Immigration and American Popular Culture

Rachel Lee Rubin is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is author of Immigration and American Popular Culture (with Jeffrey Melnick, NYU Press) and Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature, and co-editor of American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century and Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction.Jeffrey Melnick is Associate Professor of American Studies at Babson College. He is author of A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song and Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South.

"In this eminently readable and insightful overview of U.S. cultural history in the last century, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey provide a view into the roiling production of American culture." (Journal of American Ethnic History) "Eloquently written." (Popular Music) "A thought-provoking examination of immigration history." (Choice) "This books account of the interaction of immigration, popular culture, and mainstream America is loaded with brief chronicles of different levels of historieshistories of American immigration, popular culture forms, immigration laws, American cultural imperialism, and mainstream representations of immigration." (African American Review) "Immigration and Popular Culture: An Introduction is an excellent and very necessary contribution to American Studies and to the complex and important relationship between the two topics in its title." - Norma Coates (American Studies Journal) "A sprawling and uniquely synthetic account of the role immigrants have played as performers, entrepreneurs, and as the subjects of the mass culture industry. Brings a stunning, transnational array of immigrant cultural forms, immigration policies, and cohorts together in new and important ways." - Rachel Ida Buff,University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee "Rachel Rubin and Jeff Melnick show us the skinny on pop's melting pot. The cauldron does not burn off immigrant character, creating American sameness, but intensifies its many tastes. Ladle after ladle of ethnic infusions go into the potScarface to Gypsy Punks, pachuco zoot suiters to Ravi Shankar, Jimmy Cliff to West Side Story. They compound the terms of race and place until they reform the mainstream. And, suddenly, that old wasp canon has become just another ethnic style." - W. T. Lhamon, Jr.,author, most recently, of Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Aliens, Inc.1. Hollywood, 1930: Jewish Gangster Masquerade 2. Los Angeles, 1943: Zoot Suit Style, Immigrant Politics 3. Broadway, 1957: West Side Story and the Nuyorican Blues 4. Monterey, 1967: The Hippies Meet Ravi Shankar 5. South Bronx, 1977: Jamaican Migrants, Born Jamericans, and Global Music6. Cyberspace, Y2K: Giant Robots, Asian Punks Afterword: Chelsea, 2006: Wandering Popular CultureAppendix: TimelineWorks CitedIndexAbout the Authors