It is not strange that in most American communities there is no habit
of community hospitality. Communities are in themselves transitory
and fluid. Many of the native born have as yet become only partially
adjusted to their physical and social environment. At least the
childhood of most of our older generation was spent under the
influence of those who had either migrated or immigrated. "_Nous
marchons tous._" We are all "pilgrims and strangers." Some have come
sooner, and some have come later, and except for the colored people
and those in territory acquired in 1848 and in 1898, all have a common
memory of having come deliberately either _from_ something worse or
_to_ something better. All have come from where they were into what
was a far country.
While the earlier arrivals are making their own adjustments, there are
knocking at their gates strangers from a more distant country speaking
a foreign tongue, accustomed to totally different ways of living and
working. Their reception, however, need not be an impossible task. On
their arrival they are formally admitted, and information as to their
origin and destination must be supplied. Methods could be devised for
receiving them in such a way as to make them feel at ease, and for
interpreting to them the changed surroundings in which they must find
a home and a job in the shortest possible time.
If discomfort and confusion were the only distress into which the
strange group fell, the situation might be only humiliating to our
generous and hospitable spirit and could be easily remedied. But the
consequences of failure to exercise hospitality at the beginning
endure in lack of understanding on the part of both groups. The
immigrant fails to find natural and normal ways of sharing in the life
of the community, and becomes skeptical as to the sincerity of
perfectly well-meaning, but uninformed, professions on the part of the
older residents. Spiritual barriers as definite, if not as easily
perceived, as the geographical boundaries of the "colonies" formed in
the different sections of our cities, develop.
This is often true in connection with the foreign-born men and
tragically more true of the women. One Italian woman in Herrin,
Illinois, for example, who had lived nineteen years in this country,
told an investigator for this study that she had never received an
American into her home as a guest, because no American had ever come
in that spirit. A Russian woman had lived in Chicago for nine years
and had, so far as she knew, not become acquainted with any Americans.
Several instances were found in which efforts have been put forward to
secure the united effort of the whole community, and yet large groups
of immigrants have remained substantially unaware of these efforts and
were entirely untouched by them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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