How do the places communicate the narratives?

The previous pages documented the differing narratives of immigration we found at each site, and how these landscapes (and their past histories) have shaped the immigration narratives visible there today. I will now look in closer detail at how each of these stories are told through the five locations.

In his study of modern heritage tourism, John Urry observed a recent proliferation of ways in which museums and heritage sites communicate information to their visitors:

Many of these techniques were visible in the sites I visited in New York.

Once again, Ellis Island takes the lead in terms of the quantity of communication techniques employed at it Museum. One key method used throughout the site is role adoptionAka “embodied empathetic identification” (Hoskins, 2012, page 1020). For example, the audio guide makes heavy use of the second person: listen to the audio below to hear how visitors are made to put themselves in the shoes of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.

This extends to the visitor experience travelling to and from the Island: the ferry can be seen as a way of pre-emptively placing every visitor to the Museum in the position of an immigrant, as they are made to take the same journey as those being processed there would have (although it has also been noted that this experience is a poor recreation of the ‘original’“If you want to replicate the experience that immigrants had, the experience my grandparent had, you throw them in the hold of a boat and ride them around the harbor for a few days” (Associated Press, 1998, in Hoskins, 2012)

The use of place to communicate immigrants’ stories is of fundamental importance in the Tenement Museum: “I think one of the most amazing things about the Tenement Museum is the power of place. That you can actually walk into the recreated home of people who truly lived in these buildings … actually to stand, to be in the place where they lived and look around at what their home may have looked like‘Tenement Museum Apartment Tours’, 2019, 1:13”. Instead of drily recounting historical facts, visitors are made to feel as though they are physically standing in another time, a technique designed to prompt empathy with and for the experiences of those immigrants who lived in those buildings. One visitor to the museum described how the experience was “almost like you're there with [the building’s former residents]‘Tenement Museum Apartment Tours’, 2019, 3:56”. This experience of an ‘authentic’ recreated environment, coupled with the focus on the stories of individual historical characters, “allows for an ultimate closeness of the visitors to the presentation and a maximum of empathy with the protagonists and with immigrants in generalBaur, 2006, page 143”, and could be seen as a strategy employed by the Museum to communicate immigration narratives in line with their pro-immigration stance.