“The Prison, By God, Where I Have Found Myself”: Graffiti at Ellis Island immigration station, New York, c.1900-1923

In a Special Inquiry waiting room at Ellis Island immigration station, a Greek detainee wrote the message:

1912…

Έχουν εδω

…

…‘ενα μαχαίρι στο λαιμό...

Εδώ διότι θα περάσει πολλά

1912…They have here

……a knife on the neck…here because one will go through a lot[endnoteRef:1] [1: For their indispensable feedback on earlier drafts, I wish to thank my PhD supervisors Ana Carden-Coyne, David Brown and Melanie Giles at the University of Manchester, and the anonymous reviewers. Many thanks are also due to the translators, the staff at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, the art conservator Christiana Cunningham-Adams, and Marian Smith at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, for their valuable support with the research. Any mistakes are my own. The research has been funded by the University of Manchester, the Royal Historical Society and Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS). Inscription from Door 18D, originally located in Room 303. Translation by Maria Spanos, June 2018. An alternative translation, by Eleni Ntanou, August 2018, is: “1912, 11th September / I write to you / again so that no one else will come in here / because they would best put a knife to their throats and then come in here. / For he will suffer a lot whoever comes in here and will go through / many and things that cannot be recounted. / I too came and underwent many sufferings and sailed… / they do not recognise and have / K… versa / Georgios, Giannis”.]

This article uses the historic graffiti from the Main Building at Ellis Island to examine immigration detention. Most inscriptions were found in former dormitories and detention rooms. The writings are traces of migrants in transit: in a liminal space between arriving and legally being allowed to land. They are a materialization, however fragmentary, of ephemeral emotions, social bonds, humour, creativity and imagination in these spaces of detention. The graffiti, traces of migrants’ own writing, are a valuable counterpoint to the mass of official documents in which migrants’ voices were translated, paraphrased, transcribed and circumscribed. Graffiti communicate the frustrations and viewpoints of detainees far more directly and vividly than a Special Inquiry transcript recorded by a stenographer.

At Ellis Island, writing held the power to stigmatise and exclude.[endnoteRef:2] The intrusion and imposition of writing included the labelling of passengers with manifest numbers for ease of processing, and the marking out of those requiring further medical inspection with chalk symbols on their clothing.[endnoteRef:3] The graffiti formed an alternative text to the official markings and documents, etched onto the institutional building itself. This archive on the walls records over a dozen languages and individuals of different ages and nationalities, literate or not, making their mark. Written within the overcrowded and disorientating environment of detention, the messages were often remarkably personal. In the dormitories, detainees drew graffiti from their bunks, negotiating a space that was liminal not only in terms of their interrupted journeys, but between sleeping and waking, public and private. There is an intimacy and individuality lacking in the official documents. Yet, analytically, the richest terrain is often where the graffiti and official documents intersect. The entanglement of official and unofficial writing within Ellis Island opens up space for analysis: in the echoes, anomalies and silences. Such entanglements are spatial and material, as well as textual. [2: Jacob Riis, “In the Gateway of Nations,” The Century Magazine (1903): 676.] [3: Edward Corsi, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Chronicle of Ellis Island, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935), 73. ]

This article will examine whether the graffiti were a form of protest and dissent, and linked to this, the deceptively simple question of intended audience. The graffiti represent a direct intervention by the writers in their surroundings: adapting and on some level subverting them. Resistance is implicit in the vitriol and frustration expressed by some inscriptions. However, there is little evidence of open defiance of authority by detainees at Ellis Island, for example with acts of violence or rioting. Moreover, the bitterest messages are not written in a way which is highly confrontational. They are not scrawled, five-feet high, across whole walls. They are usually written in average-sized handwriting like a letter or a postcard, or a notice in a shop window, and are often signed with a full name. Collectively, cumulatively, they had a visual impact, but not individually. In his classic work on resistance, anthropologist James Scott argued that people often avoid open confrontation with authority, instead creating “a social space in which offstage dissent…may be voiced.”[endnoteRef:4] The archaeologist Eleanor Casella suggests that graffiti in institutions of confinement, such as prisons and asylums, can form such a 'hidden transcript'.[endnoteRef:5] Indeed, the walls of the dormitories and detention rooms at Ellis Island can be viewed as such a space. [4: James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), xi, 4-5.] [5: Eleanor Casella, “Written on the Walls: Inmate Graffiti within Places of Confinement” in The Archaeology of Institutional Life ed. April Beisaw and James Gibb (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2009): 174, 186.]

The archaeologist Ursula Frederick, who has researched historic inscriptions at both Manly Bay quarantine station (Sydney, Australia) and Angel Island immigration station (San Francisco), has argued that graffiti are significant evidence of “how human beings perceive and interact with their living environment; how they signal their inhabitation of or transit through a place; and how they gesture to ownership, occupation and even, or especially, arrival.”[endnoteRef:6] For Special Inquiry detainees at Ellis Island, as at other immigration stations, arrival was precarious: they were still at risk of exclusion. Some of the Ellis Island messages illuminate how detainees dramatized and articulated their confinement there to themselves. In this sense, some inscriptions are like fragments of interior monologues. The graffiti are traces of how detainees inhabited and marked the building physically, yet also how they engaged with the place imaginatively. [6: Ursula K. Frederick, “Revolution is the New Black: Graffiti/Art and Mark-making practices,” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress (2009): 213. Alison Bashford, Peter Hobbins, Anne Clarke and Ursula K. Frederick, “Geographies of commemoration: Angel Island, San Francisco and North Head, Sydney,” Journal of Historical Geography 52 (April 2016): 16-25. Peter Hobbins, Ursula K. Frederick and Anne Clarke, Stories from the Sandstone: Quarantine Inscriptions from Australia’s Immigrant Past (Crows Nest: Arbon Publishing, 2016).]

