The structure of pluralism: We're all Italian around here, aren't we, Mrs. O'Brien?' *

Abstract

This chapter is the punch-line of a story told by a perceptive observer of American ethnicity, Richard Juliani, who was being led through one of the ‘all Italian’ blocks in South Philadelphia. It summarizes in a sentence the many contradictions found in the literature on ethnicity. The problem is that there is strong evidence supporting both the assimilation and cultural pluralism hypotheses. The chapter focuses on the historical and structural problem of identifying the boundaries of groups and examining the relationship between the formation of ethnic groups and the city’s economic and ecological structure. It provides an analysis of the ‘micro-level’ issues of the antecedents and consequences of group membership. Historical information on the formation and boundaries of ethnic groups is largely limited to patterns of residential settlement or segregation. The residential patterns of immigrants are best understood in terms of the structural stage in which groups entered and subsequently played out their ethnic heritages.