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
    Fiske, John
    2004 Understanding Popular Culture. New York: Routledge
    Lipsitz, George
    2001 The Lion and the Spider: Mapping Sexuality, Space, and Politics in Miami Music. In American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Pp 139-67

  • Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota's Political Terrain

    Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota’s Political Terrain
    Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Internship Paper
    January 27, 2004
    Yongho Kim

    The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride of 2003 was a national movement aimed at claiming immigrants’ rights in the legislative branches of the United States. It gathered a critical mass of religious, labor, progressive and other political organizations and individuals to actively demonstrate and lobby in the Congress and the streets of New York City, and strategically located towns positioned along the path from the twelve departure cities to Washington, a move that intentionally followed the path laid by the freedom rides from the civil rights era.

    The Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (MN IWFR), planned by the two organizers who took a leading role during the national ride, Mariano Espinosa and Quito Ziegler, came together as a state-wide initiative that consisted of thirty immigrant riders and allies riding a bus that connected various key cities for voter mobilization and immigration law reform. Riders made connections with local organizers, contributed to voter registration efforts, and lobbied with representatives to have them support pro-immigrant legislation, symbolically marketed through AgJobs and the DREAM Act.

    In this paper, leaving the effectiveness of the movement aside (as the process is still ongoing), I argue that pro-immigrant efforts such as the MN IWFR injected a dose of instability and self-doubt in Minnesota’s political arena prior to and after various Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives, and the U.S. presidential, elections.
    (more…)

  • a decommodification agenda by capturing state power?

    so after reading Patrick Bond’s Strategies for Social Justice Movements from Southern Africa to the United States fpif.org/papers/0501movements_body.html

    Bond is thinking about circular state measures that eventually weaken local communities, and talks about fundamental change that doesn’t rely on state power, when he writes:

    …South Africa’s independent left fully understands the need to transcend national-scale capitalism. One step along the way is the strategy of decommodification.

    The South African decommodification agenda is based on interlocking, overlapping campaigns to turn basic needs into genuine human rights including: free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS, at least 50 liters of free water and 1 kilowatt hour of free electricity for each individual every day, extensive land reform(…..)

    so I think, if Rachleff is sending out something, there’s gotta be something new in there. The “measures”, as I reade them, of decommodifying services into basic human rights seems to require state intervention, and as he describes local movements in environmental justice, I thought he would provide some sort of theoretical framework to understand these processes. But then., the conclusion comes back with a reliance on state-administered reform:

    The latter [change that advances a nonreformist agenda] would include, for example, social policies stressing more generous and universal state services, controls on capital flows and imports/exports, and inward- oriented industrialization strategies allowing democratic control of finance and production in order to meet social needs.
    ……
    We must capture state power through elections in which a democratic political party amasses community/worker/peasant support by generalizing the sorts of struggles discussed above, eventually contending with those elites who remain locked into neocolonial power relationships.

    so I have never taken a polisci course, and so I have always trouble figuring out the influences of macrogroups, hierarchies, and unequal relationships. In other words, when dealing with historic processes, I always started with the little practices and observable phenomenom. am I missing something in Bond’s analysis of how to materialize a “nonreformist agenda”? at least when put into words, doesn’t it look like another developmental rhetoric?

    —-

    also: what was this NEPAD business? Because the new president of Kenya about a year ago had made some strong statements about NEPAD that made the party of the outgoing president rave. It’s been a while since the news went out, thoguh

  • Protected: MNFR second journal entry

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  • Class Notes. movements. Introduction

    class notes, Freedom Movements
    January 24, 2005

    -SNVC (?)

    • we are reading M.L.King and N.Mandela, not because they are everything that their respective movements represented, but in order to get an initial idea of what the main body of texts “representative” in public discourse of the movements is about. That way it is possible to at least talk about some”thing” when directing criticism.
    • David Garrow legal research historian.
    • Anthony Marx. political scientist trained in Amherst
    • Clay Carson. SNIC. Curator of MLK in Struggle

    Meyekiso
    Krog TRC
    Churchill

    Frederickson: watch for structures & ideologies

    Screening of Mapantsula
    What makes black film?

    • Spike Lee argues the screenwriter, director, actors, need to be black, etc, etc
    • Mapantsula differs

    Added today: I still don’t get the difference.
    -bg: 1985 state of emergency in SA. the figure of totsi (another word for mapantsula, or the young gangster)

    • rapid urbanization after ww2. large scale forced migration of a male workforce. black worker towns. prime example: Soweto.