The Ellis Island graffiti have largely been overlooked in the historiography. For example, in a recent chapter on Ellis Island, Marija Dalbello asserted that “immigrants did not leave the traces of their own writing in direct voice.”[endnoteRef:7] The graffiti are precisely such traces. This neglect is especially marked in comparison to the poetic Chinese inscriptions at Angel Island immigration station which have received much more academic attention. There, the mournful messages on the walls exemplify the injustices of the Chinese Exclusion Act and are widely acknowledged as intrinsic to the site’s heritage value. The graffiti at Ellis Island, often terse and semi-literate, are less prestigious and coherent as source material. In a footnote on the Ellis Island graffiti, Gareth Hoskins commented that, “Although a number of historical inscriptions, graffiti and drawings made on the walls of buildings around Ellis Island have been identified and protected by the National Park Service conservators, the poems at Angel Island are much more central to the historical significance of its location and feature more strongly in the site’s interpretive efforts.”[endnoteRef:8] It is telling that a recent book on immigrants’ experiences at Ellis Island does not discuss the graffiti at the site, but does quote from the Chinese poems in a section on Angel Island.[endnoteRef:9] [7: Marija Dalbello, “Reading Immigrants: Immigration as Site and Process of Reading and Writing,” in Reading and Writing from Below: Exploring the Margins of Modernity, ed. Ann-Catrine Edlund, T.G. Ashplant and Anna Kuismin (Umeå: Umeå University, 2016), 170. ] [8: Gareth Hoskins, “Citizenship and Quarantine at Ellis Island and Angel Island: The Seduction of Interruption,” in Quarantine ed. Alison Bashford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 244. ] [9: Ronald Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 91. ]

Detention and exclusion at Ellis Island during the ‘peak immigration years’ can appear of marginal significance.[endnoteRef:10] The majority of passengers passed through the inspections in a few hours, with approximately 15-20 percent temporarily detained.[endnoteRef:11] As Paul Spickard sums up the images of the two sites: “Ellis Island was a processing center; Angel Island was a prison”.[endnoteRef:12] Relative to the weight of the 12 million “enshrined Ellis Island ancestors”, the 2% who were rejected there can seem trifling and irrelevant.[endnoteRef:13] Yet, examination of the graffiti suggests that for those facing exclusion, Ellis Island was perceived as a jail. Recently, Douglas Baynton has focused attention on the exclusion of people with perceived disabilities, using case studies from the paperwork of Board of Special Inquiry appeals.[endnoteRef:14] The historic graffiti at Ellis Island, while fragmentary, similarly illuminate the lives of people who did not experience the pre-1924 era as one of unrestricted and open immigration. [10: Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace’ (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 62. ] [11: Barry Moreno, The Ellis Island Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press), xv. Vincent Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 7. ] [12: Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 241-242.] [13: Erica Rand, The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), xii. ] [14: Douglas Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), 35, 101, 127. ]

Recent studies of graffiti have frequently used the methodology of content analysis, drawing out themes and making inferences about the social meanings and functions of inscriptions.[endnoteRef:15] This qualitative, thematic approach informs this article. The first section will give a brief background on the source material. The second will explore the complex meanings of graffiti marking journeys which were still incomplete and precarious. The third will examine the graffiti as evidence of resistance against the power of the immigration authorities. Finally, the article will further consider the intricate relationship of language, literacy and power in the context of Ellis Island. [15: Kate Giles and Melanie Giles, “The Writing on the Wall: The Concealed Communities of the East Yorkshire Horselads,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11 (December 2007): 348-54. Derek Alderman and Heather Ward, “Writing on the Plywood: Toward an Analysis of Hurricane Graffiti,” Coastal Management, 36, no.1 (2007): 4. Ilse Derluyn, Charles Watters, Cindy Mels and Eric Broekaert, “’We are All the Same, Coz Exist Only One Earth, Why the BORDERS EXIST’: Messages of Migrants on their Way,” Journal of Refugee Studies 27, no.1 (March 2014): 7. Jeffery Burton and Mary Farrell, “’Life in Manzanar Where There Is a Spring Breeze’: Graffiti at a World War II Japanese American Internment Camp,” in Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory, and Heritage of 19th and 20th Century Mass Internment, ed. Harold Mytum and Gilly Carr (New York: Springer, 2013), 246. Casella, “Written on the Walls”, 173. ]

