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stories.html
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
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<title>New York City 2019: Stories</title>
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Introduction
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<b>Stories</b>
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Places
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Exhibits
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Bibliography
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<section class="section">
<div class="container" id="main">
<h1 class="title">
What narratives are told?
</h1>
<p class="subtitle">
When visiting the sites, I found a range of different narratives about immigration and immigrants being told. Through examining these differing stories, and the processes leading up to their selection for inclusion in the sites’ curatorial offerings and ultimate display to the public, we can see examples of the different ways in which <b>individual and collective memories of immigration are inscribed in physical places</b>.
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<div class="columns">
<p class="column">
In terms of the sheer quantity of information on display, Ellis Island’s National Museum of Immigration <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('audiotour')">comfortably trumped the other sites I visited<span class="popuptext" id="audiotour"><a href="https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/immigration-museum">The audio tour alone has more than 120 hours of contents and 2,000 audio stop segments.</a></span></span>.
The Museum is home to various exhibits, broadly covering <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('peopling')">the period of immigration to America before the Island opened as an immigration processing centre<span class="popuptext" id="peopling">“The Peopling of America”</span></span>, <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('neweras')">the period of immigration to the US after the immigration processing centre closed in 1954<span class="popuptext" id="neweras">“New Eras of Immigration”</span></span>, and the <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('ellisexperience')">‘Ellis Experience’<span class="popuptext" id="ellisexperience">“Peak Immigration Years”, “Through America’s Gate”, “Ellis Island Chronicles”, “Treasures from Home”, “Silent Voices”, “Restoring a Landmark”, and the reconstructed Registry and Dormitory Rooms.</span></span>.
<br>
A common critique of the Museum, which is purportedly a <i>National</i> Museum of Immigration, is its heavy focus on the history of the site itself and the kind of immigration and immigrants that would have arrived in the country through it in its ‘heyday’. In doing this, “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('kellymorton2004')">even though the Museum claims to be an Immigration Museum, its site‐specific, historical focus conveniently elides the brutal conditions facing non‐white immigrants in the US today<span class="popuptext" id="kellymorton2004"><a href="bibliography.html#kellymorton2004">Kelly and Morton, 2004, page 643</a></span></span>”.
<br>
Proponents of this view may see the site (and the immigration narratives it selectively recounts) as a tool of the state (being run by the National Park Service) “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('johnsonpratt2009')">for inscribing nationalist narratives of the past on to the popular imagination<span class="popuptext" id="johnsonpratt2009"><a href="bibliography.html#johnsonpratt2009">Johnson and Pratt, 2009, pages 453-454</a></span></span>” and thus generating a sense of national unity. In this view, the museum is “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('desforgesmaddern2004')">a unique space of memory where the multiplicities of history can be contained by a singular official power<span class="popuptext" id="desforgesmaddern2004"><a href="bibliography.html#desforgesmaddern2004">Desforges and Maddern, 2004, page 440</a></span></span>”. For example, the narrative of the American Dream is readily present in displays in the Museum which seek to show poor, downtrodden immigrants escaping poverty to a land of opportunity, rising through their hard work and determination.
</p>
<p class="column">
<img src='images/IMG_1705.jpeg' width='100%' />
</p>
</div>
<p>
Past researchers have looked at the process and actors involved in the production of narratives at places such as the Museum of Immigration. It has been noted that, contrary to the view of museums being spaces of memory which present a singular, state-ordained national narrative, in reality the narratives present in the Museum are the product of a broad range of actors advancing differing immigration narratives, and that what is on display on Ellis Island “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('desforgesmaddern2004a')">[reflects] the agendas of a variety of social groups<span class="popuptext" id="desforgesmaddern2004a"><a href="bibliography.html#desforgesmaddern2004">Desforges and Maddern, 2004, page 440</a></span></span>”.
For example, while the Reagan administration intended the site to present a patriotic narrative of a nation giving hope and freedom to impoverished and oppressed immigrants, this view was challenged by many members of the NPS and the Historians' Advisory Committee, who acted as academic consultants during the Museum’s production. Although not a homogenous group, many of these individuals “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('desforgesmaddern2004b')">were united in seeing the new museum as a space of resistance<span class="popuptext" id="desforgesmaddern2004b"><a href="bibliography.html#desforgesmaddern2004">Desforges and Maddern, 2004, page 448</a></span></span>”, which “posed a strong challenge to the links between migration and a heroic national identity”.
<br><br>
Also of note is the fact that, as the adage goes, ‘history is written by the victors’. This can be evidenced at Ellis Island, where the oral history accounts, recorded in the mid-1980s upon public request, exhibit a self-selection bias: those who answered the NPS’s request to tell their stories were almost all <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('baur2006')">people who had ‘made it’ in the US following their immigration there<span class="popuptext" id="baur2006"><a href="bibliography.html#baur2006">Baur, 2006, page 140</a></span></span>. This leads to these recordings presenting a selective narrative of immigration, including the voices of those for whom it was broadly speaking a success, and excluding those for whom it was not.
As a space of memory, the museum reproduces memories of immigration and immigrant experiences, but these memories (and the narratives they tell) will differ depending on who controls their reproduction, both in which memories (both individual and collective) are included or excluded, and the ways in which the memories are interpreted in the present.
</p>
<br>
<!-- <p>
Visiting Castle Clinton the day after visiting Ellis Island, the differences between the two sites and the information they provided about their histories were striking.
