Immigrants and Migrants
Is your family's ethnicity an important part of its identity?
Which of the following best describes your family --
a) we know about our family's connection to our home
country, and those stories and connections are important to
b) we don't remember much about immigrants in the family, but
we do have stories about our family moving from one part of
the country to another;
c) ethnicity is not too important to us, but we know stories
about our interactions with people from other ethnic groups.
To support your argument, get some family stories about
immigration, internal migration, or ethnicity. The following
questions should elicit stories that will be useful to you.
Composing your own questions might be even more successful,
especially if you base those questions on your knowledge of your
family chronology and history.
- How does your family maintain connections with its ethnic
roots -- has food been important? language? religion? Why?
- Does your informant remember relatives who were born outside
the United States? Why did they come to America? Did their being
foreign-born make them different from their American-born
children? How and why?
- Have any of your family members moved from one region of the
country to another? Why? How did they feel about the new people,
situations, and places?
- Has your informant worked with or lived near people who
identify themselves by ethnicity (German-Americans,
Irish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, etc.)? What were they like
as neighbors or co-workers?
- Has your informant ever had to work or shop or attend church
in a place where he or she couldn't understand the language?
More general questions for further conversation:
- What different towns has your informant lived in? Which was
his or her favorite and why?
- What kind of neighborhood did your informant grow up in?
- Was there a specific part of your informant's house, yard, or
neighborhood where he or she liked to play? a special place to
go to be by him/herself?
- Has your informant ever lived through a natural disaster like
a tornado or flood?
- Has there been a community that your informant has felt deeply
connected to (a neighborhood, or parish, or group of classmates
or club members)? What did your informant get out of that
community? What did he or she give to that community?
- Does your informant think that living in a particular
landscape, or climate, or type of environment (urban, rural,
suburban, etc.) shaped the kind of person he or she became?