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Streets of Gold: Immigrants in the City and the CinemaJames A. Clapp

To cite this Article Clapp, James A.(2009) 'Streets of Gold: Immigrants in the City and the Cinema', Visual Anthropology,22: 1, 1 — 19To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460802525694URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460802525694

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Streets of Gold: Immigrants in the Cityand the Cinema

James A. Clapp

Immigration and immigrants play unique and significant roles in both thedevelopment of the American city and the American cinema. The city, the cinema,and immigrants came together at the turn of the last century in an unprecedentedand economically creative way. Immigrants were involved in the creation of theAmerican cinema as audience, often as subject matter, and most significantlyin motion picture production and distribution. Immigrants and their process ofassimilation into American life have been one of the staple dramas of the Americanexperience as portrayed on film that, with a hiatus during the years between the twoworld wars, extends from the earliest days of cinema to the present day.

‘‘I came to America because in the old country I had heard that the streets of America were‘paved with gold’. But I learned three things after I arrived: First, the streets were notpaved with gold. Second, the streets were not paved at all. And third, it was I who wasgoing to have to pave them.’’

—Story told by many immigrants

L’AMERICA

As tough and ungilded as American city streets might have been, they never losttheir allure for those for whom they represented the chance for a better life. Formany, especially in the 19th century, that chance began with their first sighting ofthe Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor. It is an image Chaplin employed inhis film The Immigrant [1917], and was reprised in numerous films since. In theopening sequence of The Legend of 1900 [1998] steerage passengers assembled onthe aft deck of an ocean liner are making preparations for their imminent disembar-kation. The narrator intones over their activities that there is ‘‘always one’’ of themwho is ‘‘the first,’’ the first to get a sight of it. At first there is a sense of disbelief andthe words catch in his throat, as though waking from a dream. Then, as though thefirst one to sight land after a long voyage of lost souls, he calls out: ‘‘l’America!’’ The

JAMES A. CLAPP is emeritus professor of Urbanism and City Planning at San Diego State Uni-versity. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong in 2000 and a Visiting Professor at the Univer-sity of Paris in 1989 and 1999. His most recent book, writing as Sebastian Gerard, is ForGoodness Sake, A Novel of the Afterlife of Suzie Wong (2008), and he is currently writinga novel about the Three Gorges Dam in China. He is president of Urbis Media Productions. E-mail:urbmedia@mac.com

Visual Anthropology, 22: 1–19, 2009Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online

DOI: 10.1080/08949460802525694

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arrival of The Godfather, Part II’s [1974] youngVito Andolini (renamedVito Corleoneby an impatient immigration official) is less dramatic, but also uses the first sightingof this statue to heighten the emotional effect of arrival.

One of the most compelling scenes of arrival occurs near the end of Elia Kazan’sautobiographical America, America [1963]. Virtually all of this film takes place out-side the United States, in Greece and Turkey, but is never out of mind, especiallyin the obsession of the protagonist, a 20-year-old Anatolian Greek, named Stavros(Stathis Giallelis) with emigrating to America. America, America lends documen-tary support to the gravitational power of America’s image to oppressed peoples.Upon his arrival Stavros falls to his knees and kisses the hallowed ground ingratitude. On being told that he should cut this rather cliche gesture from the filmKazan justified keeping it in, saying ‘‘I doubt that anyone born in the United Stateshas or can have a true appreciation of what America is’’ [Wake n.d.].

However, coming to America has not always been a glorious event for immi-grants. The passage through Castle Garden and later Ellis Island could be undig-nified, as chronicled in the mustering scene in Chaplin’s The Immigrant, and thescreening and medical examinations in Hester Street [1975], America, America, andThe Godfather, Part II. Names were changed, quarantines imposed, motives ques-tioned, and some people were denied entry and repatriated. Well before the cur-rent thrust of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s more rigorousscrutiny in the post-9=11 climate, there were immigrants whose arrival wasunpleasant and illegally arranged.

Cinematic treatment of the smuggling of would-be immigrants into America,especially of those who, owing to quotas or discrimination, would not likely gainlegal entry, dates at least to the 1930s. In I Cover the Waterfront [1933], Chinesebeing smuggled into a West Coast port are chained and thrown overboard whenthe Coast Guard approaches, presaging contemporary practices in which Chineseare smuggled in shipping containers, often arriving dead or, if alive, indenturedfor years to pay off their smuggling costs.1

However, it is noteworthy that feature films about immigrants and migration felloff during the inter-war years, as did immigration itself. Not only was internationaltravel perilous during the wars, but the Depression, as well as a more xenophobicand isolationist spirit among most Americans, between those wars appears tohave affected the box-office prospects for movies that dealt with the subjects ofimmigration and assimilation. Thus I Cover the Waterfront was exceptional in thisregard. But even by 1948 My Girl Tisa, a film starring Lilli Palmer as an immigrantgirl in New York, one which touched all the aspects of the turn-of-the-centuryimmigrant experience, failed at the box office. Americans, adjusting then to post-war conditions, were not ready for nostalgia about the days of immigration.2

THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF AMERICAN CINEMA

Still, the ungilded streets of American cities were where immigrants often foundan economic foothold. In one of the early scenes of Ragtime [1981] a piano playerwatches pictures on a silent screen and casually fits his music to first a one-reeler and then some newsreels. A few scenes later, in recreated busy streets of

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Manhattan’s lower East Side, Jewish immigrants are plying various trades fromstands and pushcarts. One of them, Tateh (Mandy Patinkin), makes his livingcutting silhouette profiles for sitting customers. Later, he is seen peddling theflip-books he makes to shops, and still later, he reappears in a beach scene, thistime directing a one-reel silent film with actors in costume.

The year was 1910, and the notion that a peddler might quickly rise to becomea movie director is not only a plot convenience but also a historical recognition ofthe early days of the cinema in America. Indeed, in the early 20th century theconditions for the emergence and growth of the American cinematic experiencemight have been unique in the world. The cinema also took root in WesternEurope at the same time, and quickly spread to Asia. But in America the city,the cinema, and immigrants came together at this time in a unique and unprec-edented way. Immigrants were involved in the creation of the American cinemaas audiences, were often the subject matter too, and installed themselves inproduction and distribution as well. The portrayal of a Jewish immigrant peddleras an early American filmmaker is more fact than fiction.

