A unique community
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Migration, after all, is movement. These movement have an end-point that is largely sedentary in character or it may remain dynamic. Bald claims that the movements of the peddlers had to operate dynamically in the presence of anti-Asian policies and general xenophobia (Bald 43). They had to play with the system in order to keep making a living. It required some settlement but also some continuous movement. They had to make ad hoc adjustments to their strategies of getting in and out of the country.
However, the most important aspect is the integration of social complexities of Harlem. I see moving between the sphere of race and culture as a whole migration in and of itself. There is a certain physicality to it because Harlem itself is a bounded and very much separate space. However, the movement across ethnicities and cultures is not necessarily physical. It requires another kind of dynamism. It requires the ability to build bridges between community.
The point I am trying to make is that integration into the white society was and is seen as an obvious requisite to fit in the society. But, the secondary integration is often forgotten. They also integrated into new family spheres with other ethnicities like African Americans and Latin Americans. So, Harlem’s status as “a city within a city” can more appropriately be seen as a “host community within another host community”. So as a space of “overlapping diasporas”, Harlem also became a space of refuge (163). Black people were escaping the hostile American South. While other people were escaping other kind of discrimination. Despite the fact that it was a an economically disfavoured land, Harlem became the promised land delivering those who were oppressed to something better.
This created an obligation for each group to create at least some kind of bridge with other communities. It resulted in a Harlem that had a unique cultural layout. There was a duality to its nature. It was a refuge from the outside world of discrimination. Meanwhile, it required communities to create bridges able to withstand exchanges such as marriages, music and food.