On a Trio of Small, Ethnic Communities

Abstract

These three works on a trio of immigrant groups-Dutch, Jewish, and Chinese Americans-follow the current trend in social history that small is beautiful by concentrating on small, discrete communities: Amsterdam, Montana; Petaluma, California; and a part of New York's Chinatown. The basic criterion upon which to evaluate them is how well they illuminate larger themes in the lives and experiences of their ethnic groups as a whole. All three books succeed in their objective to a greater or lesser degree. For example, all consider ethnic group identity and consciousness in America-the central issue in the books by Yu and Kroes and a secondary one for Kann. Interestingly the first two historians note that the realization among Dutch farmers and Chinese laundrymen as members of an American ethnic group came largely internally-from the struggle between evangelicals and traditional Calvinists in the Dutch case, and the laundrymen's encounter with Chinese and Chinese American elite authoritarianism. By advocating freedom and equality for their homeland, the washmen were expressing themselves as Americans of Chinese descent. Kroes shows Dutch farmer pioneers so isolated in their Montana retreat that they thought of themselves as in America rather than of it. The radical Jewish chicken farmers of Petaluma at first did not appear to engage the identity issue; most simply enjoyed each other's company in their shtetl in America. It was their children and their children's children, the