Shirley J. Yee. An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. x + 243 pp. $74.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59213-127-3; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-59213-128-0.

Reviewed by Edward T. O'Donnell (Holy Cross College)
Published on H-SHGAPE (June, 2015)
Commissioned by Julia Irwin (University of South Florida)

Crossing Boundaries, Real and Imagined

New York’s Lower East Side has long occupied a central place in the American historical imagination. Even though immigrants from all over the world have flooded into countless neighborhoods across the United States over the past two hundred years, this section of Manhattan has proven an irresistible subject for journalists, novelists, artists, filmmakers, and scholars of various disciplines seeking to understand and explain immigration. But because of its size and the number of huge ethic enclaves that formed--Little Ireland, Little Germany, Chinatown, the Jewish East Side, and so on--most attempts to depict or study the Lower East Side have focused on smaller slices of the neighborhood. Works such as Stanley Nadel’s Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80 (1990), Moses Rischin’s The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914 (1962), and Peter Kwong’s Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950 (1979) have focused on a single ethic or racial group.[1] Such studies have provided rich insights into each group’s struggles with assimilation, nativism, poverty, poor housing, and intragroup conflicts over things like religion and political ideology. Yet, at the same time they have contributed to the popular perception of ethnic enclaves as places with firm boundaries that set residents apart from native-born Americans and other immigrant groups.

Shirley J. Yee, in her book, An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York, attempts to go beyond these imagined boundaries to explore the many ways in which people of different ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds living in southern Manhattan (her preferred term over Lower East Side) lived, worked, and interacted with each other. Such a project makes a lot of sense when one realizes that ethnic enclaves like Little Italy and Chinatown were never more than mostly Italian and Chinese; significant numbers of people of other ethnic and racial groups always resided there. With this fact as her starting point, Yee proposes to “unearth the history of complex social relations across and within ethnic enclaves isolated from the rest of the modern city” (p. 14).

To a large degree, Yee succeeds in this endeavor. However, the book’s five chapters ultimately never cohere into a unified work that advances her main argument: that from 1880 to 1930 “national and local efforts to reify racial boundaries through Jim Crow segregation, immigration restriction, and urban reform movements often facilitated interracial/interethnic social and economic relations” (p. 4). Specifically, chapters 4 and 5, which focus on efforts by anti-vice organizations and the work of settlement houses and missions, get sidetracked in narrative detail and fail to deliver much that is original or insightful regarding interracial/interethnic relations. 

By contrast, chapters 1-3 provide illuminating insights into how proximity, discriminatory laws and customs, and commercial dependency promoted interaction and occasionally intimacy between people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Yee’s focus in these chapters on the lived experience of interethnic/interracial interaction is not entirely original. Many works have noted, for example, that it was common for African American and Chinese men to marry Irish women.[2] Yee’s contribution is in bringing a new level of detail and complexity to these interethnic/interracial relationships. In chapter 1 her research uncovers many examples of interracial (usually Chinese men and white/Irish women) couples in Chinatown, including the tendency of such couples to live near each other. Yee also draws useful connections between the tenuous lives these people lived at the edges of dominant white racial order and the role of popular culture, in particular sensationalist journalistic accounts of Chinatown as a place of the exotic and taboo.

Chapters 2 and 3 shift the focus to the urban workplace and how it “facilitated and limited the formation of social and economic relations across cultural boundaries” (p. 53). Yee reveals the complex web of commercial relationships and dependencies that marked the lives of most Lower East Side entrepreneurs. Chinese restaurant owners, for example, depended on Irish and Italian food wholesalers for supplies.

One of the more fascinating aspects of these relationships that Yee’s work reveals is how often non-Chinese men voluntarily testified on behalf of Chinese who sought reentry into the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act and anti-Chinese hostility among immigration officials often made it difficult for Chinese men and women to reenter the United States after returning to China. Securing the testimony of Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and on one occasion an African American man, greatly enhanced the chances of gaining readmittance. Yee admits that while economic ties may have played a role in their willingness to testify, the evidence does suggest a level of “cordial social relations and friendship” (p. 68).

Yee also adds to our understanding of the sources of these interactions by linking them to wider legal, cultural, and economic factors at play between 1880 and 1930. For example, she shows how discriminatory laws prevented Chinese immigrants from operating funeral homes and thus led them to rely upon Irish morticians for funerals and burials. “Exclusion,” writes Yee, “… created a system of dependence for essential services” (p. 94). To retain Chinese patronage, however, these Irish morticians had to adapt their services to meet their particular cultural needs and desires.

While one learns many things from Yee’s research and analysis of interethnic/interracial interaction and cooperation, her work only goes so far in determining the precise nature of these relationships. In part, this is due to the nature of social history and the study of everyday people who leave behind precious little in terms of personal papers. But it also stems from Yee’s reliance on exclusively English-language sources. One wonders, for example, what additional insights might be garnered from a close reading of non-English ethnic newspapers that often chronicled in detail the life of ethnic neighborhoods. This observation is not intended as a criticism. Rather, it is meant to suggest that in successfully uncovering the first layer of these interactions, Yee’s work points the way for other scholars to probe more deeply.

Notes

[1]. Other studies of this nature include: Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Lawrence J. Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York's Lower East Side, 1880-1920 (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2007); and Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnicity and Culture in New York's Lower East Side (New York: New York University, 1995).

[2]. See, for example, Graham Hodges, "Desirable Companions and Lovers": Irish and African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830-1870,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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Citation: Edward T. O'Donnell. Review of Yee, Shirley J., An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930. H-SHGAPE, H-Net Reviews. June, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44343

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