    -hustler, mapantsula outside the cities or the SA version of “ghettoes”
    -regarding the social formation of totsis: greater exposure to american-led mass culture -> the big trend of the times was the detectivesque film noir -> young people identify with it to express their anger
    -what goes on today is a different matter, where young people of color have started killing other people of color. some social scientists trace the roots back to the 1950’s totsis, whereas the two phenomena deserve differential treatment.
    -theoretical framework: infrapolitics. (Will Seidt, Weapons of the Weak – studies resistance in the Phillippines)

    • McDonalds, gangster realities of the 90’s: TUPAC, Dona Carey New York [I don’t get this reference] – role in american icons.
    • makers of mapantsula told distributors that they were maknig “just another gangsta movie”. when the movie was released, it was banned in south africa.

    Mapantsula notes
    knowledge -> black body

    on the syllabus
    “do the right thing” <- smiley character? malcolm & king not as opposites. instead nothing but a man. Mapantsula was filmed in 1988

  • RE: Permission to translate White Nationalism and the Multiracial Left

    From: Yongho Kim
    To: Kil-Ja Kim, Kenyon Farrow, Mellon Minority Fellows Undegraduate Fellowship at Macalester
    Date: Mon Dec 6, 2004 9:15 am
    Subject: RE: Fwd: Permission to translate White Nationalism and the Multiracial Left

    Ms. Kim and Mr. Farrow,

    thanks for letting me post your article “White Nationalism and the Multiracial Left” on the web. It’s up now at
    http://mediamob.co.kr/aboutnews/aboutnewsview.asp?pkid=5723 (now deleted)
    http://b.yokim.net/293/

    and, I’m sure you got interesting reactions back in the summer, but wanted to share responses I’ve got on the posting over there with you. I’m adding our current email communication (only this last message I’m sending out to you) to the entry so that readers a the site have an idea of what I am doing with their comments.

    Also, let me know if you start getting too much spam (so that I take down your email addresses from the site) South Korean sites are quite a hotspot for that.

    I wanted to share your article in both directions at this south korean blog site, because my impression is that there is a large ideological gap between discussions surrounding race in south korea and the united states. Reactions, and the language they are carried on from the progressive camp in south korea about race is quite disturbing, especially now that “illegal immigrants” from Indonesia, Phillippines and the rest of Southeast Asia have started flocking to south korea (reaching 1% of the population was the last I heard), and these “illegal immigrants” are quite different from the old “illegal immigrants” which were made up of white american troops of the occupying army forces (which included blacks but were conceptualized as part of the white masse). It’s even more disturbing to learn that at south korea sources of how race is dealt with in the U.S. comes from labor unions and indy media centers, which we may agree don’t have the most subversive strategy in dealing with race.

    As for the online reactions to your articles, they do mostly focus on the first half of your article, arguing that you 1) caricaturize Moore and 2) you can’t really merge different movements into one big chunk. I think they are missing your criticism of how in-between groups such as immigrants are trying to step on black peoples’ discrimination to merely reap the benefits of not being black, which was your central argument (right?). I failed to get the concept of “black death” across, I think, and none of the reactions seem to deal with the second half (maybe it didn’t make sense?). The language and terminology barrier (we don’t have two words for “African-American” and “black” in the korean language, for example) If you decide to get out a response, you could just email them to me and I will try posting them in the original english along with translations, time permitting. Please feel free to check out the web itself.

    I’m also cc’ing this to the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellows mailing list at Macalester, at which we discussed your article in august.

  • MNFR summary on september part one

    It’s been a long month. Hopefully, I will be able to journal more regularly starting today.

    I first heard of Mariano back in July of 2003. It was some paper piece rushedly handed by someone to the education department (I think). It talked about sweat and blood and some agitational material. The education department thought it could be a good material for Voces Laborales, CDL’s monthly bulletin, and passed it on to me who was working on the June edition back then (oops, it must have been May, then)

    It’s still up and well.

    Caravana por los Derechos de Trabajadores Inmigrantes
    Voces Laborales, vol.1, n.11. Mayo-Junio 2003
    http://www.cdl.uni.cc/voc1/1.11.freedomride.htm

    Inmigrantes a lo largo del país se reúnen en Washington para pronunciarse por la justicia y reforma legal en lugar de sufrir en silencio.

