Gertel's Bakery (JEWISH PASTRIES) 53 HESTER STREET; (212) 982-3250
Katz's Delicatessen (PASTRAMI PARADISE SINCE 1888) 205 EAST HOUSTON STREET; (212) 254-2246; www.katzdeli.com
Schiller's (STYLISH, POPULAR BAR WITH GOOD FOOD) 131 RIVINGTON STREET; (212) 260-4555; www.schillersny.com
Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery (ICONIC KNISHES IN MANY FLAVORS) 137 EAST HOUSTON STREET; (212) 477-2858; KNISHERY.COM
Epilogue
As Goes New York
IN DECEMBER 2006, NEWSPAPERS AND TELEVISION STATIONS HUMMED with stories about a sweeping raid by immigration agents at six meat-packing plants across the West and Midwest. Hundreds of illegal immigrants had been seized, and many were to face either jail or deportation. What particularly struck me about the raid was where it was taking place. These plants were not in such traditional immigrant hubs as Chicago or Miami, but in the towns of Hyrum, Utah; Grand Island, Nebraska; Marshalltown, Iowa; Greeley, Colorado; Cactus, Texas; and Worthington, Minnesota. More than a few Americans reading those stories must have wondered, What were thousands of Latino immigrants doing living in the heartland?
The truth is that immigrants, legal and illegal, are firmly anchored in the heartland and indeed are now woven throughout this country. Not only are there 3,000 Somalians in once-lily-white Lewisboro, Maine, but there are lots of Laotian Hmong in St. Paul, Minnesota; Dominicans in Hazelton, Pennsylvania; Mexicans in Billings, Montana; and Afghans in Fremont, California. The number of Latinos in the Deep South—once defined solely by the uneasy encounter of blacks and whites—has quadrupled from 1990 to 2005 to 2.4 million, as Mexicans and other Hispanics pour in to take low-wage agricultural and factory jobs. A sleepy place such as Atkinson County, Georgia, within twenty miles of the Florida border, is now one-third Hispanic. We learned emphatically in December 2006 that Dearborn, Michigan, has the largest community of Iraqis outside Iraq when the makeshift souk along Warren Avenue exploded in celebration at the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Many of those honking horns and waving flags had lost fathers and brothers to the Saddam regime.
Statistics confirm this historic transformation in the United States. In just the five years between 2000 ands 2005, Indiana's immigrant population grew 34 percent, South Dakota's 44 percent, and New Hampshire's 26 percent. Los Angeles County has 1.2 million Asians, the largest concentration in any American county. According to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, immigrants in this country under questionable circumstances now constitute a major share of low-wage occupations: 24 percent of all farm workers, 17 percent of cleaning workers, 14 percent of construction workers, and 27 percent of butchers and other food processors.
So the story of polyglot, multicultural New York, with all its attendant tensions and cultural curiosities, is fast becoming the story of all of America. Sometime toward the end of 2006, the 300 millionth American was either born or entered the United States to live, and of those 300 million, 37 million were born in another country. As a result, the culture and cadences of cities and towns across the country are being irrevocably reshaped. The nation has so many Latinos that the Irish-dominated Roman Catholic Church of Leo McCarey's classic film Going My Way is now 39 percent Hispanic. Many northeastern urban police forces are no longer predominantly Irish and Italian and in not too many decades will no longer even be predominantly white. At the end of December 2006, New York City's police department graduated its latest class at Madison Square Garden, and among the 1,359 cadets were 284 immigrants who hailed from 58 nations including Albania, Barbados, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Romania.
In late 2006, I visited the University of Texas at Austin to write a column for The New York Times on the university's plan to modify its nine-year-old effort to diversify the flagship campus, which assures freshman spots to students ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating classes. I was not surprised that the formula had increased the proportions of blacks and Mexicans. This was Texas, after all, whose history was formed in the cauldron of Anglo-Mexican conflict. But I was astonished to learn that Asians now made up 14.4 percent of a campus where 81 percent of the students hail from within the state. While Asians do constitute a disproportionate share of top-flight American campuses, who knew there were so many Asians living in Texas? But there are. Houston alone has 32,261 Vietnamese, 22,462 Chinese, and 20,149 Indians. Texas' Asians come to the nation's attention when there are ethnic dustups, such as the effort to exclude Vietnamese-owned shrimp boats from the Gulf Coast industry in the 1970s and 1980s. But Texans will also remind you that an Indian-born woman from Houston, Kalpana Chawla, was one of seven crew members aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia when it exploded on reentry in 2003.
