Immigration and the Fourth of July

1918 Fourth of July parade passing the midtown Public Library, courtesy of the library's online records

For American citizens and residents, July 4th is the day to celebrate our nation's independence and freedom with fireworks, barbecues, and parades. But throughout history, Independence Day has raised questions of national identity for immigrants.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, well-off, native-born Americans were concerned about the assimilation and loyalty of immigrants. Millions of newcomers were concentrated in particular neighborhoods, like New York City’s Lower East Side, where their cultural differences in dress, language, and food were highly visible. Independence Day displays of revelry and “liquid patriotism” by immigrants, as one newspaper claimed, did not meet the expectations of some native-born Americans. Immigrants also continued to celebrate the national holidays of their home countries, even as they began the process of assimilation.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 exacerbated fears about the dangers of nationalism. Could immigrants from Russia and Germany, two nations at war with one another across the Atlantic, maintain civil relations in America? Would German immigrants subvert the American war effort after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917?

Such concerns must have plagued the New York City Mayor’s Committee on National Defense when it planned the pageant parade for July 4, 1918. According to a New York Times article from 1918, the parade was organized so that Americans of foreign birth could demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. A reporter wrote: “…in this long, kaleidoscopic pageant, now bright with splendid costumes, now drab with long columns of civilians…there was slowly woven a picture of fighting America of today, a land of many bloods but of one ideal.”

In the parade, many immigrants wore their native clothing but carried American flags, in a symbolic reconciliation of their dual identities as foreigners and Americans. Today, questions remain about what defines an American - is it the length of residence in the United States, the right to vote, or the country of birth? We no longer have such choreographed displays of patriotism as the 1918 pageant parade, but you can be sure that people of manifold nationalities will be watching the fireworks across the United States this Saturday, July 4.

Share your memories of past Independence Day holidays and tell us how you plan to celebrate July 4, 2009!

-posted by Penny King

Working-Class Housing in Tough Times

Yesterday Brian Lehrer talked with Steven Greenhouse about how the recession is affecting the working poor. More people are "doubling up," sharing apartments with boarders or other families. This was a common practice in New York's poorer neighborhoods in the 19th and 20th centuries, as overcrowding limited the available housing options.

Listen to the segment here:


Greenhouse was a recent guest at Tenement Talks (left, with Labor Commissioner Smith, Andrew Friedman of Make the Road New York, and Jeff Madrick):



- Posted by Kate Stober

Questions for Curatorial - Staying... and Leaving

Over the last few years, stricter immigration laws, the recession, and improved living conditions in countries like India, China, and Mexico have led to an exodus of both skilled workers and undocumented immigrants. Curatorial Director Dave describes migration patterns at the turn of the last century and what conditions were like for those that chose to remain in New York.

In what percentages did immigrants return to their homelands? Are there differences if looked at by time period and ethnicities?

Many immigrants came to America with the ultimate intention of returning to their home countries after earning enough money to buy land or houses. Between 1900 and 1920, 36 percent of immigrants arriving in the United States returned home. In turn-of-the-century New York, the degree to which Russian Jews became permanent settlers was remarkable. Escaping virulent anti-Semitism and political oppression, many emigrated with no intention of returning.

Nevertheless, many more went back than is ordinarily assumed. Between 1880 and 1900, 15 to 20 percent returned to their homes. After 1900, however, return migration dropped off as political upheaval and religious oppression intensified. In contrast to Russian Jews, the return rate among Italians reached 50 percent in some years—of every 10 Italians who left for the U.S. between 1880 and World War I, 5 returned home.

Sometimes called “birds of passage,” many of the first Italian immigrants were young men who came to America with the intention of earning enough money to return to Italy, buy land, and raise a family.

According to Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration, “Italians called the United States ‘the workshop’; many arrived in March, April, and May and returned in October, November, and December, when layoffs were most numerous… For many Italian men, navigating freely between their villages and America became a way of life.” Nevertheless, many returnees or ritornati chose to re-migrate to the United States.

What is the source for the claim that the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on earth at the turn of the last century?