Hollywood was created by a remarkably homogeneous group of Central andEastern European Jewish men. It was they who transformed primitive movingpictures, the product of then very recent technical advances by Edison and othersfrom 1895, into America’s most popular entertainment form by the early 1920s.Nickelodeons were replaced by movie palaces (sufficiently opulent to satisfythe escapist needs of the working class and to capture the respectable middleclass); short flicks expanded into features, their obscure players made into starsfrom 1903 onwards; and eventually, by the late 1920s, their visual pleasures wereenhanced immeasurably by sound [Zipperstein 1989: 12].

The founders of the great movie studios were Jews who had emigrated fromvillages in Germany (Carl Laemmle), Hungary (Adolf Zukor and William Fox),Russia (Louis B. Mayer), and Poland (Benjamin Warner). The men who becamethe ‘‘moguls’’ of the movie industry had no special training or talent for thatline of work. They were unlettered; indeed some of them were barely literate.But they were skilled in trades that happened to be suited to the needs of theearly film enterprise; they were used to methods of merchandising that broughtproducts to consumers.3 Early film distribution, to beer halls and social clubs,and then to nickelodeons [Figure 1], was suited to men with experience as ped-dlers. Thus the storefront theaters that exhibited films before 1920 were subse-quently transformed into movie theaters by these men who knew how toconduct business in the city—where getting the product to the consumerwas, in the initial years of movies, key to their success. Realizing the promiseof this enterprise they quickly moved into all aspects of production, formingtalent agencies, hiring entertainment lawyers, and of course with their move-ment to the film production-friendly climes of California, establishing theirown ‘‘industrial’’ city of Hollywood.

These were unlikely men to leave their imprint upon the American city. Thecinema not only changed the way in which Americans found their diversionsand entertainment, it also introduced a new land use to the city. Cities hadhad theaters since the golden age of Greece, but they were few in number andusually centralized. Large, opulent ‘‘movie palaces’’ would be built in the center

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of an American city, but they would soon proliferate and become a fixture formany years in different neighborhoods, until new methods of distribution cameinto being. But these unlikely ‘‘founding fathers of film’’ did more than establisha new industry; they left their imprint on the industry’s product as well,especially in the way it was used to portray life in their adopted country.Extremely conscious of anti-Semitism and concerned about accusations that theirdomination of the industry would undermine ‘‘American values,’’ they madegreat efforts to appear as ‘‘American’’ as possible. As a result, their films createda varnished and wholesome image of the country, a place that was far more tol-erant in their movies than it was of them. Although they craved assimilation theyassociated mostly among themselves in a social world of their own making.Hollywood allowed them a certain respectability that would not have been pos-sible in the Eastern U.S. establishment, and there were no social barriers toadmission into a business that was so new and not regarded as the equal of other‘‘professions.’’ Thus in a strange way the cinematic vision of America, certainlyin the formative years of the cinema, was created by entrepreneurs who were‘‘outsiders,’’ not only as immigrants but also as men who continued to regardthemselves as outside the mainstream of American social life [Gabler 1989:Introduction].

MELTING POTS

Cities were the first places to bring together people of different ethnic and racialbackgrounds; hence the first places to test assimilation, tolerance, competitionand co-operation among different cultures. There had been contact betweendifferent peoples before urbanization, but without mutual benefits of trade these

Figure 1 An early nickelodeon theater and its proprietors. (Photo Q Bison Archives).

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contacts were often less than amicable or sustained. Trading centers and portcities in particular were the first to experience this phenomenon. As tradebetween cities expanded, it became more necessary for different peoples to findlevels of positive social interaction once their respective economic interestsbecame reciprocal. Such interests have always been, of course, threatened bygreed, bigotry, and intolerance. As urban-based empires emerged, colonizedterritories and conquered cities became places where different peoples, culturesand religions played out multiculturalism by means of either dominance, accom-modation, or exploitation [Clapp 1986].

From the earliest cities to contemporary times, immigrants were attracted tothe promises and possibilities that cities afforded them over their rural or pas-toral pasts. There were as well numerous ‘‘forced’’ migrations, to and from citiesand countries, as a result of conquest, intolerance, and almost any number of pre-texts for one group to exert its numerical or presumed cultural, ethnic or racialsuperiority over others. Such circumstances of migration were in practice wellbefore the ugly term ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ made its way into the language andstratagems of intolerance in later 20th-century Yugoslavia.

Yet encounters and conflicts between different peoples are the stuff of manygreat dramas in literature, the theater and ultimately film too. From the Bible,to Homer, Caesar’s Gallic War, and the Voyages of Marco Polo, to the momentousevents of 20th-century world wars, the contacts and clashes of different cultures,races, religions and political philosophies have been the driving elements of greatcomedies and tragedies, both in reality and on the screen. Cities have alwaysbeen a ready stage for the playing out of such dramas, compressing and juxtapos-ing different peoples and increasing their encounters.

Most Americans are ‘‘hyphenated’’: Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans,African-Americans, or lrish- or Italian- or Polish-Americans. Despite notionsthat America is a ‘‘melting pot’’ which homogenizes immigrants into ‘‘pureAmericans,’’ most Americans remain, in varying degrees, ‘‘hyphenated’’ in theirself-identification as well. It is perhaps a distinction defining Americans that theiridentity with the country is not by way of nativity, culture, ethnicity, race orreligion, but by citizenship. Anyone can be an American in a way that anyonecannot be, say, a Chinese, a Frenchman, or an Egyptian.4

Prior to 1820, before which we have no accurate records, it is not known howmany people migrated to America; records were not kept. Since then some 50million have come, most of whom were running away from something: potatofamines for the Irish; poor soil in the mezzogiorno for the Italians; religiouspersecution for the Jews; wars and revolutions for other ethnic groups. Most ofthem were poor. Italians had a saying: Chi sta bene non si muove (‘‘the well-offdon’t leave’’).

There are two colloquial points of view about those who migrate: that they arethe dregs of the countries from which they came; or else that they were the hardier,more ambitious stock who were willing to take a chance to improve themselves.Considering the perils of migration and the difficulties of assimilation, it did takeconsiderable courage to be a migrant in the 19th century. Ships arrived after longvoyages in which immigrants had sailed in ‘‘steerage’’ with many passengersdying from disease or sick from bad food and sanitation [Coleman 1972: Chap. 7].

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While most cities that grew to unprecedented size during the 19th century didso with large influxes of population, New York did so with a difference. London,Paris, and other major European cities drew their populations largely fromwithin their respective countries; New York’s growth was very much the resultof huge waves of immigrants coming from abroad. The story of New York canbe characterized as the invasion and succession of waves of immigrants of differ-ent nationalities. As early as the 1640s, as many as 18 languages were beingspoken in the island’s tiny settlement; and as late as 1900, more than oneNew Yorker in three had been born abroad. In addition to the original Dutch,Manhattan’s settlers consisted primarily of German, Scandinavian, English,and Scottish immigrants when the first great wave of immigration hit NewYork’s shores in the 1840s. Then a heavy influx, primarily Irish refugees fromthe potato famine, more than doubled Manhattan’s population from 371,000 in1845 to 813,000 in 1860.

The lure of America’s opportunities and the push of poverty and oppression athome encouraged hundreds of thousands to risk the arduous steerage passage incramped packet ships with conditions little better than those of the Mayflowervoyagers. A crossing might last longer than two months, during which timesea-sickness, spoiled food, storms, cholera, overcrowding and anxiety oftenclaimed the lives of considerable numbers of would-be Americans. Many arrivedonly to be soon buried in the land of promise; cemeteries on Long Island arehuge. In spite of these adversities, immigrants came in unprecedented numbers.From Independence through to 1845, only 1,600,000 immigrants, of all national-ities, had entered the States; but during 1846–1855 more than 1,880,000 arrivedfrom Ireland and Britain alone. Over 163,000 entered in the peak year of Irishimmigration in 1851 [Sinclair 1967: 331]. Thus a body of highly dramatic experi-ence was accumulated that would find its way into cinematic presentation whichcontinues to the present day. Chaplin would employ the steerage experience withan admixture of comedy and nausea-inducing effect in The Immigrant [1917]; JoanMicklin Silver (Hester Street) and Francis Copola (The Godfather, Part II), amongothers, would take great pains in re-creating the experience in the streets ofNew York; and more recently Wayne Wang (Dim Sum, 1984), Ang Lee (PushingHands, 1994), and Gregory Nava (El Norte, 1983) are portraying the similaritiesand differences with the experiences of the new wave of immigration from Asiaand Latin America.

STREETS OF GOLD

To some extent it might have been fortunate for the immigrants that the streets ofAmerican cities were not paved with gold. During the heyday of American immi-gration the city was being built, rising out of the mythical compost of the foun-ders that America was destined to be a nation primarily of yeoman farmers. Herurban adolescence had all the raw energy and assertiveness of youth. America’scities grew fast, and without benefit of the parental oversight and example ofany previous American urban age; without, especially, a preceding American‘‘golden age of cities.’’ So it was the very construction of American cities, the

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buildings, the physical and social infrastructure, the unpaved streets and unexca-vated subways, that provided the ‘‘gold’’ that immigrants needed to purchase afoothold on American soil. City-building generates numerous and varied formsof employment, and that employment fueled an economic and political systemthat, for many, afforded an entrance to the promised land.

With the assistance of the labor of legions of immigrants, New York was, bymid-19th century, an ostentatiously rich city. One historian reports that:

At 563 Broadway old master paintings by Titian, Rubens, Raphael and others were forsale; and at 189 Broadway, Ever Pointed Gold Pens. Gold birdcages were also to bebought. Fine French calfboots were $1.50. H. S. Beal, at his Daguerrian Rooms at 183Broadway, would take your photograph for a dollar. Each year New York consumed$68,000 worth of fresh salmon shipped in from St. John, New Brunswick. There were132 principal eating houses, from Delmonico’s, with its very fashionable Italian andFrench cuisine, to Gosling’s in Nassau Street where Mr. Gosling dined more than 1,000people a day, very cheap. The hotels were more splendid, and very much larger, thanany in Europe at the time. The grandest was Astor House, opposite the City Hall.Rathburn’s Hotel could sleep 300. The United States Hotel, proprietor H. Johnson, adver-tised that it had installed at great expense, ‘‘an extensive range of water closets, notequaled by any similar Establishment in the United States.’’ [Coleman 1972: 155]

In the city the immigrant not only supplied the labor for this growing urbanopulence but he lived closer to it than ever before. Its proximity tantalized himwith its possibilities, which could turn to resentment when kept beyond hisreach.

This dynamic new city of growth and energy was soon to provide a vastlyenriched ‘‘sound stage’’ for the entrepreneurs of the new cinema: motion, color,contrasting lifestyles, struggle, conflict, success and failure, change, the city had itall, stories almost begging to be told. America’s streets may not have been pavedwith gold, but the drama taking place in them was worth more than gold.

THE GOLDEN DOOR

The ‘‘drama’’ of the American city was often a result of some of its internalcontradictions. America might be the only nation in the world with a ‘‘welcomesign’’ at its front door. In 1883 the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France after theyfound it could not stand at the Suez Canal, and designed by Frederic-AugusteBartholdi, was erected in New York Harbor. Even before the statue was in placeEmma Lazarus wrote a poem, ‘‘The New Colossus’’ [1883] to raise funds for thepedestal on which the Miss Liberty would stand. That poem’s oft-quoted lastlines lines were an unqualified call to America’s shores that gave voice to thecountry’s values of freedom and democracy: ‘‘Give me your tired, your poor,=Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, =Send these, the homeless, thetempest-tost to me. =I lift up my lamp beside the golden door.’’

Despite the Statue of Liberty, and a poem welcoming the ‘‘wretched refuse ofthe earth’’ and the ‘‘huddled masses,’’ there was also a strong ‘‘Nativist’’

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movement that regarded immigrants with suspicion, with bigotry, and even asan unwelcome social pollution. Countering Lazarus nearly point for point isthe poem of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, submitted to a government commissionon restricting immigration. Titled ‘‘The Unguarded Gates,’’ it warned:

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,And through them press a wild, a motley throng—Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,Fearless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav,Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;These bringing with themUnknown gods and rites,Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws.In street and alley what strange tongues are these,Accents of menace alien to our air . . . [Aldrich 1895]

And so the ‘‘golden door’’ was Janus-faced. America presented two faces to theimmigrant, welcoming and wary, friendly and fearful. Such suspicions of thealien were not peculiar to this country. These attitudes have shown themselvesin humans through time and across space.5 Against much of the historical recordof such encounters the American experience, though less noble than Americanslike to believe, earns high marks. It is also worthy of mention that the relationshipbetween immigrants and American cities has been a reciprocal one. As manyolder central cities recently suffer absolute declines in population, immigrantsare once again recognized as fresh blood that might revitalize them.6

‘‘AMERICA WAS BORN IN THE STREETS’’

Charles Spencer Chaplin, who had spent an impoverished youth in East London,U.K., immigrated to America around 1912, a few years before the large waves ofmigration began to subside because of World War I. In some respects Chaplin’sart and career illustrate both the positive and negative aspects of the Americanimmigrants’ experience.

By the time he had written and starred in The Immigrant in 1917 Chaplin wason his way to riches and legendary fame. Whether this short film was based onpersonal experience or an amalgam of immigrant experiences is unknown. Buttypical of Chaplin’s humor was that its ‘‘truth’’ was often based in behaviorsand circumstances that were not at all amusing. Chaplin’s antics and masterfulphysical comedy as he depicts seasickness on a rolling deck, or passengersattempting to take a meal in a crude, pitching dining salon, make light of the dis-comforts of steerage travel; but between laughs the contemporary viewer cannothelp but wonder what other discomforts there were on long passages under suchconditions [Figure 2].

The Immigrant’s cast of characters also includes a ‘‘motley throng’’ of gamblers,thieves, and bullies. One gets a sense that not all of the characters coming toAmerica were necessarily a positive addition. Then again, Americans themselveswere not necessarily portrayed in the best terms. A scene where passengers stand

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awestruck and in reverence at the ship’s passing of the Statue of Liberty is fol-lowed by these same passengers being herded together behind a restraining rope,corraled like livestock, shoved, kicked and insulted by customs officials. Chap-lin’s experience with American officialdom was never much better, and whilewe might smile at the quick kick he returns to a bullying officer, it might alsobe regarded, at a more serious level, as foreshadowing his tempestuous relation-ship with the American government.7

Once ashore, and broke, Chaplin’s Little Tramp’s experience in a restaurantrelates other pitfalls and difficulties in assimilation. Chaplin played a Jew, accus-tomed to eating with his hat on, but he is bullied by the waiter to remove it beforehe will be served. His table manners horrify a prudish fellow patron, and, owingto his illiteracy and lack of English, he must order food by pointing and miming.During his meal another patron is beaten by several waiters for underpaying hisbill, and much of Chaplin’s comedy centers on his attempt to avoid similar treat-ment when he discovers that a coin he had found that would have paid for hismeal had meanwhile escaped through a hole in his pocket. The Immigrant is com-edy coming just to the margins of tragedy, and only Chaplin’s comedic geniuslightens situations that would otherwise be sad and regrettable.

Chaplin also did not varnish the American immigrant experience in anotherfilm in the same series. Easy Street [1917] is ironically titled. This time his targetsare religion, and the American penchant for attempting to ‘‘civilize’’ immigrantsby Christianizing them. In the first scene the Little Tramp emerges with newresolve from the Hope Mission after submitting to some preaching and counsel-ing to answer a ‘‘Help Wanted’’ sign by the police department. In his bright newpoliceman’s uniform he is immediately given a beat in the mean and narrowEasy Street, a scene where brawling immigrants (many still clad in the traditionalgarb of their native lands) savagely beat and rob one another, and police receivethe worst of it.

One particularly large brute is the Alpha Male of the neighborhood. Now theLittle Tramp-turned-cop must confront this intimidating nemesis whom hecleverly manages to subdue by getting his head into the globe of a gaslight that

Figure 2 Chaplin comforts fellow nervous immigrants prior to disembarkation.

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he is pulling over to demonstrate his great strength. This renders Chaplin theunwitting intimidator of Easy Street, where only strength is respected, the policeare cowardly, and people are loyal only to their self-interest. Chaplin’s ‘‘easy’’street depicts theft, wife-beating, intolerance, alcoholism, crushing living densi-ties, and even drug abuse.

In the end, thanks to Chaplin’s bumbling police work Easy Street is pacifiedand its residents stroll into the New Hope Mission, the former saloon. But onesuspects that Chaplin, in using some of the more unsavory aspects of the immi-grant experience as his subject of comedy, is keeping the best, and somewhatvengeful, laugh to himself.

Chaplin’s ‘‘Little Tramp’’ character encounters the City with an immigrant’sinnocence and wonder. In this tramp role he seems to want little more thanthe basic opportunity the city promises. He does not hanker after fame or fortune,like some characters in novels of the period that employed the city as a vasttemptation. He desires little more than a job, a square meal, a roof over his head.His aspirations are not at all grand or ambitious.