Around the same period, I visited Hamilton College, a few miles outside Utica, New York, for a talk about how immigration is altering America, and I soon discovered that I'd landed in a hotbed of immigrants. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Utica was a down-at-the-heels milltown, pocked with empty factories and vacant wood-frame houses and losing its population. But in the mid-1970s a group of clergy conspired to fill the hollow spaces with refugees. It seemed that every time there was news of war or disaster, the exiles were invited to Utica. Those refugees have helped stabilize Utica's population at 60,000. One in six Uticans is now a refugee—from Bosnia, Vietnam, Cambodia, the former Soviet Union, Somalia, and twenty-five other countries. There are Vietnamese restaurants, Russian Pentecostal churches, and Bosnian mosques, hair salons, nightclubs, and ethnic stores that sell Bosnian meats and chocolate. According to Refugees, the magazine of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, thirty-one languages are spoken in city schools, the local newspaper runs a Bosnian column, and large billboards carry advertisements in Bosnian. The refugees have breathed new life into Utica's industrial base. ConMed, a maker of surgical instruments that is one of the city's largest businesses, employs 1,300 people, and half of them are refugees.
“The town had been hemorrhaging for years,” Mayor Tim Julian told the magazine. “The arrival of so many refugees has put a tourniquet around the hemorrhaging. They have saved entire neighborhoods which were ready for the wrecking ball.”
Dr. Judith Owens-Manley, Hamilton's associate director of community research and a sparkplug in the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, told me that many Bosnian doctors, scientists, and nurses, fleeing the tumult of war, arrived without the paperwork they needed to resume their occupations and so swept floors and emptied bedpans until they could requalify. Yet with cash in their pockets, they purchased abandoned two-family houses and fixed them up, though, she added mischievously, they have sometimes avoided sprucing up façades so as not to alert the tax assessor. There have been fistfights with nonBosnian students in the schools, and some conservative Uticans have lamented how their city has been altered. But those seem to be aberrations. “For the most part people have welcomed refugees,” she said. “They like the mix of cultures and think of Utica as an immigrant community.”
There have been strains almost everywhere large numbers of immigrants settle because old-timers are unhinged by the changes in the rhythms and contours of their cities and towns. The public learned about the Hmong in Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2004 because of a notorious incident in which a Hmong hunter, crossing over private property, was confronted by a group of angry white hunters and shot six of them to death, a crime for which he was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison. There are 100,000 Hmong in both states and they have brought their traditional love of game hunting to the north woods. White hunters say Hmong do not respect private property, while the Hmong say they are often the target of racial slurs.
Most clashes between immigrants and longer-settled Americans stem from the fact that illegal immigrants are taking jobs Americans won't do at low wages or are using schools and hospitals that taxpayers finance. Even such small cities as Altoona, Pennsylvania, with just a tiny fraction of immigrants, have passed ordinances threatening the licenses of employers who hire illegal immi
grants and the licenses of landlords who rent to them. My colleague Rachel Swarns reported on the reactions of whites and blacks in Atkinson, Georgia, to the growing presence of Mexicans in the schools and on the one-stoplight main street, where a Mexican video store has cropped up and the supermarket's aisles are now stacked with tortillas and cilantro.
“The way Mexicans have children, they're going to have a majority here soon,” Elton Corbitt, a white businessman whose family has lived in Atkinson since the 1800s, told Swarns. “I have children and grand-children. They're going to become second-class citizens. And we're going to be a third world country if we don't do something about it.”
