We’re all only generation or two from ‘going back’
This is a great job. Not because it’s a path to riches or because it’s necessarily easy (especially for an introvert), but because of all of the interesting things we journalists get to see up close and the people we get to meet. Last week, as I accompanied Canton Repository photographer Mike Balash to St. George Serbian Orthodox Church as members were preparing for their parish festival, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these friendly folks were one, maybe two, generations away from being told to “go back to wherever you came from.”
I thought about Crystal Park.
The neighborhood of my childhood was a mish-mash: black families who were part of the Great Migration; Irish and German Catholics who filled St. Paul Church; the Barbers, Hungarian immigrants who ran a trinkets-and-candy store; the Italian woman who owned the pizza shop on 16th Street; and the Greeks who ran City Bakery down the block.
The names were an alphabet soup: Bodo, Bagnoli, Codispoti, Sideropoulos, Mottas, Milan, Chenault, Mayle, DePina, Kinnick, Allbrittain and Diffenbaugher.
The Thomases, who were Lebanese, put up with our daily forays into their corner store, where you could return deposit pop bottles for money, which we promptly spent on candy, and where your folks could run a grocery tab.
When I think about how one might explain America, this is how I define it.
She’s foreign, too
Some people like to stress that their ancestors emigrated here “legally” though for the first 150 years, when virtually anyone who wasn’t carrying a communicable disease could walk through the gate. Even so, every one of those forebears likely had a story about being mistreated for being foreigners. How many were threatened or insulted for using their native language in a public setting? How many were overcharged and underpaid? How many were called names they didn’t understand and told to “go back” to Russia, Poland, Syria and elsewhere? How many discouraged their American-born children from learning their mother tongue?
There are people who argue the central issue of immigration is legality, but even that no longer seems to be the yardstick as the number of legal admissions systematically is being reduced to the point it’s affecting employers who can’t secure enough willing and reliable native-born workers. Last week, the White House floated its intentions to reduce the number of refugees accepted into the United States to zero, thus making a mockery of what we all know is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, who is herself, an immigrant.
Goulash and apple pie
A new Pew Research Center survey reveals that 55 percent of Republicans and conservative-leaning independents have concerns about the “loss” of American culture if we don’t stem the tide of immigration. Are we talking about the same culture where people drink themselves silly on Cinco de Mayo, Oktoberfest and St. Patrick’s Day? Everything that’s interesting and good to eat comes from someplace else. Noodles are Chinese. Hamburgers, hotdogs and potato salad were created by the Germans. There would be no such thing as sweet potato pie had African slaves not introduced the yam.
Pizza was brought here from Italy by American GIs during World War II.
As a kid, hardly a month passed in which we didn’t have goulash. Even country music is rooted in the folk tunes of Scotch-Irish settlers, and cowboys are a new-world take on South American gauchos. Some of the most significant technologies we’ve given to the wider world — TV, radio, the telephone, Google — were developed by immigrants. America is exceptional in that our national identify is rooted not in a specific race or color, but in an ideal.
If we must identify strictly American culture, it is rooted in our unabashed love of freedom, from which all artistic expression flows.