WorkLore: Seeking a Better Life

Creating a Home Away from Home

Some immigrants succeed by providing specialized services to their own ethnic communities. Others bring the foods or crafts of their homelands to a broader audience, transforming their backgrounds into businesses.

Today, Brooklyn fills tables across America with the cuisines of the world, from Chinese noodles and Mexican tortillas to Jamaican beef patties and Middle Eastern delicacies.

'When we first came here from Mexico, my dad sold tortillas from a van. He opened the first tortilla factory in 1986. Our tortillas are known to hold their shape, and not break. We make over 300,000 tortillas during each eight-hour shift.'

Tortilla Factory
2002
Courtesy of Martha Cooper

'On Belmont Avenue, Brownsville's great open market, the pushcarts are lined on each other for blocks, and the din is as deafening, marvelous and appetizing as ever… Walking down the street was like being whirled around and around in a game of blind man's bluff.'

Belmont Avenue, Brownsville
About 1910
Irving Underhill
Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum of Art/Brooklyn Public Library – Brooklyn Collection

Chart showing the changing occupations of Brooklyn's workforce from 1850 to 1990

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Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City Written in 1957 about Brooklyn in the 1920s Brooklyn and “the City”: The Great Class Divide		Charles M. Skinner, Workers for the Trusts: Wages, Housing and Industrial Altruism, The Plight of the Sugar Worker, 1900