Crowds on Hester Street

The source for the claim that the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on earth at the turn of the last century comes from a housing survey conducted by the newly created Tenement House Department of New York City in 1903, charged with insuring the implementation of the Tenement House Act of 1901. The detailed survey found the Lower East Side’s 10th ward the most densely populated in the city and, indeed, the world.

In 1903, the ward had a total population of 69, 944 or approximately 665 people per acre. The most densely populated block in the ward, bounded by Orchard, Allen, Delancey, and Broome Streets, encompassed 2.04 acres and had a population density of 2,233 people per acre.

The extraordinary population density in the Tenth Ward and neighboring Lower East Side wards was caused by several factors. The major cause was the increasing population as incredible numbers of immigrants - largely Eastern European Jews and Italians - arrived in New York.

Immigrants initially settled on the Lower East Side because this was an area with affordable housing where immigrants were welcome by building owners. Members of particular ethnic or religious groups tended to cluster where their compatriots had already settled, leading to larger communities. Here people spoke their language and shared their customs. The religious and social institutions, and the commercial establishments that eased the transition to life in America, were already in existence.

Immigration Now - Facing Deportation

Since Kat Long, author of Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City, will be speaking at the museum tomorrow night, we figured we'd mention how sex and immigration policy have become entwined today. The Mercury News reports that newcomers to the States involved in same-sex partnerships with U.S. citizens are facing deportation, since immigration rights don't apply to civil unions.

Shirley Tan's calm and happy life — San Mateo County housewife, mother of twin 12-year-old boys, singing in the church choir — blew up at 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 28, with a knock on the front door.

Within minutes, the immigration agent standing there had the 43-year-old Tan in handcuffs. She is scheduled to be deported to her native Philippines on Friday.

If Jay Mercado, Tan's partner of 23 years and the mother of her sons, were a different gender, it's highly unlikely that knock ever would have come. As a U.S. citizen, Mercado could have sponsored a wedded spouse for legal permanent residency. But although Mercado and Tan married in San Francisco in 2004, federal law limits the definition of marriage to a man and a woman, and same-sex partners of U.S. citizens don't have a route to legal permanent residence extended to straight married couples. Read more.

Schapiro's Kosher Wines

Nothing captures the shift in the Lower East Side's demographics better than this photo of a Mexican restaurant next to the recently closed Schapiro's Kosher Wines on Rivington Street - except, perhaps, this 2002 New York Times article which discusses the Lower East Side's transition from living, breathing Eastern European Jewish neighborhood with kosher butcher shops and Ratner's Deli to "museum piece" (the Tenement Museum is mentioned, of course.) The article touches on the special role food plays in people's relationship to a neighborhood.

Facts & Findings - Today's NY Times

Two items of note in today's New York Times:

Beginning today, join the discussion on contemporary immigration on the Times' Room for Debate blog. Today's post focuses on education. Also check out their interactive map, which charts where new immigrants have settled from 1880 to today.

Also starting today, and for the next 12 weeks, photographer Richard Perry will explore the City's remaining manufacturing industry. Like many American cities, New York's economy once rested on the backs of laborers in factories and workshops. The Lower East Side was the center of the garment industry: by 1880 New York produced more garments than its four closest urban competitors combined, and by 1900 the value and output of the clothing trade was three times that of sugar refining, the city’s second largest industry. By 1910, 70% of the nation’s women’s clothing and 40% of men’s was produced here. Even today, the needle trade accounts for up to a third of the City's remaining manufacturing jobs. According to the Asian American Federation, 246 garment factories employed an estimated 13,308 workers in Chinatown prior to the September 11 attack.

Questions for Curatorial - Middle Eastern Immigrants

According to a Nepali newspaper, the U.S. military is recruiting over 500 immigrant speakers of Arabic, Hindi, Pashto and other Asian languages in New York City as part of a pilot program. (The last time the military allowed immigrants with temporary visas to enlist was during the Vietnam War.) New York's Middle Eastern and South Asian communities have a rich history; the tenants of 97 Orchard likely heard some of the above languages on the street. Curitorial Director Dave explains.

Was there ever a significant Arabic-speaking population on the Lower East Side or in New York City?

