An Immigrant Neighborhood : Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York Before 1930

Examining race and ethnic relations through an intersectional lens, Shirley Yee's An Immigrant Neighborhood investigates the ways that race, class, and gender together shaped concepts of integration and assimilation as well as whiteness and citizenship in lower Manhattan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. In contrast to accounts of insulated neighbourhoods and ethnic enclaves, Yee unearths the story of working-class urban dwellers of various ethnic groupsoChinese, Jews, Italians, and Irishoroutinely interacting in social and economic settings. Yee's numerous, fascinating anecdotesosuch as one about an Irishman who served as the only funeral director for Chinese for many yearsorecount the lived experiences of these neighbourhoods, detailing friendships, business relationships, and sexual relationships that vividly counter the prevailing idea that ethnic groups did not mix except in ways marked by violence and hostility.