Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction

Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York: New York UP, 2007. 302 pp. $70.00 cloth/$21.00 paper.

Ostensibly an introduction, this book's account of the interaction of immigration, popular culture, and mainstream America is loaded with brief chronicles of afferent levels of histories- histories of American immigration, popular culture forms, immigrauon laws, American cultural imperialism, and mainstream representanone of immigration. Its case studies, profuse in number, model for the reader commonly used approaches to cultural and immigration studies. The chronologies thus constructed and substantiated, of course, make apparent the book's aim to produce an informal immigration history in which immigrants and mainstream Americans mutually inspire, represent, and create each other through popular culture.

The book highlights within each chapter and across the chapters change and continuity in regard to the nature of immigration and popular culture, and the sociopolitical and socioeconomic scenes of the United States. The six chapters focus on six major waves of immigration in relation to six American popular culture trends or forms and their impact throughout the twentieth century: Jewish immigrants in relation to gangster movies in the 1930s, Mexican immigrants to the zoot suits of the 1940s, Puerto Rican immigrants to Nuyorican music in the 1950s, Indian immigration to the hippies of the 1960s, Jamaican immigrants to rap and reggae in the 1 970s, and Asian immigrants to cyberzines in the 1 990s. Within this framework of change, the authors of the book treat the strategy of masquerade and the active role played by immigrants in the production of popular culture as constants.

Chapter one precedes, as...