1 Immigration Stations: the regulation and commemoration of mobility at Angel Island, San Francisco and Ellis Island, New York Dr Gareth Hoskins, Dr Jo Frances Maddern Introduction In the writings of history, geography and social theory the United States has long been discursively tethered to concepts of mobility. Zelinsky epically remarked how “The love of change and of all forms of mobility, an innate restlessness, is one of the prime determinants of the structure of the American national character” (1973, 53). The experience of movement, travel and immigration are key tropes in the national narrative economy (Kouwenhoven 1961, Boorstin 1966, Baudrillard 1988) - they are crucial mechanisms through which individuals overcome nature as wilderness (Turner 1947) and cultivate community out of diversity (Agnew and Smith 2003). Despite the United States’ representational affinity with the concept of mobility, here as much as anywhere else, making movement meaningful necessarily depends on a host of material social practices emerging from and embedded in grounded spaces (Cresswell 2001; Crang 2002; Blunt 2007). In the following pages we explore two of these grounded spaces where one kind of movement, immigration, is invested with meaning through the practices of regulation and commemoration. In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in San Francisco were two among seven inspection centers strategically located around the United States in a federal bureaucratic complex designed to regulate the movement of immigrants. We contrast the construction of mobility as threat in this period with the construction of mobility as full of promise in the spaces as they exist today - as national heritage sites of secular pilgrimage generating thousands of visitors annually. Our discussion synthesizes two separate research projects. The first explored themes of mobility and memory and was conducted at Angel Island San Francisco. It entailed an eleven- month ethnography, extensive documentary research, and a series of interviews with those closely associated to the site’s operation (Hoskins 2005). The second documented the restoration of the museum of immigration at Ellis Island. It involved forty interviews with producers over a period of eight months and an analysis of National Park Service archives in New York, Washington, Boston and West Virginia (Maddern 2004). Angel Island is regularly portrayed as a space of immobility and imprisonment (Takaki 1989; Kingston 1989; Limerick 1992; Daniels 1997) whereas Ellis Island is popularly understood as a set of ‘golden doors’, an almost mythological site represented in films including The Godfather (1972), Hitched (2001), novels Liberty Falling (2000), and music Ellis Island by the Irish Tenors (2001) where multicultural America was formed. In truth these spaces, although similar in many respects, are internally complex and ambiguous, drawn together by a series of laws that find unique expression according to their particular geographical characteristics. Bringing these two examples together allows us to highlight the nuances missed in oppositional representations of Angel Island and Ellis Island and how this opposition has marked parallels with theoretical readings of the spaces of mobility and immobility more generally. Theorizing mobility Islands have a tenacious hold on the human imagination due in part to their provision of stability amongst the watery chaos of their surroundings (Tuan 1974, 118). Islands have a peculiar relationship with the concept of mobility. Gillis (2004) notes how islands can represent both separation and continuity, isolation and connection: “The idea of the island brings with it at once the notion of solitude and of a founding population… islands inhabited by human beings are never enclosures only: they are crossroads, markets for exchange, and while sail remained the mode of transport they were essential and frequent stopping off points for re-provisioning” (2004, 33). US Immigration Stations Ellis Island and Angel Island are apposite examples of mobility’s ambivalence since they seem to mirror enduring oppositional binaries