How long did it take to integrate past groups of immigrants? Decades, generations.

I grew up in a segregated community, and I'm not just talking about de facto racial segregation that was the rule in the northern US before the mid-1960s. I mean that the Polish had their own section of town, and the Italians had their own section of town, and the Irish had their own section of town, and the few of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy there were lived in their own section. The very few Catholic Germans had their own church, St. Joseph's, with German sermons, right across the street from St. Patrick's, and ne'er the twain would meet. The Jews lived scattered throughout the city, but consituted their own community through their synagogues, and the fact that they were the academic cream of the city public schools. All the Poles, Italians and Irish who could afford it sent their children to the several Catholic high schools in the city. The suburbs were dominated by northern-European Protestant stock, as were their high schools.

Italian grocery stores in my town still had Italian-only speakers and the grocers spoke the Old Country language to them. I was the odd little blue-eye who dated nice Sicilian boys. (The Irish boys, though charming, tended to start drinking at about 14 or so...)

The Polish community had its own parochial elementary school (by far the best, the largest, the most beautiful), at which they taught Polish as a subject. Their church had a Polish Mass every Sunday. I remember Polish radio -- local Polish radio -- broadcasts in my grandmother's kitchen every Sunday at lunchtime. No one understood a word of it, but Nana liked the polkas.

This is within my living memory. These immigrants and their community come from the wave of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century.

And we still have Chinatowns, and Little Italies, and Little Saigons, all over this country. And what's up with the St. Patrick's Day parade? Why should we continue to have it if all the Famine Irish are now integrated after 150 years?

It takes a long time to integrate a community. We only expect it to take a shorter time now because everything is hurry-up-quick-do-it-now-I-want-it-yesterday.

People never entirely lose their back identity in the US, unless they want to. The Chicanos, the Cubans, the Puerto Ricans, all the Hispanics who insist on holding on to their heritage are only doing in a more public and aggressive way what all immigrant groups have done since the first Germans established their own community in the English colony of Pennsylvania.

And they still speak "Pennsylvania Dutch" here. It's been almost 300 years, now onct.

One of this nation's strengths is not only that we come from everywhere and we form a new allegiance to a nation that is basically an idea rather than an extended family, but that we are free to keep those parts of our varied heritage that seem to us most worth keeping, and no one has the right to make us give them up.

The gene pool is strong because of its variation; the intellectual pool is strong because of its astonishing diversity of ideas.

Regards--
Mary Anne