RECENT NONFICTION

Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy, Grace Chang, Boston, South End Press, 200 pp.

Illegal. Unamerican. Disposable. In a nation with an unprecedented history of immigration, the prevailing image of those who cross our borders in search of equal opportunity -- in particular women of color of childbearing age -- is that of a drain on society. Grace Chang's vital account of immigrant women's experiences proves just the opposite: that the women who perform our least desirable jobs -- our nannies, domestic workers, janitors, farmworkers, and factoryworkers -- are most crucial to our economy and society. Yet, Chang also shows, as frequently undocumented and therefore disenfranchised workers, they are among the most vulnerable and exploited.

Chang dismantles recent arguments in favor of curbing immigration and eliminating access to education, health care, and welfare, piercing the rhetoric to reveal the racism and misogyny underneath. She unravels the twisted history of US immigration policy and its role in drawing much-needed workers to the land of opportunity, then discarding them when the need has passed. Most importantly, she highlights the unrewarded work immigrant women perform as caretakers, cleaners, and servers in the context of the broader need for jobs with justice and dignity for all.

Chang's clarity and intelligence are a welcome intervention in the debates over immigration and work in the new global economy. Her crucial account of our simultaneous need and disdain for immigrant women's labor is a vital step toward a solution.

Grace Chang is an activist and mother of two who lives in Oakland, California. Her essays and articles on immigrant women and work have appeared in Radical America, Socialist Review, ColorLines, and the anthology Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (South End Press, 1997). She is the co-editor of Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. She is currently a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.

South End Press, 7 Brookline St., Suite 1, Cambridge, MA 02139; 800/533-8478; <southend@igc.org>

Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions, Duke University Press, 1999

Bruce Cumings is best known for his work on Korea. It is a pleasure, therefore, to have an opportunity to read his essays on Japan, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam in his latest collection, Parallax Visions. Cumings shows particular skill in countering the usual picture of Japan -- as #1, as independent, as an expansionist threat. He argues that the US contained Japan during the Cold War as effectively as it did the Soviet Union (Patrick Smith's Japan: A Reinterpretation, now out in paperback from Pantheon, develops this theme as well). Ultimately Cumings zeroes in on American hegemony: how did the US establish its position in the region and maintain it for so long? Other countries in the region have attempted to assert their power, but only the US has attained that magical status of hegemon. "Hegemony," Cumings reminds us, "is signaled when people do what you want them to do, without having to be told or, better yet, asked." And so Japan asks for US bases, South Korea asks for US investments, and even China asks for membership in the World Trade Organization. There are essays here as well on Korea, North and South. But the real treat comes when Cumings widens his focus and takes a panoramic view of the region.

John Feffer and Karin Lee staff the AFSC Tokyo office.

Cold Spring Harbor's On-line Archive of the US Eugenics Movement, at http://vector.cshl.org/eugenics

The Eugenics movement in the United States was based on a mistaken application, by Sir Galton, of Gregor Mendel's single gene theory work with pea plants. What Mendel had done was prove the existence of dominant and recessive traits in pea plants. These included things like the texture of the seeds and the height of the plants. Galton and many other eugenicists of the time took Mendel's work to mean that all human behaviors were governed by a pair of genes.

An example of something that they thought to be genetic but really was not was "thassophilia," or love of the sea. They saw that the children of sailors were more likely to become sailors and they thought that to be genetic. They completely overlooked the effect a seafaring father might have on his son. Some human traits like gender, color blindness, or earlobe attachment are governed by only a pair of genes but there is no one gene or even any combination of genes that can cause poverty, immorality, or a predisposition to violence.

What they did with these "scientific" principles of heredity was horrible. The eugenicists would say that people who scored low on an IQ test that tested knowledge of US culture as much as it tested intelligence, could not immigrate to the United States because they were mentally inferior and would "pollute the collective germ-plasm of the United States."

This web site is very informative and tells many forgotten stories about people victimized by the laws enforced. There are very few other web sites on eugenics out there and so that would make this one important even if it did not have so much information. There are six main essays that each tell parts of the history, but most of the site's use and purpose lie in its archive. The archive is a gigantic collection of thousands of pictures and small essays, and is searchable by topic or picture ID number.

Without this site there would be a danger that people would attempt to forget this stain on our nation and in part many have. When my dad was my age there were still involuntary sterilizations of prisoners, and in Virginia, whites could still not marry blacks or other so-called "inferior" races.

Jeff Kaufman was recently a Peacework volunteer, and will enter the ninth grade at The Commonwealth School this fall.

Chuck Collins and Pam Rogers with Joan P. Garner, Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change, W.W. Norton & Co., 2000, 286 pages

Last year, Americans gave more than $100 billion to charitable causes. So why didn't all that money go further than it did to alleviate problems such as poverty, homelessness, and environmental destruction?

One reason, suggest Chuck Collins and Pam Rogers, the authors of Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change, may lie in the way many of us view charity. Rather than thinking of our donations as a quick-and-easy handout to those less fortunate -- and perhaps less worthy -- than ourselves, the authors argue, we should carefully choose ways to put our contributions to work, to help build the kind of world in which we want to live.

Instead of spending "just pennies a day" to feed one starving child in Guatemala, for example, we might have more impact by giving that money to projects that focus on building up Guatemala's local economy. Rather than buying a few toys for poor kids once a year at Christmas, we might choose to fund organizing for a living wage, so that the children's parents could afford to buy Christmas presents themselves. The book emphasizes throughout that donors must be involved and aware, mindfully donating money based on their own vision of a better world, and on their assessment of which grassroots organizations are doing the most to achieve that vision.

Robin Hood Was Right offers a wide range of handy advice on socially conscious giving, from the personal/spiritual (discovering your own vision, getting beyond cynicism) to the hard-nosed and practical (making room for charity in your personal budget, dealing with the tax laws). It also includes an extensive and useful set of appendices, listing numerous groups and publications involved in social change, organizing, and socially conscious giving, as well as other resources helpful to the socially conscious giver. It even has a section on what to look for in a group's budget, to help decide whether it's the kind of organization you want to donate your money to.

Jim Phillips is a freelance writer in Cincinnatti, OH.