Less Ellis Island, More Back of the Yards
The Meades, from Ireland. I'm related to them on my dad's side, through many greats. Photo courtesy of my cousin Kate Browne, in Maryland.
Originally, this site was to be called MacArthur Park Media: Stories of a Modern-Day Ellis Island. This didn’t end up working out, mainly because MacArthur Park really isn’t a modern-day Ellis Island. (Maybe Tijuana or Nogales can make this claim, but MacArthur Park can’t: it isn’t an entry point.) I know and admit this to be true now. A couple of weeks ago, I still wanted to imagine I lived amidst legacy, so I asked the guys of Backstory With The American History Guys what was for a long time the central question that moved me to start MPM: assuming that culture of Ellis Island impacted the melting pot that European immigrants assimilated into in pre- 1920’s US, how will starting-points like MacArthur Park impact the current cultural climate in modern America? For example, I know that my however-many-great grandparents arrived from Ireland and Sweden and Germany and France to an Ellis Island in which their cultural identity was quickly and easily erased. Long names with many syllables were cut in half. My German ancestors said they spoke Deutsch; the immigration official nodded and marked them down as being Dutch. No one spoke their home language to their children, no one went back to their home country. Ties were cut right away. My dad said that he knew he was Irish as a kid only because he looked at the Italians and the Polish boys at his Catholic school and knew for certain he wasn’t either.
MacArthur Park has a culture in many ways opposite this — the neighborhood is about re-creating where immigrants have come from instead of erasing it. The markets are open-air and outside; everything is in Spanish (sometimes Korean), free English classes offered in the area are sparsely attended, since it’s so easy to be fully functional in other languages here. Of course the kids are crazy to assimilate — they’ve got Hannah Montana backpacks and the Nike swoosh buzzed into their haircut and they wear little socks with American flags on them — but the rest of the neighborhood, for better or for worse, seems completely content to imagine they are still in their home country even though many of them have gone to strenuous, expensive, sometimes death-defying lengths to get here. I know of course that there was Little Italy and Swedish pockets in Chicago and that plenty of Europeans were interested in keeping their cultural identity at least somewhat intact and maybe I’m just so many generations removed that I’m wrongly assuming that they assimilated with so little reservation. I also know that they came at a different time, when America wasn’t so totally in everyone’s face with Pizza Huts and MTV music videos all over the world, which I think rightly encourages people to hang onto whatever makes their way of doing things unique. Anyway, the point is, I don’t know, which is why I asked the Twentieth Century historian. He wrote back:
Devin,
What a thoughtful comment. I am more inclined to think about the influence of the kinds of places that recent arrivals go to after the point of entry. For all of its mythology, the emphasis on Ellis Island tends to obscure the varied settings that immigrants ended up in. I am less familiar with the broad range of options today (I keep telling them that we need a twenty-first century guy!) but from anecdotal evidence, recent arrivals end up in a broad variety of settings. I am also struck by how much more accepting our culturally pluralist society is today, than our Americanizing tendencies were one hundred years ago (not that there is not some residue.) Thanks for listening and commenting.
Twentieth-Century Guy
What I should have asked him is to compare MacArthur Park to the chaotic and corrupt Back of the Yards neighborhood, vis a vis The Jungle. Which I think I probably like because then I get to imagine myself a modern Upton Sinclair.
Los Angeles is constantly changing…new faces and new customs and traditions are spreading through our city every day. They come for a better life for themselves and their families, yet they tend to create their own villages with their own l
anguage and lifestyles from their past. We all have much to learn from each other. Devin, a well written essay and full of things to think about..even when we disagree!
Wow; the similarities between the author’s ancestors and mine are uncanny. My grandparents and father came to the US from Holland after WW II where the Dutch language was forbidden to be spoken ever again. My grandmother would become furious if she was mistaken for a German, and wouldn’t hesitate to tell the store clerk, the waitress, or whoever that Dutch has a more refined, Scandanavian pronunciation than those barbarians with gutteral pronunciations – ha. All ties to the old country were cut, and they considered themselves Americans immediately upon arriving to a rented farmhouse outside of Chicago. The only time I heard Dutch was when my father would swear at the family dog for being stupid.
Here in MacArthur Park, while I enjoy meeting and talking with so many people of different cultures, it’s still taking some getting used to watching parents allow their children to urinate and defecate on the curb, and refusal to learn English.
I’m aware of children being slapped for speaking English in the home and being lectured that this is their homeland stolen by the Americans. What was not reported about the Mayday melee was the ‘declaration of war’ upon America being screamed in Spanish by several people. We still have a long ways to go.