SHIRLEY J. YEE. An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930.

Abstract

In this book, Shirley J. Yee explores interracial and interethnic contacts in Lower Manhattan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing on the “lived experiences and everyday practices” of New York's immigrants, Yee hopes to revise a historical literature that stresses spatial isolation and difference in favor of a more complex understanding of interethnic relations. Yee declares that her “main argument is that between the end of Reconstruction and the 1930s, national and local efforts to reify racial boundaries through Jim Crow segregation, immigration exclusion laws, and urban reform movements often facilitated interracial/interethnic social and economic relations” (p. 4). Yee's analysis illustrates how working-class immigrants of diverse backgrounds often crossed the borders of well-established ethnic neighborhoods. The book is well researched, particularly in secondary sources; the author's argument is cogent and her style is clear. But An Immigrant Neighborhood ultimately falters and seems to be less than the sum of its parts. It seems rather to be a collection of loosely linked essays: the first three successfully advance the thesis of interconnectedness and backlash from the majority population; the remaining two chapters focus on the Anti-vice and Settlement House movements, which are connected by time and place, but speak of relationships that are fundamentally different in nature, rendering these chapters less effective. Moreover, Yee's observances, while interesting, lack sufficient heft to warrant attention beyond that of the specialist.