Making the Immigrant Soldier

Making the Immigrant Soldier
Author: Cristina-Ioana Dragomir
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2023-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 025205430X

Immigrants to the United States have long used the armed forces as a shortcut to citizenship. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir profiles Lily, Alexa, and Vikrant, three immigrants of varying nationalities and backgrounds who chose military service as their way of becoming American citizens. Privileging the trio’s own words and experiences, Dragomir crafts a human-focused narrative that moves from their lives in their home countries and decisions to join the military to their fraught naturalization processes within the service. Dragomir illuminates how race, ethnicity, class, and gender impacted their transformation from immigrant to soldier, veteran, and American. She explores how these factors both eased their journeys and created obstacles that complicated their access to healthcare, education, economic resources, and other forms of social justice. A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.

Immigrant Soldier

Immigrant Soldier
Author: Kathryn Lang-Slattery
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-02-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780990674238

Part coming of age story, part immigrant tale, part World War II adventure, Immigrant Soldier, The Story of a Ritchie Boy follows Herman as he evolves from a frightened and frustrated teenager, looking for a place to belong, into a confident U.S. Army Intelligence officer who struggles with the conflicting emotions of hate and forgiveness.

The Tattooed Soldier

The Tattooed Soldier
Author: Héctor Tobar
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2014-10-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250055865

Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles haunted by memories of his wife and child, who were murdered at the hands of a man marked with yellow ink. In a park near Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a sinister tattoo—yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the sign of the death squad, the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army. This chance encounter between Antonio and his family's killer ignites a psychological showdown between these two men. Each will discover that the war in Central America has migrated with them as they are engulfed by the quemazones—"the great burning" of the Los Angeles riots. A tragic tale of loss and destiny in the underbelly of an American city, The Tattooed Soldier is Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Héctor Tobar's mesmerizing exploration of violence and the marks it leaves upon us.

8 Seconds of Courage

8 Seconds of Courage
Author: Flo Groberg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501165887

Describes the author's childhood relocation from France to the U.S., where as a naturalized citizen he joined the military and served multiple tours in Afghanistan before he was wounded while protecting his patrol from a suicide bomber.

Not "A Nation of Immigrants"

Not
Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2021-08-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807036293

Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good—but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception. While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.

America Border Culture Dreamer

America Border Culture Dreamer
Author: Wendy Ewald
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 67
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0316484970

First- and second-generation immigrants to the US from all around the world collaborate with renowned photographer Wendy Ewald to create a stunning, surprising catalog of their experiences from A to Z. In a unique collaboration with photographer and educator Wendy Ewald, eighteen immigrant teenagers create an alphabet defining their experiences in pictures and words. Wendy helped the teenagers pose for and design the photographs, interviewing them along the way about their own journeys and perspectives. America Border Culture Dreamer presents Wendy and the students' poignant and powerful images and definitions along with their personal stories of change, hardship, and hope. Created in a collaboration with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, this book casts a new light on the crucial, under-heard voices of teenage immigrants themselves, making a vital contribution to the timely national conversation about immigration in America.

Immigrant Soldier

Immigrant Soldier
Author: George J Raunam
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2023-10-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

About the Book Immigrant Soldier is the story of one immigrant’s struggle from undergoing Soviet bombings in Tallinn, Estonia, to the devastation of the Dresden, Germany bombing in 1944 by the Allies. Then the uncertain years of living in a displaced persons camp after World War II in Germany. Born in Tartu, Estonia at the start of World War II in 1937, Raunam describes the struggle to understand the reason for all the random death and the fear of the unknown and for losing everything, almost. He finds a new life in America and military service as well as new meaning in friends, love, fun, and the sheer joy of working for a country that he chose. He enlists as a private in the National Guard at age seventeen, then serves in combat, is decorated with a Silver Star and retires as a lieutenant colonel, aide de camp to General of the Army Omar N Bradley. His lifelong desire to find his family takes on a new meaning with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The odyssey takes six trips to Germany, Estonia, and Russia to locate family members who did not know the status of each other’s survival after World War II. He discovers the feeling of unbelievable joy to find out that one has a brother and sister and the celebration of finding each other. About the Author George J Raunam lives in Texas. He has five children, fifteen grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. He sees his family frequently and has hosted European family members in California and Texas to share their love for America. This is his first book about how to find lost family members and the Immigrant Spirit.

Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity

Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity
Author: Eileen Tamura
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252063589

"The main theme of this book is the interplay of Americanization and acculturation of the Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands. By acculturation the author refers to what the Nisei wanted and actually did achieve-their adaptation to American middle-class life" -- Preface.

Americans All!

Americans All!
Author: Nancy Gentile Ford
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 1603443290

During the First World War, nearly half a million immigrant draftees from forty-six different nations served in the U.S. Army. This surge of Old World soldiers challenged the American military's cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions and required military leaders to reconsider their training methods for the foreign-born troops. How did the U.S. War Department integrate this diverse group into a united fighting force?The war department drew on the experiences of progressive social welfare reformers, who worked with immigrants in urban settlement houses, and they listened to industrial efficiency experts, who connected combat performance to morale and personnel management. Perhaps most significantly, the military enlisted the help of ethnic community leaders, who assisted in training, socializing, and Americanizing immigrant troops and who pressured the military to recognize and meet the important cultural and religious needs of the ethnic soldiers. These community leaders negotiated the Americanization process by promoting patriotism and loyalty to the United States while retaining key ethnic cultural traditions.Offering an exciting look at an unexplored area of military history, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I constitutes a work of special interest to scholars in the fields of military history, sociology, and ethnic studies. Ford'sresearch illuminates what it meant for the U.S. military to reexamine early twentieth-century nativism; instead of forcing soldiers into a melting pot, war department policies created an atmosphere that made both American and ethnic pride acceptable.During the war, a German officer commented on the ethnic diversity of the American army and noted, with some amazement, that these "semi-Americans" considered themselves to be "true-born sons of their adopted country." The officer was wrong on one count. The immigrant soldiers were not "semi-Americans"; they were "Americans all!"

Sons and Soldiers

Sons and Soldiers
Author: Bruce Henderson
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2017-07-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062419110

New York Times Bestseller The definitive story of the Ritchie Boys, as featured on CBS's 60 Minutes "An irresistible history of the WWII Jewish refugees who returned to Europe to fight the Nazis.” —Newsday They were young Jewish boys who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe and resettled in America. After the United States entered the war, they returned to fight for their adopted homeland and for the families they had left behind. Their stories tell the tale of one of the U.S. Army’s greatest secret weapons. Sons and Soldiers begins during the menacing rise of Hitler’s Nazi party, as Jewish families were trying desperately to get out of Europe. Bestselling author Bruce Henderson captures the heartbreaking stories of parents choosing to send their young sons away to uncertain futures in America, perhaps never to see them again. As these boys became young men, they were determined to join the fight in Europe. Henderson describes how they were recruited into the U.S. Army and how their unique mastery of the German language and psychology was put to use to interrogate German prisoners of war. These young men—known as the Ritchie Boys, after the Maryland camp where they trained—knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured. Yet they leapt at the opportunity to be sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions that saved American lives and helped win the war. A postwar army report found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys. Sons and Soldiers draws on original interviews and extensive archival research to vividly re-create the stories of six of these men, tracing their journeys from childhood through their escapes from Europe, their feats and sacrifices during the war, and finally their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten.