Day 8–Ellis Island
“I had heard that the streets in America were paved with gold. But I learned three things. First, the streets are not paved with gold. Second, the streets weren’t even paved. Third, I was expected to pave them”.—recollection from the Ellis Island Museum
This museum oozes history. I found myself trying to read everything. Nothing was promised these people when they came here, and they earned everything given to them. I was not aware of how the shippers tried to prepare the immigrants for the journey, and how these transatlantic companies were on the hook financially if their passengers got all the way to places like Ellis Island and were turned back for some health-related reason. The companies would set up places that the new arrivals might find very much like the first places they could be staying when the first got to America–anything from the sleeping arrangements to the physical layout of the towns themselves. The travellers left their homelands for reasons as varied as no opportunity (Ireland, Italy) to violent ostracism for their religious beliefs (Eastern Europeon Jews during the times of the pogroms). It wasn’t as if anyone was waiting for them with open arms on this end, either. The New Americans fell into very challenging living situations that sorely tested their ability to get along with others –from places many of them had never heard of. The sketchy history I have about my own family’s arrival originates in the Bohemia area of Czechoslovakia (I know even less about my dad’s German background), with an apparent New York arrival; their journey then took them up through Wisconsin, with an eventual resting place in Chicago in a Bohemian neighborhood in suburban Cicero, which is right next to Chicago city limits. All the Bohemians at that time made a point of heading to this enclave–but not because it was so perfect a place. The rents were relatively inexpensive, there was a commonality of language (and food, which all was–as far as I can remember, all dumpling related!), and a ”funneling” of the Czechs to a sure job at the Western Electric Plant in Cicero. And you STAYED in your neighborhood; I do remember hearing stories about relatives inadvertantly venturing into Italian areas and barely making it out safely. One way to make money was to sell simple meat and cabbage wrapped in dough to people out of your backdoor (not unlike that made in mining areas in the northern regions of Wisconsin or the U.P. in Michigan). The Catholic church played an enormous role in everyone’s lives, pretty much dictating who you would socialize with, where you would go to school, and how people would spend their free time. However, I don’t mean to make this sound so quaint and wonderful. People struggled every day to make ends meet. Anger–oftentimes fueled by the inexpensive purchase of alcohol (by the bucket!) could hurt a family. And, keeping people “safe” in their own neighborhoods could engender suspicions of anyone “different” from them, as well as develop feelings of intense racism towards African-Americans that take generations to be mitigated ( look up what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King when he led a march through Cicero in the 1960′s to push for fair housing). People–conciously or unconciously– felt limited by the self-imposed boundaries of their lives. To be fair, however, it was the best they could do at the time, and there were always a few brave enterprising souls who tried to advance beyond the ways of life laid out before them–and out of the confines of the neighborhood.
One of the great things about looking at this time in our history is the opportunity to see it as it really was for these immigrants, and the constant struggles they endured to get their foothold in America. I plan to do something with this in our third grade classrooms, as our social studies curriculum lends strong emphasis to communities brought about by new arrivals to the United States. This trip has given me ideas about which areas I should place my focus, as well as what else can be further explored. I’m sure our travels to upstate New York will give me some possible avenues on this topic too.