The source material: conservation, translation and research

When the Main Building of Ellis Island immigration station was restored as a museum in the 1980s, approximately 400 square feet of historic graffiti were recorded. They included drawings of people, ships and birds; handprints; religious motifs; and numerous names and messages in more than a dozen languages.[endnoteRef:16] This article focuses on graffiti, dating from c.1900-1923, from five areas in the Main Building.[endnoteRef:17] While room use changed over time, and the contingencies of everyday use may not have always reflected historic building plans, it is likely three of these spaces were dormitories and two were Special Inquiry waiting rooms at the time the graffiti were written. The majority of graffiti in the three former dormitories were written up in the year following the Main Building opening on December 17, 1900. This dating is inferred from the positioning of graffiti on the base layer of plaster, beneath subsequent layers of paint and architectural features, and substantiated by numerous 1901 dates in the inscriptions.[endnoteRef:18] This was a period of lax and somewhat corrupt administration at Ellis Island.[endnoteRef:19] When a new commissioner took over in 1902, he commented that previously, “Filth and bad odors existed throughout the building”.[endnoteRef:20] By September 1902, the interior walls had been painted, presumably covering the graffiti.[endnoteRef:21] Under the new regime, the detention quarters were “constantly cleaned and disinfected and frequently repainted” hinting obliquely at the official reaction to detainees writing on the walls.[endnoteRef:22] [16: James Brooke, “Old New York is Being Unearthed on Ellis Island,” New York Times, June 16, 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/16/nyregion/old-new-york-is-being-unearthed-on-ellis-island.html. “Graffiti at Ellis Island Mark the Passing of Immigrants on Threshold of New Land,” Deseret News, March 26, 1989, https://www.deseretnews.com/article/39513/GRAFFITI-AT-ELLIS-ISLAND-MARK-THE-PASSING-OF-IMMIGRANTS-ON-THRESHOLD-OF-NEW-LAND.html. Mike Schuster, “Ellis Island Graffiti Found,” National Public Radio broadcast July 5, 1986, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4473936. ] [17: Room use changed frequently over time, and the contingencies of everyday use may not always have held to building plans, throwing up some uncertainties. For example, the New York Detention Dormitory, identified as such on a 1907 building plan and in the conservator’s notes, may have been used as a ‘Mess Room’ (dining room) at the time the graffiti were written. A photograph of the Main Building’s dining room in 1902 does not, however, match the layout of the ‘New York Detention Dormitory’/‘Mess Room’ on historic building plans. National Park Service, Technical Information Center, Denver, “Main Building U.S. Immigrant Station, Ellis Island, N.Y. Harbor (From) Drawing No.1270 Second Floor Assignment Plan” STLI 356 41021. Moreno, The Ellis Island Encyclopedia, 152. Maltine Company, Quarantine Sketches [a pamphlet published as advertising by the Maltine Company for distribution to physicians], (New York: The Maltine Company, 1902), 22. Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 7, box 1, Ellis Island Restoration Views, Interior: Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti on Ellis Island, 1985-1990, STLI-3127 / STLI-36601 (Statue of Liberty National Monument Library, New York, NY).] [18: For example, the conservation treatment reports by Christiana Cunningham-Adams in folders 10, 29 and 30, boxes 1 and 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti.] [19: Thomas Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 29, 35. Harlan Unrau, Statue of Liberty Ellis Island National Monument Historic Resource Study (Historical Component): Volume II (New York-New Jersey: U.S. Department of the Interior / National Park Service, 1984), 216-17. Cannato, American Passage, 116-117.] [20: William Williams, “Memorandum Showing (1) Some of the conditions and influences which formerly existed, and (2) some of the changes made,” c.1903 (undated), Series I, Ellis Island, William Williams Papers (New York Public Library, New York, NY).] [21: Treasurer of the Office of Commissioner of Immigration, New York N.Y., “Memorandum for the Commissioner,” September 21, 1903, Box 3, Scrapbook Volume 1, Series I, Ellis Island, William Williams Papers (New York Public Library, New York, NY).] [22: Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1904 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 104.]

In addition to the c.1901 inscriptions, the source base of this article also includes graffiti from 1911-1914 written on metal doors in a Special Inquiry waiting room, part of a third-floor extension built on the west wing in 1911, and inscriptions dating 1922-1923 from a Special Inquiry detention room on the second floor. Later graffiti, from the 1930s-1950s, were also found in the Main Building and elsewhere at Ellis Island, including the Baggage and Dormitory Building. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, and later the Second World War, changed the nature of operations at Ellis Island considerably. Thus these later graffiti, which require different contextualisation and analysis, are beyond the scope of this article. When the Main Building became derelict, after Ellis Island closed in 1954, paint began to flake away from walls and doors, revealing the markings. This process was accelerated in the 1980s when large dehumidifiers were brought in to dry out the building prior to redevelopment.[endnoteRef:23] [23: Beyer, Blinder, Belle/Anderson, Notter Finegold & Alexander Inc., Architects, “Examination Report and Conservation Proposal: Graffiti: Main Building, Ellis Island” (undated), 3, folder 6 ‘Graffiti Had No Folder’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection: Through America’s Gate Research Files #1/3 (Statue of Liberty National Monument Library, New York, NY). Schuster, “Ellis Island Graffiti Found.” ]

The source material, selectively preserved in the collections of the National Museum of Immigration at Ellis Island, has been mediated by the conservation process. In 1984, the Historic Structure Report on the Main Building at Ellis Island recognised the significance of the graffiti as: “an unusual cultural resource which merits immediate attention and future consideration. It has unique potential for use in interpretation of the building.”[endnoteRef:24] The art conservator Christiana Cunningham-Adams was commissioned to work on their preservation. In her dedication to the project, she donated $25,000 of additional work to preserving graffiti which would otherwise have been discarded.[endnoteRef:25] However, in the midst of major building work, and given the fragile nature of the historic plaster, it was not possible for all of the graffiti in the Main Building to be kept in place. Eighteen inscriptions were removed from the walls and preserved as fragments. These are exquisite objects, with the appearance of ancient archaeological tablets, yet isolated from their original context. Other graffiti were photographed but not preserved; including all but one fragment from the Women’s Dormitory. Two wall sections and two graffiti-covered columns are still in situ integrated into the museum displays. Four metal doors and two marble window sills with graffiti were also preserved. Decision-making about which marks and inscriptions are significant - worthy of recording and study - is therefore to some extent a fait accompli.[endnoteRef:26] [24: Beyer, Blinder, Belle/Anderson, Notter, Finegold, Ellis Island, Historic Structure Report: The Main Building Vol. 1 (Washington D.C.: Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1984), 318-20. ] [25: Christiana Cunningham-Adams to Ziva Benderly (The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.), letter, April 7, 1986, folder “Christy Cunningham”, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.] [26: On the issue of which marks and abrasions ‘count’ when surveying for graffiti: Laura McAtackney, “Graffiti Revelations and the Changing Meanings of Kilmainham Gaol in (Post)Colonial Ireland,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20 (September 2016): 497. Melanie Giles and Kate Giles note that, “It is important to recognize that modern perceptions of graffiti, as counter-normative or ‘deviant’ behaviour, were not always prevalent in the past”. In the relatively recent context of Ellis Island however, the many layers of paint that covered the messages indicate that it was perceived as vandalism by the administration. Giles and Giles, “The Writing on the Wall”, 344.]

