After reading The Namesake in class, the characters Ashima and Ashoke are two of the main people that come to mind when thinking of immigration. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli moved to America from India, making them immigrants. They were able to succeed with an American Dream of their own and create a new life here. They had children, became fairly wealthy, and had a job to support the family. Ashima and Ashoke had to deal with leaving their entire families behind and starting over in a new place. They made friends with no problem and all of which, especially at first, were Bengali just like they were. This is a similar case with what happened when someone moved to New York City in the 1800s, over a hundred years earlier. People moved to areas with people from the same place as them which made an easier adjustment. However, the Ganguli experienced difficulties with assimilation, like when they had to name their first son in the hospital opposed to giving him a pet name before his good name. The Ganguli's had to make adjustments and sacrifices to fit in with American culture and society.
In The Namesake, Ashoke had a much easier time assimilating than his wife did. Ashoke had a job pretty much right away and wore basic clothes you would see on an American male today. Ashima, on the other hand, had a much more difficult time. She wanted to keep her Bengali culture as much as possible. She did this by constantly cooking Bengali food, when Ashoke would eat more Americanized foods. She wore a sari almost every day and was used to constantly being accompanied by someone, so it's weird for her when she is first alone. However, both characters still had the same output when it comes to holidays, birthdays, and huge traditions like naming.
Many characters in musical theatre immigrated from Another country. One example is all of the sharks in West Side Story. West Side Story takes place in the 1950s when there was a lot of immigration to New York City from Puerto Rico. In the play, a group of these immigrants formed a gang known as the "sharks". The Sharks got into fights with other gangs, particularly the Jets. The Jets tormented the Sharks when they first got to New York City, partly because they were immigrants, causing a permanent tension between the two groups and the Sharks to be hated by other New Yorkers. If immigration in the 1950s wasn't looked upon as a bad thing, the Sharks would have been in a safer, better condition since no one would have hated them just for being an immigrant.
Another example of immigration in musical theatre is the Von Trap family from The Sound of Music. Just before World War II, the Von Trap family is living in Austria, which was dangerous because they were Jewish and it was right before the holocaust. At the end of the second act, Nazis do a search and nobody can find the Von Trap family. They had fled over the Alps and escaped. They had been able to stay safe because they escaped and became immigrants of another country. I was able to find their immigration papers online from when they arrived in Vermont, their final destination to be safe. Immigration caused the family not to be killed in World War II in Austria.
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