I agree with the idea that immigration is hat breathes life into a community. The variety that comes from people immigrating to a city like New York is what makes it different than many other places. It is the idea of the melting pot again. While immigrants tended to group together with people from their home countries, everyone contributed to the day to day life of the community. A neighborhood was like one big organism. I agree with William. My neighborhood is nothing like the ones described in our readings. While there is (mostly) a better standard of living, there is absolutely no sense of community. We don’t get along with the people who live on our street, let alone the entire neighborhood. This just goes to show that although immigrants faced the deplorable situations in the tenements and cheap housing projects, they were able to find a bright side to America.
I definitely agree with Shirley about the inevitability of change in a place like New York. Even on a smaller scale like the neighborhood of East Harlem. At one time this area was called Italian Harlem, That has changed to Spanish Harlem due to the influx of Latin American immigrants. Ethnicities such as Puerto Rican and Mexican have gone through different periods of heavy immigration. A lot of these changes were shown in the accounts of Jose and Lucille. They spoke about the changes in their neighborhood. The rise of the public housing, change in ethnic majority etc. After taking the walking tour, a lot of this came into perspective. We saw the main public housing area. We also learned about the tearing down of old buildings, painting over of murals, building of malls, etc. All of these things are examples of how These neighborhoods change.
Like Shirley said though, jose and Lucille represent a sense of stability in the sense that they are the children of immigrants who grew up in the neighborhood that their parents settled in. This contrasts Maria and Mohammed who were immigrants themselves. They originally planned on keeping their stay in East Harlem relatively short. This, however is not the case and they now call it home. They contribute to the change for Jose and Lucille, yet they are now in a position to start seeing change from their own perspective.