The graffiti are evidence of vernacular literacies in a cornucopia of languages: of idiosyncratic handwriting styles, spellings and dialects.[endnoteRef:27] Louis Adamic, detained for a night at Ellis Island in 1913, remembered: “I shivered, sleepless, all night, listening to snores and dream-monologues in perhaps a dozen different languages.”[endnoteRef:28] This is evocative of the graffiti inscribed on the dormitory walls. Moreover, after a century, these ephemeral messages are often fragmentary, smudged, and barely legible. As such, they have proved a challenge to translate. In the 1980s, the agency Technical Translation International Ltd. (TTI Ltd.) partially translated 15 inscriptions of 39 supplied.[endnoteRef:29] Five Chinese graffiti were translated separately by Allen Wong. Currently, 65 textual inscriptions, dating 1900-1923 from dormitories and detention rooms of the Main Building, have been identified and recorded which are legible enough to have some meaningful content, however rudimentary. Half are short statements of presence and identity: names, often with additional information such as the date, number of days in detention, and home village. Some are interwoven with pictures: written under boats, inside handprints and as labels for faces. For example, a Yiddish inscription, recording the presence of Yasha Abram in 1901, was inside a decorative frame which the conservator suggested might be a scroll (Fig. 1).[endnoteRef:30] [27: A list of interpreters at Ellis Island immigration station in 1911 gives a sense of the potential languages in the graffiti: “Albanian, Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Dalmatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Magyar, Montenegrin, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Roumanian, Russian, Ruthenian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Syrian (Arabic), Turkish, Yiddish.” William Williams to Daniel J. Keefe, “Ellis Island, Its Organization and Some of Its Work,” notes and cover letter, Aug 9, 1911, 27, Record Group 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1789-2004 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/16495172. ] [28: Louis Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle: An Immigrant in Search of the Land of Promise Discovers the Real America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), 41-42.] [29: Technical Translations International Ltd., (TTI Ltd.), translations in folder “Translations – Graffiti,” New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.] [30: Translation by Brina Marks, personal communication, 12 February 2018: “day in…/ I, Yasha Abram, slept / only in the month of June 1901 in 16 and / stayed only one [?] day. Since the / first day I remain…”.]

Figure 1: A Yiddish inscription, dated 1901, from a third-floor dormitory. The photograph, taken in the 1980s, shows the graffiti before removal. Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty NM / National Park Service.[endnoteRef:31] [31: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 31, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti.]

The most common languages in the 1900-1923 Main Building graffiti are Greek, Italian and Hungarian, with further inscriptions in Yiddish, Romanian, German, Czech (Bohemian), Russian, Slovenian, Arabic and Armenian. A newspaper article from the 1980s mentions graffiti in Polish and French.[endnoteRef:32] There is strikingly little English. One word – “women” – appears to have been copied from a restroom sign.[endnoteRef:33] There were also later graffiti, tentatively dated to the 1930s-1950s, in Chinese and Spanish found in the Main Building.[endnoteRef:34] The proviso must be given that the translations included in this article are tentative, subjective and as fragmentary as the surviving graffiti (thus the frequent ellipses). The translation work is an open-ended process which will extend beyond the current research project. [32: Brooke, “Old New York is Being Unearthed on Ellis Island.”] [33: Door 18B, “Women…Donne…”. A historic photograph of the Special Inquiry waiting room in which the door was originally located shows multilingual notices to label the male and female restrooms. Beyer, Blinder, Belle/Anderson, Notter, Finegold, Ellis Island, Historic Structure Report: The Main Building Vol. 1, (Washington D.C.: Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1984): 185. An inscription on column 310 (North column) may also be in English but only two words “prison” and “America” are tentatively legible.] [34: The Chinese inscriptions in the Main Building at Ellis Island, tentatively dated to the 1930s from references in the text, included poetry and political slogans. They were found on marble toilet partitions, the current location of which is unknown. Four translations appear in the second edition of Island, a collection of Angel Island poetry: Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940, 2nd edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014): 40, 178-183.]

Research on people named in the 1900-1923 graffiti has, so far, resulted in further documents for 23 passengers. All of these were male, including seven boys under 16 years old. Official records show that twenty were detained for Special Inquiry for being ‘Likely to become a Public Charge’ (L.P.C.). This was the more serious of the two kinds of detention at Ellis Island. The “New York Detained” had conditionally passed inspection but would not be released until “some minor objection” was overcome.[endnoteRef:35] Passengers detained for Special Inquiry, on the other hand, were subject to further investigation and a hearing, and were at greater risk of exclusion.[endnoteRef:36] Among the detainees who wrote the graffiti, there may also have been non-citizens being deported after a period of residence in the United States, stowaways or foreign sailors who had tried to jump ship.[endnoteRef:37] [35: Williams to Keefe, “Ellis Island, Its Organization and Some of Its Work,” 25.] [36: Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate, 71-73. ] [37: Immigration statistics for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1902, noted that 4,203 immigrants had been debarred from the port of New York. The largest category was 3,422 “Paupers, or likely to become a public charge” (L.P.C.). There were also 391 people deported via Ellis Island, having become ineligible within a year of entering the United States. Frank Sargent, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1902 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902), 9. Williams to Keefe, “Ellis Island, Its Organization and Some of Its Work,” 27.]

