Boarding and Belonging

Abstract

The gap between the subject matter of migration studies and that of North American urban and ethnic history has narrowed in recent years. Historians of migration now study in detail the precise local causes of the movement from old world locations and the pattern of the consequent diaspora. At the same time, those who study major American cities and small industrial towns have begun to show some appreciation of the relationship between migration causes and settlement. In most studies, however, there remains a lacuna between accounts and explanations of the crossing and the history of ethnic institutional and neighbourhood life on the North American side. Although we have moved from Oscar Handlinfs compelling, if often incorrect, metaphors of "uprootedness" and "in fellow-felling" to explain the processes of migrating, ghettoizing, and acculturating, we continue to depend too much on mono-causal agents of settlement such as family chain migration or the padrone system. Using these ideas to carry them over the rough spots in narration, historians lose sight of the important mental transition from sojourner to settler among newcomers, and of the formative period in ethnic settlement when male sojourners predominated. Even if it is a proper reflection of the sojourner's ambivalence as a man neither in his home place nor reconciled to his new place, this lack of study destroys our chance to discover the stages of cultural and institutional transition from migration to sojourning and settlement.