Unity and Diversity

When I was growing up in the Rosedale neighborhood of Queens New York we were surrounded by an ethnic group from a country that had warmer weather than we did, spoke a Latin-derived language, and whose older members spoke little or no English. They typically had large families, with several generations frequently all living together in the same house, were overwhelmingly Catholic and were connected to a subculture of crime. Who were these people? Not the Mexicans, though you might be forgiven for thinking so, but it was the Italians. Just next door to us was the Spitale family. Grandma Spitale, who spoke about seven words of English, presided over her family from the balacony of the two family house. Mr. & Mrs. Spitale spoke both Italian and English; Mr. Spitale was a trash man, which seemed to be so overwhelmingly staffed with Italians that many referred to it as 'Mussolini's Army'. Lenny Spitale, who was a year older than I was, spoke no Italian at all is a pharmacist.

Every non-English-speaking ethnic group has had to contend with the language barrier when arriving here. Many of us are descended from those people. In general, the generation that first arrives here speaks little or no English. The children of these immigrants speak both, their family's language at home and English at school and with their friends. The grandchildren are usually indistinguishable from children whose ancestors arrived one hundred years ago or more.

One of the differences is that these days you see more efforts to communicate to these immigrants in their native languages. Some folks see this as a bad thing, that immigrants should be required to learn English before getting a job, receiving government benefits or being served in a restaurant or grocery store. Most of these people have no idea how hard it is to learn a new language as an adult, or how hard many of these new immigrants labor to learn English. Yet we take cheap shots at immigrants for their lack of facility with the language, when our own ancestors were in the same boat.