Marking Migration

Many of the graffiti appear to mark migrants’ arrival in the United States: whether through their names, drawings of ships or handprints. Yet, the meanings of these graffiti are complicated by the precarious status of Special Inquiry detainees. Illustrating this, for example, is an Italian message declaring the arrival of a father and son, Achille and Giuseppe Cecchini. The 11-year-old Giuseppe’s name comes first, implying that he was the writer. The inscription is low down on a dormitory column, suggesting the writer was sitting or lying on either a bottom bunk or the floor. Beneath the message, there are doodles of two figures in bowler hats. One has a squiggle of writing next to his mouth. The translator, Elena Spagnuolo, suggested that this smaller figure might be Giuseppe and he was labelled “io” (I). On the surface, the message appears a straightforward statement of arrival:

Cecchini GiuseppeAchille Cecchinivenuto alla batteriaIl giorno 18 Maggio diSabato 1901

Cecchini GiuseppeAchille Cecchinicame to the Batteryon the 18th MaySaturday 1901

Passenger records show that May 18, 1901 was not, in fact, their day of arrival. They had arrived at Ellis Island on May 16 and been detained for Special Inquiry on the grounds of being Likely to Become a Public Charge (L.P.C.). The father Achille, a laborer, was 52 years old. They had $13 between them and no onward tickets. The manifest records that they knew “Nobody” in the United States. The message was written on the date of their Board of Special Inquiry hearing on whether they would be admitted. Perhaps, hopeful of acceptance, they prematurely proclaimed arrival (they were eventually admitted on May 23, 1901).[endnoteRef:38] [38: “Record of Aliens held for Special Inquiry”, S.S. Hohenzollern from Genoa, Italy, arrived New York May 16, 1901, Microfilm Roll 0195, Microfilm Publication T715, page 198, line 20, Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897-1957, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (National Archives, Washington, D.C.). Accessed through: Ancestry.com, New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 [database online], Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2010.]

Within the same dormitory as the Cecchini inscription, there were eight drawings of ships. These are also simple on the surface, suggesting the port environs, and recently completed migrant journeys. The conservation notes, made in the 1980s, hint at an optimistic and patriotic interpretation. One drawing is described as “a ship with figures waving”, evoking nostalgic, sepia images of arriving migrants at Ellis Island.[endnoteRef:39] Examining the drawing now, a solitary figure is visible on deck (although the drawings are as open to different readings as the texts). In the smudged, nearly-illegible message below it, the words “prison” and “America” can be tentatively made out. Another boat drawing, which was not preserved, is described as “a person with an oar in a boat and buildings in the distance.”[endnoteRef:40] This could suggest dreams of escape from confinement on Ellis Island, rather than the migration voyage itself. [39: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 27, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti.] [40: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 25, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti. The building plan in this folder inaccurately labels H305 (a hallway which was originally part of the dormitory, subdivided in 1907) in the position of H303 (a later, separate hallway built c.1911). The location of the graffiti is correctly labelled on a separate building plan headed “Graffiti” in the folder “Christy Cunningham,” New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.]

Figure 2: Wall fragment with incised ship, c.1901, from the second floor of the Main Building at Ellis Island. Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty NM / National Park Service.

Inscriptions accompanying two of the ship drawings underscore the ambivalence in their meanings. An incised picture of a ship, from an area which was either used as a New York Detention Dormitory or a Mess Room c.1901, has been preserved as a plaster fragment. Isolated like this, it appears a serene and beautiful image (fig. 2). It has steam rising from three funnels, suggesting swift forward motion, yet it is anchored. The conservator noted that the ship had an American flag flying.[endnoteRef:41] It is in fact a Greek flag (with a cross, rather than stars in the corner). On the same wall, there was found a Greek inscription which provoked the following note from the 1980s translator: “The exclamation of great distress ‘Ah!’ prevails throughout the writings. I can also make out the word ‘dog’. Presumably someone paralleled his life to that of a dog.”[endnoteRef:42] A recent re-translation by Maria Spanos made out the words: [41: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 7, box 1, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti.] [42: Technical Translations International Ltd. (TTI Ltd.), “213 – W. Wall, 7/26, Translation from Greek,” folder 1 ‘Graffiti Translations’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.]

Από τους 15 Γρεκούς που γύρισαν πίσω

Αχ ... και ...

της μητέρας μου...

Out of the 15 Greeks they turned back...

Oh... And...

my mother

The text suggests the writer may have been excluded by a Board of Special Inquiry. This complicates the beautiful image of the ship with the Greek flag. The original context of the despairing Greek inscription suggests the ship may be a marker of home loyalties, or dreams or fears of return. Similarly, a ship drawing on a third-floor dormitory column has the following inscription beneath (translation by Maria Spanos):

Συμπατριώται Έλληνες μάθετε όποιος έλθη εδώ

θα γιρήση πίσω καθώς και εγώ

Χρι. Δ. Μα… ας

Χωρίον Κε... Δήμος Τεγέας Επαρχία Μαντινείας

...Ελληνες όταν έλθετε εις Αμερικήν

Compatriots Greeks learn that whoever comes here

Will return back as I am

Chr. D. Ma… as

Village Ker… Municipality of Tegeas Province of Mantineia

…Greeks when you come in America

In this case, it is explicit that the writer has been excluded from the United States. The ship drawing evokes a futile journey, or perhaps the return one. As is typical of the Greek messages, the writer addresses an audience of compatriots. There are other Greek inscriptions nearby on the same dormitory column, evoking a community of fellow detainees. There is a hint that his imagined audience includes people still in Greece, yet to set out. The inscription has the tone of a public notice and a warning. There is an echo with a study of contemporary migrants’ graffiti, in police waiting rooms at the Belgium port of Zeebruge, by Ilse Derluyn et al. They argue that these messages often address an audience of “brothers-on-the-way”, expressing solidarity and advice to future migrants who might be detained there.[endnoteRef:43] [43: Derluyn et al., “’We are All the Same, Coz Exist Only One Earth, Why the BORDERS EXIST,’” 9-11.]

