While most of the description of the festa centers on Italian Harlem and its dwellers, Orsi makes a brief yet fascinating sojourn detour in which he describes how the festa fit into American history. Religious authority in Italian Harlem wanted recognition from the Vatican, and the immigrants themselves wanted recognition as part of New York’s longstanding fabric. Father Tofini’s appeal to the Pope stated that the Madonna deserved a crown because she was of “longstanding antiquity”—even though the festa was only two decades old at that point. According to Tofini, this was barely a generation by European standards but was an era by American ones.

This got me thinking about how we view our own history. Americans have the most abbreviated history of perhaps any country. We tend to disregard Native Americans and Spanish colonization and begin with the English settlers of Jamestown. This gives us barely five hundred years to work with, and is probably the reason why we tend to view very small periods of time as being entire epochs. More importantly, it is probably why we develop such a personal connection to our political figures. The reason we constantly reference the Founding Fathers in our political discourse is that they did not die all that long ago. In our language, in the way we constantly ask ourselves what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, we portray them not as founding legislators but as scarcely deceased grandparents. Tofini was right. The American conception of time is very zoomed in, affixed to details, able to extrapolate huge themes and epic struggles from short amounts of time.

The other thing which interested me was Orsi’s idea of a female spiritual hierarchy. The Italian immigrants were obsessed with the image of the suffering mother, and they sought to live that image whenever possible. To be a woman, married or unmarried, was then to experience constant pressure and to be expected to endure it for the sake of the domus and the community. This, more than anything else, was the ideal trait of a woman in Italian Harlem: the ability to suffer unceasingly without complaint. It is strange that the Madonna, who provided the template by which the community subjected women to such pressure, also served as a spiritual friend to those same women.

Orsi goes to great length to describe the depredations of Italian Harlem. Crime is rampant, people are poor, and privacy is nonexistent. People desperately miss Italy, even though they may well have been worse off there. Yet after providing such extensive support for this thesis, after labeling the area as miserable, he changes course. At the end of Chapter 2, numerous people talk about Italian Harlem fondly. To them, t was dirty, it was cramped, it was alien and dangerous, but it was home.

This surprised me. How does one go so rapidly from one nation to the next, especially when in the latter nation you are treated poorly at every turn? How can someone call decrepitude their home, especially when that decrepitude is an ocean away from their culture? Do different groups of immigrants experience this differently?

It seems like the Italian immigrants of that era settled in quickly if uneasily. Is that the ‘average’ experience of an immigrant? Are there certain groups who feel more comfortable more quickly here? Conversely, are there people who never weave themselves a place in our social fabric?

The second thing I found interesting was Orsi’s mention of Italian Harlem’s diversity. The name ‘Italian Harlem’ suggests a sort of monolith, solid and homogenous, but according to Orsi things were never that way. In fact, Italian Harlem’s history is one of tension: first with the Irish, then the Jews, and then with the Puerto Ricans and African Americans. In the presence of such diversity and tension, how were Italians able to express their culture as jubilantly as they did during the festa of the Madonna? Maybe the feeling of isolation inspired solidarity, and the festa was a challenge as well as a ritual. Perhaps it is when a people feel most alone and threatened that they produce their most extravagant public displays.

I’d already known about the appalling living conditions for immigrants in the late nineteenth century, but Foner’s book reminded me. The one area in which we think of the previous generation’s immigrants as having suffered or been mistreated is housing—the squalor of the Lower East Side is a sort of archetypal image in New York City, with its own attendant institution (the Tenement museum) and chronicler (Jacob Riis). The sheer density was the most astounding. While I am aware Manhattan is crowded, and that it used to be more so, I had no idea that Manhattan was once crowded in a way that redefined what it meant to live, where not only space but air seemed to be a scarce commodity. This more than crime or employment was the bane of the old immigrant’s life, and escaping it allowed for upward mobility.

New York City developments, such as the consolidation of 1898 and the opening of the subway in 1904, finally allowed for people to move out of lower Manhattan, to settle uptown and further. There can be no doubt that this decentralization helped Italians and Jews to become more prosperous and comfortable, though homogenous neighborhoods and discrimination were still the norm.

The one thing that intrigues me about today’s immigration is the concept of ethnic succession; more specifically that new waves of immigration may have actually prevented New York from an endless fall into urban decay. As whites moved out of the city center, seeking larger homes and more segregated communities, immigrants moved in, ensuring that the city had the tax base needed to provide essential services. While immigrants also move to the suburbs, and increasingly move straight there, they are without a doubt concentrated in the five boroughs, meaning that we can thank them to some degree for the continuing viability of New York City’s infrastructure and services.

I identified with the point Falzer made about American patriotism. It definitely seems like we prize national symbols and compete to be the most fervent supporters of our country more than other nations; what I had not thought of was that this could be due to our lack of a unified culture. I wonder whether this sort of compensation is a good thing. On the one hand, this sort of aggressive patriotism is probably responsible for our domineering presence on the world. A more timid nation probably could not have become a superpower on par with us, even if endowed with our resources and population. On the other hand, a nation less obsessively concerned with demonstrating its affection for itself may not have become as willing to fight countless wars abroad.

Steinberg’s statement that assimilation is happening faster than we think also struck me as unusual. We think of post-1965 immigrants as remaining stubbornly separate, divided by language and secured in their own urban enclaves. This is apparently untrue; the rate of assimilation among Asian and Latino immigrants is staggering. I found this to be true based on personal experience; furthermore, I think generational assimilation is fueled by the first off the boat. Immigrant parents often actively encourage their children to join American cultural life in order to maximize the children’s chances of success. They know that their children will be furnished with the languages and culture of their home country, but also that their children will speak English and be comfortable in American society. The combination is a powerful one, and there is a strong incentive for immigrants to ensure the assimilation of their children, even if it may be too late for them. Thus, the ethnic enclave as we conceive it may come to be a thing of the past, as the children of immigrants come to define themselves as more American than anything else.