Crossing the border can be a cruel social leveler. For José Clemente Orozco, as for many Mexican immigrants, entering the United States proved a harsh and humiliating experience. But unlike most of his compatriots, the renowned muralist endured immigrant indignities at opposite ends of the map, on both the southern and northern edges of the U.S.

Orozco’s first and most famous frontier passage came in 1917, more than a decade before creating his heroic Prometheus at Pomona College. U.S. customs agents at Laredo, Texas, confiscated and destroyed most of the paintings he was carrying, claiming that they were somehow obscene. It was a bitter first impression of the country he had looked to for new artistic horizons. Instead, he found at first a vexing sort of censorship that would worry him for many years to come.

The second border incident is less notorious in art circles, though Orozco himself mentions it in his autobiography. This time, the brush with authorities didn’t involve his art. But it left a personal wound that might feel familiar to many fellow immigrants, regardless of profession, fame or social class.oro

During that same trip, Orozco made a tourist stop at Niagara Falls. At one point, he crossed into Canada to get a better view of the binational natural wonder. World War I was raging and authorities feared an assassination attempt on England’s Prince of Wales, who happened to be visiting at the same time. Adding to a climate of international tension, Orozco recalls, newspapers blared “in enormous red headlines” an account by a “yellow journalist” about Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries assaulting a train in Sonora and allegedly violating all the women on board.

“I had been there a couple of hours when a policeman detected something suspicious in my countenance and asked for my passport,” Orozco writes of his aborted Canadian sojourn. “On seeing that I was a Mexican he literally gave a jump and expelled me on the spot, himself conducting me back to the American side. ‘Mexican’ and ‘bandit’ were synonymous.”

In either incident, those border agents could not have imagined that they were deporting—or destroying the work of—an artist who was to become, in the words of Art Professor Victor Sorell, “the Michelangelo of the 20th Century.”  Although somewhat overshadowed by the other two members of the esteemed troika of Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Orozco has gained increasing attention and respectability in the United States, especially in the past decade. He was the subject of a 2007 PBS documentary, Orozco: Man of Fire, and of a 2002 traveling exhibition, José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934, organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, site of the last of three murals the artist created during that seven-year stay in this country.

In written essays and interviews, experts paint a portrait of an artist whose life and labor were deeply and permanently influenced by his binational lifestyle. Of Mexico’s big three muralists— Los Tres Grandes—Orozco was the one who spent the most time in the United States, a total of 10 years during four separate stays—in 1917-19, 1927-34, 1940 and 1945-46. His visits coincided with the most convulsive global events of the 20th century, including both world wars. Orozco was living in New York the day the stock market crashed in 1929, becoming an artistic eyewitness who documented its aftermath in grim urban tableaus during the first years of the Great Depression. One of those paintings, 1931’s Los Muertos, depicts skyscrapers collapsing in a jagged jumble, an image that would be used 70 years later by a Mexican magazine to illustrate the tragedy of 9/11.

Seen through the prism of his immigrant experience, Orozco’s story will feel familiar even to those far from the rarefied art circles he inhabited. The Niagara Falls fiasco raises issues of xenophobia and racial profiling that still resonate to this day, almost 100 years later. Beyond that, all immigrants can relate to elements of the artist’s cross-border existence—the struggle to navigate the culture gap, to carve out a space where they’re not always welcome, to build a new life from scratch, to move forward despite crippling setbacks. In Orozco’s case, that included periods of poverty and isolation, epic failures as an artist and early public scorn for his work. Not to mention the loss of one hand in a fireworks accident as a young man, a disability that would have sidelined most aspiring muralists, since it is such a physically challenging art form.

“He certainly represents that [immigrant] spirit of gumption and upward battle,” says Laurie Coyle, who wrote, directed and produced the vivid Orozco documentary along with collaborator Rick Tejada-Flores.

The incident in Laredo came as a culture shock for Orozco. Though no records of the destroyed paintings exist, experts believe they were part of a series of watercolors called House of Tears, depicting brothel scenes. They were studies in the human psyche, not sexuality. They may have been grim and hopeless, but not titillating. “The pictures were far from immoral,” writes Orozco in his autobiography. “There was nothing shameless about them. There weren’t even any nudes.”

His reaction: Just keep moving. “At first, I was too dumbfounded to utter a word, but then when I did protest furiously, it was of no avail,” he writes, “and I sadly continued on my way to San Francisco.”

Though barely mentioned again, the border incident created a sort of philosophical angst for the artist, with long-term effects, according to Renato González Mello, professor of contemporary art at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and the foremost expert on Orozco. The encounter represents a historic clash that flares when Latin Catholic culture meets Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, he explains. Aesthetically speaking, that clash hinges on traditional distinctions between high and low art, a dichotomy that was of particular concern to Orozco and other Mexican artists of the revolutionary era who brashly worked to breach it.

“The incident makes him see that the distinction between high and low is subject to legal definitions,” González says in a bilingual phone interview from Mexico City. “What in Mexico would be a problem of good taste or bad taste, or simply a problem of class, in the United States becomes a matter of law enforcement… This is like a completely different planet for Orozco, and he sees it as incredibly strange and irrational.”