    Esta Caravana, o Freedom Ride, representa la más grande movilización de trabajadores inmigrantes y nuestros aliados en la historia de los Estados Unidos.

    Los inmigrantes y nuestros aliados iniciaremos el movimiento en el 20 de Septiembre de 2003, desde las ciudades más alejadas del país para brindar apoyo a las reformas legales. Después de reunirnos en Washington con los Miembros del Congreso, nos dirigiremos a Nueva York, para una masiva manifestación el Sábado, 4 de Octubre.

    Los trabajadores hemos participado en la construcción de este país. No hay mina, puente, o surco en los campos de todo Estados Unidos que no hayan sido tocados con las lágrimas, sudor y sangre de los inmigrantes. Pero vivimos en constante amenaza de deportación y pérdida abrupta del trabajo. Recientemente, un nuevo momentum nos ha hecho objeto de una de las legislaciones y medidas ejecutivas más represivas que recuerdan memorias recientes. Justamente, los trabajadores inmigrantes demandamos amnistía total para los trabajadores que han contribuido tanto, y justamente reclamamos estar libres del reforzamiento de las condiciones de explotación.

    Este es el mensaje que llevará la Caravana, o Freedom Ride de los trabajadores Inmigrantes, orgullosamente y en alta voz a través del país. Ésta es una iniciativa que nació en Oakland Park, California, donde se reunieron representantes de más de 400 organizaciones que incluye el AFL-CIO, comunidades religiosas y asociaciones estudiantiles.

    Para más información, contactar Centro de Derechos Laborales (Teléfono: 612-276-0788) o la página web www.immigrantworkersfreedomride.com

    Then I kind of forgot about it – I think I went to a few planning meetings, but back then I was more involved with doing quote and quote “authentic spanish” work in editing RCTA’s textbook. Soon, Jorge took off as rider representing CDL. I think there was someone else who went under RCTA’s sponsorship.

    When I finished the summer internship with RCTA and started the work-study with TCRLN, the two intern/staff members had also been riders. Somehow I had not seen Mariano very often back then, but starting the spring of 2004 he started coming to our office regularly. I think he still had his SEIU situation dragging behind him and heard some comments. In retrospect, there should have been tensions between our direction which was about bringing workers to solve their issues within the context of unions, and his, but apprently the Freedom Ride connection had overcome that. One night, while standing post for the worker’s rights center, he came in to talk about something, and I just fell asleep right in front of Julia and him while they discussed plans. There is no better way of leaving lasting impressions.

    I also remember earlier a CDL volunteer who was a rider and organizer, and was very excited about it – he once winked and said “you know, all this is really about getting Bush out of office”. In a sense, he was a bit like the old man who comes to Macalester’s library – he did lots of research on sites like CommonDreams and printed tons of articles. One day, CDL decided not to engage officially with him because of his partisan leanings. I think he moved to ACT now.

    I also recall Maura, who took a class with professor Ping in the semester when she took a week off to participate in the ride in late september. Maura said that her classes were not really about English, but about immigrants, and she was doing census research and reading stories by second generation immigrants – I’d guess Ping is tenured already?

    Then last summer, around mid-july, the Freedom Ride people came up with the idea of organizing a full ride across rural Minnesota to raise awareness on activism going on in other cities and develop a stronger voice in legislation. Some key items that caught my attention: there are way fewer people in the countryside, so organizing a core of immigrants to vote/raise their voice is quite menacing for the state house and senate; among other things, what activists in the rural area need is media exposure, more than workforce.

    That was amazing. And a few weeks later, Mariano came to ask me for a website for MNFR. It’s been the most rewarding web work I have done since started in 1997. And it’s not only in terms of the kind of movement it supported or people I came in touch with through it, but the sheer technical aspect as well – daily hits, variety of visit sources, tasks that were non-tech specific, and so forth. Dealing a trained staff that understood domains and servers was great. So we bought a domain name and shared ¡Adelante!’s server using a parked domain feature (or something like that)

    Deciding what the domain name was going to be took over an hour, I think. Mariano and Quito sat there and started talking about the kind of relationships they wanted to have with hosts, sponsors and affiliates, and the impact that a name like Freedom Ride Coalition or IWFR MN Chapter or else could have on such relationships, or the images they could portray thereof. He kept asking for themed names, like “immigration reform” “justice for immigrants”, while quito and me tried pushig forward abbreviated names that would be 1) easy to remember 2) stick to pickets and banners without taking too much space. We settled for mnfr.org, but I think Mariano is still not very happy with that.

