(upbeat music) - [Bruno] People become very aware of who they are when they are confronted with diversity and otherness.

- [Chang] Tribalism manifests itself when people feel insecure.

It's really just this urge for people to bind together with those they're familiar with.

- [Lior] The problem 21st century is that there's no way to bridge or to put together alliance of political tribes that define themselves by what they are not.

- [Michelle] One of the things that we see in history when we try to break down those labels and understand the processes by which particular groups are made is understanding the moments of potential solidarity, the moments of networks that are being knitted very actively across people with shared interests, with shared hopes and dreams and ideas about the future.

(upbeat music) - [Michelle] A common cliche about Jerusalem a century ago was that it was this unchanging place.

And that's often because people have viewed the Ottoman Empire in the exact same ways.

These were very dynamic places that were modernizing and developing and changing in a number of ways.

The Ottoman Empire was established roughly in 1299.

It existed until the end of World War I and it spanned three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Among the challenges that the Ottoman Empire faced in the 19th century was the central question of, what bounded together other than the dynasty?

Christians in southeastern Europe and Muslims in North Africa, and Jews in the cities around the empire, from Baghdad to Istanbul or elsewhere.

They certainly saw themselves as Jerusalemites but they also saw themselves as Ottomans committed to this empire that promised them a certain amount of political freedom but also promised them a certain amount of a social freedom.

And so when we think about Jerusalem, if we get away from that image of it being this timeless place from the ancient world or from biblical lore, we see in the early 1900s a Jerusalem that is connected by a train to the rest of the world.

It is dynamic connected to the Ottoman Empire.

It's undergoing a tremendous amount of growth.

And it's seen as a really exciting time for determining what a modern Jerusalem in the mind of the early 20th century should look like.

The tramway emerges as an symbol of what a modern city should look like and what a modern Jerusalem could look like within a modernizing Ottoman Empire.

And there were other cities across the empire that already had electric tramways and sort of had these symbols of Mediterranean modernity or an Ottoman modernity.

And city leaders in Jerusalem wanted one as well.

But it was also I think a really important symbolic achievement for members of the Jerusalem City Council.

The Chamber of Commerce did comprise members of all of the different religious groups working together to transform Jerusalem.

The president of the Chamber of Commerce was a man, Yusuf Wafa who was a Muslim.

The vice president was Salim Ayub who was a Christian.

The secretary was a man named Albert Antebi who was a Jew.

So the discussion of the tramway was part of this broader project to modernize the city and it was one that was very clearly reflecting this vision of the city as a city shared by all of its residents.

We have a patchwork of neighborhoods and compounds that we're far more ethno-religiously homogeneous neighborhoods.

With the tramway proposal, one of the things that's fascinating is these proposed lines were going to service all different parts of the city.

And they were really going to be crossing and connecting these different residential areas in which it would give greater access and greater mobility to people who might have moved to one of these more homogeneous neighborhoods.

And so what we see from the plans and from the discussions of the city council and the Chamber was that they did see this as being one urban landscape.

Over the long term, we see this developing into a very big problem, particularly in the post World War I period in which the British government is recognizing Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people and we see a clash between the Zionist Movement and Palestinian nationalism coming to a head.

And this is that moment where we see already within one decade the price of a political framing and a political discourse that did fragment Jerusalemites.

What we have to think about is all of the other context that changed from the original 1909 tramway proposal to even just a decade later in which you have again.

The political system has changed, the ideology has changed, the urban landscape has changed, and the rationale of the city has changed.

So there's no longer just Jerusalem for all of its residents.

(upbeat music) (train chiming) Today if you go to Jerusalem, you'll notice a very sleek and modern looking tramway that goes through downtown Jerusalem and it connects the far northeastern corner to the far southwestern corner of the city.

And when the tramway opened in 2011, it was really hailed as a symbol of a modern global city in many ways echoing the discourse that we heard in the Ottoman period.

But it was also meant to signal the unification of the city, you know, to show that the city was unified, would remain unified under Israeli sovereignty.

Today's tramway is a very different landscape, right?

It was built against a city council that does not reflect the entire population of the city.

There's not a single Palestinian member on the Jerusalem City Council, even though the Palestinian population of the city is almost 37%.

And so we do see that it is really an attempt to paper over the deep divisions in the city rather than actually reflecting a unified city.

(upbeat music) - [Chang] The Chinese have been moving around the world pretty much from the beginning.

But to the US in particular that was very much driven by the gold rush in California.

And a few decades later, more Chinese moved over to the US to work for the railway.

San Francisco obviously was the earliest place where they arrived because the Gold rush actually ended just in less than 10 years, the gold was pretty much exhausted so they had to go elsewhere for a living.

And then there were this very widespread hostility against immigrants, especially Chinese immigrants that drove many Chinese who have been living in elsewhere in the US to Chinatown in San Francisco.

That was about 12 blocks, and it became basically a slum-like neighborhood where all the Chinese were taking refuge there in order to defend themselves against this hostility from the American population.