But Chaplin invariably gets swept up in the circumstances and events of thecity, always finding himself in the midst of its turmoil; he negotiates its wilesand perils with determination and ever-shifting fortunes, only trying to get by,to survive. He is often courteous in the face of rudeness, and at the same timenot fatuously grateful at what good fortune might come his way. He finds andloses money, and somehow survives being ignorant of new customs and mores.He seems devoid of ideology, proselytizing, or other ulterior purposes, or inter-ested in some cause or quest. His most consistent ambition seems to be to win theaffections of a pretty girl.8

Immigrant moviegoers would not have been surprised that the conditionswithin which comedy was being played out were close to social conditionsfamiliar to them, conditions that social reformers such as Jacob Riis and LincolnSteffens were photographing and writing about.9 They might also have appreci-ated the depiction of realistic mayhem in parts of New York being perpetrated byGangs of New York [2002].10

The look and feel of the ‘‘Five Points’’ area of lower Manhattan have beenrealistically re-created, ironically on the sets of Rome’s Cinecitta, as the battle-ground of Nativists and immigrants in the mid-19th century. Gangs of New Yorkclads the sentiments of the poems of Emma Lazarus and Thomas Bailey Aldrichin the motley leather armor of the streets and sets them at one another in bloodybattle. Woven into the larger epic set-piece of the story is one of revenge, that ofthe seething vengeance of a boy, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo diCaprio) againstthe vicious gang leader, Bill ‘‘The Butcher’’ Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis), whokilled Vallon’s father years before. These are meaner streets than director MartinScorsese had conjured in his earlier film of a later New York ethnic neighbor-hood. These are streets governed only by tribal rules of war, codes of honor,and incendiary hatreds, and exploited by a cynical and greedy political system.

This view of New York evokes images of cities in the midst of civil war. Gangsrule the streets and form alliances with the Tammany Hall political machine ofWilliam Marcy Tweed to parcel out jobs through graft and corruption. Suchconditions, too, might not have been unfamiliar to many of the immigrants,

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and some were already or soon became inured to them. Depending upon one’sethnicity or political allegiance, the police could be more harmful than protective.Firemen engaged in arson in order to loot buildings that they then allowed toburn down, and politicians were their accomplices. In Gangs of New York thestreets are drenched in blood rather than paved with gold, and some of the‘‘opportunities’’ for immigrants to the American city were there only for thoseviolent enough to seize them.

The gangs and crime organizations could also prey on their own kind.‘‘Protection’’ was a common means of extorting money and favors from busi-nesses within one’s own ethnic group. In the flashback scenes to Manhattan’s‘‘Little Italy’’ in The Godfather, Part II, the local ‘‘Black Hand’’ kingpin roamsthe streets demanding his protection money, until the young Vito Corleone(Robert De Niro) assassinates him and takes over the power of the streets. Butnearer the close of the 19th century these conditions were moderated by an influxof new immigrant groups and the effects of political reforms. Gangs becamemore organized, but also realized that they would eventually have to findmore ‘‘legitimate’’ enterprises. Moreover newer immigrants, more daring anddesperate, were arriving to challenge the hegemony of the city streets.

Obtaining a legitimate foothold in the American city often involved a differentexploitation. Joan Micklin Silver’s independent feature film, Hester Street [1975],provides an authentic visual return to these same teeming streets in the decadebefore the turn of the 20th century, and is an intimate look at the ways in whichthe city altered ethnic values and mores.11 Here Jews found work in the fabledgarment industry, or as peddlers [Figure 3] and shopkeepers on the lower EastSide. The story centers on a garment worker, Jake (Steven Keats) who has immi-grated ahead of his wife and child and works in one of the sweatshops. By thetime his wife arrives from the old country, Jake, born Yekl in Russia and alreadya few years in America, sees himself as an ‘‘American fella’’ even though hissocial life and even his adulterous adventures are confined to the lower East Side‘‘ghetto.’’ He regards those who cling to old country ways as ‘‘greenhorns,’’ andhas fun at the expense of more conservative and religious Jews like Bernstein, aboarder who shares his meager flat, sports a heavy beard, and spends hoursreading the scriptures and praying. Jake prefers the company of Mamie (DorrieKavanaugh), a voluptuous dancehall girl, herself not long over from Poland, andone who shares his ambitious desire for assimilation.

Dramatic tension is provided by the arrival of Jake’s wife, Gitl (Carol Kane)and their young son, whom Jake renames from his Hebrew name to ‘‘Joey.’’ Withher wig, old world clothes and unsophisticated ways, Gitl is every bit the ‘‘green-horn’’ who clashes with Jake’s view of himself as a ‘‘Yankee.’’ He denies her anyconjugal attention or even affection, continues his affair with Mamie, and, in spiteof his urging that she forgo the wig and dress herself up, when she finally doesso, he flies into a rage.

Gitl decides she has had enough of this treatment and demands a divorce. SinceJake wants the divorce even more he convinces Mamie, who has considerable sav-ings, to put up some money to buy Gitl’s agreement. Gitl demonstrates that her oldworld ‘‘bargaining’’ skills are better than those of the lawyer hired by her husbandto make the negotiation. She ‘‘takes’’ nearly every penny of the girlfriend’s savings,

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gets her divorce and plans to marry Bernstein, the plodding but dependable board-er. By the end of the movie she is well on her way to becoming an ‘‘uptown lady’’and even Jake is clearly impressed by her deportment during their last meetingbefore the rabbi who dissolves their Old World marriage.

Hester Street has its foundation in factual circumstances. As with other immi-grant groups, Jewish husbands often came to America first to get an economicfoothold and send passage money home. Hence their ‘‘acculturation’’ was moreadvanced, and wives, once they arrived, were a reminder of the old ways. In thecity men could find other outlets for sexual urges (as Jake does with a prostituteand with Mamie), with a degree of anonymity that the old country and villagesdid not afford. As a result, marital strife and divorces were not uncommon inspite of the strong religious and cultural family bonds among Jews. Moreover,the character of Mamie, who has managed to amass substantial savings as asingle woman, is an example of the emergence of the financial and social inde-pendence of city women. The city offered many new sources of employmentfor women in industries like garment manufacturing, shop-keeping and clericalwork. With financial independence more women began to change the urban

Figure 3 Pushcarts in Hester Street, Lower Manhattan (ca. 1920).

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demographics by choosing to remain single, to leave unhappy marriages, or tonot have children.12

Silver chose not only to shoot in black and white to enhance the authenticity ofher film, but also to have her actors use a dialogue of heavily-accented English orYiddish. To some, who may have only heard such dialogue from Borsht Beltstand-up comedians, this might seem to ask too much of the viewer, but it addsto the ‘‘documentary’’ feel of a fictional film that is rich in historical detail.