    Oh, forgot mentioning that I also met Liz who interned almost full-time with MNFR during spring of 2004, in our Lilly weekly discussions. She mentioned the fateful meeting where someone proposed that immigrants across the country rise up and initiate a general strike to show our power, and the moderator or chair of the discussion had suggested taking a more feasible step. Then Pedro (Pablo?) rose up and started pointing at each one, yelling out “are YOU an immigrant?” and “are YOU an immigrant” , going on each person. And that scared a lot of people, and they didn’t come back – MNFR had lost quite a base. According Liz’s interpretaiton, if I got her right, that attitude came from his ISAIAH training, where “training” consists of you being yelled at for two hours. (now it all sounds weird..) I was really interested in that incident and tried asking more, but TCRLN people weren’t too excited to recall the story either. But then, now I think that htis was maybe an AFFIRM meeting.

  • Making connections with the audience: professionalism and alienation

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    May 10, 2004. (due May 7th – three days late )

    Making connections with the audience: professionalism and alienation

    In reflecting on the production of “Forgotten”, I want to focus on the difference between the performance at the Union Hall and the one at Macalester in the level of connections it allowed student performers to make with the audience during the show itself.

    The Union Hall was not meant to be used as a performance space – it had a podium dedicated to lectures and some backstage space. Bob arranged it so that the main actors would hide behind the backstage space when they were not performing, but the worker’s chorus had to stay in the back of the hall, visible to the audience. In between scenes, and in the majority of scenes where the worker’s chorus was not present, we (the worker’s chorus) could stand in the back and listen to peoples’ reactions – laughter, exclamations, suspense, etc.

    Having not had the time to stay and chat with audiences, this was a medium through which I could connect with the audience. They laughed when the foreman said “It’s in the corner where no one else ever goes”, they were focused and silent during the introduction of “The Ford Hunger March”. I also had a chance to confirm feelings I had towards situations – a bitter taste for Lewis not listening to his wife, for example – by finding reactions or the lack of them in the audience. In the same vein, not having a proper lightning set helped view the expressions in the faces of the people present there.

    On the other hand, Macalester’s concert hall was conceived from the beginning as a performance space. There were doors that closed well (the Union Hall’s backstage was not an enclosed space, but just a wall separating the hall from the back stage) at the stage and a separate entrance hallway outside of the concert hall, which was where the students waited. Behind the thick walls, we could only follow the general melody in order to know when to enter. The intense spotlight also prevented us from seeing the audience.

    This contributed to separating the student performers from the performance experience. Although a stretch, I parallel this to a general pattern where technical professionalism matches an increased distance between artist and audience as in Rose’s account of western music isolating the musician through sheet music. As Pete Seeger’s effort to incorporate the audience in the singing was a way to break through his contradictions between the message portrayed and his own life (Filene 196), directions to the opposite pole seem to alienate the performers.

    As a side note, I would like to point out that our Thursday concert was the second time I had listened to the lyrics for the whole show attentively and could figure out what the whole story was about.

    As a result, in the brief moments that I exchanged brief commentaries with audiences after the show, I felt there were more shared emotional links in the Union Hall, not because it was a working class space, but because it was less professional and allowed for informal human expressions such as laughter to transmit both sides.

  • imagined conversation between Benjamin Filene and Ruth Glasser on "authenticity"

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    May 10, 2004 (due April 15 – 3 weeks late)

    [DJ plays “We shall not be moved” by the Almanac Singers]

    Glasser: I like how the band uses the banjo, which gives it a more folk feel. Were the instruments made in the east coast before being sold to the singers? (G 18)

    Filene: I think you are right in that it was made in the east coast through the producers.. but I look more into the intention of the singer behind using “traditional” instruments. Pete Seeger was always torn between wanting to speak out for the working class and only being able to do so through a commercial distribution process. He faced the contradiction and expressed it overtly. (F 201)