Getting used to new rules would take time. For the two years he spent in the United States on that first visit, Orozco did not produce any art works of note. Instead, he painted movie posters and Kewpie dolls for subsistence. “I still believed that there was some law against art in the United States,” the artist is quoted saying in the documentary, “and I wasn’t taking any more chances.”

Orozco returned to Mexico in 1919, on the cusp of the country’s public mural movement. But Orozco’s first major commission in 1924 was soon plunged into chaos when angry conservative students defaced his murals at the capital’s National Preparatory School, because they considered them seditious and sacrilegious. Orozco recalls that he and Siqueiros were both “thrown out into the streets like mad dogs.”

Orozco (front row, fifth from right) with an unidentified group in Frary Hall, where he would paint his Prometheus. Photo courtesy of Honnold-Mudd Library.

The muralists managed to finish the work two years later, to great acclaim. But soon, government support for the mural movement dried up, and with it the hope for new commissions. With that discouraging backdrop, noting that “there was little to hold me in Mexico,” Orozco decided to set out once again for El Norte, arriving in New York in the winter of 1927.

“It was December and very cold,” he writes. “I knew nobody and proposed to begin all over.”

For six months, Orozco lived in virtual anonymity, until hemet American journalist Alma Reed, who was to become his agent and chief cheerleader. She had been referred to the artist by another writer, Anita Brenner, daughter of Jewish emigrants to Mexico who was familiar with his work and expressed concern for his “sad and lonely and neglected” condition. But she warned Reed that Orozco could be difficult, a man “tortured by hypersensitive nerves” who was “easily hurt.”

In her own book about Orozco, Reed recounts going to meet the artist for the first time at his basement apartment in Manhattan. Instead of a temperamental grouch, Reed found “a gentle host” with a “cordial smile” and a “vague touch of the debonair.” She was incensed by the way her fellow Americans were ignoring him, a snub she called “a breach of international courtesy.”

“Not one of our very wealthy and socially prominent art patrons or subsidized cultural institutions had made the slightest gesture of welcome to this renowned master of the long-lost technique of true fresco …,” writes Reed. Impelled by a “nebulous desire to make amends,” she vowed to “let him know that one ‘Norteamericana’ felt honored to welcome him, though somewhat belatedly, to Babylon-on-Hudson and had come to wish him all the success and happiness he so richly deserved.”

In the next few years, Reed did much to make that success happen. She would be instrumental, in fact, in helping the painter land his three mural jobs, at Pomona and Dartmouth colleges and in New York at the New School for Social Research. And she helped introduce Orozco to a diverse and stimulating set of new contacts through the Delphic Circle, an intellectual and literary salon founded by Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos around a vision of universal brotherhood. The group, which had staged the ancient Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound in Delphi the same year Orozco arrived in New York, would be extremely influential in his work.

“I think the adoration that Alma Reed demonstrated toward him, the attention he received in New York at the ashram of the Delphic Circle, that kind of deified him in the same way that Rivera had been deified,” says Sorell, university distinguished professor emeritus at Chicago State University. “His confidence must have grown exponentially.”

Orozco spent more than two years in New York before landing his first mural commission at Pomona. Meanwhile, he survived partly by catering—or caving—to the trendy demand for Mexican art that developed in the United States and Europe during the 1920s and 30s. He made paintings of what writer and curator Diane Miliotes describes as “landscapes that verge on the folkloric … with these stock images of a pueblo, or an indigenous woman and her child, and maybe a maguey plant or two.”

In an essay for the companion book to the Dartmouth exhibition, Timothy Rub notes that “Orozco developed a keen if somewhat cynical awareness of what American patrons expected of Mexican painters.” In the same book, González Mello puts it more bluntly: “The first thing Orozco does upon his arrival (in New York) is become a professional Mexican.”

Personally, the artist found the whole thing distasteful. Even in Mexico, he was harshly critical of revolutionary artists who pandered to the folkloric, glorified the indigenous or idealized the concept of nationality, or Mexicanidad, all of which had been the bread and butter of the mural movement.

In the United States, he had to deal with the market on its own terms, at least to some extent.

“He’s dealing with an audience that doesn’t know anything about Mexico, except that it’s exotic and exciting and violent,” says Miliotes, who served as in-house curator for the Hood Museum exhibition. “And there’s this wonderful vogue for it that he’s trying to take advantage of, but it forces him to try to navigate that craze without feeling that he’s totally selling himself out.”

Those concerns would soon fade. In 1930, Orozco put himself firmly on the map as a world-class artist with his own daring identity when he painted Prometheus, the first fresco by a Mexican artist in the United States. The commission for the space above the fireplace in Frary Hall was pushed along by Catalan art historian José Pijoán, who was then teaching at Pomona.

At first, he considered calling on Orozco’s rival, Diego Rivera. But it was Pijoán’s colleague, artist Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, who steered the project to Orozco. Crespo de la Serna, then teaching at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, was a friend of Orozco and would become his assistant on Prometheus. “… The beauty of it is that a few kids and a few penniless professors had the faith and the courage to institute the proceedings and went ahead without committees, boards, or rubber stamps,” Pijoan wrote in the Los Angeles Times shortly after the work was completed.

