Almost All Aliens
Almost All Aliens offers a unique reinterpretation of immigration in the history of the United States. Setting aside the European migrant-centered melting-pot model of immigrant assimilation, Paul Spickard, Francisco Beltrán, and Laura Hooton put forward a fresh and provocative reconceptualization that embraces the multicultural, racialized, and colonially inflected reality of immigration that has always existed in the United States. Their astute study illustrates the complex relationship between ethnic identity and race, slavery, and colonial expansion.
Examining the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic, as well as those who crossed the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the North American Borderlands, Almost All Aliens provides a distinct, inclusive, and critical analysis of immigration, race, and identity in the United States from 1600 until the present. The second edition updates Almost All Aliens through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, recounting and analyzing the massive changes in immigration policy, the reception of immigrants, and immigrant experiences that whipsawed back and forth throughout the era. It includes a new final chapter that brings the story up to the present day.
This book will appeal to students and researchers alike studying the history of immigration, race, and colonialism in the United States, as well as those interested in American identity, especially in the context of the early twenty-first century.
Paul Spickard is Distinguished Professor of History and several other fields at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has held positions at 15 universities in the United States and abroad. Among his many books are Race in Mind: Critical Essays and Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity.
Francisco Beltrán is Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK. Previously, he taught at San Francisco State University, the University of Michigan, and Reed College. His teaching and research interests include Chicanx and Latinx history, race and ethnicity, immigration, borderlands, and oral history.
Laura Hooton is Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, San Angelo, TX. She taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point for three years, where she founded the Black History Project. Her work appears in Farming Across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West and California History.