    G: Did he? Still, that sounds a bit hypocritical – if you do not come from a middle class background, why would you pretend to sound like one, and then “apologize” for doing it? Pete should have worked along with singers from true working class background – those who worked partly in music and were dedicated in daytime to mining and other working-class jobs. (G 93)

    F: It can’t be that easy… he had to negotiate with the industry in order to be heard – we could most likely not be able to discuss his music had Pete not gone commercial. (F 203)

    G: Maybe.. what about the lyrics, though? What does he mean by “we” in “we shall not be moved”, “the union is behind us”, and “we’re black and white together”, when the Almanac Singers does not come from a working class background, is not really related to the union, nor is racially diverse? Puerto Ricans bought the discs made by Puerto Ricans about Puerto Rico, not because they expected people to imitate their accents and present a self-image intended to represent them, but because they knew that these were their brothers and sisters telling their stories. (G 124) Why cannot we expect a similar background for American “folk” singers?

    [Music shifts to “Casey Jones”]

    F: With folk musicians it’s a bit of a different story – people needed to work together for common causes. Civil rights activists, for example, didn’t mind a white guy singing the struggle of African-Americans – we could say that they didn’t expect him to represent the cause, but rather to draw middle class, white sympathizers to be able to identify with the movement. (F 201) The story of Casey Jones, for example, is a case in point. Pete also brought the folk music back to the folk with his sing-alongs. (F 195)

    G: That sounds more like a transitional way of negotiating the limitations of the music industry. Shouldn’t Pete’s goal to change the fact that singers cannot reach audiences unless they are abiding by commercial demand?

    Kim: Ruth! Hello! What are you people talking about? I heard you mention Pete Seeger.

    G: It’s that Ben annoys me because he says that all musicians face contradictions by their involvement with commercialized music industry and that Pete did what he could – highlighting the limitations of folk music, without really trying to do anything about it.

    K: Oh, you should check Tricia Rose! I guess you read her.. doesn’t she say in Black Noise that hip hop’s relationship with the commodity market does not necessarily mean that hip hop is being absorbed by the system, but rather an appropriation of the conditions of production. (Rose 40). Take women graffiti writers, for example – they use colors and shapes set by society (pink color, landscapes) but not as a way of reinforcing preconceived notions, but in order to gain visibility in an area often known as male-dominated (R 44). Rappers also encourage audience participation (R 54), which is not the focus but could be seen as a continuation of Pete.

    F: Thanks for the help, Yongho. Indeed, singers to subvert commercial structures – for instance, Lead Belly sued the Lomaxes, his former [scrip] employer, for the control of revenues produces from his concerts. (F 62) It’s just that during Pete’s times the industry was very complex.

    [Yongho plugs “The Message” with Dr. Dre]

    G: But it’s still not authentic – granted, judging authenticity by merely the country the artist is from is quite silly (G 155) But what if a white, suburban, middle-class singer claims a share of black hip hop identity while hiding his backgrounds?

    F: Dylan would be a good example. He concealed his background but his songs were consciousness-raising in a number of ways.

    G: No. You don’t just justify racial masquerading by saying that the singer was trying to face contradictions in a creative way, in the same way you would do it along class lines.

    Y: [silence] I think it’s about how we’re locating the artist within society – is the artist going to merely become part of the music industry, or is the artist conceive as an active agent working with the given tools and environment? (R 63) That’s how we could see some hope for the working class people who have to deal with societal structures of exploitation on a daily basis.

  • Coalition-making in The Fuse’s Seattle 1919

    Yongho Kim
    Labor’s Story through Music
    February 25, 2004

    Coalition-making in The Fuse’s Seattle 1919: Class Solidarity and Divisiveness, and Incorporation of the Other in post-World War I Unionism.

    Seattle 1919 addresses issues of class solidarity frequently present in the newly emerging U.S. unionism and attempts to unite workers from different race, gender, and skill groups under a common struggle against the capitalist classes. Babson defines solidarity as that which “defined an injury to any one worker as an injury to all workers” (Babson, 9). In practice, this amounted to workers striking in sympathy for a strike held by workers from another industry brought together by geographical links (such as the different unions in the Seattle 1919 strike) or by relationships in their modes of production (such as the Pullman 1894 strike, in which railroad workers joined train operators’ strike). Indeed, the Seattle 1919 strike appears to have been a major show of class solidarity in the inter wars period; was this the reason that it was picked as the title for The Fuse’s rock opera – because the songs focused in class solidarity and Seattle 1919 was its symbol?

