Immigrant Foundations

(Frame from Christ in Concrete (1949), directed by Edward Dmytryk)

“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America, which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture, and the arts.”

–       James Madison

IMMIGRATION. It’s one of those big “hot-button issues” that all of the politicians and news pundits seem to enjoy arguing about every evening on our favorite television news networks and during major presidential debates. But while they occupy themselves by asking questions about how we, as “patriots,” can better protect our border in the South and about how the government can proceed to finally get the Mexicans out of our country, a key point about this issue continues to elude all of them: Immigration is not just what does or doesn’t happen at the U.S. – Mexico Border. It is a much, much broader concept, and it is much more inclusive than these silly news pundits and politicians make it out to be.

Immigration is where we ALL come from, in one way or another. Maybe the majority of those of us who are reading this were born here. But what about our parents? Our grandparents? Our great-grandparents? How many of us can pinpoint an ancestor, at any point down the line, who was not born in the United States of America? Who was born somewhere else, and for whatever reason, decided to – or, maybe, was forced to – hop on a boat or a plane or whatever and cross the Atlantic to make the U.S. their new home? (HINT: The answer’s “all of us.”) When it all comes down to it, we all have our origins someplace else.

The U.S. has immigrant foundations. New York City has immigrant foundations.

Chinese, Germans, Italians, Irish, Poles, Greeks – it’s an endless list of ethnicities and nationalities, spanning almost every single continent on the planet. But wherever these people came from throughout the years is not nearly so important as what they did once they arrived in America in pursuit of their dreams. It is the same thing that Geremio and Luigi did in Edward Dmytryk’s film Christ in Concrete (1949). They took up brick and mortar (or steel and cable or glass or whatever) and set about turning their dreams into a reality. They physically built those dreams up. They physically built the city up, so that it can stand in all the grandeur that it does today.

But they did not just build the city up physically. Along the way, they built it up in another way as well. While laying the physical foundations of New York City, they also infused those foundations with the various aspects of the cultures and traditions they brought with them from their home countries: the cuisine, the music, the fashion. And those various cultural and traditional features mixed and merged with each other throughout the years to create a new type of culture. One that is distinctly cosmopolitan. One that is distinctly American. One that is distinctly “New York.”

And it is this unique diversity-promoting culture – visible in Christ in Concrete and in all of the films we’ve watched this semester – that makes New York City such a wonderful place to be.

– Katarzyna Zajac