The Chinese population was serving the white population and there were a lot of trade going on.

Trade was really the main connecting point.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act actually made exception for merchants.

That led to the rapid growth of the merchant population in Chinatown.

(ominous music) The 1906 San Francisco fire burned the old Chinatown completely to the ground.

(ominous music) But in a few years time, Chinatown was rebuilt in its original location and Chinese merchants hired a kind of cosmopolitan American architecture firm to design the new Chinatown as a sort of fantasy oriental land with all the pagodas and all kinds of decorative details, lanterns, tiled roofs.

Basically this type of cliche oriental decoration that they put into the Chinatown after 1906, it became almost like a China version of Hollywood or some other kind of Disney Land destination for tourists.

- [Reporter] Chinatown, the largest oriental city in the oxidant.

Here are silks and incense, teakwood and ivory, and a soft spoken people slowly move about their work and play still maintaining all the traditions of the far east.

- [Chang] The second generation Chinese were born here.

They were all bilingual.

They were dressed mostly in the Western style.

Then their families entered all trades in American society.

They were doctors, they were lawyers, and they supported all kinds of culture activities.

So these group of people, their very agenda is to become active citizens in the US while maintaining some connections to those in China.

And they were really eager to leave part of their old Chinese identities behind and to embrace the most avant-garde and cosmopolitan culture that was available in the US.

One specific example is May's Studio in San Francisco and that was very much a creation of these merging of political and commercial and cultural interests by members of merchant families.

So this photo studio was started by the marriage of Estella May and her husband Paul Chan and they operated this studio from 1920s all the way to 1960s in San Francisco's Chinatown.

And this place really documents what was happening in Chinatown at the time that facilitated the connections between the Chinese communities in the US and those back in China by sometimes making photos for their IDs as well as these very interesting practice they did to create the kind of fake family reunions for some of the Chinese immigrants.

Because the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in place and many new immigrants, they could not see their families back in China for years or even decades.

So the photo studio, what they did was to put the negatives of the families back in China together with the negatives of the people here into one print.

So they look like the whole family was sitting together for a photo and they manipulate and they create these kind of pseudo family reunions which people bought as both for comforting, fantasy, as well as they believed this type of portrayed family reunions would proceed and lead to the real family reunion.

Their visual style is very much staged.

They don't take naturalistic photographs and sometimes surreal because it's so staged.

And also they would very consciously combine the western and the Chinese elements in a lot of the photos to signal their connections to both the traditional Chinese culture and the modern even Christian and American culture.

They were trying to really become the connecting point that is located in Chinatown.

This small group of people are very consciously trying to create this connectedness as the very essence of the identity.

(ominous music) - [Lior] I think that the most surprising fact for people who don't know Iran is that Iran even today in 2022 has the second biggest Jewish community in the Middle East, outside Israel.

It's a community that dates back to the Babylonian Exile 2,700 years ago.

In the height of the 20th century, it had about 100,000 Jews living in Iran.

Iran is a very tribal country.

Iran is a country of 27 minorities, religious, ethnic, lingual minorities.

(sings in foreign language) The idea of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, was to unify Iran on things that were different than religion.

The first beneficiaries of this policy were the Jews.

They were identified ethnically with the Persian majority of the country, and when there was no role for Islam, they could really integrate in levels that were unseen before.

Within very short time, we see the Jews becoming part of the state bureaucracy, of the healthcare system, of banking and education and higher education.

Within 15 years, most of the Jews left the traditional Jewish quarter, the mahalla, and moved to the new neighborhoods in northern Tehran and built new synagogues that also reflected the growth in wealth of this community.

- [Reporter] Again, the free world is troubled by trouble in Iran regarding with anxiety, the rioting and plots said to be aimed at overthrowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a ruler who has long been regarded as one of the West's best.

- There were many issues that each minority could take with the regime of the Shah but at the end of the day, the dictatorship of the Shah was brutal.

- [Reporter] Iran's army proved loyal to its ruler and in two days had the situation in hand.

- It was combined by very harsh measures of forbidden teaching the local languages.

Minorities could not publish in their own languages, they could not teach their languages and the idea was to create this unified basis, cultural basis for the entire country to erase the minority identities.

In the long run, I think that this is what came back to create the broadest coalition of any popular movement in the 20th century when in 1978, 1979, 90% of the country rallied behind Ayatollah Khomeini to overthrow the Shah for his dictatorship.

- [Reporter] There's no mistaking what this in fact really is.

It's a massive voice of protest against the rule of The Shah.

- And he basically helped to create this basis because he made them all identify with the majority group and they saw their interests not as particular groups of minorities, but as one nation of Iran against the dictatorship of the Shah.

Political revolutionaries, they must have this kind of utopian idea in order to motivate themselves to go as far as risking their own lives in order to achieve this change.

And the Iranian revolutionaries were willing to sacrifice everything.

They believe that they're going to create a new Iranian Republic that would be utopian, that will respect the human rights of all Iranians.

The Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians can enjoy the same rights in Iran as citizens and it's not going to take any of the rights or the privileges of the Muslims.

