Golis: Celebrating stories of who we are

They came together to talk about how their families came to Santa Rosa, and they told stories we know by heart. From your own family’s history, you will recognize the courage required to move to a new place, the hardships involved with building a new life, the love and security afforded by family and, finally, the success that follows from hard work.

These, of course, are American stories, which is to say they are immigrants’ stories, too. This panel of storytellers, brought together Wednesday night by the fledgling Historical Society of Santa Rosa, included citizens of Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Japanese and?African-American ancestry.

If you were at the 6th Street Playhouse, you know there was good humor and pride all-around. These Santa Rosans are proud of what their parents and grandparents accomplished - and they’re proud, too, to be Americans.

“Thank God for our ancestors who paved the way for all of us,” said attorney Jack DeMeo. His grandparents immigrated to Santa Rosa from Italy in the last decade of the 19th century, settling in the west side neighborhood that would be called Little Italy.

You can’t know the history of Santa Rosa and Sonoma County without knowing the history of immigration. For 178 years, people have been arriving at this former Mexican outpost on Santa Rosa Creek - native-born Americans, Irish, Germans, Chinese, Jews, Italians, Japanese, Swiss, Portuguese, Swedes, Filipinos, Latinos, Dust Bowl immigrants, Eritreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians and more.

“All Kinds of People,” explained historians Gaye LeBaron, Dee Blackman, Joann Mitchell and Harvey Hansen in “Santa Rosa, A Nineteenth Century Town.”

For most of us, it becomes easy to pretend after a time that we were always here. Hey, I’m an American and a Californian.

But a little more than a century ago, my paternal grandparents, Peter and Elizabeth Golis, immigrated to the U.S. from Poland. The family history lists a ship that left Bremen, Germany, bound for the Port of New York, on Oct. 11, 1911.

How lucky for me that they were brave enough and ambitious enough to pick up and move half way around the world.

They gave me my immigrant story.

In this nation of immigrants, we have a history of making the latest generation of immigrants feel unwelcome. Irish, Poles, Italians, Chinese, Japanese and more - many have suffered discrimination.

On Wednesday night, we were reminded that:

The Chinese Exclusion Act outlawed additional Chinese immigration and denied the right of citizenship to Chinese people already living here.

More than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry - including more than 1,000 from Sonoma County - were imprisoned during World War II.

During World War II, people of Italian descent could be jailed for being out past the 9 p.m. curfew, even if it was only to deliver tomatoes grown on their small farms and bound for a military mess.

African-Americans who arrived here in 1952 were turned away when they tried to buy a house they liked.

If you watched last week’s PBS special, “The Italian Americans,” you also know that Joe DiMaggio was America’s greatest sports hero in 1942, but that didn’t stop the government from declaring his Sicilian-born parents to be “enemy aliens” during World War II.

Among these groups were people who weren’t allowed to own property, people who were buried in a potter’s field of unmarked graves and people who felt the sting of big and small indignities.

And yet they loved their country.

A friend mentioned last week that he will be traveling to France to visit the beaches where Allied forces landed on D-Day. I told him he will never forget what it feels like to be in that solemn place. Standing among the grave markers of more than 9,000 Americans, he will find Italian names and Jewish names, Anglo-Saxon names and Latino names, Polish names and Scandinavian names. They are all American names, and they all died there fighting for this nation of immigrants.

Every country has the obligation to maintain its borders, and as we are reminded every day, people can and will make their own judgments about immigration policy.

But as we try to repair an immigration system that everyone knows is broken, it might be worthwhile to recall the lessons of history and of our own families’ travels. Unless you happen to be a Native American, your ancestors came here from some other place.

And aren’t you glad they did?

When Americans of Japanese descent returned to Sonoma County after their World War II incarceration, they discovered that their neighbors had taken care of their homes and farms until they returned. Why in Sonoma County and not in other parts of the West?

On Wednesday night, columnist and historian Gaye LeBaron said it probably happened that way because their neighbors were also immigrants.

It turns out we can be proud of what happens when we honor the history that we all share.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.