Immigrant Stories
When historian Peter Rachleff ’73 and his wife, Beth Cleary, bought a house on the East Side of St. Paul, Minn., the neighborhood “had been buffeted by plant closings and deindustrialization,” Rachleff says, and “had become the site of new immigration from Southeast Asia, Central America and East Africa.” The history of the East Side seemed like a “microcosm of the American experience.”
The couple, both on the faculty at Macalaster College, began dreaming of a project that could serve, he says, “to build not only knowledge about immigrants’ and workers’ experiences, but also to build bridges which might link disparate communities.”