My Father, the Anchor Baby
Note: For the complete list of posts, go HERE.
My father has now been gone for almost 32 years. Goodness. Half my life.
There are many aspects of his early life that would have led all but the fanciful and optimistic Madame Marie to predict a very different “rest of the story” from the one that actually materialized. MANY...
My father was a quiet man, a man who would seemingly go to any lengths to avoid conflict. The phrase, “We just won’t go there anymore” was used so often and in so many contexts in our family that it became something of a lesson. If we had been older, it would have been good fodder for a drinking game.
My father was also a man who loved a joke and who didn’t mind being the butt of a joke. We once convinced him to wear my Ramapo High School band uniform and allow my buddy Ron and me to gather to gather all of the kids in the neighborhood, all to enact an Oscar worthy performance of a street sweeper (a Strassenputzer -- why do I remember that?) with many mouths to feed. This was for some crazy German class video -- oops, contemporary bias, make that an 8mm movie.
I realize now that these two core traits -- conflict avoidance and using laughter to cover pain -- were likely the means he used to deal with a rather unbelievably sad childhood. But that full story is a story for another day.
The first official glimpse of my father in the world is in the 1925 census (New York State used to do a mid-cycle census for a number of years in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In 1925, my father’s mother and father had been in the United States for less than five years. Elsewhere on the form, it notes that neither spoke English. They had been married for a year.
I look a bit more closely at this census record to perhaps breathe a bit of life into it and to understand what it might say about life for this new little nuclear family of three, living at 191 East Third Street in Manhattan in the East Village.
Looking at Google Maps and exploring a bit, it seems as if the current building on the site is the same one that was there in 1925, between Avenue A and Avenue B. The building has 6 floors and 12 units.
Joanne’s Exchange, which according to Google is “a buzzy secondhand shop with a play area & large selection of maternity & kids' clothes, gear and toys,” is located on the ground floor. I go to their web site and Joanne’s does sound like a nice business, masking some of the incredible -- and painful -- stories residing deep in the bricks of the building.
Jane’s Exchange is the largest and oldest Children’s and Maternity Store in NYC. This unique and child friendly store opened 25 years ago to serve the local East Village community and now serves all five boroughs. We are a grass-roots business and our mission statement includes offering the opportunity to all NYC families to support sustainability in an ecologically and economically challenged time.
Put simply, recycling through consignment is a “feel-good” way to help the environment, make shopping for our children more affordable, and support a local business. It’s a win-win!! At a time when chain stores and on-line shopping are taking over, we have a home grown neighborhood “mom and pop” that offers a wide variety of styles and brands at prices unheard of elsewhere in the city.
Diving a bit further into census record, I discover that the census was indeed taken literally weeks after my father was born. The census enumerator -- it looks like a Henry Autou -- even directly wrote on the census record for my father, “15 days old.” That’s seems nice and surprisingly personal for a census record. I wonder if my father was born at home, or in a hospital? As I think about this, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a copy of his birth certificate. Memo to file: get this record.
Grandfather Frank seems to have an unusual occupation -- “corset cutter.” I imagine this is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds and likely had very little to do with Frederick’s of Hollywood or Victoria’s Secret.
I try to get a sense of this place, this unusual combination of nationalities, all landing in this one building in the East Village. At a time when it undoubtedly was not as fashionable as it is now.
Being something of a “counter” (yes, I was on the Math Team in High School; admitting this is the first step in my rehabilitation), I do some counting up of the folks living at good old 191 East Third Street in 1925.
117 people were living in the building in 1925. I am guessing there must have been more flats in 1925 than the current 12. And likely without aluminum appliances.
Here are the countries of origin for the residents -- US (50), Russia (36), Austria (15), Italy (7), Poland (5), Romania (4). Surprisingly, only 51 of the residents are listed as “aliens” (the non-citizen kind, not the UFO kind). 66 were U.S. citizens.
Now this balance somewhat surprises me at first. It seems a lot less “melting pot” than I had always assumed.