ACCULTURATION

The relationship between immigrants and American cities has, on balance, been areciprocally beneficial one. Immigrants have found opportunity in the city, andin turn have enriched its culture with their own contributions. But the relation-ship has also been complex and dynamic. The rich variety of occupations typicalof cities afforded an expanded range of opportunities to people who originatedfrom rural, pastoral and village circumstances.13 But the transition from tra-ditional to modern cultures has also had its effects upon those traditional cul-tures. The question of the ‘‘breakdown’’ of traditional cultures by contact withurbanization has long been a subject of sociological interest and debate.

One point of view, best represented by Oscar Handlin’s 1951 Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Uprooted, maintained that the majority of the 35-odd millionpersons who immigrated to America in the century after 1820 had a ‘‘traumatic,potentially devastating experience.’’ Most of them had come from traditionalpeasant societies, not cities, and found themselves in America’s urban-industrial,more technologically developed society and cities, and so in their adjustmentsuffered loss of self-esteem and alienation.

This pessimistic view is countered by those who, while recognizing that theimmigration experience was difficult for some, assert that most made successfuladjustments to American society [Krause 1978: 291–92; Lewis 1951; Greeley 1976].It was helpful for some immigrant groups to have had what might be called‘‘prior urban experience.’’ Many Jews and Chinese, for example, had alreadycome to America from ‘‘diasporic’’ experiences in which they had adjusted toother host societies. Often these immigrants had been in urban environmentsin which the prior experience of having obtained an economic foothold in othercultures provided a familiarity with different political and economic systems.

Experience has also shown that the ‘‘melting pot’’ did not fully render immi-grants into some homogeneous, stereotypical, generic ‘‘Americans,’’ but ratherthey often retained important and functional attributes of their traditional cul-tures, such as a religion, strong families, and identity with their motherlands.However, retention of traditions has also been a source of conflict between immi-grants and their more ‘‘acculturated’’ fellow Americans, in addition to being asource of conflict within and amongst immigrant groups as well as intergenera-tional conflicts within immigrant families. But conflict is also the essence ofdrama, and the conflict between the customs and traditions of one’s ‘‘mother’’country, and the adjustment to becoming an American, is both sociologicallyand cinematically interesting.

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Several films by and about Asian-Americans focus upon this dynamic. HongKong-born Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing [1982] is illustrative of the interplayof cultures. Although a simple mystery about the search for the missing Chan,it is also a reference to the American-made Charlie Chan series of films that neverwas—and no longer is—in any way insightful about the Asian-American experi-ence.14 But the influences of American films are evident in this film’s small debtto The Third Man, and the employment of elements of film noir. The quest forChan becomes incidental to an immersion into the culture and everyday life ofSan Francisco’s Chinatown. The excursion, guided by two taxi drivers who aretrying to find the missing Chan and the $4,000 he has of theirs, is really a journeythrough a part of immigrant America that has not been so exposed cinematicallyby one of its own. The audience is taken into restaurant kitchens, offices, bars,flop houses, not finding Chan, who is replaced by an emerging portrait of thecomplexity and richness of this blended culture.

Wang followed his examination of Chinese-American life in San Francisco withDim Sum [1984]. The lightly-plotted comedy of the Tam family illustrates howtraditional Chinese values and emotional complexities have been retained andinfluence intergenerational relationships. However, the extent to which the OldWorld past invades and influences the New World present is well told in Wang’sJoy Luck Club [1993] about a group of Chinese-born women who meet regularly toplay mah-jongg in San Francisco. Though they now lead comfortable lives, theirpasts in pre-revolutionary China, a time of famine, forced migrations and priva-tions that often required great personal sacrifices, are indelible. Though theirdaughters are ‘‘Americanized’’ and successful, their filial relationships aregreatly influenced by their mothers’ pasts. These pasts include that of one motherwho was one of her husband’s multiple wives, another who had children takenfrom her, and another who was forced to abandon her children. Joy Luck Clubdemonstrates convincingly that, as the new American immigrant filmmakerstake their place alongside their predecessors, American cinema is vastly enrichedby these cultures, their pasts, and their adjustments to the new urban society.

Adjustment does not come easily for the hero in Pushing Hands [1994],made by the Taiwan-born, U.S.-educated writer-director, Ang Lee. Mr. Chu(Sihung Lung), a tai chi master, copes with his new life in well-to-do suburbanWestchester by maintaining the rituals of his former Beijing life: exercising withhis tai chi quan, listening to Peking Opera, watching Chinese videos and prepar-ing his own Chinese meals. Chu’s son, Alex (Bo Z. Wang) is, in some sense, thenew immigrant success story, a well-paid professional married to a Westernwoman, Martha (Deb Snyder), who is a writer. They have a young son to carryon the family name. The problem is that Mr. Chu is just a little too exotic forMartha, who is home with him the entire day and cannot abide his cookingand Chinese music.

Pushing Hands brings together multiple dimensions of the immigrant experi-ence: intergenerational differences, the difficulties of those who migrate whenthey are older, and the differences between the ethnic enclaves of Chinatowns,which function as retreats and half-way houses for immigrants, and the culturalblandness of suburban existence. While it is a comedy, there is a core truth to thepredicament of Mr. Chu, who is not only foreign but in many ways superfluous.

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In the end, Chu manages a bittersweet compromise with America, immersinghimself in the society of urban Chinatown and drawing upon his tai chi to restoresome connection and balance in his life.

In a country founded by immigrants migration remains one of the principalmeans by which Americans, of the tenth or first generation, have escapedoppression (at home or abroad), and improved their well-being, whether one isa migrant from Odessa to Oklahoma City, or Oklahoma City to Olympia, or fromthe city to the suburbs. For many Americans a key element of the AmericanDream is that geographic mobility often equals social mobility.

