Curating the Immigrant Experience

Like Ellis Island, the Lower East Side is more than a place on a map: It was their ancestors’ entry point into the United States.

For millions of German and especially Italian and Jewish Americans, Manhattan’s rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side is much more than a physical neighborhood. It is shrine to what Irving Howe called “the world of our fathers.” To walk the neighborhood’s streets or to visit the community’s Tenement Museum is to connect with their roots.

Like tens of thousands of tourists each year, I recently visited the neighborhood, walked its streets and toured one of its tenements while trying to envision and re-experience the environment captured in the late-19th- and early-20th-century photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Although my family never lived on the Lower East Side, it is, nonetheless, part of my heritage. It’s an enduring symbol of those who left the shtetls of Eastern Europe to make a fresh start in America. For it is there that so many of my ancestors’ landsmen resided before moving to the Midwest.

As a friend and I took the Tenement Museum’s walking and apartment tours and tried to imagine the pushcarts now succeeded by upscale dining sheds, high-end shops and stylishly dressed 20-somethings, I kept wondering what message the guides were trying to convey.

Were they tapping into our nostalgic longing for the world we have lost?

Were they trying to remind us about the exploitation and grinding poverty, the sweatshops and outwork that so many of our ancestors endured?

Was the goal to reawaken a consciousness of the immigrants’ labor and political activism, of the anarchist and socialist and communist movements, the Jewish Bund, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the Uprising of the 20,000?

Or was the lesson something else altogether: a portrait of the Lower East Side as a “golden ghetto,” or, as immigrant Mary Antin called it, “the Promised Land”—a culturally rich, dynamic and aspiring community that stands in stark contrast to today’s stereotypes about dilapidated inner-city ghettos, ravaged by crime and drug addiction and beset with broken or dysfunctional families, failed schools and joblessness?

It was decidedly not the harshly negative portrait that Anzia Yezierska painted in Hungry Hearts (1920), Salome of the Tenements (1923), Arrogant Beggar (1927) and especially Bread Givers (1925):

• A life of destitution, which witnessed a constant battle with hunger and the ever-present threat of eviction.
• The cramped, unsanitary tenement apartment, which contributed to a sense of entrapment and desperation.
• The religiously devout fathers who prioritized religious study over work and who exacerbated their families’ financial woes, placing additional burdens on their wives and daughters or who abandoned their families altogether (as did an estimated 10 percent of Jewish fathers in turn-of-the-century New York).
• The repression of women’s ambitions.
• The barriers of gender, class and ethnicity faced by immigrants in a society that discriminated against them.
• The tension between assimilation and the preservation of cultural traditions and identities.
• The emotional dynamics of immigrant family life, with its emphasis on family loyalty, duty and sacrifice and the resulting guilt as the children struggle to pursue their own dreams.

Yezierska presents powerful narratives of resistance, self-determination and the pursuit of a new identity in the face of overwhelming obstacles. But that’s a story that the Tenement Museum barely alludes to.

The messages that the tour guides sent were decidedly mixed—and sanitized. A lot was omitted. Hard to believe, there was not a single mention of the neighborhood’s churches and synagogues. We walked by a local school but were told very little about the students’ experience or the tension between the teachers and the parents. And there was nothing about gangs or crime and only the briefest mentions of “outwork,” the garment work performed inside the cramped apartments.

I must confess that I was shocked that one of the guides portrayed the settlement house workers as the true villains of the story, who were depicted as blind to the immigrants’ cultural traditions and religious laws and whose primary goal was to Americanize the newcomers.

Still, I doubt anyone leaves the tours without feeling a host of powerful emotions. For as much as the Lower East Side has been Disneyfied, in our mind’s eye it is still the place where, for millions of Europeans, the American story began.

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Today, the United States is once again a nation of immigrants. The immigrant story is an integral part of the American narrative, and telling it is essential for understanding the nation’s past, present and future.

But how should educators tell the immigrant story whether in museums or in high school or college curricula?

Telling that story, both past and present, is essential for many reasons. First and foremost, the immigrant experience is central to understanding the identity of the United States. The story of immigration is not just about the newcomers themselves but about the evolving definition of what it means to be American. By telling the immigrant story, we can better appreciate the diverse origins of American culture and recognize how immigration has continually reshaped and revitalized the nation.

In a time when immigration remains among this society’s most contentious issues, sharing the stories of immigrants—highlighting their struggles, contributions and resilience—can foster empathy and promote social cohesion. It helps to humanize the immigrant experience, countering stereotypes and challenging xenophobic narratives.

In addition, the immigrant story connects the present to the past, showing how the challenges and opportunities faced by today’s immigrants have historical precedents. Understanding this continuity is crucial for contextualizing current debates about immigration and for crafting informed policies that reflect the nation’s long-standing values and ideals.

Immigrants have been a driving force behind American innovation, creativity and economic growth, and we should certainly celebrate that story, highlighting the contributions that immigrants have made and continue to make, reinforcing the idea that diversity is a strength and a key component of the nation’s success. But we mustn’t whitewash the past and conceal the underside of the immigrant experience.

It seems obvious to me that we should strive to tell the immigrant story in a balanced, nuanced manner, reflecting both the challenges that immigrants have experienced and any lessons that can be drawn. Balance requires us to discuss the resilience and agency of immigrants while also addressing the discrimination, xenophobia and systemic barriers that have been part of the immigrant experience.

Balance also requires us to point out the similarities and differences between immigrants in the past and the present. It is crucial to recognize the ways in which the immigrant experience has evolved and to draw important distinctions between the experiences of various immigrant groups. The conditions, policies and social contexts that affect immigrants today differ from those of the past, and this complexity must be acknowledged in any telling of the immigrant story.