    A major point of contention between workers (particularly the skilled) and the factory owner class in early 20th century was scientific management and the scrip system (Zinn, 9). Scientific management, a system of production introduced by Taylor in which workers were to perform minimum tasks on pieces carried on a line (Babson, 27), involved a decrease at the cost of production and the de-skilling of workers, which threatened to end with the relative autonomy enjoyed by skilled craftsmen. (Babson, 29)

    Class solidarity was a problematic concept in early U.S. unionism, especially when applied over marginalized minorities among the working class. White workers would often not accept African-American authorities, although they would appeal to class solidarity in times of hardship. (Arnesen, 80)

    In “Street Speech”, a rhetoric that seems to have been transplanted from that of freedom for slaves is used to advocate the right for workers to be free from the scrip system. The singer says, “brick by brick / nail by nail / we built the mansions / and we built the jails”, pointing out that the power to bring about both opulence of the upper class and oppression on the worker class lies within the worker class. At the same time, it is suggested that the struggle of the working class is akin to that of the African-American peoples because both are directed against a group that owns the means of production. The song goes on: “We don’t want them / we don’t need them / these parasites who live off someone else!”. Thus “Street Speech” is a coalitional effort to incorporate African-Americans to the organizing effort, while at the same time it is meant to rouse feelings of class solidarity from white union workers towards African-Americans who, driven by poverty, often acted as strikebreakers (Babson, 48), triggering racial lynching from union members.

    Unskilled workers were also often excluded in the support from skilled workers’ unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL). During World War I, unskilled workers’ unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were prosecuted by the government under the implicit consent of the AFL (Babson, 37). In Seattle’s 1919 strike, even though local AFL affiliates cooperated with each other on a radical path more on IWW’s lane, national AFL representatives dissented. (Brecher, 105) It is to note that the price of such non-cooperation only came back to the worker. In “Caught in the middle”, the singer laments: “I joined IWW for a principle / and the AF of L for a job / now I’m caught in the middle / don’t know which way to go”.

    The uneasiness between the AFL and IWW is also closely bound by the tensions around the newly introduced scientific management. Scientific management, introduced by Taylor, was encouraged to union workers to work in small, mechanical tasks that didn’t require a specific skill. This meant that whenever a strike broke among skilled craftsmen, managers could easily replace them with dozens of unskilled workers from the streets. (Babson, 28) This was the chief reason why AFL would not offer membership to industrial workers. (Babson, 32)

    Seattle 1919 uses strategies of incorporation by appealing to shared experiences as described above. It also points out a common struggle against the capitalist class as a reason to unite forces. The scarcity of solidarity among different minority groups is sometimes compensated by recognizing a common opposing force.

    One form of such approach is by weighing the capitalist’s power against powers traditionally held as authoritative. The singer expresses this in “One Step Further”, in which he sings “I don’t care about the government / I think Rockefeller owns the president”. The capitalist class is portrayed as am powerful force that flies above any controlling mechanism. The weariness of an opposing force that go beyond law is a compelling reason to join a struggle against it.

    A definitive split between AFL and IWW, and the eventual demise of the IWW while AFL grew under government protection, took place during World War I. On the one hand the demand for industrial output increased, while available labor was held steady because immigration routes were blocked. The government, worried that a general strike may disrupt the highly profitable war machinery exportations situation, created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) that mediated negotiations between corporations and unions in order to prevent strikes from erupting. AFL was highly cooperative in the process, alienating the draft-resisting IWW in the process. (Babson, 39) Seattle 1919 is critical of this relationship. “The Push” goes like this: “You say it’s for the war but I think it’s for the money”, which may be referring to the NWLB that is pleading for no strikes because it would damage the country but also to the AFL that claims to show its patriotic stance while receiving compensations in the form of organizing support. I think the song lines up with the IWW, which is evident in the anti-war stance of the lines “In the bloody trenches / where is law and order? / Dying for your country”

    Seattle 1919 is a call to class solidarity across skill and racial lines, because there is a common struggle against a common opposing force. Unfortunately, the brief one-month general strike in Seattle, which most closely resembled such close knit solidarity among the working class in the city, fell down because of fissures with external AFL pressuring and the government threat of turning the peaceful manifestation into a violent one.

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