In Longmont, Colorado, a town thirty-five miles north of Denver where 20 percent of the 80,000 residents are Latino, the city council decided to hire an “immigrant integration coordinator,” and that set off a raucous debate. Some whites wondered whether the town should stanch rather than encourage the flow of immigrants. Conversely, many Latinos resisted the effort at assimilation implicit in the job's title, worried that it would mean a loss of ethnic identity and culture.
“It's the ones coming here who don't want to fit in, who don't want to live the American dream, that bother me,” Fred Schotte, a retired banker, told my colleague Kirk Johnson. “I feel like someone has come into my house and now I have to accommodate to them.”
A hopeful lesson in how immigrants can integrate rather smoothly into all parts of this country is provided by the saga of Indian motel keepers. The 1991 movie Mississippi Masala alerted Americans to the odd phenomenon of an Indian man owning a motel in a godforsaken corner of the planet. But that phenomenon is no longer odd. Many Americans have by now experienced the sensation of pulling off the highway in the true-blue hinterlands of Wyoming or Iowa for a night's rest at a motel and encountering an Indian man or woman at the check-in desk. During the last three decades, Indian immigrants have quietly acquired more than one-third of America's 53,000 hotels, most of them budget and midpriced franchises. Indians own half the nation's Days Inns, half of its Ramadas, 40 percent of its Holiday Inns. Most of these hotel-owning Indians come from a single state—Gujarat, on the western coast of India, just above Bombay—and are named Patel, which is more common in the region than Smith is in middle America.
Indians came here in large numbers after the loosening of immigration laws in the 1960s, most with advanced degrees in chemistry, engineering, medicine, and other specialties. It happened also to be a time when the hotel business was at a watershed. Interstate highways were spreading like tendrils across the country and travelers were bypassing tumbledown roadside motels run by retired couples and checking in at sleek new franchise operations popping up at the exits. Many of these franchise motels were put up for sale because of the gas and savings-and-loan crises of the 1970s and 1980s, and some could be picked up cheaply enough for immigrants to afford. The Indians' knowledge of English, professional credentials, and a traditional commercial savvy gave them a leg up on other newcomers. They also had a network of relatives and friends to help out and a national ethic of hospitality. “There's actually a phrase in Hindi: ‘A guest is like God,’” Dr. Chekitan Dev, a professor at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, told me.
The guest may be divine, but ministering to that guest is not. Running a hotel is a twenty-four-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year business, often operated in circumstances that foster loneliness and dislocation. Many Indians were tough enough to make those sacrifices. “If you want to improve your lot in life, educate your children, then maybe you have to go to Minnesota where no one else will go,” Hitesh Bhakta, chairman of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, said.
Like the Filipino trailblazers in nursing, Indians are seeing their children branch away from the family occupation, but the Indian off-spring are taking hotel-keeping to a more sophisticated level. The children don't want to spend their days changing sheets and checking in tired guests, so they are enrolling in hotel schools such as those at Cornell, New York University, and San Diego State to study how to manage chains of hotels, work in corporate headquarters, and acquire more up-scale properties, Marriotts and Hiltons, for instance. Call them the Cornell hotel Patels. Their path is no different from that taken by the children of Jewish cutters and sewing-machine operators who became dress designers and manufacturers or the children of Italian stonema-sons who became construction contractors.
Vinu Patel realized his immigrant dreams by working 100 hours a week to turn a profit on a struggling motel. Morning and night, Patel, a Gujarati, manned the front desk and did repairs on a sixty-room EconoLodge in Bordentown, New Jersey, while his wife, Indu, son, Montu, and daughter, Payal, hauled suitcases, made up beds, and vacuumed rooms. The work paid off. At age fifty-seven, Patel owns not only the EconoLodge but, with other relatives, four more hotels. Yet, he wanted something better for his children. He wanted them to work with bankers rather than as bellhops and helped put Montu and Payal through the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management at New York University.
“What we did, we did the practical way,” Vinu Patel said of his own generation. “But with their educational background, the children can work for corporate America. They understand what corporations are looking for in the hotel industry—how to market and acquire the product better than we do.” Montu received his master's degree in 2003 and began advising his father on acquiring hotels while working as director of sales for American Express' travel agency network. Payal, who attended NYU's undergraduate hospitality program, took a job evaluating hotels and other real estate for Standard & Poor's.
