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Chapter Sixteen TACOS AND KlMCHEE The Quickening Pace ofEthnic Interaction ON THE Green Bay peninsula in Wisconsin, a visitor in the mid1980s would have found some families who still spoke the Walloon dialect of Belgium and kept alive customs of the southern provinces ofthat country, such as the "kermiss," the thanksgiving for the harvest. In rural Wisconsin the visitor would have found many other examples of the persistence of old immigrant ethnicity. Until recently it was possible to hear Welsh spoken in the little town of Cambria about thirty miles northeast of Madison. In Sheboygan County, many rural churches still conducted services in Dutch; in Gibbsville, some DutchAmerican farmers preferred to wear wooden shoes; and in the small town of Chut the annual Corpus Christi procession was conducted in the Dutch Catholic manner. In the St. Croix valley, Swedish-Americans began preparation for the Christmas season on St. Lucia's Day, December 13, in the old Swedish style, including the hanging of sheaves ofgrain in the trees for the birds and the animals. Polish-Americans read Polish-language newspapers at Steven's Point in central Wisconsin, around Independence in the west central section, and in the countryside around Pulaski in the east central part of the state. Danish, French, Italian, Belgian, Norwegian, Swiss, Polish, Dutch, Finnish , Russian, Swedish, and Welsh immigrants and their children and grandchildren had all created distinctive rural communities in Wisconsin. Some of the names of small towns in that state reflected their origin: Freistadt, Luxemburg, Viroqua, Brussels, Pulaski. Until the advent of radio, interstate highways, and central schools, such small towns and rural ethnic enclaves had remained largely isolated. But after the Second World War, migration to the cities increased, and ifthose left behind were more isolated by the departure of younger men and women, those who left acquired a wider multiethnic consciousness. Welsh-Americans who returned to their childhood church in Penniel, Wisconsin (twelve miles south of Oshkosh) on the fourth Sunday ofAugust for a Welsh songfest, Gymanfa Ganue, went home afterward to Oshkosh, Madison, Milwaukee, and other cities where they worked with and met socially Americans from a variety ofother backgrounds. German-Americans from Milwaukee who spent weekends with relatives in rural towns like Watertown, where they 306 THE ETHNIC IANDSCAPE brushed up on their German and ate rye bread and pumpernickel, also returned home to multiethnic cities where some bought Mexican fast food and others drank Japanese beer with friends whose ancestors came from Russia, Ireland, and China.! There had always been a certain amount ofcontact between newcomers and natives ever since the Pilgrims first landed at Cape Cod, but the frequency became greater and the pace more rapid in the 1970S and 1980s than earlier. In the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, there probably had been more interaction between Indians and Euro-Americans, new immigrants and native-born, and blacks and whites in the cities than in the first half of the twentieth century, when ethnic separatism became more prevalent. The removal and diminution ofthe Indians, the enforcement of Jim Crow segregation laws, and the isolation of immigrants in cities, the majority of whom were unskilled and unlettered, all occurred extensively by the early 1900S. In the cities, immigrants often lived and worked in isolation from others, blacks were segregated from them and from most other whites, and Indians barely entered the consciousness of non-Indians at all. In late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia, there had been a considerable amount of intermingling in the streets and alleys, where a mixture of languages and dialects was spoken, but by the 1840S, after the large-scale immigration of the Irish, separatism became so common that fire companies were organized along ethnic lines, with Irish Protestants belonging to one company and Irish Catholics to another. Writing about ethnicity in Philadelphia in the 1830S and 1840S, one historian observed that "the city was becoming a mosaic of subcommunities, separated from one another by barriers ofclass and culture and by attitudes and behavior derived from different traditions."2 Irish units proliferated in the state militia in New York, with perhaps as many as twenty-five or thirty by 1855, and by 1860 they had an entire regiment, the 69th, which refused to turn out for a parade honoring the visiting British Prince ofWales.3 Following the heavy migrations of immigrants from several European countries to Philadelphia, another historian wrote of a "cultural imperative " for clustering. Writing about Polish immigrants, she said that a Pole's "status...

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