It must have been a fearful journey. It was a time in which women were commonly viewed as property, to be given over from father to husband. The young Marie, my grandmother, had been promised in marriage to a man she did not love. So she fled her native Ukraine and came to America. I do not know whether she entered by way of Ellis Island. It was a common port of entry. It seems likely that she would have been among those processed by overworked officials of varying degrees of sympathy for newcomers.
The social networking that went on in those days is unclear to me. She somehow got word that the man to whom she had been promised was on his way to find her, claim her, and take her back to the Ukraine. One story my momma told me illustrates the terror a new land must hold for new immigrants. After being in her new land for a few months, Marie became lost in New York City. She spoke no English. In the country she had fled, authorities were always to be feared, and she did not know what reaction there would be in America to a woman fleeing the man who owned her. She avoided the police. She confronted the confusion of the streets alone.
Her stay in New York was one of watchful waiting, looking for some sign of the man who was searching for his escaped bride. Eventually, she packed up and continued her odyssey, journeying up the Hudson River and then westward, finally settling between Syracuse and Rochester. She met a man, fell in love, and married.
I never knew my grandfather. He died when my mother was a young child, I have the impression her memories of him were vague. He served in the Polish army at some point. My mother was the youngest of several sisters born of that marriage. It was an insular existence. My mother did not speak English until she was old enough to go to school. My grandmother never knew any language than that of her own upbringing. My mother translated.
The arguments for English-only policies would have applied to my grandmother, although people of her origin are not the targets. Anti-immigrant sentiment of today would not have been aimed at her either. Those who argue against citizenship for children born here do not have my mother in mind. But my grandmother’s ethnicity, and that of my mother, was very much an issue in their community when my parents were married. My momma was eventually accepted by his family, but the thin residue of ethnic separateness was always present.
Eastern Europeans, with their strange language, their strange names, and their stranger Catholic religion, were not an easy fit in the community of my birth. Nativism has a long tradition in this country, although the targets shift over time. Today, bigotry is directed against those of Latin descent. It is most distinctive, for me, among those who hate illegal immigration because the undocumented cut ahead, not following the rules. When those same enforcers of immigration etiquette also push to restrict legal immigration, I suspect the niceties of waiting in line are not their real concern.
Immigrants have ALWAYS had the same pattern: The adult immigrants, always speak their original language, their kids are bilingual, their grandkids speak only English, and their great-grandkids take language lessons in the original language.
I swears, it’s like no one ever noticed this until automated phones sytems cam into being with ‘Press 1 for English’, and the bigots (the worst of which are the third generation, I swear) act like this is the most horrible of impositions.