1 gen 1892 anni - New York's ellis Islan opens

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Explosive population growth made cities a world of new arrivals, including many young women and men arriving from the countryside. Traditionally, rural daughters had provided essential labor for spinning and weaving cloth, but industrialization relocated those tasks from the household to the factory. Finding themselves without a useful household role, many farm daughters sought paid employment. In an age of declining rural prosperity, many sons also left the farm and — like immigrants arriving from other countries — set aside part of their pay to help the folks at home. Explaining why she moved to Chicago, an African American woman from Louisiana declared, “A child with any respect about herself or hisself wouldn’t like to see their mother and father work so hard and earn nothing. I feel it my duty to help.”

America’s cities also became homes for millions of overseas immigrants. Most numerous in Boston were the Irish; in Minneapolis, Swedes; in other northern cities, Germans. Arriving in a great metropolis, immigrants confronted many difficulties. One Polish man, who had lost the address of his American cousins, felt utterly alone after disembarking at New York’s main immigration facility, Ellis Island, which opened in 1892. Then he heard a kindly voice in Polish, offering to help. “From sheer joy,” he recalled, “tears welled up in my eyes to hear my native tongue.” Such experiences suggest why immigrants stuck together, relying on relatives and friends to get oriented and find jobs. A high degree of ethnic clustering resulted, even within a single factory. At the Jones and Laughlin steelworks in Pittsburgh, for example, the carpentry shop was German, the hammer shop Polish, and the blooming mill Serbian. “My people … stick together,” observed a son of Ukrainian immigrants. But he added, “We who are born in this country … feel this country is our home.”
Patterns of settlement varied by ethnic group. Many Italians, recruited by padroni, or labor bosses, found work in northeastern and Mid-Atlantic cities. Their urban concentration was especially marked after the 1880s, as more and more laborers arrived from southern Italy. The attraction of America was obvious to one young man, who had grown up in a poor southern Italian farm family. “I had never gotten any wages of any kind before,” he reported after settling with his uncle in New Jersey. “The work here was just as hard as that on the farm; but I didn’t mind it much because I would receive what seemed to me like a lot.” Amadeo Peter Giannini, who started off as a produce merchant in San Francisco, soon turned to banking. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, his Banca d’Italia was the first financial institution to reopen in the Bay area. Expanding steadily across the West, it eventually became Bank of America.

mutual benefit societies: An organization through which members of an ethnic immigrant group or other community, usually those from a particular province or town, pooled their funds to aid one another in case of emergency need. The societies functioned as fraternal clubs that collected dues from members in order to pay support in case of death or disability.

Like Giannini’s bank, institutions of many kinds sprang up to serve ethnic urban communities. Throughout America, Italian speakers avidly read the newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano; Jews read the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward; Bohemians gathered in singing societies. By 1903, Italians in Chicago had sixty-six mutual benefit societies, most composed of people from a particular province or town. These societies collected dues from members and paid support in case of death or disability on the job. Mutual benefit societies also functioned as fraternal clubs. “We are strangers in a strange country,” explained one member of a Chinese tong, or mutual benefit society, in Chicago. “We must have an organization (tong) to control our country fellows and develop our friendship.”
Sharply defined ethnic neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Chinatown, Italian North Beach, and Jewish Hayes Valley grew up in every major city, driven by both discrimination and immigrants’ desire to stick together (Map 18.1). In addition to patterns of ethnic and racial segregation, residential districts in almost all industrial cities divided along lines of economic class. Around Los Angeles’s central plaza, Mexican neighborhoods diversified, incorporating Italians and Jews. Later, as the plaza became a site for business and tourism, immigrants were pushed into working-class neighborhoods like Belvedere and Boyle Heights, which sprang up to the east. Though ethnically diverse, East Los Angeles was resolutely working class; middle-class white neighborhoods grew up predominantly in West Los Angeles.

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