Ellis Island, Immigrant NY and the Tenement Tours

This whole day focussed on the immigrants of NY, taking us back in time on a tour of Ellis Island, exploring the areas of the immigrant neighbourhood (which is now an affluent neighbourhood) and touring through a voyeuristic old Tenement apartment building, showing us the daily living conditions of a poor immigrant family.

Ellis Island was presented to us as very masculine; we had a pretty obviously ex-military tour guide who presented the island as a patriarchal structure, which it was, limiting the allowance of female immigrants, requiring them the have an escort, judging them on their family dynamics and motherhood. The space even felt like it was dominated by an institutional patriarchy, its architecture beautiful but intimidating, an obvious space for judgement of those attempting to immigrate.

The tenement tours did not seem as dominated by masculinity, our tour guide was female, and the stories we heard of the apartment spaces were related to a single mother and her children and another family a couple of decades later. The hardships of the family we voyeuristically preyed upon were based on the dominantly masculine political power, which didn’t offer any support to a single mother in a time where a woman could not manage to support her own family.

Both tours were immersed in history, which is not exactly what I am trying to explore in this blog, but because of the construction of ‘taking us back into history’ the dominating male institutional power came forward, touching upon what it was like as a woman during immigration in the early 1900s. Because of the storybook nature of the tours, the dominany masculinity only came across as a story, and other than the pig headed tour guide at Ellis Island, I was removed from any gender discrepancies in the spaces themselves.