The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
From every shore and still arriving
NEW HAVEN — It was a made-for-television moment: “Where’s Toni?” President Donald Trump said, looking around the East Room of the White House for New Haven Mayor Toni N. Harp in January after singling her out among a room of fellow mayors.
“Toni Harp. Where’s Toni? Toni? Toni?” Trump said, according to a transcript of the event released by the White House. When Harp wasn’t there to stand, Trump joked she might be a “sanctuary city person” and “that’s not possible, is it?”
Although Harp was in Washington, D.C., she had skipped the meeting because of actions taken by the Trump administration threatening 23 sanctuary cities — cities that limit or refuse cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
“I just felt that it was an inappropriate time to visit the president,” Harp told the Register after the Jan. 24 meeting.
Four days later, Harp released a statement on behalf of the African American Mayors Association, of which she was president at the time, criticizing the Trump administration for conducting itself like “racists and bigots.”
“Mayors have an obligation to defend the cities they are elected to serve, and protect society’s most vulnerable citizens. The rhetoric coming out of the White House is disheartening and offensive to the hardworking immigrants living and working legally across the country,” Harp said.
While the nation is divided over immigration reform and deportation of the undocumented, Harp standing with undocumented immigrants follows a long legacy of immigration to the Elm City, with many waves of ethnic groups making a home in New Haven over the last three centuries, transforming it into the multicultural city it is today; in 2016, a FiveThirtyEight analysis concluded New Haven is the most demographically representative metropolitan area in the nation.
Native Americans and the English
According to an ethnic history released by The New Haven Ethnic Heritage Center, the first known people to live in New Haven were the Native American Quinnipiack Tribe. In 1638, 500 English Puritans colonized the area, creating a treaty with the Quinnipiack, which established the first American reservation on New Haven’s east shore. For the next 200 years, the English were the most numerous nationality in New Haven.
It was the English who developed the “nine squares” downtown, which include the New Haven Green. The history of the plight of Native Americans is well documented. The remaining members of the Quinnipiack tribe left New Haven in the 1760s, according to http://colonialwarsct.org. There are about 17,000 people in Connecticut who are American Indian or Alaska Native, according to www.census.gov.
African Americans
Today, New Haven proudly bears the Amistad Memorial outside City Hall, commemorating the U.S. Supreme Court case argued in New Haven that found Africans on a slave ship in 1839 had a right to mutiny and were acting in self-defense. In 1784, Connecticut passed a bill emancipating black and biracial children by the age of 25 and born after that date, and in 1820, African Americans were 7.5 percent of New Haven’s population. Around this time, free blacks began to move to New Haven, moving from the South and the rural North.
Connecticut was not always a leader in the abolition movement, however. According to the New Haven Ethnic Heritage Center, Connecticut had the largest number of enslaved people in New England — 6,464 people — at the time of the American Revolution, and although the importation of enslaved people to Connecticut was outlawed in 1774, emancipation bills were rejected by the Legislature in 1777, 1779 and 1780. In 1848, Connecticut was the last state in New England to abolish slavery.
Financial opportunities were few, however, and free blacks often were servants whose housing was tied to the wealthy families they served or segregated to the Dixwell area. Black residents quickly became an important part of city life, including establishing churches as segregation kept the faithful from full participation in other congregations. One example of a historic black church is Varick Memorial AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, the second-oldest AME Episcopal Zion parish in the world. It remains a vibrant, active parish to this day.
Irish and Germans
Around 1846, after many Irish had begun to starve because of a major potato famine, about 1 million emigrated to America. By 1850, 76 percent of New Haven’s foreign-born population was Irish. Most of the Irish arriving in New Haven had been unskilled farmers, and they began working as servants. Anti-Irish sentiment rose, as they were viewed by many to be lowering wages and working conditions.
New Haven’s first synagogue, Mishkan Israel, was founded on Grand Avenue in 1840 by German Jews. That year, between 15 and 20 German Jewish families lived in the city. In the late 1840s, skilled Germans seeking to escape proletarian revolts traveled to New Haven for new opportunities. Many of these Germans were Jews, according to the New Haven Ethnic Heritage Center, and they became tailors, merchants, druggists and restaurateurs.
The German and Irish in New Haven predominantly settled in the Hill neighborhood on Congress Avenue.
Poles
Between the 1880 and 1920 Census, the Polish population in New Haven grew from 52 to 3,009. Roughly in that time period, 3 million Poles traveled to America, many of them rural and unskilled. Many found jobs in factories or on Westville and Fair Haven farms.
Patty Nuelsen, director of development for the New Haven/ León Sister City Project, which sends delegations from New Haven to the city’s Nicaraguan sister city, said her passion for the cultural exchange is rooted in her own experience growing up in a Polish Catholic community on State Street.
“I got very attracted to the idea of a sister city with Nicaragua because of that identification of how much it means to be sharing cultures. Nobody is untouched by different cultures that come into their own community, and New Haven is a perfect example of that,” she said. “In a lot of ways, in a lot of quarters of the city, there’s still an attachment to ethnic origins and bringing that into the city.”
The Sister City Project, she said, exposes people in New Haven to “a shared humanity and how differently people live,” even in the face of poverty stemming from multiple factors including American imperialism.
Nuelsen said she believes her upbringing as a Polish American in New Haven had a similar effect, being rooted in Polish tradition but also having exposure to other cultures.
Italians
Although immigration by Swedes and Russian Jewry to New Haven swelled by the hundreds in the late 19th century, the largest wave of immigrants to the city began arriving in the 1880s: the Italians. As Irish immigrants began to acquire more wealth, Italian men looking to earn and save money in America began replacing them around Wooster Square.
