The Sweetness of Freedom: Stories of Immigrants (review)

A first look at The Sweetness of Freedom: Stories of Immigrants could be misleading: the cover design bears an image of a passenger ship and old wooden trunks on a wharf, thus strongly suggesting that the contents refer to the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century immigration wave that had shaped the perception of immigrants for decades. Yet the book holds some major surprises: firstly, in the “Acknowledgements” we learn that this is a very particular collection of oral histories, that of immigrants and migrants who settled in Michigan, often previously residing in other areas of the U.S. Secondly, the period covered by the book extends roughly from the 1880s until today. These two simple observations help situate the book in context, historically and geographically, and help readers to immediately grasp its relevance.

Another important technical aspect of this book’s genesis is that it was a by-product of several years’ preparation for the 2005 historical exhibit Movers and Seekers: The Stories of Michigan’s Immigrants and Migrants. Aspects of the work were also presented at two major conferences, the 2005 Michigan Oral History Association’s and the 2006 Michigan Women’s Studies Association’s. It is a product of the collaboration of many people: professional regional historians, museum staff, graduate interns, local activists, artists, and family historians. Thanks to the interviewees’ whole-hearted engagement, the book is enriched with their photographs, reproductions of artwork, keepsakes, reprints of documents, correspondence, and other illustrations that greatly enhance the overall impact of the oral histories themselves.

The “Introduction” explains the authors’ methodology and their goals for this project: “[they] researched the history and geography of the various waves of immigration and migration from all over the world to Michigan in the twentieth and late nineteenth centuries and then identified a select number of individuals whose stories were more or less representative of different time periods” (3).

Some interviewees were selected on an informal basis, such as family members or acquaintances, or friends of friends of the people working on the exhibit. The book also seems to be anchored on the stories about prominent members of the local community coming from migrant families, such as the collection’s first selection, of the painter Mathias J. Alten, who came to the U.S. from Germany in 1889, ultimately establishing himself as a fairly successful artist, working in Europe and other parts of the U.S. Another such “local VIP” story is that of third-generation Italian immigrant Francis “Bus” Spaniola, a former State Representative, or the education activist, Marylou Hernandez, named Hispanic Female of the Year 2000, from a family of Mexican American migrant laborers.

The main interviewer for the project, Martha Aladjem Bloomfield, decided not to intervene into the migrants’ stories, except minimally. She describes her basic approach in one paragraph, stating that she “did not have a huge list of questions,” and that she “wanted to tell [migrants’] stories the way they wanted to, the way they could make sense of them without much external direction” (22). The way the book presents the material reflects her approach, with a clear delineation of the author’s/editor’s input as an introductory section to each chapter, sketching the historical context along with the interviewee’s basic biographical facts on one to two pages, while the rest of each chapter consists of the interviewee’s own words, divided into themed sections, usually centering around one aspect or period of the migration process, or subsequent adjustment. The most often recurring themes are those of education, foodways, and discrimination or outright persecution in the mother country, as well as economic hardship, language, and returns to the mother country.

The above problems, especially in the stories of most recent immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, arriving in the 1970s and 1980s, quite powerfully reinvigorate the well-worn saying that “America is a nation of immigrants.” The tragic choices and troubles of Koreans...