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Book Reviews
Children: The Neglected Actors in the Drama of Immigration
| KLAPPER, MELISSA R. Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880–1925. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. xi + 219 pp. Illustrations, notes. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 1-56663-733-3.
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Many of the most intense contemporary debates about immigration center on children. Apart from policy debates, such as whether immigrant children should be allowed to serve their parents as translators with doctors and public officials, or whether undocumented children should have the same access to health care and other social services as native-born children, there is a wrenching cultural debate. Is there a crisis among first- and second-generation immigrant children? Are these children especially likely to drop out of school or become teenage parents, delinquents, or gang members? Are they failing to integrate into American society? Do they feel marginalized, isolated, and conflicted? This is not the first time that Americans have debated such questions. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the children of immigrants provoked intense concern, with reformers convinced that childhood represented the key to addressing issues of urban crime, poverty, and cultural assimilation. |
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Unlike Selma Cantor Berrol's 1995 Growing Up American, which attempted to cover the entire span of American history from colonization to the present, Small Strangers focuses on the turn-of-the-century era of mass immigration. Although it makes few explicit comparisons between immigrant children of that era and their contemporary counterparts, it nevertheless sheds light on issues of continuing relevance. These include the generational rifts that frequently divided immigrant parents and children, and immigrant children's pervasive sense of being caught between two contrasting sets of values and expectations: a traditionalist culture, emphasizing family loyalty and filial obedience, and a highly individualistic secular society with a strongly hedonistic ethos. |
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The book begins by examining the conflicting conceptions of childhood embraced by immigrant parents and by childsavers, the reformers who believed that all children, regardless of social class, had a right to a protected childhood. Klapper adopts a very useful typology of childsaving—tracing a shift from charity to scientific philanthropy to public health and social work programs—and she does an effective and nuanced job of identifying differences between middle-class and immigrant working-class attitudes toward prolonged childhood dependence, child labor, children's leisure, family privacy, and education. One of the book's key themes involves childhood as a battleground, where reformers and immigrant communities struggled over children's identity, affiliation, and acculturation. The author offers striking examples of the way that schools sought to use children as vehicles for getting mothers to abandon traditional practices, including the use of swaddling clothes. |
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The book then explores ethnic diversity among immigrant children. Klapper does a particularly impressive job of discussing the diverse customs that surrounded childbirth, naming, children's religious upbringing, and the strategies that immigrant families adopted to maintain their traditions, including the establishment of language schools and the celebration of distinctive holidays. Yet she argues that ambivalence toward Americanization was widespread on the part of immigrant parents and children alike. Not only were ethnic groups not monolithic in their response to educators' and reformers' Americanization efforts, but resistance and accommodation coexisted. Thus, even as many immigrant adolescents adopted "American" fashions, customs, and modes of expression, many continued to socialize primarily within their own ethnic group and responded to discrimination with symbolic displays of resistance. Especially exciting is the book's discussion of how immigrant children contributed to the creation of an emerging urban youth culture that cut across ethnic, gender, and class lines, embracing a repertoire of shared games and rhymes, and common modes of dress and behavior. |
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This book contains a great deal of useful information about immigrant children's involvement in work and their experiences in school and leisure activities, as well as the impact of restrictive immigration legislation and the Great Depression upon immigrant children's sense of ethnic identity. But perhaps most interesting is the discussion of how immigrant adolescents responded emotionally and psychologically to the expectations, fantasies, disappointments, and experiences with prejudice that they encountered. By emphasizing children's agency and the psychological dimension of the immigrant experience, Small Strangers helps bring these children to life. It also provides valuable comparative context for understanding the experience of contemporary immigrant children. |
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Steven Mintz
Columbia University |
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