At which point did America go from a “Gangs of New York” reality of ethnic enclaves that kept to themselves to what we have now?

20 comments

1. You obviously ain’t been to some parts of New York.
   It still exists to a degree.

2. Ethnic enclaves still very much exist, and they were never kept to themselves as much as you’re implying (made explicitly clear in the Gangs of New York book.)

3. We still haven’t. The real difference is that the ethnicities that formed enclaves in the time period Gangs of New York takes place have become generally accepted. No one really cares if your ancestors were Irish or Italian anymore and the decendents of those immigrants are just viewed as just any other American. Now we have enclaves from South American and Asian nations for all the exact same reasons we had back then.

4. This might be a better question for r/AskHistorians for a real technical answer. My impression is that those enclaves tend to die out within a generation or two from when there was last a big wave of immigrants coming in from the “old country.” So the big wave of European immigrants coming through Ellis Island starts to dry up in the early decades of the 20th century and their kids and grandkids keep on wearing the badge of pride of being “Italian“ or “Irish” or whatever into the middle decades of the century but pretty quickly after that people are too assimilated to care.

   Of course there are still strong immigrant enclaves today – Chinatowns, Little Havanas, etc.

5. I didn’t know that reality ended.

6. Yeah at least in NJ ethnic enclaves didn’t go away, both with more recent immigrant communities and the descendants of older waves of immigration. Some of that is because of people moving into communities with shared heritage other times it’s a legacy of redlining but it’s absolutely still there.

   For anyone familiar with the area I had heard recently Edison has one of the largest Afghani communities in the country but wanted to see if anyone else knew anything about it.

7. We still have ethnic enclaves now.

   Especially in the New York / New Jersey area.

8. Chicago is the most segregated city in the country, IIRC.

9. What you’re asking is basically for us to recap the history of the US from the Civil War period, through Reconstruction, to approximately…. *now.*

   It wasn’t just one process. Irish-Americans were basically considered subhuman at the point the movie (and nonfiction book) was set, and they didn’t form ethnic enclaves and “kept to themselves” because they just liked each other better than non-Irish. You got similar things with a lot of ethnicities (The first Klan chapter in Maine was established, not to go after African-Americans, but Quebecquois immigrants, for example). There are whole books about how the process of “becoming white” happened- basically, filling out institutions, the role of parochial schooling and so on.

   The World Wars played a huge part in the smoothing of ethnic discrimination, especially As the US government was asking German and Italian immigrants to go fight in Germany and Italy. (There was- among other things- a play at the time of WW1, “The Hyphen”, trying to elicit feelings of “just” being American, from formerly very nativist quarters.)

   This was a slow process. As late as the 90s, my father got told “I don’t mind you people, you fought in World War 2 like everyone else”. Some people *still* go on about ‘old stock Americans’ because it’s their “culture’n’heritage”. But I digress.

   Anyway, long process, some really not-sterling moments.

   The industries thing is, I’m afraid, another book.

10. Flight to suburbia after WWII.

11. >Also, what industries/sectors of society are still very much ethnicity dominated?

    The New York City Police Department is still very very Irish.

12. This answer is only about European Americans.

    “White ethnics” as a prominent cultural and electoral bloc lasted well into the 60s, maybe even until as late as the 90s in a few select Northeastern or Midwestern cities. But class and education level are more prominent signifiers these days.

    I don’t believe there are all that many white people who still organize their lives strongly on ethnic lines (going to the Polish church, speaking a smattering of Polish phrases, playing for the Polish rec baseball team, using the Polish word of mouth to land a job, etc.) I’m sure there’s a few out there though.

    This is a question for r/askhistorians. But my intuition is basically the 70/80s.

13. The white ethnic enclaves started assimilating rapidly after WW2

    There are newer ethnic enclaves but with the internet, higher car ownership and globalization you will see often the newer enclaves are actually shops and services but the people live all over. It’s not quite the same where everybody was forced into a rundown neighborhood. Immigrants are very likely to live in a suburban house and have access to a car

14. Generally speaking, waves of immigrants come into the country, and over a few generations completely integrate, but it really depends on a lot of factors. The most important is, honestly, if you’re white. The earlier the wave, the more time you got into integrate. Preference was always given more to Protestants (like Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Dutchmen) and English speakers from the British Isles, not to mention skilled workers. The second big wave of European immigration, after predominantly from Northern and Western Europe, came from Eastern and Southern Europe. Poles, Greeks, Italians, Jews, who all weren’t Protestant and didn’t speak English, found it tougher to integrate. Usually, also, the quicker you “integrated”, the faster you left the big cities.

    But I’ve heard that after WWII, Catholics, Jews and Protestants all served together and found that they could bury their differences. The Scotch Irish were a bit special from the get-go, in that they went to the rougher country out west. Plus, New England “Roundhead” stock was different from Virginia “Cavalier” stock, and they spread to all different places – it’s pretty interesting that southern Indiana and Utah, for example, were settled by two different groups.

    For non-whites, we all know that Black people were never given the chance to integrate fully. The Great Migration(s) also greatly changed the dynamic of blacks in Northern cities, and also set them apart from Northern blacks that were already there. Segregation through redlining up north became the norm. That and white flight, and the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt contributed heavily to the segregation we find today in cities like Chicago. Each major northern US city actually has a very different history of black migration. It’s frankly fascinating.

    The Chinese were excluded from the country in 1882, and they came in far fewer numbers until after the Second World War, by which time China became Communist and they couldn’t come into the US even if they wanted to leave. There are many different waves of Chinese immigrants, but the Exclusion Act really stunted the growth. Japanese Americans tended to be small farmers, compared to more urban Chinese-Americans. After the Vietnam War, a wave of people from Southeast Asia came in. Many had a very tough time integrating, especially people from Laos and Cambodia, whose societies were quite different from America, and they suffered, you know, genocidal trauma. It’s been a burden on our country that non-whites haven’t been able to fully integrate the way whites have.

    The 1924 Immigration Act devastated immigration into America, and greatly stunted the growth of our country. With the exception of a large wave of Puerto Ricans coming into the country, we wouldn’t really start being an immigrant friendly nation until I want to say the 80s or 90s.

    I unfortunately know way too little about the Hispanic experience in America.

15. And don’t assume New York is representative of the rest of the U.S. It rarely is.

    I kind of doubt Minnesota ever had a gangs of New York situation.

16. I wouldn’t say it’s over, but that it gradually melts together as immigration waves are melted together generationally. That’s at least the experience I’ve seen growing up in a majority minority city.

    First generation immigrants are generally fairly insular, have language based communication issues, and tend to form enclaves among other immigrants.

    Second generation goes through school here and learns the local culture and makes friends among other groups.

    Third gen only knows the old country culture through their grandparents and maybe some trips, and is fairly integrated.

17. And cue a thousand people screaming that we haven’t….

18. They never went away. If you grew up in NYC you can still make a reasonable assumption of a persons ethnicity based on his neighborhood and maybe a couple of details.

    Its just new ethnic groups come in every decade. Italian/Irish Americans for example area dying breed.

19. I feel like things are even more integrated now than when I was a kid in the 90s, early 00s.

20. Basically America has this cycle were we get waves of immigrants that native people hate but slowly accepted into society because they join in on hating the wave of immigrants that come after them.

    People stopped carring about the Irish when the Italians and Germans came over. Now people are caring less about Hispanics and more about Muslims.

    Few ethnicities are indifferent to this cycle for their unique history with the US society and government like blacks and native Americans being to such examples.