By 1930, there were more than 14,500 Italian immigrants living in New Haven. In 1925, Italian immigrant Frank Pepe opened the first Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, arguably the city’s most popular attraction besides Yale University.
U.S. Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, D-Conn., a daughter and granddaughter of Italian immigrants, has represented the Elm City in Congress since 1991. She said the social safety nets of churches and social groups created by early Italian immigrants built strength and community.
“These were, if you will, places where it was social, but if they lost their jobs or needed help they congregated in specific areas,” she said. “Wherever they went, they stuck together. They recreated a piece of the old country and they drew on their Italian roots, which helped them to grow strong, and in New Haven it was in Wooster Square.”
DeLauro said she learned her values from various communities: the church and the kitchen table. “The press often asks me, ‘Congresswoman DeLauro, what motivates you to take on the issues you take on and vote the way you do?’ Quite frankly, it’s an easy answer,” she said. “It is about being brought up in an Italian Catholic household in Wooster Square.”
DeLauro said her grandparents worked hard to sustain their pastry shop, Canestri’s, with her grandfather baking pastries at night and her grandmother selling them during the day. After her grandmother became widowed, she became “iconic” to the shop, DeLauro said. Her mother worked long hours at a sweatshop, where they turned the needles on at the start of work and did not turn them off until the end of the shift. Her mother, Luisa, went on to be the longestserving alder in New Haven’s history.
“The story of her generation is the story of strength, of perseverance and of faith,” she said. “My mother was a force of nature. She loved politics, she loved government, but most of all she understood what government and politics could do and how it could make a difference in people’s lives.”
Her father, she said, came to New Haven with his father in 1913 without the ability to read or write in English. He was mocked in the seventh grade when asked to define the word “janitor,” believing it to mean family for its similarity to the Italian word for parents, genitori. He stopped seeking a formal education, but never stopped learning, DeLauro said.
“He was self-made. He taught himself and was a great reader of the classics who could quote Emile Zola. He was a great lover of music and the opera and served in the U.S. Army,” she said.
Now, DeLauro says she feels “blessed” to have grown up in an immigrant family in New Haven, who could have only dreamed she would serve in the U.S. government.
Puerto Ricans
Already American citizens, Puerto Ricans began moving to New Haven in significant numbers in the 1950s. The number began to grow into the 1960s, and in 1966, the Asociacion Cultural Hispaña formed to serve as a coalition for Spanish-speaking New Haven residents. In 1969, Junta for Progressive Action came into existence.
Alicia Caraballo, interim director of Junta for Progressive Action, is the daughter of one of the organization’s founders.
“My mother was active here back in the late ’60s. At the time, there was a growing Puerto Rican community here and there were a lot of concerns during that era with civil rights,” she said.
Although all of New Haven’s ethnic groups were involved in fighting in World War II and the city’s factories were booming with business, by mid-century the factories were once again closing and parts of the city were seeing an increase of crime and poverty. Additionally, many in New Haven joined the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s, bolstered by radical groups with roots in the community such as the Black Panthers.
Caraballo said Junta was another community group offering assistance as a culture of community activism formed in the city.
“Activists made sure there was advocacy and direct services provided not only to Puerto Ricans, but all Latinos in the city, and that has continued to be a priority for this organization,” she said. “I think right from the beginning there was and continues to this day a feeling about working together and recognizing it doesn’t make sense if everyone is out on their own. We can accomplish so much by being together and working together.”
Caraballo said the spirit continues today, as Junta for Progressive Action has accommodated and assisted nearly 1,000 Puerto Rican evacuees following two hurricanes that struck the island last summer.
Sergio Olmedo-Ramirez, a 22-year-old staff organizer for Junta for Progressive Action, said he was led back to the organization and community because of how much it supported him as an undocumented Mexican immigrant coming to New Haven in 2004.
“I call New Haven my home. This is the community I really identify with,” he said.
In 2007, federal immigration officials raided the city and made arrests days after the city unveiled its Elm City Resident Card, which was designed to give documentation to all of the city’s residents, as many undocumented residents were targeted for crimes and fearful of making reports. The ensuing protests from the community, OlmedoRamirez said, stuck with him.
“I was in the seventh grade, and I felt protected in New Haven, that I could speak out as undocumented and people were not going to turn and treat me differently,” he said.
Now, Olmedo-Ramirez’s job is to assist Latino immigrants in finding resources and offering them help.
“It’s my way of giving back,” he said.
In this decade, New Haven’s status as a sanctuary city has been a high-profile feature in its ongoing history of immigration and changing ethnicity. In summer 2017, Norwalk mother Nury Chavarria — facing deportation to Guatemala after living in Connecticut for a quarter-century — was offered sanctuary in New Haven’s Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal Church before being granted an emergency stay of deportation.
Chavarria was the first of several to seek sanctuary in a New Haven church last year. Nelson Pinos Gonzalez, a New Haven resident, has stayed in First and Summerfield United Methodist Church since November to avoid deportation to Ecuador. He took the place of Meriden resident Marco Antonio Reyes Alvarez, who stayed in the church for three months, avoiding immediate deportation also to Ecuador.
Last year, the New Haven Board of Education developed protocols and guidelines preparing against raids by federal immigration authorities.
“Sanctuary cities matter in this country,” said New Haven Alder Darryl Brackeen at a Yale protest in favor of making the university a sanctuary campus. “We must stand up for what is right; we must stand up for what is true.”