Ellis Island is designed as a day out, requiring a 30-minute ferry to get there and providing hours’ worth of information within the museum.
Castle Clinton, on the other hand, is located at the southern tip of Manhattan nearby many other attractions, and as such is seen much more as a site that visitors might visit for a shorter duration.
This is reflected not only in the fact that Castle Clinton charges <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('nofees')">no entrance fees<span class="popuptext" id="nofees">Compared to Ellis Island, which <a href="https://www.nps.gov/elis/planyourvisit/fees.htm">costs $19.25 for adults to get to</a>.</span></span>, but also in the information displayed to visitors within.
<br>
We based our visit on information on the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/cacl/planyourvisit/guidedtours.htm">National Park Service website</a>, which advertises free guided tours at 10:00am, 12:00am, 2:00pm, and 3:30pm.
When we arrived, however, there were no obvious signs of these tours.
After inquiring at the <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('ticket')">ticket office<span class="popuptext" id="ticket">(For ferries to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the reason for most people to go into Castle Clinton.)</span></span>, we were directed to the Park Rangers’ office.
There we were initially told there were no tours available, before a senior Ranger came out and gave us a personal 30-minute talk on the site’s history.
Whilst he was very knowledgeable, it was clear that the majority of visitors to the site spent relatively little time there, and few were aware of the site’s former role as an immigration processing centre.
While Ellis Island explicitly focuses on immigration, Castle Clinton’s informational exhibits cover the <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('roles')">wide range of roles the building has played<span class="popuptext" id="roles">The site was an immigration processing centre for only 35 years of its colourful 212-year history</span></span>: any immigration narratives are therefore more site-specific than thematic or comprehensive.
Although 8 million immigrants passed through the site, their experiences and stories are not remembered at Castle Clinton in anything nearing the detail afforded to those who arrived via Ellis Island, marking a clear example of differing levels of remembering when comparing different times, people, and places.
</p>
<br> -->
<p>
In Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial, all immigration narratives are set within and in relation to the narrative(s) of the famine which the Memorial seeks to commemorate.
The Memorial “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('smith2002')">shows one instance and one cause of the immigration that has shaped and continues to shape New York City<span class="popuptext" id="smith2002"><a href="bibliography.html#smith2002">Smith, 2002</a></span></span>”, but does not explicitly focus on the theme of immigration.
The Memorial could also be viewed as a physical manifestation of a collective memory: that of the Famine and consequent emigration from Ireland, that serves as “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('pletnevaveller2012')">a repository of Irish and American memory of the Famine<span class="popuptext" id="pletnevaveller2012"><a href="bibliography.html#pletnevaveller2012">Pletneva Veller, 2012, page 2</a></span></span>”.
Maurice Halbwachs, who popularised the idea of collective memory, observed that the most successful group memories are concretised in “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('halbwachs1992')">a material reality such as a statue, a monument, a place in space<span class="popuptext" id="halbwachs1992"><a href="bibliography.html#halbwachs1992">Halbwachs, 1992, page 204</a></span></span>”: the Hunger Memorial can be viewed as an example of this for the memory of the Great Famine.
</p>
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<div class="columns">
<p class="column">
<img src='images/IMG_2244.jpeg' width='100%' />
</p>
<p class="column">
Like the Irish Hunger Memorial, the Museum at Eldridge Street presents immigration narratives through a largely ethnicity-specific lens. The Museum focuses on the history of those Jewish immigrants who formed the original congregation of the Synagogue, and as such includes displays such as “Becoming American Jews”.
Through their educational programs, the Museum “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('eldridge2015')">really [talks] about how life changes for people when they come to a new country<span class="popuptext" id="eldridge2015"><a href="bibliography.html#eldridge2015">‘Museum At Eldridge Street Profile’, 2015, 9:41</a></span></span>”
<br><br>
While the state may present <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('immigrationnarratives')">its immigration narratives<span class="popuptext" id="immigrationnarratives">I acknowledge that the stories present at such sites do not represent a homogenous state-controlled immigration narrative.</span></span> at NPS sites, this ‘elite memory’ will be
<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('withers1996')">contested elsewhere<span class="popuptext" id="withers1996">“Elite memory is not shared and may, indeed, be fragmented and opposed via alternative remembered pasts”<a href="bibliography.html#withers1996"> Withers, 1996, page 326</a></span></span>.
The Tenement Museum is an example of a heritage site run as an “alternative [place] of memory”, established “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('till2008')">to give voice and presence to peoples, pasts, and places forgotten in national narratives<span class="popuptext" id="till2008"><a href="bibliography.html#till2008">Till 2008, page 296</a></span></span>”.
Narratives of immigration are <span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('american')">central to the visitor experience<span class="popuptext" id="american"><a href="https://www.tenement.org/">Their website</a> greets visitors with the tagline “Bringing American immigrant stories to life”</span></span> at the Tenement Museum,
and their interpretation of the past makes no claim to detached historical impartiality:
at the Museum’s annual gala in 2019, its President proudly declared “<span class="popup" onclick="myFunction('jennings2019')">at this juncture in history, we cannot be neutral<span class="popuptext" id="jennings2019"><a href="bibliography.html#jennings2019">Jennings, 2019</a></span></span>”.
</p>
</div>
<p class="subtitle"><a href="places.html">Now click here to examine the ways in which these narratives are influenced by the places in which they are told.</a></p>
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