Despite all the changes this book has recorded in a single city, the bigger American story today may be how many foreigners are living not in the city but in the suburbs. Since 2000, nearly as many immigrants have settled in New York's suburbs as in the city itself. They now constitute 22 percent of the suburban population in the New York area, double that of 1970. The share of Asians has grown tenfold, according to my colleague Sam Roberts, an expert in census data. In Palisades Park, New Jersey, Koreans now constitute a majority of the 17,000 residents and own 90 percent of the shops along the main street, and they are clamoring for more Korean police officers and political leaders. Outside San Francisco, Fremont, California, which in the 1950s was carved out of five towns that wanted to incorporate into a suburban-like city, has a population of 210,387, but of those, 95,894, or 46 percent, were born abroad—including Afghans, Indian Sikhs, and Taiwanese. One of Fremont's constituent towns, Centerville, is known as Little Kabul, with a boulevard packed with Afghan stores and such restaurants as Salang Pass. The best-selling novel The Kite Runner was partly set in Centerville. Another district in Fremont, Mission San Jose, is peopled by affluent Taiwanese, Japanese, and other Asians, including, when she was younger, Olympic skater Kristi Yamaguchi, whose grandparents were interned with other Japanese Americans during World War II and who graduated from Mission San Jose High School.
If Taiwanese, Korean, Indian, and Afghan immigrants who came here during the past forty years are staking out firm plots of earth in the nation's suburbs, then they have indeed become full-fledged Americans. They are living the same American dream of a house and a backyard that generations of Italians, Eastern European Jews, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians pursued. Count in the immigrants in the nation's prairies and mountainsides, and it seems increasingly obvious that the world is not only in a single city; the world is in the entire country. New specimens from far-flung specks on the globe are settling in once-immutable corners of the nation, transforming them, yes, but, for the most part, realizing the classic immigrant dreams of solid anchors in quiet communities where they can freely choose to cleave to their heritage or strip it off. They are merging—conspicuously or inconspicuously—into the mighty American river. It is a very different river from the one that flowed a half century ago, fed by streams and rivulets we knew little about only yesterday, but still it rolls mightily and charmingly alo
ng.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE generous indulgence of The New York Times, which let me spend three years running around New York's most exotic and beguiling neighborhoods, exploring, delving, schmoozing, and noshing to my heart's content. They let me be a roving foreign correspondent, but I got to sleep at home. To the editors who made that possible: Jon Landman for lapping up the notion of a neighborhoods beat when I broached it, and Susan Edgerley and Joe Sexton for wholeheartedly letting me persist when they took over as Metro editors. Jill Abramson was a welcome cheerleader. Most of all, though, I am grateful to Anne Cronin, whose passion for vivid stories encouraged me to come up with one colorful idea after another, who wielded her editor's rudder with intelligence and discretion, and who dressed articles up with glorious special effects—makeup, photographs, and maps. Her deputies—Bill Goss, Monica Drake, and Diego Ribadeneira—always edited sensitively.
At The Times, a special thanks goes to Alex Ward, who was gracious in letting me craft a book out of stories that first appeared in sparser, more reportorial form in The Times. I'd like to thank Charlie Bagli and Fernanda Santos, who worked on two of those original articles with me. Other colleagues, including Sam Roberts, Nina Bernstein, Kirk Johnson, David Gonzalez, Rachel Swarns, Sewell Chan, Sabrina Tavernise, Andrea Elliott, Jennifer 8. Lee, Yilu Zhao, Lee Romero, and Angel Franco, have written about or photographed immigrants, neighborhoods, and shifts in population, and their reporting enlightened mine. Jim Perry kindly helped with the map. It would be neglectful to fail to pay tribute to two of The Times' departed—Dick Shepard and Murray Schumach—who taught me about the zest you can feel writing about the city's charming ethnic groups and its hidden corners. Finally, a special credit goes to the unparalleled Arthur Gelb, a mentor to many, who offered me a tall shot of enthusiasm as well as some shrewd suggestions about the book's direction and the title.
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