The story of immigration to the United States, of course, can be told as a narrative of pride, focusing on how the country has become a successful example of cultural integration and diversity. This approach celebrates the contributions of immigrants to American society, underlining the ways in which they have enriched the nation culturally, economically and socially.

At the same time, it is important not to shy away from the more disturbing aspects of the immigrant experience, such as nativism, xenophobia and exclusionary policies (as well as how many members of immigrant groups used crime, as well as sports, as a “crooked ladder for upward mobility”). These elements are part of the historical and contemporary reality of immigration and must be addressed to provide a complete and honest account of the immigrant story.

We must also frame the immigrant story as a tale of continuity and change. While many of the challenges faced by immigrants today are similar to those of the past, there are also significant differences, such as the impact of globalization, changes in immigration law and the role of technology in shaping immigrant experiences. This duality should be explored to offer a comprehensive understanding of immigration in the United States.

Ultimately, the immigrant story should be humanizing, focusing on the individual and collective experiences of immigrants. It should be inclusive, representing the diversity of immigrant backgrounds and should strive to give voice to those who have often been marginalized or overlooked in historical narratives.

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Let me conclude by turning to a more contentious issue. I am among those who worry that California’s various ethnic studies curricula insufficiently address the experience of European immigrants, especially those from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe. I understand that these curricular goals are to focus on nonwhite groups that have been historically marginalized in the United States, including African Americans, Latino/as, Native Americans and Asian Americans and to emphasize the systemic racism, discrimination and struggles for civil rights and economic opportunity that these groups have faced.

But by downplaying the experience of earlier immigrants, students lose valuable historical context for understanding contemporary immigration and the experiences of historically marginalized non-European groups. By comparing and contrasting past and present, students can gain a deeper appreciation for the complexities of immigration and the ongoing struggles for inclusion and equality and upward mobility. They can also examine the parallels and differences between the accounts of immigrants a century and more ago and contemporary immigrant narratives.

Among the issues that students might explore are these:

• The push and pull factors driving immigration (both voluntary and involuntary immigration, including slavery, indentured servitude, contract labor and various other forms of labor trafficking).
• Challenges related to nativism, xenophobia, religious intolerance and cultural stereotyping.
• The fluidity of racial and ethnic categories.
• The ways in which power and privilege are distributed in American society, including the differing places of various immigrant groups in the economy, including those who work in low-wage, precarious jobs, often facing exploitation and limited labor protections.
• The tension between assimilation and cultural retention.
• The differences between the structure and organization, roles and functions of generational and extended kin relations and emotional and power dynamics of immigrant and native-born families.
• The intersectionality of oppression and the ways in which race, ethnicity and class interact in the experiences of both historical and contemporary immigrant groups.
• Educational and socioeconomic mobility and how this varies among immigrant groups.
• The role of immigrants in social movements, including labor rights, civil rights and immigrant rights and their impact on the political landscape.
• Past and present immigration laws, debates and policies including issues related to refugee admissions, border security and pathways to citizenship.

Through thoughtful curation, museums and school curricula can bridge the gap between past and present immigrant experiences, offering powerful lenses to examine the cultural, social and economic impacts of migration, while exploring the challenges, contributions and resilience of immigrants and fostering a deeper understanding of the ongoing journey toward belonging, empowerment and identity in a diverse society.

The representation of immigration in museums and curricula serves not only to preserve the history of past migrations but to illuminate the contemporary realities faced by immigrants, offering a space for reflection and dialogue about the diverse and evolving nature of the immigrant experience.

By embracing the stories of immigrants from various backgrounds and eras, museums, schools and campuses can create a more inclusive national narrative that captures the complexities of migration, provides a platform for immigrant voices and fosters a more nuanced understanding of what it’s like to leave one’s homeland and adapt to a new environment.

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It’s easy to romanticize and sentimentalize the immigrant experience and to depict the United States as a nation that has been continuously transformed by the diverse peoples who have come to its shores seeking freedom, opportunity and a better life.

In Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman celebrates the diversity of America, viewing the nation as a mosaic of different cultures, peoples and ideas, brought together through the process of immigration. “Here,” he wrote, “is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations.”

Barack Obama, too, celebrated Americans’ shared immigrant experience:

Americans’ acceptance of diversity remains a work in progress, and it’s easy to emphasize this country’s illiberalism, bigotry, dogmatism, intolerance, parochialism, sectarianism and small-mindedness. After all, this country’s first naturalization act limited naturalized citizenship to whites only.

But I’d also urge our students to reflect on words that George Washington wrote in a 1783 letter to the “Inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland who have lately arrived in the City of New York.” He described the United States as a sanctuary and asylum for those who seek freedom and opportunity irrespective of national origin or religion:

Let’s not be overly critical of the sentimentality that tends to color the treatment of the immigrant experience at the Tenement Museum or Ellis Island or the Statue of Liberty.

While a nostalgic sentimentality can quite rightly be criticized for oversimplifying complex realities, when it comes to the immigration, romanticizing this country as a nation of immigrants and invoking narratives of struggle, resilience and the pursuit of the American dream, such narratives have played a valuable role in helping this society live up to its highest ideals.

Sentimental narratives, focusing on immigrants’ personal stories, hardships, perseverance and triumphs, encourage native-born Americans to be more welcoming and supportive. By contributing to a more inclusive national identity, where immigrants are seen as key contributors to the country’s ongoing success, these narratives have helped to create a more compassionate and empathetic society.

In times of rising nativism and xenophobia, sentimental stories can serve as a counternarrative that emphasizes the positive contributions of immigrants and the importance of maintaining an open and inclusive society.

Sentimental narratives that celebrate the cultural heritage of immigrants, that showcase their traditions, customs and contributions to American culture, encourage a more pluralistic society where multiple identities and backgrounds are valued.

We could do worse.