Summary: Permanently Lost: The Trauma Of Immigration

For this assignment I have chosen to look more in depth at Immigration in the late nineteenth century until early twentieth century, and how this life changing experience was handled by different ethnic groups. In turn I will compare and contrast the essays of Victor Greene and Mark Wyman who both portray immigration in their own light. Victor Greens’s essay titled “Permanently Lost: The Trauma of Immigration” uses tools such as music and ballads to display how immigration effected certain ethnic groups and their families. While Mark Wyman’s “Coming and Going: Round - Trip to America” focuses on pamphlets given out in the workforce and more concrete evidence as to how and why immigration took place the way it did. To my mind Wyman’s use …show more content…
He stripped the stories of its ____ and showed its true colors. Meaning that he acknowledged the purpose of immigration in the first place; which was to temporarily come to America to make a substantial amount of money so that they may than go back to their homeland and properly provide for their family. This was the case for most but not all immigrants at the time, the average man would stay any where from three to five years making around one thousand dollars to as much as six thousand. Wyman along with the immigrants of the time were aware that the journey would not be easy “everyone worked like hell” (Finn 88). Some of these hardships that Wyman had brought to the attention of the audience reading his essay would be the living conditions of these peasants or immigrants, as well as the working conditions that they were exposed to daily. Including but not limited to living in what looked like a pig pen, sometimes resulting in five families living in a dark sulfur exposed one bed room house. While being at home was not necessarily ideal working wasn 't much better, since seventy percent of immigrants were young male workers, the standard work day consisted of manual labor much like slave driving in my opinion. I say this because the workers were driven with the use of shoving, yelling, pushing and threatening to make sure they were productive at all times. Again …show more content…
While I found it interesting how Greene uses songs and ballads to demonstrate how immigration affected its people not only psychologically but culturally as well. Some of my favorite examples from Greene’s work was the song of “ The Disillusioned Immigrants” who saw that there wasn 't enough money to make them want to stay in America even for the money. Another key difference between these two authors that sets them apart from each other is how Wyman saw the idea of immigration as a short term financial gain while Greene seemed to believe it was the idea of permanency and trying to set up cultural grounds in the new land of America. As we saw through historical evidence for the Mexicans and the Chinese primarily that Greene’s idea of this was simply impossible and not rash for this minorities. This is just another reason why I agree and side with the way that Wyman looks at