The landmark work would become “the first major modern fresco in this country and thus epochal in the history of the medium,” according to the late art historian David W. Scott, former chair of the Art Department at Scripps College.

Yet, as bold as the fresco was, Orozco at first avoided painting a penis on Prometheus, the heroic nude that towers over diners at Frary. While more lofty artistic considerations about classic representations of the male physique may also have been at play, the artist was certainly well aware of his local critics and the risk of offending puritanical community standards. “Absolutely, I think he was hesitant (to add the penis) because there was disapproval that he was painting a very large naked male figure on the wall,” says Coyle, the documentarian. “He was reading the press and some of these critical articles were actually appearing while he was working on the mural.”

Orozco didn’t have to check the newspapers to find condemnation. He embarked on the project, he writes, “to the disgust of the trustees who would grumble as they made their way through the refectory and eye the scaffoldings askance, disposed to fall upon me at the first mis-step.”

A penis was appended later to the fresco when Orozco returned for a visit  months later, but it didn’t adhere properly because the wall had dried. Since then, of course, the missing member has been the subject of student jokes and pranks. The genital shortcomings didn’t deter artist Jackson Pollock, an Orozco admirer, from famously declaring Prometheus “the greatest painting in North America.”

Despite the controversy, the Pomona campus community, especially faculty and students, defended the artist’s right to express himself. The following year, in the face of yet another public outcry, administrators of the New School defended his depiction of Lenin and Stalin in his series of five frescoes with sociopolitical themes. The support in both cases must have been reassuring since he had seen how vicious public censorship could be, on both sides of the border. Later, the Dartmouth community also would stand up for his artistic freedom at a time when murals by Rivera in New York and Siqueiros in Los Angeles were being whitewashed or destroyed for political reasons.

Orozco returned to Mexico in triumph in 1934 and proceeded to create astonishing works of art that mark the pinnacle of his career. He completed his masterwork at Guadalajara’s Hospicio Cabañas, crowned by the soaring image of The Man of Fire in the cupola of the colonial structure, dubbed the Sistine Chapel of the Americas. In 1940, hailed as a celebrity, he returned to New York and created the anti-war mural, Dive Bomber and Tank, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art. Orozco wrote his final chapter in the United States in 1945-46, near the end of his life. This time, the trip was primarily personal. He came to this country for the last time out of love. And he left with a broken heart.

Earlier, the aging artist had fallen head over heels for the young and beautiful lead dancer for the Mexico City Ballet, Gloria Campobello. But when his mistress gave him an ultimatum and his wife Margarita refused to give him a divorce, the stage was set for a midlife crisis that ripped open the man’s hermetic heart.

Orozco left his family and moved to New York to be with Campobello. But she soon abandoned him and returned to Mexico, ignoring his pathetic, pining letters. The artist found himself alone in Manhattan once again, just as he had started. Now all he wanted was to go back home and he begged his wife to take him back: “I know that I have behaved very badly with you and I have paid dearly with my remorse,” he wrote. “I don’t want to live here anymore. I don’t want any of it. Or even to see it again. My only thought is to return to you if you will take me back.”

And she did. He returned to Mexico City, with only three more years to live. His final works evinced a premonition of death. When it finally came, on Sept. 7, 1949, it caught him in the midst of a new project, painting a public housing mural.

Orozco had come to this country as an unknown, and left as an artist of global stature. Far from leveling him, immigration had vaulted him to new heights.

“I really think his experience in the United States inspired him to speak to people across borders,” says Coyle, the documentary filmmaker. “He did not want to be seen as a national artist or a Mexican artist. He really kind of chafed at those boundaries and divisions that people used to define themselves and what they were doing.”

On a summer day in 1922, as the strains of opera music and applause from the commencement audience faded away, President James Blaisdell presented a doctor of laws to Fong Foo Sec, the College’s first Chinese immigrant student. It was only the third LL.D awarded since the College’s founding 35 years earlier, and the story of a peasant laborer turned goodwill ambassador receiving an honorary degree attracted coverage from as far afield as the New York Times.

Fong had become the chief English editor of the Commercial Press, China’s first modern publisher. At Commencement, he was praised as an “heir by birth to the wisdom of an ancient and wonderful people; scholar as well of Western learning; holding all these combined riches in the services of a great heart; internationalist, educator, modest Christian gentleman.”

The pomp could not have been more different than Fong’s arrival four decades earlier, when his improbable journey to Pomona began under the cover of twilight. After his steamship docked in San Francisco in 1882, the scrawny 13-year-old boy hid in a baggage cart, while his fellow passengers banded together to fend off attackers along the waterfront, in case the immigrants were discovered before reaching the sanctuary of Chinatown.

“I was received with bricks and kicks,” Fong said, describing his reception in a magazine interview and in his memoirs decades later. “Some rude Americans, seeing Chinese laborers flock in and finding no way to stop them, threw street litter at us to vent their fury.”

