Newcomers make old-timers nervous, especially if the newcomers are different from the old-timers, whether those differences are skin-deep, culinary, linguistic, religious or cultural.
When I moved to California’s Sierra Nevada foothills in the 1980s, the locals looked at “flatlanders” like me with a jaundiced eye. But nobody complained to the county supervisors about us, probably because most of us were white, spoke English and weren’t applying for jobs in the gold mines or the lumber mills.
It was a different story down the road in the city of Stockton. There, rumors that Vietnamese immigrants were stealing and eating pets led to calls for a city ordinance that would outlaw “petnapping.”
Sound familiar?
Needless to say, in Stockton, as with the recent xenophobic response to Haitians who have settled — legally — in Springfield, Ohio, the rumors were without foundation.
As a card-carrying folklorist, when I learned that one of the Springfield petnapping stories had come from somebody’s neighbor’s daughter’s friend, my urban legend alarm bells jangled.
Legend scholars like to call such stories “foaflore”: friend-of-a-friend lore. What interests us is why tales with little or no basis in fact circulate, and what attitudes they reveal.
In the case of the pet-eating immigrants, a folklorist named Florence Baer did a lot of the spadework for us. Baer first heard about the anti-Vietnamese rumors from her students at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton.
None were eyewitnesses.
None heard testimony from actual pet owners.
All had heard the stories from friends who had heard the stories from friends, and so on.
The news media inadvertently played a role in the dissemination of these libels. The Stockton Record reported that some residents were claiming that petnapping had occurred, but Baer, wrote, “readers do not necessarily read as carefully as reporters write.” (In this case, the stories weren’t written as carefully as one would like.)
In response to these unsubstantiated stories, a member of the city council called for an ordinance. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” he said.
But then it was pointed out that no new ordinance was needed, not because the smoke was fake and there was no fire, but because stealing people’s pets was already illegal. The proposed pet-napping ban was nixed on a 5-4 vote — not exactly a resounding return to sanity.
From debunking the petnapping stories, Baer moved on to analyzing them. Two things seem to capture the attention of local populations about strangers in their midst: One is that they eat “weird” food (note how many ethnic slurs reference diet: Frogs, Krauts, Limeys, Beaners, Greasers, etc.). The other is a fear that they’re competing with the locals for jobs, goods and services.
Here, Baer wrote, the Southeast Asians (some members of the community generically referred to as Vietnamese were from Laos and Cambodia) were in a no-win situation: “If they work, whether in the fields or a doughnut shop, they are said to deprive an American citizen of a job. If they do not work, they are said to be living off the taxpayers.”
Baer saw attitudes toward immigrants as manifestations of a belief in “limited good,” a term coined by the anthropologist George Foster. The idea is that the economic pie is only so big, so if new arrivals start getting a piece of it, there will be less for everyone else. Thus the locals feel threatened and, feeling threatened, they lash out.
Stories of pet-eating symbolize not just the foreignness of our new neighbors – “we, possessed of greater sensibility (and more civilized), tenderly care for animals as pets while they see them only as food” – but their taking from us that which is precious to us.
Little wonder that the anti-immigrant crowd has seized on the rumors emanating from Springfield, Ohio, and that Trump and Vance have amplified them.
Thus do politicians scare up votes.
Note that the thorough debunking of the stories deters their circulation not at all. Vance slyly acknowledged that the stories were baseless while encouraging their continued spread all the same. The stories may be fake, Vance suggests, but the threat they symbolize is real. Or so Trump, Vance and their minions would have us believe.
If there’s an upside to any of this, it’s that Trump, at long last, has become a laughingstock. “They’re eating the pets” is the line that launched a thousand memes.
The unfunny side is that whipping up nativist hatred leads to hateful actions. In Stockton in the early ‘80s, according to an editorial in the Record, 100 people picketed the homes of Southeast Asian residents. A local Vietnamese priest wrote a letter to the editor telling of broken windows and damage to homes and cars belonging to Southeast Asian residents.
In Springfield, there have been multiple bomb threats and school evacuations. “Everybody is completely on edge,” a high school student told The New York Times. “It’s really stressful.”
Not our fault, say the Republican nominees (while Trump blames Democratic “rhetoric” for the two attempts on his life).
Let’s hope there isn’t worse to come.
