Perla Knudsen is a 33 year-old women born and raised in Managua, Nicaragua. Prior to coming to the U.S. at the age of 27, she graduated as a license lawyer and was working in her field when she received the news that her father's request for her visa to come to the U.S. was finally accepted and ready to go after many years of waiting. Upon arrival to present time, she learned many things for herself, things like discrimination, diversity, immigration; topics in which we will see further along in this blog. We learn how her story, though some may thing is insignificant, is actually a tiny put key piece of the mosaic of stories and voices that makes up California Ethnic History.
Diversity
Upon arrival, Perla's father took her to Union Square, a site located in the Financial District of San Francisco famously visited by tourists.There and from then on she was faced with the awesome diversity that San Francisco greatly offers.
San Francisco's grand scene of diversity perfectly ties in with the California's Ethnic History and how different ethnic groups arrived to California, makes up the diversity of people we still see today. In the textbook, "Competing Visions: A History of California" in page 113, it mentions the arrival of multiple ethnic groups during the Gold Rush era. As well as in the Academic Journal Article, "Facing the Urban Frontier: African American History in the Reshaping of the Twentieth-Century American West" by Quintard Taylor, it mentions the arrival of African Americans to California cities and how they today make up "over 90 percent of African American women and men in the West resides in its cities."(Taylor, 6)
"During 1849, about 100,000 immigrants from all over the world, but especially from the eastern United States, flooded northern California, forever changing the destiny of the state...Chinese immigrants came mostly after 1849. They were young men from southeastern China- from big cities like Hong Kong and Canton as well as from the countryside...[Also] two thirds of the new population attracted to California during the Gold Rush came from the eastern United States and were a multi-ethnic group of Scottish, French, Irish, German, and British descent." (Cherny and Lemke-Santangelo, 113)
"African American Oakland began with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869... The Pullman Palace Car Company's decision to station a porter on each of its car to provide service to passengers, and their announcement that the porter would be a black man...These porters, and the waiters and cooks who followed, had relatively steady railroad jobs and thus created a small, prosperous middle-class community far removed from the national centers of African American population...By 1910 Oakland, rather than San Francisco, had the largest black population of the Bay Area communities, and the East Bay, which included Oakland, Berkeley, and smaller cities such as Richmond and Alameda, had become the center of African American cultural and social life in Northern California." (Taylor, 7)
Discrimination
Perla Knudsen is currently happily married with her husband of 5 years. Unfortunately however, due to the being in a interracial relationship, she has experience some discrimination varying from weird stares to the infamous "oh, she married him for the green card" comments. This ties all the way back to the Gold Rush era in our California Ethnic History when being in an interracial relationship was frowned upon followed by some racial slurs, in which we would get to see in the Academic Journal Article, "Sex, Gender, Culture and a Great Event: The California Gold Rush" by Albert L. Hurtado.
"In the early years of the gold rush-say, until 1851 or 1852- there were
many Indian women in the state, although their numbers were declining rapidly. No one would be surprised to hear that white men extended few courtesies to Indian women...[But] white men abandoned their Indian consorts as soon as white spouses became available and when the development of frontier society made Indian marriages an embarrassing reminder of past conditions. Men who persisted in living with native women earned the racist sobriquet "squaw men", and their children were known as "half-breeds"- slurs that condemned racial mixing." (Hurtado, 9-11)
Immigration
In the year 2000, her father Javier Hernandez, was given permanent residency under the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act or NACARA, a U.S. law that pass in 1997 that provided certain Nicaraguans, Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Cubans, and former Soviet bloc countries varies of immigration benefits including permanent residency and relief of deportation after the settlement agreement in the class action lawsuit American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh. Through that her father was able to petition for her and her 4 other siblings to the American Embassy to come her to the U.S. as permanent residents. Though the process of her having her visa accepted, arrive to the U.S. and obtain her green card took a couple years.
Thank you and Enjoy!
Work Cited
Cherny, Lemke-Santangelo, and Griswold del Castillo, Competing Visions: A History of California, Second Edition. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2005 & 2014.
Taylor, Quintard. "Facing the Urban Frontier: African American History in the Reshaping of the Twentieth-Century American West." The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 43, No.1, (Spring 2012), pp. 4-27.
Hurtado, Albert L. "Sex, Gender, Culture, and a Great Event: The California Gold Rush." Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 68, No.1, (Feb., 1999), pp. 1-19.
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