Fong’s immigrant tale is both emblematic and exceptional: emblematic in the peasant roots, the struggles and dream of prosperity he shared with Chinese laborers of that era. Exceptional in the fact that Fong, though he came as a laborer, was able to get a college education in the U.S. and seize the opportunities it brought. He arrived at a time when formal immigration restrictions were scant, but also to a land gripped by anti-Chinese hysteria, just before a new law that, in the words of historian Erika Lee, “forever changed America’s relationship to immigration.”

IF FONG, IN HIS TINY VILLAGE in Guangdong province in southern China, had heard of such threats against his countrymen, he remained undeterred in his quest to go to Gold Mountain, a name California had picked up during the Gold Rush era. Fong’s childhood nicknames, Kuang Yaoxi, “to shine in the West” and Kuang Jingxi “to respect the West” are revealing. “He was expected, or perhaps destined, to become associated with the Western world and Western culture,” says Leung Yuen Sang, chairman of the History Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has conducted research on Fong.

Born in 1869, Fong tended his family’s water buffalo and planted rice, taro and sweet potatoes, but did not begin school until he was 8. Often hungry, he went barefoot and wore patched clothes, reserving his shoes for festival days, Fong wrote in his memoirs. But his father saw a way out for Fong. From the start of the 19th century, his clansmen, driven by bandits, floods, war and rebellion, went abroad to seek their fortunes. After seeing villagers travel to America and return with “their pockets full,” his father asked Fong if he’d like to go too.

To pay for his ticket, the family borrowed money from relatives and friends, a common practice for would-be travelers. In January 1882, accompanied by his neighbor, Fong left for Hong Kong where he stayed before sailing for San Francisco on the S.S. China. In the crowded hold, amid stormy weather and high waves, he learned his first words of English and picked up advice. Fong’s steamship was one of scores jammed with thousands of his compatriots who began rushing over while the U.S. Congress debated a moratorium on most immigration from China.

According to his memoirs, Fong arrived sometime after the passage, on May 6, 1882, of what became known as the Exclusion Act, but before it took effect 90 days later. The San Francisco Chronicle published the arrivals and passenger load of steamships from the Orient, noting in March of that year, “It is a matter of some interest to know just how many Chinese are likely to be pressed upon our shores.”

The Chronicle also wrote of crowded, unclean conditions aboard steamers, which were anchored on quarantine grounds and fumigated to prevent the spread of smallpox. In headline after headline, the newspaper created the sense of a city besieged: “More Chinese: Another Thousand Arrive in This Port,” “And Still They Come … Two Thousand Others on the Way,” “Another Chinese Cargo: Eighty Thousand Heathen Awaiting Shipment to This City.”

ANTI-CHINESE SENTIMENT had been building for decades on the West Coast. During economic downturns, the immigrants, with their cheap labor, became scapegoats. Mob violence flared against them, and in San Francisco, in 1877, thousands of rioters attacked Chinese laundries and the wharves of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the chief transpacific carriers of the laborers.

California had already passed its own anti-Chinese measures, and after years of pressure, particularly from the West Coast, Congress took unprecedented federal action in the form of 1882’s Exclusion Act. The 10-year ban on Chinese laborers would be the first federal moratorium barring immigration based upon race and class. Only merchants, teachers, students and their servants would be permitted to enter thereafter.

At first, confusion reigned. When the Exclusion Act took effect, a Chronicle headline proclaimed that the arrival of the “last cargo” of Chinese in San Francisco was “A Scene that Will Become Historical.” Still, the Chinese continued arriving as enforcement in the beginning remained haphazard. The act represented the U.S. government’s first attempts to process immigrants, and officials at the ports weren’t sure how to handle Chinese laborers under the new regulations, says Erika Lee, director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. But in time the law succeeded in reducing Chinese immigration, which plummeted from 39,579 in 1882 to only 10 people, five years later. The Chinese population in the West shrank, as immigrants moved east to work and open small businesses. In the months and years to come, restrictions would tighten, with Chinese required to carry certificates of registration verifying legal entry. Later on, the right to re-enter the U.S. would be rescinded, and the act would be renewed.

“Beginning in 1882, the United States stopped being a nation of immigrants that welcomed foreigners without restrictions,” Lee argues in her book, At America’s Gates. “For the first time in its history, the United States began to exert federal control over immigrants at its gates and within its borders, thereby setting standards, by race, class, and gender for who was to be welcomed into this country.”

AFTER ARRIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO, Fong was forced to hide in a basement his first few days in Chinatown, a neighborhood of narrow alleys and cramped tenements, but also of temples and gaily-painted balconies. Laws targeting Chinese—their tight living quarters and their use of poles to carry loads on sidewalks— reflected the simmering resentment. “The city authorities, because they had not been able to prevent their coming, tried to make it difficult for [the Chinese] to settle down here,” Fong wrote.

 Like many immigrants, Fong turned to kinsmen for help. He left for Sacramento to live with an uncle, a vegetable dealer, who found him a job as a cook to a wealthy family. He earned $1 a week, along with the occasional gift of a dime, which he treasured “as gold.” He—like many Chinese immigrants—sent money back to cover the debt incurred to cover his passage to America and pay for family expenses.