In this Greek inscription, and others in various languages, identity is framed in terms of home localities back in Europe. Personal names are often embellished with home villages and provinces. None of the messages so far translated specify onward destinations in the United States, although these are given on ships’ manifests. For example, in another former dormitory on the third floor, there were several messages in Hungarian (despite the labelling of the space on historic building plans as a Women’s Dormitory, the messages all appear to be by men or boys). One inscription recorded a group. This tentative translation is by Zsuzsa Racz:

Szeles

és fia

és Istók

Hozsvár György mag

Bércsák István

Bácsi ősmagyarokUngarians from Bács County

Tar Gáspár Bereg m, Csidfalvai lakók 10 nap

egy Kvenyania

…Szeles…

and his son…

And Istók

György Hozsvár

István Bércsák

True old Hungarians from Bács CountryUngarians from Bács County

Gáspár Tar from Bereg County, resident of Csanádfalva for 10 days

One company

There may have been comfort in inscribing social bonds: making visible companionship and support. In this case, the Hungarians were travelling together. Elsewhere, the propinquity of messages in the same language, mentioning specific villages and provinces, creates a similar effect. The writers may have been strangers, but the clustering of their messages on the walls creates the illusion of community.

Among all the messages, there is only one inscription which explicitly expresses a sense of happiness at arrival in the United States. This is from the space used as either a New York Detention Dormitory or a Mess Room c.1901, and the writer does not appear to have been awaiting Special Inquiry. It is clear, however, that this was not a stereotypical one-way migration journey. Written in Armenian, the message was translated by Aris Sevag as follows:

It is beautiful, so lovely… Armenian… may the Lord bless Columbus’ soul… Baghdasar Tashjian who says may the Lord bless his soul, whoever comes here won’t… [regret it]… It is three times that I travel to America, only the Lord… be to those who come here… greetings to you all. 1901 Tashjian from the city of Kharpert.[endnoteRef:44] [44: Translation by Aris Sevag for an Armenian exhibit at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/homeMemories/keepsakes.html Archived webpage retrieved with the kind assistance of Jennifer Hammer, July 18, 2017. Reproduced by kind permission of Asdghig Sevag.]

While the writer praises America, his sense of belonging is in Kharpert (Harpoot). There is a worldliness, perhaps a slight bravado, to the statement that this is his third trip. A possible match in the passenger records is a 49-year-old shoemaker, Gaspar Tashjian, who arrived in 1901, making a return visit to the United States. His destination address was that of a brother, Bagdassar, who lived in the established Armenian community in Worcester, Massachusetts.[endnoteRef:45] In the corners of the inscription are motifs of a tree branch and a peacock. The writing makes way for the picture of the branch, like a stamp in the corner of a postcard. Arevig Caprielian, of the Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society, suggested that image could be a symbol of diaspora – the branches trailing away from a strong stem.[endnoteRef:46] In the formulaic phrasing which scaffolds the writing (“greetings to you all”), the inscription has the genial tone of a letter to friends. Marking the walls in a familiar language may have been a way for detainees to domesticate and personalise the space next to their temporary bunk. [45: Passenger record for Gaspar Tashjian arriving on the ship ‘La Bretagne’ in the port of New York on 23 June, 1901, Microfilm Roll 0208, Microfilm Publication T715, page 173, line 13, Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897-1957.] [46: Arevig Caprielian, personal communication, January 10, 2018.]

These inscriptions, while simple, have a sense of narrative: the distance travelled is implicit in the home villages, the pictures of ships and the languages. Among the cryptic doodles and scribbles there may be marks made by people who were illiterate in lieu of a signature. In the New York Detention Dormitory there are two outlines of left hands. A palm print is a signature of sorts. As Susan Stewart argues, there is something innately personal and intimate in the gestures of handwriting: “To sign your name, your mark, is to leave a track like any other track of the body.”[endnoteRef:47] In the context of Ellis Island, these messages marked journeys completed, however provisionally, physically etching the name of the writer on the place. For Special Inquiry detainees, their presence in the United States was precarious: they were still at risk of exclusion.[endnoteRef:48] Leaving a name was a small proof that they had existed there at all. The translator Haridina Fraser suggested that there was perhaps a kind of sympathetic magic at play: the name on the wall a simulacrum for the person who had been excluded. [47: Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993 [1984]), 14.] [48: Fifty-First Congress, Session II, Ch. 551. 1891.]

Four graffiti by a 23-year-old Greek laborer, George Pelekanos, were found in a Special Inquiry detention room on the second floor. He was detained on arrival, in 1922, on suspicion that he had lied to the inspectors to evade a full quota. He was sent back to Europe a week later after a failed appeal.[endnoteRef:49] His messages were scattered around the detention room, suggesting restlessness, or inscriptions made over a series of days (one of his signatures is labelled “Monday” in Greek). One of his messages has been translated by Maria Spanos thus: [49: “PELEKANOS, George, age 23 in 1922, from Constantinople,” file 55235/102, Record Group 85, Entry 9, (National Archives, Washington, D.C.).]

Γεωρ Πελεκάνος 19

Ήλθεν ως εδώ εκανε πολλά…

...Εις τούτην την…Φυλακή να έμενε

George Pelakanos 19[22]Came all the way here did a lot……in this…prison to have stayed

The message evokes his frustration at the futile journey. Repeatedly inscribing his name suggests a desire to be remembered. It was an assertion, however powerless, of his own significance and of the effort he had made to reach the United States.