The gravitational pull of America is both powerful and paradoxical. Part ofthat pull is the American cinema itself, and the fascination Americans have fortheir own dreams. Foreign protesters might burn the Stars and Stripes and chantangry slogans against American foreign policy one moment but express a wish tocome to America in the next. Some come packed into shipping containers, otherspacked like sardines in the truck of coyote smugglers across the southwesternborders, or in flimsy rafts and leaky boats across the 90-mile stretch of waterbetween Cuba and Florida. Once in America they may complain about discrimi-nation or some American values, but few would consider returning to their landsof lesser opportunity.

The pull of the American Dream is told with truth and power in the journey ofRosa (Zaide Sylvia Gutierrez) and Enrique (Ernest Gomez Cruz), Guatemalansiblings making their way to El Norte [1983]. After the father is killed and theirmother disappears they set off for America, are mistreated getting throughMexico, and end up crawling into the US through a rat-infested tunnel, only todiscover that Enrique must begin by being what his father was back in Guate-mala, a bracero, just a pair of arms to work the fields and orchards.

Braceros are, in addition to being exploited by their employers, tolerated by thegeneral public because they are regarded as doing the type of work that otherAmericans avoid—back-breaking, long hours, low-paying, stooped labor insun-baked fields. But when immigrants are seen as competing with other busi-nesses the reception can be cold and hostile. Such is the situation for a colonyof Vietnamese fishermen who settle in a Texas gulf town in Alamo Bay [1985],in which racism surfaces when local fishermen feel their livelihood threatenedby immigrant competition. The film, by the French director Louis Malle, demon-strates that in some places there is not enough room for everybody in theAmerican Dream. Smaller cities can become overwhelmed by immigrants inways that can upset and transform the prevailing social order, as has the immi-grant Hmong population of Wausau, Wisconsin [Beck 1994].

The bittersweetness of the immigrant urban experience is also treated in thecomedyMoscow on the Hudson [1984]. Vladimir (RobinWilliams) is a defector fromwhat was, at the time the film was made, the USSR. At first he delights in evendoing menial jobs, and there is a pleasing and humorous scene at a lunch counterin which immigrants from different countries recite the US Constitution. Indeed,being New York, it seems that everyone Vladimir meets there is also from some-where else. But the realities of life in the American city are for Vladimir menialwork, livingwith a black family who enduremany of the same disadvantages that,seen in flashbacks, he thought he had left back in the USSR.15

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In films like El Norte and Moscow on the Hudson one is left to ponder how muchthe American Dream delivers on its promise. That of course is more the stuff ofsociology and statistics than of cinema, but, intuitively or perhaps wishfully, itseems that for at least enough immigrants there is a reasonable chance the streetsare at least already paved. Avalon [1990] is a film that takes the viewer through acouple of generations of the immigrant experience of a Russian-Jewish family inBaltimore. Compared to most immigrant films, this autobiographical chronicle,based on the family of director Barry Levinson and its settlement in the Avalonneighborhood in Baltimore, is nearly idyllic. After the arrival of the firstKruchinsky brother on the Fourth of July, 1914, framed in glorious fireworks,the others arrive to fill out a large extended family of musicians and businessmenwho prosper and propagate over the next four decades. The downside of theimmigrant experience of the Kruchinsky family is not discrimination, poverty,or restricted social advancement, but a subtle and insidious diminishing of fam-ily traditions and the connection to their roots. This may be one of the paradoxesfor immigrants who have achieved the security and material well-being of theAmerican Dream. Once these are acquired there is the time for reflection on whathas been sacrificed. Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, and himself animmigrant son, has written:

There is a difference between having a good time in life and being happy. . . . We are allAmericans now, we are all successes now. And yet the most successful Italian man I knowadmits that though the one human act he could not understand was suicide, he under-stood it when he became [an American] success . . . He went back to Italy and tried to livelike a peasant again. But he can never again be unaware of more subtle traps than povertyand hunger. [‘‘Choosing a Dream,’’ as quoted in Kessner 1977: 177]

In the end it may be that coming to America is not a destination after all, only acontinuation of a longer journey.

NOTES

1. As with Africans, many Chinese were also brought in against their will. Chinesewomen, for example, were sold to or Shanghaied to be smuggled to West Coast citiesto become unwilling brides or to supply brothels [Yan 2001]. The economic exploi-tation and physical mistreatment of immigrants, often as much by their formercompatriots as by their new hosts, continues at borders around the world. In contem-porary southern California, New Mexico and Texas, for example, illegal migrants areoften found dead from dehydration in the desert or suffocated inside sealed trucks,left abandoned by their transporters, or ‘‘coyotes’’ [The Border, 1982].

2. These same decades did much to break down the world of colonialism and unleash atide of immigration that would wash across many developed nations, which continuesto the present day. With the breakdown of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations twodecades ago a further wave of immigration was set in motion. Hence the number offilms treating these populations both as subject and audience increased markedly inthe period since the 1960s.

3. European Jews might well have become skilled at ‘‘peddling’’ their wares from cartsand stalls to consumers (not to mention lending money) because in many countries

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they were either not allowed to own property, or otherwise found owning real estatea risky investment when expulsions or pogroms were threats.

4. Americans are projected to become even more ‘‘hyphenated’’ in the future. The Popu-lation Research Center, in Portland, Oregon, ‘‘. . . projects that the black intermarriagerate will climb dramatically in this century, to a point at which 37 percent of African-Americans will claim mixed ancestry by 2100. By then more than 40 percent of Asian-Americans will be mixed. Most remarkable, however, by century’s end the number ofLatinos claiming mixed ancestry will be more than two times the number claiming asingle background’’ [Rodriguez 2003: 95]. Already, more than half of all new mar-riages of Jews in America are with gentiles.

5. In some aboriginal societies the stranger was subjected to harsher treatment, oftentortured and killed as a ‘‘protection’’ against any adulteration of the native societywith anything from the outsider’s viruses to religious or social beliefs [Lofland 1973].

