Something that has always hurt my heart every time I come across it in a reading is the fact that so many immigrants arriving here have the image of an “earthly paradise,” or a city paved in gold when they think of New York City. Then they step off the boat (or the plane these days) and see that this mythical city is just a gray, drab setting. I was shocked that even my own mother (a VERY pessimistic woman) had the exact same image of a gold city in her head before arriving. Just like the immigrants in Orsi’s book (and many of the other readings before this) she saw old friends and neighbors return, richer than ever, and she believed that you could literally pull gold off of a tree. It just hurts to imagine how crushed people must have been once they see gray instead of gold. I do honestly cry every time I’m forced to read something like that.
Piri Thomas’s autobiography gives us that real first person point of view that all of our other readings lacked. Of course, the authors of the other books go to great lengths to illustrate and recreate these scenes for us, but Thomas’s honest, simple narration is something we really haven’t seen in this class yet. In response to Rebecca, I think that Piri was a criminal as a result of his environment and his search for himself. Even today, I know plenty of kids who make “bad” moral choices (we’ll use the term “bad” to describe Piri’s choices for now) because they are still searching for their identity, something that is especially hard to find in a place like New York City, where everyone tries to assimilate despite the fact that everyone is still so different from one another. I had an old friend who made choices similar to Piri’s; and he recently told me something interesting that pertains to this. He came to New York from Pakistan, and he always got beat up (I believe it was because he spoke weird). And he said that he made all those choices because he always felt that he was getting beat up because he wasn’t GOOD ENOUGH. It’s no different than Piri’s story of facing the Italians and growing up based on these outer influences. I really found Piri’s story inspiring, and I think that the fact that he came out of all of this a changed, stronger man has made all the difference.
Something that I found interesting in Sharman’s reading was Maria’s fear of her own ethnic group. “As more Mexicans crowd the tenements, her fears turn as much to them as to ethnic outsiders… “With Mexicans, there are more conflicts, with other races or even among themselves” (131). Normally, the immigrant fears the other ethnicity and clings to their own. This was a stark contrast to everything else that we’ve ever read, where the mentality is “We good, they bad.”