New York’s Arab community, largely Syrian-Lebanese, dates from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900, half of the Syrians in the United States resided in New York City. The first Arabs did not arrive in the city until the 1870s, but that population grew to several thousand by 1920, mostly located on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Others lived in Brooklyn, eventually the center of the city’s Arab community, although many still commuted to work in Manhattan. New York’s Syrian population was overwhelmingly Christian and large enough to support several churches, newspapers, and ethnic organizations, such as the Syrian Ladies Aid Society, which helped new immigrants. Male immigrants made their living by peddling, factory work, and running small businesses, while the women who worked were concentrated in factories manufacturing negligees, kimonos, lace, and embroidery. Syrian craftsmen were noted for rugs and tapestries.

After 1907, a community of Levantine Jews settled among the Romanians between Allen and Chrystie Streets on the Lower East Side. These approximately 10,000 refugees from upheavals within the Turkish Empire with their distinctive customs, religious practices, and languages were an island in a sea of East European Jews. The majority conversed in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), but there were also some 1,000 Arabic-speaking Syrian Jews and a slightly smaller contingent whose first language was Greek.

Post-1965 liberal immigration policies encouraged a considerable number of Arabic-speaking Middle Easterners to immigrate to the United States. They had economic motives for doing so, but the constant turmoil in that region also fed their desire to escape. The center of this more recent Arab settlement in New York City was Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue section with its many restaurants, bakeries, and Arab-run shops. This new Arab immigration differed from that of the early twentieth century. While those that came before World War II were typically Christians, most of the newcomers were Muslims. Growing numbers of Muslim New Yorkers attended the seventy old and newly established mosques that existed in 1993 and participated in the annual fall observation of Ramadan. Such occasions brought Arabs together with Muslims from Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as well as African-Americans of that religious persuasion. In April 1991, the newest and largest mosque in New York opened on West 96th Street in Manhattan, with space for 1,000 worshippers. Muslims have also established ten schools in the city to provide religious and secular education for their children.

Facts and Findings - "Learn English or Bust"?

A University of Wisconsin study debunks the myth that 19th and early 20th century immigrants picked up English quickly.

Joseph Salmons has always been struck by the pervasiveness of the argument. In his visits across Wisconsin, in many newspaper letters to the editor, and in the national debates raging over modern immigration, he encounters the same refrain:

"My great, great grandparents came to America and quickly learned English to survive. Why can't today's immigrants do the same?"

The look at century-old language patterns seems especially salient in the modern political culture, where "English-only" movements are cropping up everywhere and there is considerable debate about how quickly new Spanish-speaking immigrants should be assimilating a new language.

As a professor of German who has extensively studied European immigrant languages in the Midwest, Salmons discovered there was little direct research available about whether this "learn English or bust" ethic really existed.

To read the rest...http://www.news.wisc.edu/15801

Immigration, Then and Now - A History of Housing

Overcrowded, illegally partitioned apartments are as common in New York's immigrant neighborhoods today as they were back in the 19th century. The New York Times made the comparison in an article last week, opening with a description of a Mexican couple's 23 X 11 foot room in Bushwick, one of nine to twelve apartments squeezed into a five-family brownstone.

“Have you ever been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum?” asked Javier Valdes, who visited Guadalupe’s room recently and who is deputy director of Make the Road New York, a community services group of which Guadalupe is a member. “It’s like a repeat of history. It’s just a different group of people going through it.”

The only difference? When 97 Orchard was built, housing regulations were next to nonexistent. When the first crop of tenements sprang up in the 1860s, landlords tried to cram as many working-class families into the buildings as possible. Beyond these squalid apartments, cheap housing options were limited. Some immigrants squeezed into subdivided one-family houses. Others lived in dark, airless basements, rear tenements (which sat behind streetfront buildings), or shantytowns on the fringes of the city, where Central Park is today.

The residents of 97 Orchard were lucky, because Louis Glockner, their landlord, had an incentive to keep standards high (even before NYC passed the nation's first housing law in 1867): he himself lived in the building. In 1870, 97 Orchard's apartments were relatively bright and spacious, housing, on average, no more than 3-4 people.

Then - Officials investigate a crowded tenement in 1900, several decades after housing codes are passed. Photo courtesy of the History Place.

Now - New York Times photo of an immigrant couple's 11 x 23 ft. room