6. Recently one reporter observed this trend in a ‘‘small but growing number of citieswith declining populations’’ that need to address resulting shortages of labor: ‘‘[I]nPittsburgh, . . . . the population fell by 9.5 percent in the 1990’s [and] Philadelphia,which lost 4 percent of its population since 1990, is considering a plan that would cre-ate an ‘‘Office of New Philadelphians’’ patterned after similar offices in New York andBoston that help new foreign arrivals. It was not that long ago that many city officialsviewed immigrants as a drain on public services and that workers saw them as com-petition for jobs. But the booming economy of the late 1990’s made immigrant labor atall skill levels a valued commodity, and foreign-born residents, typically with larger,younger families, helped restock urban neighborhoods that shrank as the middle classmoved to the suburbs’’ [Schmitt 2001].

7. While it might have been a convenient device for the screenwriter in the 1992 filmChaplin, the comedian’s kick was supposedly rebuked by his enemy, J. Edgar Hoover,at a dinner party. Hoover alleged that Chaplin was a communist and the kick demon-strated his lack of respect for authority and the values of the United States.

8. Off-screen, the same pretty girls who were often cast in his pictures were a source ofChaplin’s difficult relationship with the U.S. Government, particularly the FBI. Hispreference for quite young women aroused fears of those who saw the motion pictureindustry as a threat to morality, particularly in view of some of the scandals inChaplin’s time. Eventually the FBI’s harassment contributed to driving him fromthe country altogether, to a residence in Switzerland.

9. Riis (an immigrant from Denmark) and Steffens were journalists who railed againstconditions in tenements and schools and the corruption of government in newspapersand books [Riis 1891, Steffens 1904].

10. New York’s streets were dangerous and violent from the very beginning, as depictedin a historical novel about the period in which it was the Dutch colonial settlementcalled Nieuw Amsterdam [Swerling 2001].

11. Silver chose Greenwich Village’s Morton Street (because the real lower East Side hadbeen too modernized) to tell the story of family life among the East European Jews(based on Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of the same name) who had immigrated inthe later decades of the 19th century.

12. The growing number of single urban women is a result of the continuation of thisphenomenon, to the extent that in some countries, such as Japan, it has begun toseriously depress birthrates. The unmarried urban women became the subject of agrowing number of movies. Of particular interest are The Apartment [1960] and AnUnmarried Woman [1978; see also Ewan 1981: 42–63].

13. However, changes in the economic structure of urban areas, particularly central cities,have diminished the number and types of occupation accessible to unskilled and

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under-educated immigrants. For example, many manufacturing concerns have movedto outlying areas or diminished in number, being replaced in central cities by service-sector occupations that are less accessible to unskilled immigrants [Clapp 1970].

14. The Charlie Chan series of over forty films from 1921 to 1949 never had an Asian actorin the role. Warner Oland played the lead until his death, and then it was taken overby Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters after Toler’s death (only the sons, Number OneSon, Keye Luke, and Number Two Son, Sen Yung, were Asian). Charlie was alwaysbrilliant, solving mysteries with a combination of deductive brilliance and Chineseaphorisms like ‘‘Sometimes insignificant molehill sometimes more important thanconspicuous mountain,’’ which he delivered with the missing articles and simpletenses of Chinese fractured English.The popular and often amusing series was copied for another Asian detective, Mr.

Moto, a Japanese imitation played by French actor Peter Lorre, which ran for ninemovies. Another imitation was the Mr. Wong detective series that resulted in fivefilms at the end of the 1940s, also with a lead played by a Westerner, Boris Karloff.Charlie Chan was resurrected most recently in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the DragonQueen [1981], with Chan played by the British-Russian actor Peter Ustinov. Even whenAmerican producers got around to hiring Asian actors they seemed to regard them asculturally interchangeable. In the Oscar and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song[1961], about a Chinese girl who smuggles herself into San Francisco, the cast includesNancy Kwan (Chinese-English), James Shigeta and Myoshi Umecki (Japanese), JackSoo (Chinese) and Juanita Hall (African-American).

15. A romantic comedy approach to immigration is treated in Green Card [1990] in whicha Frenchman played by Gerard Depardieu makes a fictitious marriage with anAmerican woman (Andie MacDowell) in order to obtain a green card. The film is aresurrection of the dramatic lines of some of the screwball comedies of the 1930s,and they inevitably fall into true love after predictable strains in their relationship.

REFERENCES

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey1895 ‘‘The Unguarded Gates.’’ [Poem].

Beck, Roy1994 The Ordeal of Immigration in Wausau. Atlantic Monthly, April: 84–97.

Clapp, A. James1986 Shylock’s Ghetto: The Place of the Play. Places, 3(2): 40–46.

Coleman, Terry1972 Going to America. New York: Random House, Inc.

Gabler, Neal1989 An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Anchor Books.

Greeley, Andrew1976 The Ethnic Miracle. The Public Interest, 45(Fall): 20–36.

Handlin, Oscar1951 The Uprooted. New York.

Krause, Corinne Azen1978 Urbanization without Breakdown: Italian, Jewish, and Slavic Immigrant Women in

Pittsburgh, 1900 to 1945. Journal of Urban History, 4(3): 291–306.Lewis, Oscar

1951 Urbanization without Breakdown. Scientific American, 75: 31–41.Lofland, L.

1973 A World of Strangers. New York: Basic Books.

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Riis, Jacob A.1891 How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York: C. Scribner’s

Sons.Rodriguez, Richard

2003 Mongrel America. The Atlantic Monthly, (291)1, Jan.–Feb: 95–97.Schmitt, Eric

2001 To Fill in Gaps, Shrinking Cities Seek a New Wave of Foreigners. New York Times, May 30.Steffens, Lincoln

1957 (orig. 1904) The Shame of the Cities. New York: Hill and Wang.Swerling, B.

2001 City of Dreams. New York: Simon and Schuster.Wake, Bob

n.d. America, America (Review), http://www.culturevulture.net/Movies2/ AmericaAmerica.htmYan, Geling

2001 The Lost Daughter of Happiness. New York: Hyperion.Zipperstein, Steven

1989 The Lions of Judah in the Jungle of Hollywood. Los Angeles Times Book Review, Nov. 5: 12, 15.

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