It's not that given the privileges of citizenship to to others will take any from them.

But also within the different Muslim minorities, the promise was to allow them to return to their culture, to respect their cultural autonomy, to teach their languages, to publish in their languages, to speak their languages.

It was utopian when you read the protocols of the committee that was charged with drafting the constitution.

It didn't immediately become an Islamic republic or Islamic revolution.

So immediately after the revolution, along with the utopian moment, there is a chaotic moment.

Many people are trying to figure out what's the best way for them to survive.

- [Reporter] Iraq declared today that its fighting with Iran is now a full scale war.

- [Lior] All these negotiation between the government and the people ended in summer 1980 with the breaking out of the Iran-Iraq War.

And this was the opportunity for the government to impose many of the restrictions that stayed into place until today.

It's devastating to think what it could have been and what it turned out to be.

But in the moment of the revolution, they really believed that they can create these alliances that will be long lasting and eventually lead to a society that will be for all of them equally.

I think that this is the promise of being able to be more fluid but also to see the greater good as the end goal, to be able to create a vision that will tend to every minority group or every group of the society.

(upbeat music) - [Reporter] In the midst of the Indian Ocean lies a beautiful jewel of an island, Mauritius.

- [Bruno] Mauritius, it's a tiny tropical island located East of Madagascar.

So roughly 790 square miles.

Located in a very strategic position in the Indian Ocean.

Mauritius has no indigenous population which is something that actually distinguishes it from a number of colonized spaces at the time.

The country from the very beginning was presented as a multicultural country that is really as a collection of groups that identify with various ancestral histories.

When I talk about my own story to people, I realized that, yeah, it was pretty unique to actually be trilingual when I was six years old.

And not just be trilingual because I was learning languages, but because I was also hearing them in my daily life.

I was already experiencing cultural diversity before I realized that the name for it was cultural diversity.

I grew up with kids who don't look like me at all and we comfortable with that diversity.

The history of the island is interesting in the sense that it really starts with colonization.

The first inhabitants of the island were the Dutch who really were first to kind of colonize the island and stay there for several decades.

When the Dutch left the island at the very beginning of the 18th century, the French were the one who colonized the island after that.

They used it as a military post and then as a plantation colony.

The French colonizers brought in a number of enslaved people from Madagascar and from East Africa.

The French approach was very much a kind of assimilationist approach whereas the British had a different approach to questions of diversity.

The British reinforced the plantation structure and the plantation model in Mauritius and by the mid of the 19th century when slavery was abolished, India was still a British colony.

And so the British brought in indentured servants from South Asia, but also from East Asia.

Those diasporic groups could actually strictly maintain their culture, their religion, their languages, their ways of dressing up or their cuisine and things like that.

But those communities could still maintain strong ties to their homeland precisely because they could still transmit language, religion, cultural habits.

(sings in foreign language) And as you can imagine when it comes to descendants of slaves and Creoles, because they have no recollection of their place of origin, they don't know from what part of Madagascar or from what part of East Africa they're from.

They don't know the language they used to speak.

They don't know the culture they used to belong to.

In Mauritius, the term Creole is a complicated one and the term Creole is not only a stigmatizing one when it comes to the people because they are seen as those who are really kind of below the kind of socioeconomic spectrum in Mauritius.

But it also touches the identity and the language, right?

And so what does it mean to be Creole and how you compare yourself to others who kind of can claim a more pure lineage.

What does it mean to speak a language, you know, Creole language that to many is not even a language.

(upbeat music) To me, Mauritius is not just a kind of a multicultural place but it's also a profoundly Creolized space in the sense that those cultural groups that come together end up creating a new kind of society.

New cultural expressions that really comes from the kind of syncretisms at work in the society.

And so I, for instance, grew up in Mauritius speaking Creole in my house.

At school I would speak English.

I could hear the call for prayer from the mosque when I wake up in Arabic but we also will listen to Bollywood songs on the bus.

I think there is a profoundly Creolized way of life and other people enjoy that.

And I grew up with that diversity and so I feel comfortable and not threatened by it.

And I think a lot of Mauritians feel comfortable and not threatened by the day to day diversity.

When I think about developed nations from the global North today wrestling with the idea of diversity, how they become anxious about the presence of the other who don't look like them, who don't pray like them, who don't eat like them, listen to the same music and how much anxiety it creates, I think that these countries have a lot to learn from the experience of countries like Mauritius who have been living from that diversity for the past 300 years.

(upbeat music) - [Chang] We are today very much in a globalized age where the bonafide tribalism is really not possible.

- [Bruno] There should be ways in which we acknowledge the diversity that is not just about a collection of discreet forms of identifications.

- [Lior] If we're fluid and not rigid about the boundaries, it automatically leads to finding partnership with other tribes based on common goal.

- [Michelle] Opening up our minds and our understanding that people are complex and multifaceted individuals and societies are complex and multifaceted really does enable us to determine not only the society that we live in but also the society that we will build moving forward.

(soft music)