An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930

Conclusion

Conclusion T his book offers a social history of southern Manhattan that challenges conventional notions of this area of New York as either a hotbed of interracial sex and violence or a cluster of isolated ethnic communities. Romanticized notions of New York history, rooted in ethnic and racial stereotypes, as well as in memories of family and community, belie and oversimplify the complexity of urban social relations that simmered below the surface during the late nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although interracial sex and criminality were certainly a part of daily realities in working-class neighborhoods, more mundane, unglamorous relations also developed as people struggled to form and sustain families, create communal networks , and earn decent livelihoods. Working-class and immigrant people who lived and labored in lower Manhattan created a range of social, political, and economic relationships both within and across ethnic communities . In a larger sense, this study explores the processes of urban community formation among working-class and immigrant peoples during a time when Jim Crow segregation and xenophobia maintained an uneasy and often contradictory co-existence with Progressive ideals of democracy and social reform. National ideologies of “difference” shaped public discourses about “assimilation” and the meaning of “American” and “whiteness.” These ideas flourished among both Progressive-era 174 | conclusion reformers, who sought to change individuals by improving the urban environment, and exclusionists, who rallied to prevent the new immigrants from weakening the body politic. An intersectional approach allows us to view the ways in which concepts of “isolation,” “integration,” “assimilation,” “American,” and “whiteness” played out daily through interactions across lines of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Between 1880 and 1930, New York State followed federal immigration and citizenship laws by limiting access to certain occupations to those deemed eligible for citizenship. At the municipal level, police cracked down on interracial sex and marriage, and wealthy male leaders initiated the formation of private anti-vice organizations to combat corruption and vice. But instead of separating people, such policies and practices actually facilitated social, economic, and political relations within and between ethnic groups. The development of co-ethnic and interracial /interethnic networks of family, friends, neighbors, fellow workers , and community leaders was essential to meeting the basic needs and desires of the men, women, and children in urban neighborhoods who were establishing families, birthing babies, caring for the sick, burying the dead, conducting business, and finding employment. Personal desire was sometimes strong enough to resist social taboos. As Chapter 1 illustrates, condemnation from the larger society and within co-ethnic communities did not prevent people from marrying across ethnic and racial boundaries and establishing mixed families within safe niches. This is evident in the residential patterns of mixed-race couples in the “Chinatown” neighborhood over time. But as the stories of Bert Eutemey and Louise Holmes and Ethel Gross and Harry Hopkins illustrate , such unions sometimes exacerbated existing tensions around both family expectations and larger societal conceptions about difference. The collective historical experience of Asian immigrants, in particular , is instructive regarding the residual effects of formal and informal discrimination in the paid labor force. In the case of Chinese New Yorkers , such restrictions resulted in reliance on outsiders for many essential services and, at the same time, facilitated a mutually dependent set of economic relations with non-Chinese businessmen from the neighborhood , as well as from those from other parts of the city. At the same time, Chinese and other immigrant small-business owners in the city maintained economic and social connections that extended beyond the Conclusion  | 175 neighborhoods, crossing local, state, and national borders to maintain a flow of goods and capital to stock their stores and their eating and drinking establishments. Thus, rather than functioning as isolated entities , immigrant communities were in fact active participants in a growing transnational commercial world. The very presence of vibrant urban working-class immigrant communities , however, provoked anxiety among reformers and municipal leaders. The nationwide effort to control or eliminate illicit behavior manifested itself in cities across the country and focused to a great extent on poor and immigrant neighborhoods. As illustrated by the activities of the Committee of Fifteen and Committee of Fourteen in New York City, wealthy civic leaders, industrialists, ministers, and social scientists sought to stamp out prostitution, gambling, illegal drugs, and corruption in the police and municipal government. At the level of neighborhood politics, interactions between anti-vice...