From The Peopling of New York City
Margot Gardow
Contents |
About me
I'm a Jersey kid. I like me a lot more then I like you. I'm overly sarcastic and kind of mean and really like colorful sneakers. I went to normal high school then private Quaker boarding school and between the two of them discovered I don't really like school. I am not returning to Baruch next semester and I may go to NCSU next year. I want to be a carpenter, actor, rockstar, fashion photographer, designer, stunt driver, screenwriter, park ranger and mutant superhero all rolled into one. lahlahlah.
My heroes are Lady Gaga, Micheal Alig and Wedge Antilles.
Ideal Community
My ideal community would be a town up in the trees. There would be collections of tree houses connected via rope swings and bridges. I would be deep in the forest, spread along the side of a hill, somewhere where it’s always warm. Everyone would wear shorts and dresses made by a consortium of seamstresses who have a tree all to their selves full of looms and sewing machines. The community would grow food on every available surface: on roofs, the sides of trees, and platforms above the canopy. We would hunt game with spears and blasters. There would be a tree devoted to the giant chlorophyll powered generator that would power all our computers and radios. There would be anti gravity platforms that would float amongst the trees and bands would set up and play on them as their fans swung and scampered after them. There would be dances every night, at different trees and sometimes across the whole forest. We would have bonfires on the mossy forest floor and sing hippie songs and sacrifice action figures to the forest spirits. We would bathe in the streams and waterfalls that make their way down are hill and on hot days go cool off in the ocean at the edge of the forest.
Immigration Film Clip
The clip I showed during class was from the movie The Triplets of Belleville, a movie not directly focused on the issue of immigration but it was involved in the plot.
Triplets of Belleville clip
Census Track Information
Kinnelon Census Information
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=kinnelon&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=28.252954,67.851563&ie=UTF8&ll=40.995707,-74.371862&spn=0.026236,0.066261&z=14
My town is white. The census information proves how homogenous my town truly is. Kinnelon, New Jersey is 95% white. the remaining fiver percent are a mix of miscellaneous other races who may as well be white due to the culture of my town. There are no homeless people, not many renters and few jobless people. Most people live in the family household with the the average 3.27 (versus the U.S. 3.14) number of people in each family. I live in one of the most statistically normal towns in the U.S.A.
From There to Here
Field Trip Notes
The African Burial Ground project began in 1991, when, during excavation work for a new federal office building, workers discovered the skeletal remains of the first of more than 400 men, women and children. Further investigation revealed that during the 17th and 18th centuries, free and enslaved Africans were buried in a 6.6 acre burial ground in lower Manhattan outside the boundaries of the settlement of New Amsterdam, which would become New York. Over the decades, the unmarked cemetery was covered over by development and landfill.
(African Burial Ground Website)
The Tenement Museum is located on 97 Orchard Street. It was built on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1863, and was home to nearly 7000 working class immigrants.
From these apartments all the new arrivals had to make a new life in America: find a job, keep the job and support their family all while trying to live a fulfilling life.
Ellis Island was opened on January 1, 1892. It was the nation's main federal immigration station all the way thru 195. From its first day to its last the station processed over 12 million immigrant steamship passengers. This means that 40% of America's population can trace their ancestry through Ellis Island. The main building was restored opened as a museum on September 10, 1990.
