It was a simple request. When I asked Annie Polland, director of the Tenement Museum on New York’s Lower East Side, whether I could bring my undergraduate NYU journalism class to learn about the immigrant experience, she agreed. On one condition. The price of admission wasn’t money. It was a story.
The museum has a digital archive of more than 15,000 stories of American mementos of immigration and internal migration, grouped by topic: food, religion, work, attire, fun. Annie asked if my students would contribute theirs.
So my students submitted stories of the movement of their families through time, from continent to continent, or across this continent: from Korea, Honduras, Belarus, India, Italy, the Philippines, China, Portugal, Hungary, as well as Ohio, Arizona and Louisiana. Just a garden-variety NYU class of 15.
The 2024 election is a contest of storytelling, principally about immigration. Throughout American history, we’ve heard the bad stories about immigrants — and also the good ones. Bad stories — like Donald Trump’s claim that immigrants will “walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat” — are turbocharged by rage, hate, fear.
But equally powerful are the good stories, guided by gentler angels: of the gathering of family, the sharing of food, the poem engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, a welcome for the tempest-tost.
An NYPD boat passes the Statue of Liberty on May 24, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
Trump is a gifted storyteller; he can tell a false story well. It has currency, even if it is outrageously and transparently a lie, like the story of Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. The only way it can be fought — its kryptonite — is by telling a true story better. The history of America is the contest of these two types of storytelling.
A bad story can’t just be fought by numbers. It’s no use saying: In a recent survey, 99% of immigrants said they have no appetite for their neighbors’ pets. It has to be fought by a better story. You have to say: Immigration isn’t about crime, it’s about the strength and persistence of family.
In my student Sofia’s aunt, who left behind her family in the Philippines to work as a nurse in the U.S., I see the Indian nanny of my sons who left India so that she could make money to send back to her in-laws to take care of her infant children. Said Sofia: “My mom shared countless stories about Filipino migrant workers, like my aunt, who leave their families behind to build better futures. These workers, often referred to as ‘bagong bayani,’ or modern-day heroes, make immense personal sacrifices to support their loved ones back home.”
It made me think of the time my nanny pointed to a teenage girl in a picture of a wedding in India and asked, “Who’s that?” The woman who was showing her the pictures looked at her in surprise. “Why, that’s your daughter!” My nanny burst into tears.
In viewing my students’ stories, I see my own family’s story — as you might see yours. That Honduran sopa de caracol that Francis’ mom enjoys so much: “I watched as she ate her soup with a smile on her, savoring every slurp and sip, I can only imagine that this was a sign she felt at home again, at peace.” Exactly as I watch my mom enjoying her mung bean dal in her New Jersey kitchen. Just as the word “mami” comforts Connor, the word “beta” is what I call my Indian sons.
In the story of Ethan’s bubbie, who escaped the Holocaust and whose children made a visit to the synagogue where she worshiped in Belarus, I have a vision of my grandparents taking me to the Krishna temple at Dakor, which generations of my family went on a pilgrimage to every monsoon. Their story, my story.
My students don’t all have recent immigrant backgrounds, though every last one has family who has immigrated here sometime or other. And their stories aren’t all about international migration. But the migration from Sarah’s hometown of Custar, Ohio, to New York can be as vast a distance as it was for me from Bombay to New York. As I found out when I moved from Jackson Heights, Queens to Iowa City for my master’s degree, traveling from the most diverse neighborhood in the country to the home of the world’s biggest hog can be a substantial culture shock.
You can relate to my students’ stories even if you think you have no relation to immigrants. Has your family ever held a secret or had to assume a new identity in the pursuit of a better life?
You should read Cora’s story, about her great-grandfather John. “When John was 8-years-old, his parents decided to move the family north in search of a better life. John’s family was Black, but light-skinned, so partway through the train ride from New Orleans to Chicago, the family moved from the “Colored” car to the “white” car. Upon arrival in Chicago, John and his family lived as white people, and told no one of their heritage or where they had come from. After John died in 1988, his eldest daughter, Jackie, noticed a “C” on his birth certificate. She decided to investigate further, and uncovered the family secret.”
I invite Trump and JD Vance to contribute stories of their Scottish and German and Irish ancestors — and their wives, of their Slovenian and Indian origins — to the Tenement Museum’s archive.
Donald’s grandfather, a draft-dodger from Germany, lived on Forsyth St., two blocks away from Orchard St., where the Tenement Museum is located. Perhaps Donald would like to contribute a recipe about the spaetzle Friedrich enjoyed? Or maybe he’d rather post a clipping from Ben Franklin’s 1751 jeremiad against immigration from a “sh--hole” country called Germany: “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
And Vance could contribute a recipe for the vegetarian curry he cooks for his wife Usha’s family, the one that Trump’s bestie Laura Loomer predicted would stink up the White House.
Someday soon, I hope that a Haitian or Venezuelan student in my class, newly arrived in these United States, will put up a souvenir of their family history: the recipe for a pikliz sauce, or a poem their grandfather wrote about Bolivar. And they will take their place in the magnificent archive of migrant stories in the Tenement Museum. And I will tell my student: Your story belongs here. And so do you.
Mehta is the author of “This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto,” and “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”
