Voices of Difference
Stories of Immigrant Women in Western New York
By Marie Saccomando Coppola and Cheryl Apruzzese Thompson
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Monica Jardine at her Allentown home. Photo: Rita Clement.
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-Leslie Carr speaking of her Sicilian grandmother.
“She took three prized possessions with her: a fine goose down pillow, a crucifix and a statue of the Madonna.”
-Janice Zampogna relating her grandmother’s escape from Poland during the first World War.
“It came with a knock at the door.... We grabbed our bags and left the house, which was then sealed. We were granted exit through Liberty Flights. We arrived on Dec. 29, 1967. I was eight years old.”
-Clotilde Dedecker on leaving Cuba.
“...you make it work. You deepen your intellectual understanding of it. You can have two identities. It’s possible to have two... I think it’s better to accept the challenge of making sense of it....”
-Monica Jardine on immigration from Guyana.
When the Women’s Pavilion 2001 began to plan for the celebration of the Pan-American Centennial, I chaired a focus group on immigrant women, with Rita Clement as the co-chair. I was interested in the subject because of the graduate work I had done at the University of Buffalo in the American Studies Department. There, I was introduced to looking at U.S. history from another country’s point of view. Through my work in Women’s Studies, I became familiar with the maxim of U.S. feminist literature of the sixties—that the personal was political. I began to formulate the idea that looking at U.S. history from a woman’s viewpoint, as well as from another country’s frame of reference would enrich the record of the past.
The department encouraged students to construct research that was meaningful to their lives. As the daughter of a Sicilian immigrant, curiosity about my heritage lead me to create a research project based on collecting oral histories from women in Sicily and comparing them with those of Sicilian-American women. Oral history is particularly suited to women because it allows the researcher to be personal. In some cases, my questions and the dialogues that resulted evoked anguished memories, but these were stories that really needed to be told.
For the Women’s Pavilion project, which would not be limited to Sicilian immigrants, my first thoughts were to collect stories of women who came to Western New York during the largest wave of immigration at the turn of the century. For the Pan-Am celebration, I envisioned using the past in order to see present-day Buffalo more clearly. The comparison would show how far our community has come in the last one hundred years in its understanding of other cultures.
The decision to present the work in a video format was made because it would reach the largest audience in conjunction with the Pan-Am 2001 festivities, and would create a legacy that could be used for educational purposes as well as diversity training in institutions and business.
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Sawsan Tabbaa, a gene
therapy researcher at the University at Buffalo. Photo: Rita Clement. |
We wanted a cross section of the ethnic groups represented in our research. As we began to include more recent immigrants, we looked for women who came during different decades after WWII. Fourteen women spoke to us either about family members or about their own experience. We chose stories that encompassed the experiences of the others.
Kathryn Neeson’s story of her mother is the traditional immigrant tale many of us have heard in our own families: sacrifice, determination, and hard work brought success. Comparing the obstacles faced a hundred years ago with those women encounter today provides insight into the roles immigrant women play in our community.
Neeson relates a classic turn-of-the-last-century story about her mother, Winifred Gilmartin. It begins with the potato famine in Ireland, which forced Neeson’s grandparents to migrate to Scotland when Winifred was three or four years old. Winifred’s mother died in childbirth. As a young woman Winifred immigrated to Canada, but really wanted to be in the U.S. She entered illegally through Detroit, but the trauma of being an illegal alien was more than she could bear. Eventually she returned to Scotland and went through legal channels to re-enter the U.S.
The stories of the two women we interviewed who came to Western New York in the 1990s reflect a different world with different cultural prejudices. Sawsan Tabbaa was a practicing dentist in Damascus, Syria. At present, she teaches and researches gene therapy at U.B. As a Muslim woman who wears a head covering for religious reasons, she has been target of intolerance, often drawing negative remarks on the street.
“I have to struggle double to prove myself,” Tabbaa relates. “.... They look down upon me.... Since you’re covered, you must be dumb.”
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Immigration documents for Winifred Gilmartin Neeson. Photo: Rita Clement.
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Sawsan is trying to understand cultural diversity by taking a course in the Education Department at U.B. “I am learning about the oppressed and the oppressors” she says. “.... Know there’s a difference, accept it and then move on....”
Monica Jardine came to the U.S. in 1970 to pursue graduate work because there were no universities offering Ph.D. programs in Guyana at the time. Guyana, which is on the northern coast of South America, had recently received its independence from Great Britain. After working in the SUNY system for a number of years, in 1991 she chose SUNY Buffalo for her professional education and Allentown for her home. Allentown became her home because the Victorian houses reminded her of those in Guyana.
She now teaches in the Women’s Studies department at UB, where she takes exception to the label “immigrant,” referring to texts that describe people with her experience as “transnational migrants.” She explains that today’s technology makes more communication possible and keeps the connection between the old and new lands. The experience of immigration is not just what happens to you on the outside in a new environment. It includes what you left behind: family, friends, loyalty to a national identity.
“...You learn to be an immigrant,” she says. “You learn to leave behind a lot of dreams....You never completely do.”
Western New York is famous for many ethnic restaurants. That is partly because of the influence of women who carry on their ethnicity through cooking, the last vestige of a subculture to disappear. Leslie Carr talks about her grandmother’s inventiveness and resourcefulness: “She could live on a shoestring. Her recipes have been passed down. What she could do with beans and pasta!”
Janice Zampogna sees the work ethic applied to feeding a family as the greatest legacy:
“...[We] had to adapt to the food available here...[We] made a lot of soup: chicken, cabbage, blood.”
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Immigration documents for
Winifred Gilmartin Neeson. Photo: Rita Clement. |
“My mother made lard with pork rind... birch beer [carbonated]... canned peaches, pears, pickled eggplant,” relates Anne Greenman, whose heritage is Sicilian.
For more recent immigrants, technology helps to keep their culture alive. In addition to the telephone and email, satellite dishes bring worldwide programs into our living rooms. When our film crew walked into Sawsan Tabbaa’s home, we saw a broadcast on TV in Arabic. Originally from Damascus, Syria, her family is able to keep in daily touch with the culture they left.
Difference can be interpreted in many ways but most simply, it is being “the other”—the one who is different. It could be color, race, gender, spiritual belief or anything the society dictates.
There is a tradition in our society to praise the first in our families to come to the U.S. for their courage, determination, and hard work. Those who have arrived lately have many of those same characteristics. After watching Voices of Difference, people may look upon recent immigrants with some of the same empathy they have for immigrants of the past.
Voices of Difference was made with the support of Vince Mistretta, owner of the Ricecooker Video Production Company. For more information or to purchase the video, contact Rita Clement at rcascia@hotmail.com or Marie Saccomando Coppola at mscoppola@aol.com.
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