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. Dec. 10. Obtained from Library of Congress.
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 the 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.
Content will be featured here in Summer/Fall 2026.
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 is your family’s story of immigration? What was gained and what was lost?
How does historic memory strengthen the capacity to fight xenophobia?
