Hitting the Books: How NASA Helped JFK Build His "Nation of Immigrants"

It turns out that this fundamental myth started in the early 1960s.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was a landmark event in American history, etched deeply into our nation's collective psyche. The event ushered in an era of unbridled possibility – stars were finally within reach – and its effects were felt across culture, from art and fashion to politics and culture. In After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, a multidisciplinary collection of historians, researchers, and scholars explores the myriad ways in which putting a man on the moon impacted the American experience.

University of Florida Press

Excerpt from "Scientists Without Borders: Immigrants in NASA and the Apollo Program" by Rosanna Perotti from After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, edited by J Bret Bennington and Rodney F. Hill. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2023. Reproduced with permission from University of Florida Press.

Since NASA's earliest days, immigrant engineers, scientists, and technicians have lent their talent, labor, and technical skills to the space program. But space travel itself has always been more than a scientific enterprise. Human spaceflight was one of the "big dreams" of the 1960s, as space historian Valerie Neal reminds us, and as a "big idea" spaceflight relied heavily on narratives. American cultures. The Apollo program (1963-1972) evoked the image of a pioneer of the frontier in the 1960s - exploration and discovery were essential to America's history and its continued redefinition, and Americans welcomed the border as a metaphor for space exploration (Neal 15). The shuttle program (1972-2011) echoed the narrative of Americans "going to work". As the Apollo missions were replaced by the Space Shuttle, NASA supporters and commentators depicted Shuttle crews with images associated with blue-collar work: "Astronaut repairmen performed service calls in a vehicle often referred to as a space truck."

These two narratives - "pioneering the frontier" and "doing the work" - are closely associated with a third narrative that was becoming deeply embedded in American national identity in the 1960s: the myth of the United States as that nation. immigrants and the immigrant as the backbone of egalitarian American democracy. This myth of the American immigrant was not born in the 19th or even the beginning of the 20th century, when immigration reached its peak and Congress struggled to impose limits and quotas. The myth did not gain widespread acceptance until the early 1960s. It is no coincidence that John F. Kennedy presented the immigration myth most succinctly in his pamphlet, A Nation of Immigrants, in 1963 , as Kennedy prepared to ask Congress to revise the nation's immigration laws. At the same time, his administration was pressing furiously to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, a central goal of the New Frontier. Interestingly, Kennedy's space proposals were a much higher political priority for the administration than immigration reform (the latter was not accomplished until 1965, as we will see later). But his articulation of the “immigrant nation” narrative provided powerful imagery in support of the space program he has championed from the start…