Long Journey Home

Abstract

Having served its purpose—assimilating its human resource to whatever extent that it can within context of the old-country language limitations—the immigrant community releases its members to the host society and slowly fades away. Assimilation, drawing society’s newcomers into that host society, is a value-adding process. Possessed of neither skills nor fluency in the language nor the ability to cast an informed vote, the newcomer’s value to his city will at first be quite limited. By learning the language, putting new skills to use, and making better-informed political choices, however, he will raise that value to where he can sustain his adopted society at the same competence level as the city’s more senior citizens. San Francisco’s Italian Americans entered that final phase of their hyphenated existence after World War II, when in ever larger numbers they began to move out of their immigrant enclave and into the the wider currents of American life.

Sure I brought new sorts of people into the city government—Blacks, Asians, Chicanos, gays … What would you have a Mayor do—suppress the new San Francisco to satisfy the old?

Mayor George Moscone, April 30,1977¹

We had anarchist newspapers in Italian. The garbage men on the truck would roar up to the bookstore and get their Italian anarchist newspapers.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, June 8,2003²