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Working at the Crossroads: American Studies for the 21st Century Presidential Address to the American Studies Association November 9, 2001

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR ROLE AS American studies scholars and teachers has taken on dimensions and conditions we could not have imagined just one year ago. The horrific events of September 11, 2001, and the aftermath of a new-fashioned global war on terrorism, have transformed the thinking and direction of many of us who study and interpret social and cultural life in the United States. For me to make sense of my own world in these troubling times, I have deliberately returned to work that I have done for over a decade that gives meaning to my own life as an academic. Last year, as I prepared for a presentation to a community forum in East Los Angeles, I noticed an elderly African American woman enter the auditorium carrying two plastic grocery sacks full of what appeared to be letters. This forum was being held at the International Institute in Boyle Heights, a place where immigrants from around the world had been welcomed to Los Angeles for the past eighty years (fig. 1). But this meeting brought together different generations of newcomers to Los Angeles that had rarely met: today's largely recent Latino immigrants in the neighborhood and an older group of white, Jewish, African American, Asian American, and Latino citizens who had first entered Boyle Heights in the mid-twentieth century but no longer lived in the community (figs. 2 and 3).