Traces of Resistance

In various historic contexts, graffiti have been interpreted as an articulation of resistance to authority; a form of “spatial insubordination”.[endnoteRef:50] At Ellis Island, resistance is implicit in detainees defacing the walls, the materiality of the blue chalk or crayon used for some messages (which echoes the chalk and grease pencils used by the inspectors) and the vitriolic content of some messages. Nevertheless, the messages are equivocal as evidence of defiance and protest. Rather, they appear to have been a soft form of dissent. Instead of risking direct confrontation with authority, which may have appeared futile, some detainees gave voice to their emotions on the walls. A term from Julie de Dardel’s recent study of carceral space is apt here: the writing of graffiti was not an open rebellion, but a “micro-transgression”.[endnoteRef:51] It could be a coping strategy and distraction for people held in the limbo of immigration detention. [50: Alexei Zadorojnyi, “Transcripts of Dissent? Political Graffiti and Elite Ideology Under the Principate,” in Ancient Graffiti in Context, ed. Jennifer Baird and Claire Taylor (London: Routledge, 2011), 110. Also, Casella, “Written on the Walls,” 181; Burton and Farrell, “Life in Manzanar Where There Is a Spring Breeze,” 254.] [51: Julie de Dardel, “Resisting ‘Bare Life’: Prisoners’ Agency in the New Prison Culture Era in Columbia,” in Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention, ed. Dominique Moran, Nick Gill and Deirdre Conlon (New York: Routledge, 2013), 190.]

Open defiance by detainees at Ellis Island during this period was infrequent. Victor Safford, who worked as a doctor at Ellis Island, wrote in his memoir that despite sporadic tensions, “I cannot recall any serious result… [They] are on the whole likely to be inoffensive people and are not nearly so tough and dangerous as they look to the uninitiated visitor”.[endnoteRef:52] He said the more memorable incidents included a fight between two Italians; a general panic following a man fainting; and the crowd turning on an elderly man whose coat was infested with lice. In 1896, there were “small riots” after 531 excluded Italians were placed in a “temporary detention pen”.[endnoteRef:53] Occasionally, a detainee would attempt to escape by swimming to the mainland, stowing away on the ferry or commandeering a boat.[endnoteRef:54] Luigi Morelli recalled a fellow detainee discussing such a pipedream of “jumping overboard”, and advising him against it: “’No, but you freeze,’ I told him in Italiano …‘You find police,’ I said.”[endnoteRef:55] [52: Victor Safford, Immigration Problems: Personal experiences of an official (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1925), 99.] [53: “Armed Constables Wanted: Dr Senner Fears Serious Trouble At Ellis Island,” New York Tribune, April 16, 1896, 4, Chronicling America (Library of Congress), http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1896-04-16/ed-1/seq-4/.] [54: “The News This Morning,” New York Tribune, July 31, 1905, 6, Chronicling America (Library of Congress), http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1905-07-31/ed-1/seq-6/.] [55: Luigi Morelli, (born in Italy, arrived at Ellis Island 1920, aged 23 on ‘The Patria’), interview by Carlo Scissura, Feb 22, 1991, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.]

While the emotions of detention may not have resulted in mutiny, they were visceral. By the time of the First World War, Ellis Island had already earned the clichéd moniker, “the Island of Tears.”[endnoteRef:56] The priest Father Gambera, who worked for an Italian immigrant aid society at Ellis Island from 1900-1905, commented that the halls “echoed with complaints and bitter weeping” from people “terrified” of being sent back.[endnoteRef:57] Doukenie Bacos recalled, “I cry. I cry all night.”[endnoteRef:58] Harry Mark Petrakis said that his father, “spent the dark, sleepless hours, frantic about my mother and the girls”.[endnoteRef:59] Ernest Hamlin Abbott, who reported on Ellis Island for The Outlook in 1902, described how: “At the end of the passageway was the room of the rejected. It was not easy to face a room full of men whose hope for all their future had been dashed.”[endnoteRef:60] [56: Frederic Howe, The Confessions of a Reformer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 253.] [57: Giacomo Gambera, A Migrant Missionary Story: The autobiography of Giacomo Gambera, ed. Mary Elizabeth Brown (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1994), 138.] [58: Doukenie Babayanie Bacos, (Turkish, born in Greece, arrived at Ellis Island 1919, aged 15, on ‘The King Alexander’), interview by Paul Sigrist, May 23, 1991, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.] [59: Harry Mark Petrakis, “A Portrait of a Miracle,” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1986, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-07-04/news/8602170598_1_hair-eyes-portrait. ] [60: Ernest Hamlin Abbott, “America’s Welcome to the Immigrant,” The Outlook, Oct 4, 1902, 260.]

Frank Matero, a professor of architecture, made an initial examination of the historic graffiti in the 1980s while they were still all in place on the walls. He observed how many messages in the dormitories seemed to have been written by people from their beds. Some graffiti were high up on the walls in areas which would have been inaccessible except from a top-tier bunk. On the dormitory columns, which are nine-feet high, the inscriptions extend from the floor to close to the ceiling.[endnoteRef:61] The graffiti found in the Women’s Dormitory were on the “ceiling lintel face and soffit”.[endnoteRef:62] Matero noted that this created a surprising sense of intimacy. The graffiti had been written in personal space despite the mass, communal conditions.[endnoteRef:63] [61: Detainees were usually moved to day rooms. A report in 1911, however, does refer to detainees having to stay in a dormitory in the ‘Baggage and Dormitory’ building during the day due to over-crowding: “When all of the beds are occupied, as frequently they are, the congestion in this room is very great… In addition, the ventilation is very imperfect. Unfortunately, it is necessary to use it also as a day room, though being encumbered with beds it is obviously inappropriate for this purpose.” William Williams, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Immigration for the Port of New York (Office of Commissioner of Immigration, Ellis Island, New York Harbor, N.Y., October 10, 1911), 4, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:6317365$1i. ] [62: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 29, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti.] [63: Frank Matero, personal communication, January 4, 2017.]

