By Michelle Hines, University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted 8-31-09
GREENSBORO, N.C. – Andreas Lixl, a native of Austria, was bothered by a dearth of materials on immigrants to the Carolinas. So Lixl – head of the Department of German, Russian, Japanese and Chinese Studies and a research fellow at the Center for New North Carolinians – compiled their stories in a new collection.
Lixl’s book, “Memories of Carolinian Immigrants,” University Press of America, 284 pages, spans the colonial period to the present. Diaries, letters and other firsthand accounts offer a diverse and very personal look at the immigrant experience.
Records show an influx of about one million immigrants to the Carolinas in the last decade. That’s more than seven percent of the region’s total population of approximately 13 million. 
“That figure is comparable to Ellis Island around 1900,” Lixl says. “We are equaling Ellis Island in numbers, but there’s no historical awareness of it.”
Lixl wants to change that, building historical awareness by recounting stories. For example:
•Loreta Velazquez, a Cuban immigrant, disguised herself as a male lieutenant, and served as solider and spy during the American Civil War.
•Omar ibn Said was captured in his native Senegal and sold into slavery in Charleston.
•Chang and Eng Bunker, Siamese twins, came to America from Thailand. The brothers married two sisters from North Carolina and settled on a farm in Surry County.
The South, suffering from a vacuum of labor after the Civil War, began actively recruiting immigrants in the 1870s, but Lixl says that effort was clouded by racism. “They tried to replace black workers with white workers. It was basically a project to whiten-up the South.”
By the 1950s, however, things had changed. The South was becoming more tolerant of the “other,” he says. The influx of immigrants continued in the 1970s and ’80s with an economic boom in the South. Jobs and a milder climate were a draw. “As industry died in the Rust Belt, the Sun Belt took off,” Lixl says. “The Carolinas became a magnet for immigration.”
Lixl says his book is “the tip of the iceberg.” He continues to collect immigrant stories and wants to disseminate those accounts to school teachers.
“Immigration has been the lifeline of this country from the get-go,” he says. “Colonial history was immigrant history.”