At his uncle’s urging, Fong studied English at a night school set up by the Congregational Church in Sacramento’s Chinatown, but he started gambling and stopped going to class. Scolded by his uncle, he returned to school and a new teacher, Rev. Chin Toy, became his mentor.

Fong found himself debating whether to convert to Christianity. Among his parents, relatives, and friends, not a single one was Christian, and he hesitated giving up the idols his ancestors had worshipped for generations. “If Christianity turns out to be unreliable, I will lose heavily,” he wrote in his memoirs.

After a fire gutted the heart of Sacramento’s Chinatown and destroyed his few possessions, Fong had to move into a dark basement room, thick with his uncle’s opium smoke. Fong then asked if he could stay in the mission church, and Rev. Chin consented to the unprecedented request. From age 15 to 17, Fong lived in the mission, where he learned Chinese, the Bible, English, elementary science, and read books such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Travels in Africa. Six months later, he was baptized, but it took the Salvation Army to stoke his religious passion.

Drawn by the sound of the bugle one night, coming home from his cook’s job, Fong watched the preachers in the street, fervent despite a jeering crowd. Their zeal led him to question his faith and whether his sins had been forgiven. Struck by a vision of Christ’s breast streaming with blood, he knelt during a church service and repented.

His conversion was unusual—missionaries in those days did not make deep inroads among Chinese immigrants, who “did not seem to see the efficacy of a god who sacrificed his son on a cross,” says Madeline Hsu, director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “Until there was a better sense of community and utility in attending church, missionaries seemed largely ineffectual.”

The Salvation Army, unable to proselytize among the Chinese until Fong joined up, sent him to their San Francisco headquarters in 1889 for six months of training. As a preacher, Fong became the object of “laughter, bullying, and insults. As a Chinese, I suffered more than any Westerner,” he wrote. Still, for more than a year, Fong evangelized in California, Oregon and Washington.

One night, a brawny man in the street started beating Fong, who could not defend himself, and the teenager escaped after a woman intervened. Another time, while Fong passed a football field, boys swarmed around him, spitting and assaulting him until he found refuge in a nearby house.

After a labor meeting to discuss measures against the Chinese, boys began following Fong, who brandished a paper knife to ward them off. He might have found his greatest peril in Tacoma, Wash., where mobs in November 1885 drove out every Chinese, part of a wave of xenophobic violence sweeping the West. During an evening meeting sometime after the anti-Chinese riots, Fong’s friends heard voices outside and urged him to change out of his Salvation Army uniform, hide in a friend’s house and then aboard a ship anchored in the harbor where he spent the night. “Later, it came to light several hundred people had gathered outside the door of the meeting place, ready to seize me,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Fong endured. After taking typing and shorthand in night school, he became a clerk at the Salvation Army, and then was promoted to secretary to a major, the organization’s ranking leader on the Pacific Coast. The next few years had “significant bearing” on his future, he wrote, because he associated with people of “superior class” who spoke fluent English. On his own, he studied history, archeology and literature, and honed his public speaking and debate skills.

BUT FONG HAD AMBITIONS that would lead him to Pomona—and, eventually, back to China. “If I could obtain higher learning, I could go back and be of service to society,” he wrote in his memoirs.“To spend my whole life in a foreign country did not seem to me the most ideal solution.”

In 1897, Fong met Pasadena businessman Samuel Hahn, whose son, Edwin, attended Pomona. Fong shared his dreams with them. Edwin Hahn, in turn, told Cyrus Baldwin, Pomona’s first president. Not long after, President Baldwin called upon Fong in San Francisco at the Salvation Army headquarters, urging him to come at once. Fong’s $300 savings, and his pledge to work part-time, would cover his tuition, the president assured him. Years later, Fong would name his first-born son Baldwin in gratitude.

Fong entered Pomona’s prep school, cleaning houses, waiting on tables, typewriting, picking apples and cooking to cover his expenses. Like some students, Fong built a wood shack to save on rent and prepared his own meals, harvesting vegetables from a friend’s garden, according to classmate Charles L. Boynton, who contributed to a memorial volume after Fong’s death. Rev. Boynton would become a missionary in Shanghai. (With the College’s Congregationalist roots, a good number of Pomona students went on to become missionaries in the early days.)

As a student, Fong helped bridge the gulf between cultures and countries, a role that would become his life’s work. He was seen as an expert on his homeland. Under the headline “The Views of a Bright Chinese Student,” the Los Angeles Times printed the transcript of a lengthy address Fong had given in Los Angeles regarding current events in China. And Boynton asked Fong—known as “Sec” or “Mr. Sec”—to speak with students planning to become missionaries in China, to share what he knew of the country and to make a personal appeal for evangelization. Fong also began his decades-long involvement with the YMCA during this time, after hearing about a fellow student’s account of young people surrendering their lives to Christ at a gathering on the hillside overlooking the ocean at sunset in Pacific Grove.

He interrupted his studies at Pomona twice: first, shortly after enrolling to accompany General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, on a tour of the United States, and for a second time, in 1899, after he contracted tuberculosis and a physician ordered him to recuperate in a mountain camp for a year. “I was under the impression there was no cure for the disease and that it was a matter of a few months before my life, with its hopes crushed and work undone, would come to an end,” Fong later wrote in a letter.

