The new Bostonians
The faces of the city have changed dramatically in recent years. Once predominantly Yankee and Irish, a majority of the city is now nonwhite. Once provincial, it is now polyglot.
From Boston Common to Bunker Hill, the red line known as the Freedom Trail weaves along 2 miles of pockmarked pavement and crooked cobblestone, past Paul Revere's house to the Old North Church, from a meetinghouse where revolutionary rallying cries first echoed to open fields where British forces once marched. The monuments and markers pay tribute to the old Boston, a city where the Colonial past is ever present.
But amble along the red ribbon of mottled paint and well-trod brick, and you will also find vibrant evidence of the new Boston, a city where waves of recent immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa are embroidering the landscape with a kaleidoscope of new languages, cultures, and customs.
Like the thread tracing lineage on a family tree, the Freedom Trail links ancestral landmarks to the signposts of change.
For much of its 374-year history, Boston was largely defined by its English heritage and Yankee spirit. The city's name evoked images of Puritans and Pilgrims, upper-crust Brahmins and stately brownstones, and stalwart Irish enclaves.
That began to change three decades ago as the area's Puerto Rican community started to mushroom, new immigration flows emerged, and the city saw the start of influxes from Portugal, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. During the 1990s the demographic shifts accelerated, as the white population moved out of the city and new immigrants moved in.
Today, in the new Boston, one in four people is foreign-born; more than half the population is made up of African-American, Latino, and Asian residents; and more than 140 languages are spoken.
The new Boston is found in the juxtaposition of the old and the modern: the four young Japanese women, who came here to study English and spent a warm spring afternoon sipping iced cappuccinos in a
''Boston's got a wonderful story," says Westy Egmont, director of the International Institute of Boston, a refugee resettlement agency whose offices are a few yards away from the Freedom Trail. "It's . . . about the people. The city continues to evolve. It is more exciting and more vibrant and more global than anyone could ever have imagined."
The story unfolds with every pace along the red brick line.
Inside the Omni Parker House, the country's oldest continuously operating hotel, history rumbles within walls paneled in dark wood and trimmed with ornately carved molding. John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for office there and proposed to his future wife in the hotel restaurant, where Malcolm X once worked as a busboy and Ho Chi Minh was a pastry chef.
Today the 350-person staff reflects the shifting immigrant tides of Boston. Last year a map in the housekeeping department was covered with more than 50 pins and tiny flags that noted each employee's country of origin.
"I can't think of a country we don't have someone from," says Paul Pinto, 36, area director of human resources for Omni Hotels. "We've had many people who arrived here speaking just enough English to say hello and thank you, then rose to high positions in the hotel."
Pinto knows that struggle. He watched his parents tackle the hurdles of language and culture when his family emigrated from Portugal 32 years ago. On the Somerville block where he grew up, Pinto's family was the only non-Irish, non-American household. As a young boy, all too aware of his own differences, he remembers being embarrassed to speak Portuguese. He remembers encountering suspicion and faint hostility.
But he also remembers the pride as he witnessed his mother remake her life. She entered the country unable to speak English and worked two jobs cleaning offices to put her children through college. Then, she went back to school herself, earning a diploma and a job as a librarian at Boston University.
"The idea of improving ourselves and learning was just driven into us," says Pinto, whose own immigrant background also cemented a belief in the strength of diversity. That belief surfaces in the people he hires, many of whom are newly arrived refugees referred by resettlement agencies such as the International Institute.
Take Azmir Zulovic, 33, a bartender at the hotel. He arrived in Boston 10 years ago as a refugee from war-torn Bosnia and found himself in a country unlike anything he anticipated.
"It was a shock," Zulovic says. "I expected Beverly Hills, like what you see on TV. What I found was actually a melting pot, so many different people all together. It took a year just to get adjusted. The language, the culture, the customs, the rules, the laws, the etiquette, everything. I had to start from zero."
He landed a job as a busboy at the Omni Parker House, where his Irish immigrant co-workers helped teach him English. He has since earned a business degree from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he was introduced to the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism.
In the stretch from the Omni Parker to Faneuil Hall, the Freedom Trail skirts by the International Institute at 1 Milk St. Inside the building, which lays claim to being the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin, resettlement workers help more than 10,000 immigrants and refugees take their first steps in this country, through housing assistance, English classes, and job-training courses.
"Who is here now is different than who was here," says Egmont, the director. "Chinatown is now Asiatown. In Dorchester, there are parishes that have gone from being Irish and French Canadian to the true diversity of having Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese, and Ukrainians. The North End has changed. It's now a tourist center, where most of the people working in the kitchens are not Italian."
The dizzying breadth, and swiftness, of the changing demographics has triggered fear as well as excitement, Egmont acknowledges. Some resent the loss of the city's old identity and ethnic character, and greet new immigrants with apprehension and suspicion.
That, too, is part of Boston's legacy. The city's national reputation as a bastion of tolerance and liberal politics was dashed when the busing crisis of the 1970s laid bare the deep racial divide running through its communities. More than 15,000 African-American children were bused from predominantly black neighborhoods to Charlestown and South Boston, where white residents greeted them with rocks and slurs. The first city in America to abolish slavery suddenly became labeled the most racist city in the country.
In the 30 years since, the city has struggled to shed its image as a place torn along racial lines. The wounds have been slow to heal. Many blacks in other parts of the country still view Boston as a hostile place to visit, and those who live here sometimes see it as a hostile place to live.