Midterm
In Nancy Foner’s book, From Ellis Island to JFK, she writes of when the Jews and Italians first came to New York they were considered lesser citizens, lesser whites. While they were still considered better then “non-whites” it took these “lesser white” cultures at least two generations to get rid of those stigmas, to overcome the prejudice and be considered American but now people don’t even question their place in American society. When American history is studied students are taught to associate the words prejudice and bigotry with America’s attitudes towards Native Americans, then Africans and sometimes Japanese. The prejudice that was resent when certain European groups started immigrating to the United States was as equally extreme and detrimental as all other stories in the history books. The prejudice against the incoming Western European immigrants was such that they were almost banned from the States with “scientific” reasons backing the cause. Social scientists believed that they were all of inferior stock, physically mentally and even looks wise, and did not want true Americans breeding with them. The italians and Jew had to deal with these prejudices for generations, but the longer they were around, and as new waves of immigrants started flooding in, their supposed “non-whitness” was forgotten. People stopped thinking of Italians as darker skinned or Jews as lesser people and they all became part of the “white” category. They all because American. The incoming immigrants today are facing new racial stigmas. Added to the fact that they as individuals and groups are new to America, most incoming immigrants are not white. This nulls some of the rules that applied to older immigrant waves. Previous immigrants were all at least light skinned and can now truly be defined as white because of their skin color. New immigrants waves will never be defined as that. Will it be harder for new immigrant groups to become American because they will never be defined as “white”? Theses stigmas remain yet the key to being American is no longer in “whiteness”, it is more about what generation of immigrant a person is and compliance to America’s societal standards. Yet while this is the main apart of the definition of being American, “whiteness” still has something to do with it. It will be harder for the newer waves of immigrants to become “American” because they are not white and do not fit in appearance- wise with traditional America. These are problems that incoming Ghanaians, West Indians, Asians, and Hispanics will have to deal with. Will people unite via skin color or trough culture? How many generations of prejudice will these immigrant cultures endure before they are considered American? How much does skin color really matter?
The three main theories of immigrant culture in American society are on a spectrum. They are almost like stages, the first being pluralism, or trying to keep one’s culture as separate from American society as possible, then the melting pot stage, where America takes aspects of a culture and makes it part of it’s own, and for some peoples, assimilation, where as individuals they lose almost all sense of their culture and become Americanized. Not every immigrant group has gone through these stages yet they all can be defined at every point in their history in these terms and here are two cultures so defined. The most extreme blending in of cultures is assimilation. Assimilation is when a culture completely blends into the American society, trying to become as American as possible. This has happened in New York City to several older immigrant groups such as the Jews, Irish and to a lesser degree, the Italians. In Beyond the Melting Pot it is stated that New York was once an Irish City. Where now people are concerned with the Hispanic and Black vote they used to be concerned with the Irish vote because they made up a quarter of New York’s population at the turn of the century. The old New York Irish no longer have their distinct political or cultural niche, having spread out both literally and figuratively into the suburbs and wider tri-state area. There is no Irish corner left in New York and families with Irish heritage are proud of it but don’t hold to there roots as other cultures do. The middle ground is the melting pot theory and on the other end of the spectrum from assimilation is cultural pluralism. The Italians are a great example of both these theories at different stages in their immigration history. They were once extremely exclusive, keeping to their own neighborhoods and networking within their own people. Businesses were family things and Italian boys and girls married other Italian boys and girls. This resulted in neighborhoods directly imported from Italy where little English heard and they were able to keep to their own traditions. They kept up this cultural pluralism for many generations but have now opened their communities for the rest of the country. Those neighborhoods are now slowly thinning out. It is now the fourth generation from Italian immigrants and these men and women are now professionals as opposed to factory workers and are longing for green lawns instead of concrete lawns. Joseph Berger’s book, The World in a City, explains how traditionally Italian neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst are becoming mixing bowls of culture. The Italians are moving to the suburbs and the Asians and Middle Easterners are taking over in the old city spots. Because of this the culture is getting spread thinner but that doesn’t mean their losing their old traditions. Today’s generations of Italians descended from the first wave of New York immigrants are bring their vibe along with the to the suburbs, especially New Jersey, home of The Sopranos and at least two Italian restaurants in ever North Jersey town. They still keep businesses in the family, most pizza parlors are family run and even such Italian directors as Francis Ford Coppola use mostly friends and family in his movies. The Italian culture has dispersed itself, moving itself out of pocket neighborhoods in New York City into everyday life while maintaining it’s integrity. There are new immigrant waves each decade, bringing more changes to the face of New York City. Each immigrant group will be defined by one of these theories and most likely be defined by each one as they grow up in and change New York.
