Immigration and Assimilation
Crowd of European immigrants on deck of the S.S. Patricia. Photographer Edwin Levick, “Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner”. United States, ca. 1906.
Since forever, people have moved around, following rivers, seasons, dreams, and survival. Patterns of migration, immigration, or emigration arise from the need to flee oppression, to seek better land to hunt, forage or cultivate, to find opportunity, and from the deeply human desire to connect with others.
If your ancestors did not emerge on Turtle Island and if they were not forced in shackles across the Middle Passage to be enslaved in the “New World,” then they were immigrants who journeyed here by choice or – more commonly – because they were fleeing poverty, famine, persecution, or war.
In a time when the violence of white supremacy has reached horrific extremes, with ICE waging a terror campaign throughout our communities, forcibly disappearing people to detention centers, foreign prisons or deporting them to countries they fled to seek asylum, it has never been more important to remember that all of us who are Euro-descendants are the children of immigrants.
However your ancestors arrived in the U.S., there is a story. Often, that story is erased, distorted, or forgotten as a way to escape persecution or bury trauma. Names were changed to rewrite a complex past and assimilate into a white-washed “American” future.
The loss and trauma our ancestors endured in being severed from family, culture and place finds its expression as surely as an underground river finds its way to the surface. Unresolved trauma can manifest in scapegoating newer immigrants, poisoning the body politic and fueling the fires of fascism.
Recovering immigration stories – piecing together the facts through documents and oral histories, comprehending and honoring the journeys of our forebears, even speculating on what may have happened when the facts are buried or long gone – is critical to challenging white supremacy and to reckoning, in a healthy and healing way, with the ancestral ground on which we tread.
As the musician, poet, scholar and organizer Lyla June Johnston says, “Our task is to shake the amnesia.”
This page welcomes stories of immigration and assimilation, solidarity with immigrant rights, and explorations of the links between ancestral immigration and present-day struggles against xenophobia.
MELTING POT CEREMONY In 1914, Ford Motor Company established the Ford English School, where immigrant employees were required to attend classes to learn English and American civics. Graduation culminated in a “Melting Pot Ceremony”. During this ritual, students would wear clothing representing their native countries and, symbolizing their transformation, would enter a large prop “melting pot”. They would then emerge from the other side dressed in homogenous “American” suits and hats, waving American flags.
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My essay traces how practices of care, solidarity, and political engagement moved through my family—from Sicilian immigrant traditions, through my mother’s interracial organizing and civil-rights work, and into my own political life. By placing those inheritances inside the history of racial formation in the United States, the piece asks what we carry forward, what we interrogate, and how inherited ways of belonging can be transformed into deeper anti-racist solidarity in the present.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood how traumatic immigration had been for my nonna, my grandmother. I also witnessed how that trauma got passed down through the generations as well as the process of “becoming white.” My mother once told me that each member of our family made a choice – to embrace whiteness, forgetting all the prejudice they had endured as Sicilians or to remember what they had gone through and empathize with Black people and other people of color facing racism. She chose the latter path and instilled that in me.
Framed within the context of my own journey toward healing my relationship to whiteness, this piece briefly explores the historical construction of “whiteness” as a racialized category, the experience of European ancestors (pre and post immigration), the costs of assimilation, and the necessity of ancestral healing to the work of racial justice and social transformation.
Reconnecting with my ancestors has been an essential part of my learning and unlearning. When I acknowledge what my ancestors lost in order to become white, I begin to understand the deep roots of white supremacy in myself. This piece is an excerpt from a larger work that imagines my great-grandmother Katherine's life in early twentieth-century Minneapolis.
Blood Uncles speaks to the tragedy of recent immigrants becoming anti-immigration, and the way that those of us who see it happen in our families should be careful of the language we use, how we approach looking back to where we came from, and the rights we might have or assume we have as immigrants there ourselves.
I discuss the reclamation of my Italian heritage through shamanic practice, language study and travels to Italy. This essay contrasts my early life in an Italian-American family with my rejection of my culture due to racism I experienced in the 70s. I explore the healing that has taken place as I engaged in ancestral lineage healing, expanding my understanding of what it means to be an Italian-American.
QUESTIONS to CONSIDER
Who were the ancestors who came, why did they migrate, and how have the generations since been shaped by their journey?
What was gained and what was lost?
How does historic memory strengthen the capacity to fight xenophobia?