A friend reasoned with him, helping restore his enthusiasm, and he looked fondly upon his time at Pomona. “Five years in college and all the assistance from friends—these I cannot forget.” After four years in Pomona’s prep school followed by a year of regular collegiate enrollment, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated with honors with a bachelor of letters in 1905. He then headed east to Columbia, where he earned dual master’s degrees in English literature and education—fulfilling a prophecy. A generation ago, a fortune teller told Fong’s grandfather that an offspring would be awarded high academic honors.

FONG RETURNED TO CHINA in 1906 after a quarter-century absence. “The people are my people, and it doesn’t take long for me to forget that I had seen life—lived, struggled—in the West, and I was one of them once more,” he wrote.

He taught English and landed an appointment at the Ministry of Communications before taking his post at the Commercial Press in Shanghai, which published textbooks and translations. Such work contributed much to the educational development of China, which he considered vital to ensuring the country’s survival. Fong believed Chinese students also had to understand sciences, art, history, law and the government of Western countries.

In the decades ahead, Fong would become a prominent volunteer leader in Rotary International and the YMCA, and travel to Europe, Australia and the United States. And yet, despite his degrees, despite his accolades, under the Exclusion Act, he was not unlike the lowliest Chinese laborer who returned to his village after spending years in Gold Mountain.

America, it seemed, wasn’t ready for them. Permanent settlement in the U.S. was not an attractive option, because Chinese were prohibited from becoming naturalized citizens and faced a limited set of economic and social options. Many Chinese Americans were barred from certain professions, such as practicing law, even if they were college graduates. “It is notable that he ‘made his mark’ in China, not the U.S,” says Lee. During this time, the U.S. system for dealing with immigrants was becoming more and more formalized. Only a few years after Fong returned to China, an immigration station for detaining new and some returning Chinese immigrants opened on Angel Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. By then, the Exclusion Act had set into motion new modes of immigration regulation that would give rise to U.S. passports, green cards, a trained force of government officials and interpreters, and a bureaucracy to enforce the law.

When Fong died in 1938, the Exclusion Act was still in effect. It wasn’t until five years later, when China and the United States became allies during World War II, that Congress repealed it. Large-scale Chinese immigration wasn’t allowed until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act two decades after the war’s end.

But throughout his life, Fong had remained optimistic about the power of education to alter American attitudes toward the Chinese, even if the laws hadn’t caught up to reflect that change. He exuded that spirit in an interview with a YMCA magazine, Association Men, in 1922, the same year he returned to the U.S. to receive his honorary degree from Pomona.

“The presence of several thousand Chinese students in your colleges and universities has given you a truer conception of us, than you get from the Chinese laundrymen,” Fong said. “The change which has come over the American is truly remarkable … you receive me with cordiality and friendliness. I am hailed as an equal.”

AMY MOTLAGH ’98: REVOLUTION & REDEMPTION

 Amy Motlagh’s life journey has been bookended by revolutions. Born to an Iranian father and American mother, she was 2 years old when her family left Iran for San Diego just months before the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy. Now a professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, she has found herself caught in the middle of another series of uprisings in Egypt that have inspired her to see her own people’s struggles in a new light.

“When we left Iran, my family settled in a very white neighborhood in San Diego, but I grew up hearing Farsi and knowing a few words. At that time, there was a lot of bad feeling surrounding Iran; particularly in the wake of the hostage crisis, I tried to distance myself from my Iranian heritage. Although he had lived in the U.S. before, my father was ambivalent about living there permanently, and he would often wonder aloud about the life we would have had if we had stayed. During the Iraq War there was a lot of tension at home. I remember intensely watching news from Iran. It could be your family’s house that was being bombed.

I didn’t start thinking about studying Iran until I took a Pomona class with Zayn Kassam called Women in Islam and did a project on [Iranian novelist] Nahid Rachlin. After graduating I finally returned to Iran with my dad, which changed my perception completely—I witnessed a very different Iran from the one I had seen on TV, and was amazed to find that even under this oppressive regime, there was such a vibrant culture. I loved hearing Persian. It’s a language that values wordplay and takes poetry seriously, and I quickly understood how important it was for me to master it.

Eventually, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. Although I was studying Persian literature, I also felt called to respond to questions about the Iranian diaspora being raised by books like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. As somebody familiar with the American and Iranian literary traditions, I thought I could offer a critical perspective on how these works fit into a longer history of immigration, assimilation and life-writing in the United States.

It was initially frightening to be in Cairo during the demonstrations in January and February. We would hear gunshots or tanks driving by and be scared for friends who were participating. But once we saw what was happening in Tahrir Square with our own eyes, we could see that the protestors were peaceful and well-organized. Their courage has been inspiring. It’s a bit ironic to be experiencing a revolution when my family tried to leave one, but in certain ways [being in Cairo is] redemptive for me: I always felt like I missed out on something that was a huge part of my generation’s experience in Iran. My cousins grew up in a culture that was being radically remade, where people led double lives at home and in public, and where they had to deal with so many issues I didn’t have to deal with. It seems important to now be part of what’s happening in Egypt, even if it’s from the sidelines.

