Immigration and Migration and the Making of a Modern American City

Background Content: Immigration and Migration in an Urban Setting

Our seminar readings led us through immigrant and migrant communities in three cities, progressing chronologically and geographically from young New York City to a burgeoning Los Angeles. In all contexts, the stresses of uprooting and transplanting to a new culture produced challenges shaped by economics, policy, and culture. Some were specific to gender, others to class or race.

In the Five Points district of mid-nineteenth century lower Manhattan, America's first tenements grew out of multi-family housing built inadequately and divided over and over to accommodate groups coming from the southern and rural New England states, Europe, and even China. There was already an African American presence in Five Points by 1863, the year of legal emancipation. Being in the North, however—before or after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863—did not ensure liberty and security, whether one was legally freed from slavery or not. In the slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs, she illustrates the complexities of life for freed and escaped Blacks. Working class European immigrants lashed out at "things symbolic of black political, economic, and social power" during the Draft Riot of the same year, during which eleven African American men were brutally killed and the Colored Orphan Asylum was burned down. ¹¹

The trying experiences of all of these non-native New Yorkers were shaped by race, class, and gender. With nowhere else in the city to live, residents of Five Points experienced over-crowding, and much of life took place out in the streets. Lack of plumbing, infrastructure, and sanitation encouraged outbreaks of cholera and small pox and high mortality rates. Jobs available to immigrants were tedious with impossibly low wages—for children as well as adults. The documentation for this is abundant, but Jacob Riis's 1890 How the Other Half Lives brings the setting to life with his and others' photographs. Not until the Tenement House Act of 1867 had property owners been forced against their will and profits to make some inadequate improvements. ¹² In the meantime, "tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their surroundings. . .were at last content to remain there," Riis says with some sense of fatalism. ¹³ This is the 1893 setting for Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

We continued with the African American migrant experience in the First Great Migration of 1910-1930, specifically to Chicago. The Chicago Defender's vast distribution in the South spread information about migration north even to the most obscure pockets of the southern states. ¹⁴ Labor agents, letter writers, returnees, and money that founds its way south were all convincing to those thinking of migrating. The railroads were a source of jobs and also a conduit for information both directions. The Defender celebrated the opportunities for Blacks up north as "influential, moderately prosperous, and modern" while giving thorough coverage to the danger and oppression in the South. ¹⁵ Existing and new institutions like church congregations and migration clubs capitalizing on group travel rates moved people in accelerated numbers. ¹⁶ Once in Chicago, migrants met challenges from whites and from the Old Settlers, blacks settled in southern Chicago, near other blacks for proximity to resources and familiar institutions. ¹⁷ Segregation and integration were erratic; some laws were enforced, some were not, but by 1915 blacks were excluded from most white life and the greater economy. ¹⁸ The faced exclusion from unexpected places, too. By 1919 there was a shortage of housing for black Chicagoans, and earlier—the Old settlers—chagrined by the provincial ways of the newcomers moved even farther south to avoid them. The print media including the Defender and black organizations campaigned to instruct newcomers how to behave in public and at work. ¹⁹ The most unpleasant and low-paying jobs in the meat-packing and steel industries were the most accessible for men; women worked in factories and packing houses and as servants and hand laundresses. ²⁰ In transit, upon arrival in the North, and throughout their settling years, African Americans of the First Great Migration in Chicago were challenged by their race and class, urban geography, and even prejudice by other Blacks. Richard Wright's Black Boy, tells of his slow migration to Chicago and his struggles there.

The third immigrant history I want my students to know more about as a source for our narrative readings is Mexican immigration, an area with which my students have contemporary connections. They should understand how federal and local policies and historical events have helped to determine legality and, beyond the obvious language differences, why life can be so hard for them. By 1910 Mexico and the United States already had a co-dependent labor relationship, facilitated and encouraged by the railroad system. But the relationship was also complex and changed according to labor needs and US immigration policy over through the century. ²¹ To the 1917 literacy test and head tax on migrants, the Immigration Act of 1924 added a Visa fee, causing some migrants to go underground and for some to remain on the American side of the border. They began to disperse north and west, creating the setting for the stories set in Chicago we'll read in class. We learned in seminar about the campaign in the 1920's to Americanize Mexican migrants in Los Angeles, a city of newcomers who were more homogeneous—white and largely from the Midwest. Housekeeping skills, English language acquisition, and dietary habits were all under siege. ²² Sanchez says of the ultimately unsuccessful American attempts that they "are an important window for looking at the assumptions made about both Mexican and American culture" and that "Mexican culture was seen as malleable, but required intense education in 'American values. . ." ²³ Current restrictionist laws in states like California, Arizona, and Oklahoma suggest that in the eyes of many Americans, the status of Mexican Americans has not changed.

Established in the American psyche as labor class, possibly illegal, and needing to be Americanized, the long history of Mexican migration seems to ensure that their status in the States will continue to be slow to change. This is the context for our readings, one from late 20 ^th century Chicago—The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros—and the other from undocumented teenagers today, a collection of stories by undocumented teenagers called Things I'll Never Say: Stories of Growing up Undocumented in the United States.

Puerto Rico was annexed after the 1898 Spanish American war, paving the way for eventual American citizenship with the Immigration Act of 1917. Puerto Ricans expected to benefit from the shared economy and modernism they would gain from their experience on the continent. In our cities they encountered the same challenges of job shortages, limited affordable housing, and discrimination as other immigrant groups we've studied. We find all of this in Down These Mean Streets, the 1930s story of Piri Thomas, a Puerto Rican boy from Spanish Harlem.

Each of these migrant/immigrant groups have their own compelling stories, and rites of passage ones are abundant among them. Beginning with the trauma of uprooting to move to a new land, the young men and women in the narratives represented here encounter culture-confirming or life-changing acts and decisions. Each young man whose stories are represented here faces the time-honored and universal fistfight to earn entitlement to occupy his new space. In several narratives young men or women must make a crucial decision to deny their old cultures or embrace the new, sometimes even to betray their race or culture to fit in. In two stories, young men, facing challenges specific to their migration experience, make decisions they may not have otherwise—to steal or shoot—and then must face the internal or external consequences that will shape their adult selves.