Still, Egmont hopes that turbulent racial history will help residents cope with the current transformation. "We had to learn a lot about living together and letting others live," he says. "It forced on Boston a whole new political awareness of openness and inclusion."
The Freedom Trail intersects with numerous other reminders of the city's diverse heritage. At the foot of the State House, the red line crosses paths with the Black Heritage Trail at the site of the Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial, a tribute to the black soldiers who fought in the Civil War.
The Irish Famine Memorial, at Washington and School streets, commemorates the famine and the waves of Irish immigrants who settled in Boston over the last 150 years. About 25 percent of the city's population claims Irish ancestry.
At Congress and Union streets, six glass towers, etched with 6 million numbers and set on an ebony granite path, form the New England Holocaust Memorial, which honors the victims of the Holocaust.
Just across the street, at the entrance to City Hall, marks the disembarkation point where indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and 17th-century European immigrants entered the country. A plaque declares the spot as "An Immigrant's Gateway."
"America's promise has drawn people from all corners of the world to Boston, in search of a better life for themselves and their families," the plaque reads. "Their traditions and values have become the fabric of our neighborhoods."
That promise of a better life led Aayan Jibril and her family from their homeland of Somalia to the vendors' row of Quincy Market. There, Jibril works seven days a week, selling sarongs, handbags, and hats in fabric with tropical batik designs. Her husband, an Iranian immigrant, runs another pushcart on the opposite side of the market, a refurbished 19th-century merchants row that has become one of Boston's biggest tourist draws.
"People ask how we have a house and a car," says Jibril, who ushered in one of the first warm days of spring by sporting a teal-colored sarong from her stock of wares. "I say, 'With the poor little pushcart.' That's how we make a living, how we feed our kids. I work hard and I believe in myself. If you believe in yourself, you can do it."
Jibril was 15 when she arrived in Boston with her mother and four siblings. Then, a few months after coming to this unfamiliar place, she and her two older sisters found themselves on their own. Her mother, deciding that her two youngest children should spend their formative years in Somalia, went back to that country for several years.
But Jibril never stumbled. Eyes set on the future, she focused on learning English, finishing high school, and working full-time jobs to help support her family.
It was not a matter of hardship or sacrifice, she says, waving away any such notion. "It was simple, extremely easy. We were taught to be responsible, to get up every day and do something."
At Quincy Market, Jibril works alongside pushcart vendors from Israel, Ireland, and Ghana. Farther down the Freedom Trail, in the butcher shops and weekend open-air market of Blackstone Street, the global symphony of the new Boston swells even louder.
In one corner of the market, two UMass-Boston nursing students, both immigrants from Africa, paused their shopping to catch up with each other. A few yards away, a Salvadoran family, now residents of Somerville, hoisted a box filled with the fresh produce they just purchased. A Cambodian merchant, whose family came to this country 15 years ago, operated a stall next to an Italian immigrant who speaks no English.
At the entrance to one of several halal meat markets, Hakeem Ortiz, whose father is Moroccan and whose mother is Puerto Rican, ushered customers into the store selling Middle Eastern food and meat slaughtered according to Muslim law. A few doors away, inside the New Meat Market, Maly Tham leaned on a counter and reflected on her mother's journey from Cambodian refugee to Haymarket store owner.
Muy Tham gravitated toward the butchers' shops of Blackstone Street because her father had been a butcher in Cambodia. Nearly a century earlier, another newly arrived immigrant began life in Boston by selling meat on the streets of the North End, where newcomers from Italy were transforming the neighborhood into a replica of their old country.
That immigrant was the grandfather of Richard and Ben Molinari. For decades, their family has been a mainstay in the Italian neighborhood and at Sacred Heart Church, which sits just across from the Paul Revere House and along the Freedom Trail.
Although the Molinaris relish the activity and vibrancy that resonates through the North End of today, they also worry that the neighborhood could lose its unique identity. Old warehouses and empty factory buildings are being converted to condominiums and bringing a younger, more upscale crowd to the neighborhood. The Living Room, a trendy martini bar, sits just across the street from the Molinari apartment.
"In this restaurant, everyone is speaking Italian," notes Ben Molinari, as he sips cappuccino in Caffe Vittoria. "If you take that away, if you lose the Italian neighborhood, the city becomes mundane."
Yet even as the Molinaris worry about what their neighborhood may be losing, the red line of the Freedom Trail also shows visitors the new flavors it is gaining. In the kitchens of the North End restaurants, young immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil prepare traditional Italian dishes. In the dining rooms, lunchtime crowds are sprinkled with young Latino professionals who slip effortlessly from Spanish to English.
And on a quiet street just around the corner from the Old North Church, Vietnamese refugee Lam Tran runs a corner grocery that still bears the name of the previous owner, an Italian immigrant whose widow still lives in the neighborhood.
A classically trained musician who came to Boston to study at Berklee School of Music, Tran worked as a housecleaner and in a weapons factory before stumbling onto "Bob's Grocery Store" 10 years ago. It was for sale, and Tran said he felt an instant connection with the place and the people of the North End.
Two blocks from Bob's Grocery, the Freedom Trail leaves Boston and crosses over the Charlestown Bridge, where it runs through Charlestown and the Navy Yard. On one side of the bridge the Bunker Hill Memorial rises into the sky, an obelisk representing a touchstone of the past. On the other is the gleaming, modern expanse of the Zakim Bridge, an ode to the city's future. 