ALDO RAMIREZ ’00: MIGRANT TO MENTOR

For Aldo Ramirez ’00, school was an escape from a hard life toiling in the orchards and fields as a young boy. So, it is no surprise that after graduating from Pomona, he pursued a career in education. He is now putting his experience to work by helping young, low-income immigrants as principal of a small elementary school in the city of San Bernardino.

 I was born in L.A. and very shortly after, my family had to move back to Mexico. We lived over there for three or four years. It was a very happy time. My parents and my grandparents were hard workers. They had cattle. They had some crops. So, that is what we did out there. Then my family started moving back to the U.S. as farm workers, moving up through California, Oregon and Washington.

My earliest memories of that time were picking apples and pears and peaches, nectarines and things like that in Washington State. … We would get up really early in the morning, sometimes before the sun was out. It was not fun, I can tell you that. It was very hard, carrying a ladder in the morning. Your hands would freeze. Pulling the cherries from the trees, the stems would wear your fingers down. But during that time my parents always tried to stay positive. They always told us they wanted us to go to college and get a college degree so we wouldn’t have to work out in the fields.

It definitely helped with my endurance. I mean, in school it was pretty easy to put forward a lot of effort. When I was going to school, I didn’t have to work in the fields so I loved school. Most of the teachers that I had were fantastic. They wanted us to do well. But my 8th grade teacher, Mrs. Copeland, she was especially kind. She taught me a lot about writing and literature. And she kept track of me when I was going through high school. And in my senior year, I had a 4.0 grade point average so she came over to the high school and she pulled me out and she gave me literature on Pomona College. And she said ‘I think this is a very good school for you to go to.’ She’s the one who steered me that way and helped me put my application together. She just cared. She wanted me to be successful.

One of my first courses I took at Pomona was Raymond Buriel’s Psychology of the Chicano. And that just resonated with me. It was so interesting to start thinking about the psyche of immigrants, specifically from Mexico. Because education was such a positive experience for me, I did some work as part of a mentor program for students from one of the Pomona Unified School District’s middle schools. And so when I graduated I decided to go into teaching. And it was a perfect fit. I mean it gave me the opportunity to give back. Just like Mrs. Copeland helped me, I found myself in the position of being able to help the families of the students I was teaching. I find as soon as I share my experiences with them and I show them pictures of my family, they relate really quickly. And they do look up to me and a lot of them aspire to do what I have done. The city of San Bernardino has a high concentration of English language learners. About 40 percent of the district is English language learners. About 95 percent of the district gets free or reduced-price lunches so we are working with a very needy population.

JOE NGUYEN ’05: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED …

Joe Nguyen ’05 grew up in the Deep South as the son of immigrant parents whose roots stretch from Germany and Austria to Vietnam. So, perhaps it’s only natural that he decided to become a stand-up comedian. Nguyen holds on to his day job working for the state of California and does standup at night in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

 “My mom’s parents met and got married after World War II in a Jewish refugee camp in Shanghai. They wanted to move to the United States but, because of quotas, went to the Dominican Republic, where my mom and her sister were born and raised. My dad was an officer in the South Vietnamese army. He and his family narrowly escaped when Saigon fell at the end of the Vietnam War. His brother, who was in the Navy, was able to get them all on a ship to Guam.

My parents met while they were in college in Michigan. They moved to Atlanta when my dad got an engineering job there, and that’s where I grew up. When my family all gets together, it’s a very interesting mix. I think that, apart from the kind of food that I enjoy, there’s an open-mindedness that comes from growing up in a multicultural household.

I never considered myself a funny guy until sometime during college, when I realized I enjoyed cracking jokes and entertaining people. At some point, I started watching and listening to more standup comedy and thought, ‘I’d like to try that; I think I can do it.’

I didn’t have a job lined up after graduation, so I moved north with my girlfriend at the time. I took courses and performed at the San Francisco Comedy College, produced and hosted my own comedy show and, after a few years, started opening for some clubs. I moved to Los Angeles a few months ago and am learning the scene here and lining up shows.

My show used to be mostly about being different. From start to finish, it was ‘Hey, I’m a Vietnamese-Jew.’ I think that’s OK for a five-minute set, but when you do 15 minutes, people want something that is little more relatable. A lot of the newer material is less about my racial background. My style is slower paced, kind of dry and generally, pretty clean, like observational comedy.  So far, my parents seem supportive. I don’t know if it’s because they’re my parents or if they really approve of me doing standup comedy. They’ve been to a few shows in San Francisco, and I also did one show in Atlanta.

My dad still encourages me to go to law school, but we’ll see about that. Whatever I end up doing, I don’t think I’ll ever quit standup.

I get a little crazy sometimes and look at reviews of my shows online. I’m happy to say that most have been pretty positive. But there was one about a routine I did for the Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show, which is held every Christmas in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. It said, ‘Joe was OK, but his material was too much about being Vietnamese and Jewish; he needs to focus more on being a philosophy major at Pomona.’ And I said, ‘Damn, I thought I was giving the people what they want.’ You can’t please everybody.”