Since this question of “anchor babies” and “chain migration” (yes, I know these are often used as pejorative terms) currently generate a lot of mindless political chatter, I decide to take a look at this from the perspective of the residents of 191 East 3rd Street in 1925.
Frank and Elizabeth were part of a massive chain migration of brothers and sisters who came to the U.S. over a period of two decades, starting with a few people early in the 1900s and then adding to this in ones and twos and threes, all settling in the same area of lower Manhattan. And for those who haven’t ever looked at the actual definition of “anchor baby,” here’s what wikipedia has to say.
"Anchor baby" is a term (regarded by some as a pejorative) used to refer to a child born to a non-citizen mother in a country that has birthright citizenship which will therefore help the mother and other family members gain legal residency. In the U.S., the term is generally used as a derogatory reference to the supposed role of the child, who automatically qualifies as an American citizen and has the rights guaranteed in the 14th Amendment. The term is also often used in the context of the debate over illegal immigration to the United States.
Admittedly, the current environment is a bit different than when my grandparents came; they came to America in an era of open immigration. It wasn’t until passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act or Johnson-Reed Act, that the U.S. used restrictive immigration policies in the 1920s based on the 1890 proportions of foreign-born European nationalities.
But I still found myself wondering about this mix of citizens and “aliens.” Looking back at the 66 U.S. citizens I mentioned earlier living at 191 3rd Street in 1925, I wonder how many would fit the above definition of “anchor babies?” 5? 10? 20?
And Richard Dawson would say…. And the census said….
All of the 66 except 6 were what we would now call "anchor babies." Six. 60 “anchor babies” in that one building.
The general current conversation seems to be that this kind of birthright citizen is now a “problem” and a new one at that. And that “anchor babies” will never become part of the mainstream. That they are “the other” and a “problem.”
As I reflect on the current headlines in the context of our own family story, my focus in not so much on the endless policy debates, driven by politicians on both sides eager for victory in what they have unnecessarily positioned as a zero sum game to gain advantage for their particular party. They all just piss me off.
All I can see are the faces that are now wondering how on earth they got turned into pawns in a political game. The yearning faces at the border who have most likely come here to get away from something and are indeed, like my grandparents, children of God.
My father's parents did not speak English and I imagine suffered a fair amount of humiliation as an easy "other" target by those already here. My father was an “anchor baby" and a product of "chain migration" before the current iterations and abuses of the terms.
As I look more closely at the 1925 census record, I realize that Frank’s brother Michael and his wife Jennie and their family definitely lived in the same building as Frank. Now that I think about it, I do remember a certain fondness by my Dad for an Aunt Jennie. Perhaps this is why.
When I put some of the names of their children into Ancestry from the Census record -- Louis, Josephine and Eugene -- small green leaves pop up on their records, indicating the Ancestry has found “hints” about more details about this little family, to whom my grandparents and their new son were inevitably close.
I come across naturalization papers for Michael dated just a few months after the 1925 census. Jennie eventually became a citizen on June 25, 1951. Sadly, it appears that Michael didn’t escape the 1930s. He died in 1934, apparently only 50 years old. This makes me nervous about my own prospects, since my father died at 62.
On a more positive note, Jennie lived until 1972, and Josie until 1992 and Eugene until 1996. There apparently was another child, Joseph, born in 1914, who died in 1920. I wonder if that had something to do with the Spanish flu, which raged during 1919 and 1920. And Louis -- Luigi -- their oldest -- was apparently dead less than a year after the 1925 census was taken.
Now I will be the first to admit that I’m not very good at figuring out the whole cousins thing. Despite my avowed interest in genealogy and history, when someone says “they were second cousins, twice removed,” I have absolutely no idea what this means. But it’s not very complicated with this crowd. Jennie was my father’s aunt, not some distant and complicated relation. Her presence until 1972 troubles me. As does Josie and Eugene living into the 1990s, who would have been first cousins of my father. And they apparently all lived in the New York area.
Where were these people? And why no mention ever of any of them in our family?
What on earth was that all about?
