Before identifying the influences of new ethnic groups into the New York City melting pot today, Reitano draws our attention to the overall picture immigration in New York City paints. Since the removal of national origin quotas with 1965 immigration reform, the city’s population soared, and by the early 2000s, 37.8% of the city’s population was foreign born. Minorities even comprised the majority of New York voters in the 2009 elections. Although Dominicans, Chinese and Jamaicans are the city’s largest immigrant groups, they only make up 30% of the total immigrant population. In fact, in New York City there are 110 different languages spoken. Such a culturally cosmopolitan and amalgamated city yields cosmopolitan identities among the youth of the large foreign born population and contributes to the “New” New York Reitano refers to in the title of Chapter 10.
With these final new waves of immigration that will define New York City, leadership is held by two distinct mayors. First, the Republican in the historically Democratic city, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani attempted and succeeded in implementing conservative reform and was praised for his crack down on urban crime and response to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Mayor Michael Bloomberg succeeded Giuliani and restored the city’s self-confidence after 9/11 and helped the economy rebound.
Starting in the late twentieth century, Reitano points first to the Russian-Jewish immigration that transformed Brighton Beach, Brooklyn into a thriving community. Like many communities in New York City, the residents leaving for the suburbs or retiring gave immigrants a space to move into. 30% of Brighton Beach was vacant when Russian Jews filled in with their first wave of immigration in 1979 and their second wave ten years later after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Asians, on the other hand, as opposed to being absorbed into an area were excluded to one—Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. The Chinese were the first group to suffer exclusion as immigrants from 1882 to 1943. Not only were they prohibited from most occupations and the prospects of citizenship but were controlled by the Chinatown Consolidated Benevolent Association. After the repeal of immigrant quotas, Chinatown’s population exploded and Chinatown became the place where immigrants reunited with their families but was equally a trap with the exploitation of sweatshop labor for those that settled. In addition to these poorer, mostly Chinese immigrants that settled in Chinatown, there were “Uptown Chinese” immigrants that hailed from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Geographically separating themselves from their poorer counterparts, the “Uptown Chinese” may have lived outside of Chinatown but they did invest and buy up real estate in Lower Manhattan. In 1943, the Chinese were granted the ability to become citizens and the Chinese American community flourished politically. Among the Asian migrants, Korean immigrants entered New York City very often with professional backgrounds. Similar to the Russian Jews in Brooklyn, Korean immigrants replaced retiring Jewish and Italian markets and groceries. Mid-Manhattan, with thriving Korean businesses and restaurants, would serve as Koreatown but in a commercial as opposed to residential sense.
The Latino presence in New York City was originally characterized by Puerto Rican immigration. Puerto Ricans proved to be the dominant Latino group in New York City since their major migration to New York to join the post World War II industrial labor force. However, Puerto Ricans live in constant conflict with their Latino culture and American identity. While their migration peaked in the 1950s, it has been on the decline as other Latino groups challenge their dominance, particularly Dominicans. Dominicans, like Puerto Ricans, are relatively close to their native land but do participate in New York politics and contribute to the economy. In the factory, with the upward mobility or departure of Jewish and Italian immigrants, Dominican women filled in; although exploited, factory work was still a means of social mobility for them. Dominican women preferred to stay in New York City while most Dominican men dreamed of one day returning permanently back to the Dominican Republic. It was the women who united the Latino identity by building cultural bridges between groups like the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans through involvement and interactions in public locations like church or community board meetings. The result is locations like Corona, Queens where an amalgamation of ethnicities unite to represent a single Latino community.
Like the united Latino identity, the West Indian American Day Carnival promotes a pan-ethnicity among West Indians and more. West Indian immigrants tend to be classified as Black although they come from nations and communities where color was never a defining feature. West Indians have been “learning race” since their first migration to New York City in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance. Often, they would embrace their British ties in order to elevate themselves above the status of African Americans. They quickly learned that race trumps ethnicity with police brutality under Mayor Giuliani due to racial profiling. In 1977, West Africans attempted to politically separate themselves from the African American identity with the first cross-Caribbean club in support of a political candidate.
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Giuliani, contrary to previous New York City mayors, reflected conservative values and focused his efforts on the middle class. He emphasized “individual initiative and private enterprise” over public activism and even advocated for the privatization of public services (221). Giuliani referred to the social programs promoted by mayors before him as the “compassion industry” that only served to increase laziness at the expense of the hardworking. He was the first mayor to actually propose that New York State reduce funding for the city’s welfare and Medicaid programs. In 1995, Giuliani reduced the welfare roles, rejecting scores of applicants and eliminating over 600,000 people already on welfare. In addition, he turned the welfare centers into job centers as all able-bodied adult welfare recipients were now required to work for their stipends—an approach long overdue.
Inevitably, these reforms were criticized for being heartless with welfare recipients not being properly protected on job sites where they were working for their stipends and welfare recipients in college having to drop out of school in order to put in hours to receive their stipend. Giuliani’s many tax cuts helped businesses and wealthy private institutions but destroyed groups like the Human Resources Administration and the Health and Hospitals Corporation where the main benefactors were minorities.
Giuliani also targeted schools in his efforts to reform New York City through regularization and control. His major achievements included shifting the supervision of school security to the police department and implementing city wide testing to institute a sense of uniformity to the public school system and raise student standards. However, Giuliani also weakened the school system by drastically cutting schools’ operating and construction budgets while increasing disbursements for books and computers. In areas like Brooklyn and the Bronx where he was confronted with fierce opposition, Giuliani shifted school construction funds to areas where he was supported like Queens and Staten Island. Giuliani appointed Bronx Borough President and congressman Herman Badillo as special education monitor in the hopes of implementing a “standards movement” to routinize teaching and standardize the public school system. Opponents of this “standards movement” believed that implementing standards were restricting opportunities, especially for minorities and the poor in the wake of Badillo’s targeting of CUNY’s open admissions policy.
Giuliani overstepped his boundaries on several occasions when it came to his position as mayor. In 1999, Giuliani threatened to cut the Brooklyn Museum’s funds and end its lease after it mounted a portrait of the Virgin Mary that used dried elephant dung and pornographic cutouts. Giuliani’s defense was that the government should not be patronizing “offensive art,” but his attempt at cultural domineering was confronted with resentful backlash. While Giuliani’s First Amendment initiatives were reversed by the courts, controversy surrounding any of his proposals and movements were overshadowed by 9/11. The mayor, in a time of utter chaos, remained calm, toured Ground Zero, attended funerals and served as the face and father of New York City during this crisis which defined his mayoralty.