PETER WERMUTH ’01: AMBASSADOR OF BASEBALL

Peter Wermuth ’00 is trying to get cricket nation excited about that other bat-and-ball sport. Sent by Major League Baseball to oversee the six-team Australian Baseball League as CEO, Wermuth was first exposed to hardball as a kid growing up in Germany. He played on the Pomona-Pitzer squad and coached on the German national team before heading to the big-league boardroom.

I started playing baseball at age 10—my older brother went to college in America and brought some equipment back to Germany. We had no clue what we were doing: our first time out, we went to a schoolyard and set up a field with two bases and home plate.

The catalyst for me was attending my first German-American Baseball League game in Mainz, my hometown. It was a great atmosphere: a big barbecue going, old men playing dominos on the side of the field, people playing music and even some Latin dancing.

There wasn’t any German youth baseball in the country at the time, but the U.S. Armed Forces ran its own Little League, which I joined. I’d travel from one military base to another, competing against American teams and gradually losing some of my German accent. When I was 12, I applied to be the club’s treasurer; they wouldn’t let me, which I didn’t think was reasonable at all, so I went off and started my own club.

I wanted to attend college in the U.S. All the other top liberal arts schools were in the Northeast, and with baseball being a big part of the decision, [Pomona] was an easy choice. At Columbia Business School, I ran the Sports Business Association and brought an M.L.B. executive to campus. After the talk he asked me what I was planning to do that summer and I told him, “I’m going to work for you.” I did—and have been since.

I always knew I wanted to set up a professional league. Baseball in most countries outside the U.S. is not the national sport. It’s difficult for an American to understand that ‘if you build it’ they will not necessarily come! In Australia there’s cricket, rugby union, rugby league, Australian-rules football. You have to treat baseball as a niche sport. That’s something I bring to the table because I lived in that sort of environment in Germany.

We’re hoping to reach that second tier [in Australia]. My U.S. experiences inspired me to use what I think of as the minor league model, where it’s framed as a fun family night out. Exciting promotions, mascots, upbeat music, a safe environment—baseball is almost secondary.

I’d love to grow the league as fast as possible, but we don’t want the resources that we put in to exceed demand. It’d be a disaster to play in venues that we can’t fill. Though we’ll never be cricket or the Australian Football League, I think we can establish a really attractive product. This is likely the last chance baseball has to establish itself as a relevant sport in Australia, and I feel great responsibility for the future of the sport in this country.

 ANBINH PHAN ’01: CREATIVE EMPATHY

Anbinh Phan ’01 was born in a refugee camp in Malaysia after her parents fled Vietnam by boat during the exodus of the late ’70s. The family eventually settled in Torrance, Calif. After graduating from Pomona, Phan earned an M.P.A. from Princeton and a law degree from Georgetown, and now she is starting a social-justice venture revolving around stateless persons and human trafficking victims in Southeast Asia. Her work has spurred her to reflect on her family’s risky journey to America. In the photo, Phan holds a shapshot of herself with her mother at the refugee camp in Malaysia.

My parents worked really hard in Torrance. We lived modestly so that they could send money home to Vietnam. At Pomona, my whole experience made me think much more deeply about self-identity, Christian faith and civil rights. Having that multidisciplinary education helped me start to see things through numerous lenses.

I focused on international trade after graduating: I did a fellowship in Vietnam for eight months and worked at the U.S. Treasury for several years. I got interested in human rights, since a huge part of international trade revolves around labor, the supply chain and how products are manufactured.

In the summer after my second year of law school in 2009, I worked for [the human rights organizations] Global Centurion and Boat People S.O.S. in Southeast Asia, and met human trafficking survivors in shelters and asylums in Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. I only got glimpses of their lives, but they made a big impression on me, and I realized these people have aspirations like my family. They just want to create better futures for themselves.

During the trip I returned to Pulau Tengah, the Malaysian refugee camp I was born in, which was an amazing experience. To me it was this mythical place where my family had put so many hopes after surviving war and poverty. They were so brave to leave their country and have a child in the middle of the ocean. It wasn’t a coincidence that my name means “peace” in Vietnamese—that’s what my parents hoped for me on these shores.

When I came back to law school, I couldn’t get the experience out of my mind, and I started devoting my research to that region. Even though I’m American, I can relate as a member of the Vietnamese diaspora—I speak the language and understand the pressures and fears they face. It’s a natural empathy.

I feel privileged to be in America. I always wanted to pursue public service, because I didn’t want my family to work for all these things just so I could benefit individually. My ultimate dream is for these people I’m trying to help to gain some sense of optimism about their future. I’ve not seen the things I’m doing accomplish that yet, but I deeply hope that’s where we’ll be soon enough.

Recently, I presented at the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Cambodia. It was an opportunity to emphasize the challenges stateless people face—no access to education or social services, and a high vulnerability to labor and sex trafficking—as well as to advocate for a solution. As much as it was about legal rights, it was also a human story. It was fulfilling to share information to empathetic ears; the stories we chose to tell reflect who we are and what we hope for in the world.