Immigration , Ethnicity , Pluralism and Insularity

The national myth expressed in Emma Lazarus’s poem “The Great Colossus”— “Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”—speaks to America’s historic symbolic role as a receiver of oppressed peoples. In part, the myth reflects reality. Compared with living through the Irish potato famine or the Cossacks’ pogroms in Russia, compared with hopeless poverty in rural Italy or ethnic re- pression in Poland, America appeared as a beacon of economic opportunity and peaceably coexisting religions. By contemporary standards, though, one constant theme of American religious history is the distrust and hatred expressed toward one group of immigrants after another: from Benjamin Franklin’s distaste for “boorish” Germans in the eighteenth century, to the relentless flow of anti-Catholic propaganda in the nineteenth century, to Father Charles Coughlin’s anti-Semitic screeds on the radio in the 1930s, to the attacks on Indian Sikhs mistaken as Middle Eastern Muslims in the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001. America’s embrace of migrants has always been less than total. Frequently it has engendered ethno-racial nativist political movements in defense of the country’s supposed Anglo-Saxon heritage. From the Know-Nothings of the 1850s to the self- styled Minutemen of the early twenty-first century, America’s immigrant heritage has consistently been confronted by a grassroots nativist heritage that perceives a threat to American Protestantism and white democracy.
Taken as a whole, immigration to the United States has produced an incredibly open, dynamic, and diverse society, a pluralist wonderland that certainly com- pares favorably with the difficulties that European societies have experienced in assimilating much smaller numbers of immigrants. Looked at with a more focused lens, however, American immigration has produced intensely bonded and bound- ed ethnic communities that have worked precisely because they were not dynamic and diverse, but insular and self-protecting, as Roberto R. Treviño points out in “Religion, Ethnicity, and the Immigrant Experience.” Furthermore, European immigrants have assimilated into, and contributed to, American notions and prac- tices of “whiteness.” Scholars have disagreed on whether particular immigrant groups were “whitened” over time—described by scholarly books with titles such as How the Irish Became White (2009)—or were, as one scholar has described Italians coming to Chicago, “white on arrival.” No matter how one times the process by which European immigrants achieved the status of full-fledged “white persons,” the key is that they were not black, or illegal, or permanently foreign; that is to say, they were not of African, Mexican, or Asian descent. As the historian Mae Ngai has expressed it While Euro-Americans’ ethnic and racial identities became uncoupled, non-Europe- an immigrants—among them Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, and Filipinos—acquired ethnic and racial identities that were one and the same. the racialization of the latter groups’ national origins rendered them unalterably foreign and unassimilable to the nation. the Immigration Act of 1924 thus established legal foundations for social processes that would unfold over the next several decades, processes that historians have called, for European immigrants, “becoming American” (or, more precisely, white Americans), while casting Mexicans as illegal aliens and foredooming Asians to permanent foreignness. (“the Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86 [1999]: 70)

The United States was a white republic in more than just a cultural sense; it was a white republic in a strict legal sense as well. According to the Naturalization Act of 1790, citizen status was to be confined to white migrants. Complications arose in the nineteenth century with the advent of the huge Irish Catholic migration. The immigrants were indisputably phenotypically white, but they were Catholic as well, accused of being in a state of slavish subservience to Rome. Could Catholics be Americans? They were Americans, in ever-increasing percentages, but this did not stop the ideological ground war from raging. Protestant intellectuals and propagandists inveighed against “papism” and trumpeted the historic connection between Protestantism (in which one read the Bible for one’s self) and democracy—a connection that also had racial roots when connected to the glorious heritage of Anglo-Saxons from the Magna Carta forward. Catholics, by contrast, were purportedly inherently monarchist; their very religious belief structure abrogated against democratic ideals. Besides this kind of intellectual connection of Protestantism to American democracy, both ideologically and racially, a generation of imaginative writers produced novels, imaginary “memoirs,” tracts, pamphlets, and newspaper accounts of the unspeakable practices of priests, nuns, and their duped parishioners. Most famous of all was Maria Monk’s grotesquely lurid Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk; or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836). This ludicrous fantasy, masquerading as a memoir, was allegedly produced by an escaped nun. It unforgettably set in place the classic formulation: priests secretly visited convents and impregnated nuns, whose children were then consumed in gruesome Catholic parodies of the rite of Eucharist. Such antebellum-era Protestant porn rose above its fraudulent origins precisely because it encapsulated the darkest fears of the still-present, if already declining, Protestant majority. More serious than such Protestant fantasy fulfillment were anti-Irish and anti-Catholic riots that rocked urban life in the antebellum North.
The end result, as was often the case with numerous ethnic-immigrant groups in American history, was to create ethnic and communal-national bonds even when those might have been weak, or even nonexistent, in the past. The consistent pattern was that European immigrants who identified by region or some sub-ethnicity increasingly assumed nationalized identities within the context of a diversifying America. “Italians” often became “Italians” in America, where an appellation such as “Bolognese” or “Milanese” would not have registered, and where workers of Italian ancestry banded together in search of economic opportunity and to build institutions (including churches) that could serve their community. The same held true for Germans in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, who recognized their “Germanness” far more in America than in their more provincialized home identities. The same held true even for involuntary immigrants, for that matter, as Africans of diverse backgrounds learned to recognize themselves as “Africans” rather than as hailing from some particularized locale or ethnicity. The same, arguably, is under way today with Middle Eastern migrants, who can more easily transcend intra-Islamic divisions (Sunni, Shi’ite, Sufi, and others) when faced with the reality of attacks on mosques in American cities, or with the humiliations of trying to make it through airport security or answer periodic evangelical outbursts at their “evil religion,” as detailed further in Jane Smith’s “Islam in America.”
The same immigration patterns that have internationalized the populace of the United States, then, have also fostered ties of communal ethnic identification. Nowhere is this more the case than with religious expressions. Through much of American history, believers from diverse religious traditions and of various ethnic and national backgrounds defined their religious expressions within, or against, or outside the implicit white Protestant norm. Sometimes this has meant hiding or denying particular religious practices or belief in order to protect them, a response familiar to Native Americans. This has also been a common practice of African Americans, whose religious expressions elicited fear among white slaveowners and others who sometimes perceived their elusively subversive messages.
At other times, this communal ethno-religion has meant cultivating a religious form drawn from the homeland but given a special place of prominence that had never been the case originally. One may look, for example, at the celebration of the Madonna of 115th Street, which drew on Italian roots but took on a meaning for New York Italians that it could never possibly have in a more provincial, less alien setting. The adoration of Our Lady of Charity in Miami, the Virgin who tends to the suffering of Cuban Catholic exiles from Castro’s regime, speaks to how religious practices become tied to political struggles. In this case, Cubans looked to “our lady of the exile” for a spiritual home even as they created a network of successful institutions in the United States. One also thinks of Old World religious systems, such as Buddhism, whose practitioners sometimes devoted themselves to the oldest and most venerated of Buddhist schools, and others who created new Buddhist organizations unknown before American immigration. The advent of Reform Judaism in the United States also illustrates the adaptation of immigrant religious mores to American realities. Strict Sabbath laws had to accommodate urban lives in an industrial society.
Immigration is at once the source of American religious diversity, dynamism, and insularity. Further, because the relation between ethnic identity and religious practice is often so close, and because religions tie people to regional and national self-identities, immigrant religions have reinforced communal bonds, even as they have expanded ideas of what it means to be American.