Most of the graffiti were written in graphite pencil. However, some are drawn with thick blue lines. In places, this material has a waxy appearance, in others powdery. The conservator Christiana Cunningham-Adams identified the material as chalk and surmised that this was probably “the same blue chalk that doctors used to mark comments on people’s coats.”[endnoteRef:64] The material also evokes the coloured grease pencils used by inspectors to annotate ships’ manifests during the legal inspection in the Registry Room. Some graffiti may well have been written using the inspectors’ writing materials: stolen, spared or picked up off the floor for the amusement of children held in detention. Or it was perhaps a piece of tailor’s chalk from somebody’s pocket.[endnoteRef:65] Regardless of how they acquired it, the material is evocative in the context of Ellis Island. Detainees in the ‘Special Inquiry’ category might have witnessed people being marked out with blue chalk during the medical line inspection, and in some cases (for example, if they were detained as ‘L.P.C.’ due to “poor physique”) may have been marked themselves.[endnoteRef:66] This humiliating practice singled individuals out for possible exclusion. In turn, as the graffiti shows, some detainees marked the walls. In the dormitories, the blue chalk was gently subverted and transformed. There is a playfulness and imagination to the drawings. Instead of symbols of exclusion, the chalk was used to draw faces, dashes and scribbles. Next to an inscription by a 14-year-old Special Inquiry detainee, Michele Stoppiello, there is a blue chalk animal, possibly a deer.[endnoteRef:67] The latter is suggestive of memories of home. [64: Brooke, “Old New York is being unearthed on Ellis Island.”] [65: There is also the possibility, broached in a poem (the Ellis Island graffiti attract poets), that some of the blue chalk graffiti were written by staff. However, the positioning and content make this less likely for the dormitory column graffiti which are low down, as if written by someone on the lowest bunk or on the floor. Vincent Ferrini, The Whole Song: Selected Poems edited and with an introduction by Kenneth Warren and Fred Whitehead (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004): 129. ] [66: Leah Drachman, (arrived at Ellis Island 1916, aged 16, ship ‘The New Amsterdam’), interview by Margo Nash on Oct 17, 1973, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.] [67: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 22, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti.]

Anger and despair were also written onto the walls. An Italian message was translated by the conservator as: “Damned be the day that I left my fatherland.”[endnoteRef:68] Two messages directly address America, as if writing onto the institutional building was a form of communication with the power it embodied. One message in Italian, almost illegible, begins “O America assassina” (O America murderer).[endnoteRef:69] A Greek message also addressed the United States directly (fig.3).[endnoteRef:70] A translation by Haridina Fraser is as follows (spelling errors in the original Greek have been left verbatim): [68: The Italian translation appears in the conservator’s notes: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 17, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti. Not all the words are clear on the preserved fragment. What is legible, as deciphered by Elena Spagnuolo, is: “Maledetta questa Domenica…dela mia patria” (Damned be this Sunday…from my fatherland).] [69: Column 314, South face, in the third floor, west wing.] [70: The inscription was also translated in the 1980s by Technical Translation International Ltd. as: “Blast you America with your much money [sic] who took the Greeks away from their race, poor souls!” Technical Translation International Ltd. (TTI Ltd.), “221 – E. Wall, 8/4, Translation from Greek,” folder 1 ‘Graffiti Translations’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.]

Ανάθεμασε Αμερηκή με τους πολλούς παράδες που έμασες τους Έλληνες εις της φηλής όλους τους φουκαράδες

Damn you [anathema to you] America with all your wealth [money] that you added [gathered] the Greeks together with all the wretched ones of your race.

Figure 3: A Greek message, c.1901. The photograph, taken in the 1980s, shows the graffiti still in situ. Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty NM / National Park Service.

The translator Haridina Fraser has noted an echo with a Greek folk song, recorded in the 1930s by Dimitris Perdikopoulos, which begins, “Damn you America with your many dollars, you took away from our village all the young, brave men”.[endnoteRef:71] It is plausible these lyrics, written by Stavros Pantelides, drew on older Greek proverbs or folk songs about emigration to America. The translator Maria Spanos highlighted that in Greek the message rhymes beautifully, with lines ending parades (money) and foukarades (wretches), strengthening the suggestion that this was a quotation from a song or poem. As Anna Caraveli has argued, the audience of folk songs in Greek villages, familiar with local performers’ standard repertory, would be able to recognise a longer work or sentiment from just a couple of lines.[endnoteRef:72] Stathis Gauntlett notes that twentieth-century Greek emigrant songs often utilised the perspective of those left behind, such as abandoned mothers. They were like laments for the dead, with the emigrants as the lost ones.[endnoteRef:73] [71: Translation by Haridina Fraser, personal communication, February 2018. The version of the song Ανάθεμά σε Αμερική (Damn You America) recorded by Dimitris Perdikopoulos had words and music by Stavros Pantelides: https://youtu.be/H9qYt5n6we0 (Accessed February 27, 2018). A version of the song is also referred to here: Stathis Gauntlett, “The Diaspora Sings Back: Rebetika Down Under,” in Dimitris Tziovas, ed., Greek Diaspora and Migration Since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture (London: Routledge, 2016), 274.] [72: Anna Caraveli, “The Song Beyond the Song: Aesthetics and Social Interaction in Greek Folksong,” The Journal of American Folklore 95, no. 376 (April-June 1982): 133.] [73: Gauntlett, “The Diaspora Sings Back,” 273-274.]

This shifts how the message could be interpreted. Rather than invective directly aimed at the immigration authorities, it suggests the writer was seeking sympathy for their anger and frustration with an audience of fellow Greeks, who might recognise the quotation, drawing on common cultural reference points. There are echoes with this song’s lyrics in two other Greek graffiti, also dating from c.1901, in a third-floor dormitory. One is near-illegible, but Maria Spanos could make out fragments which translated as, “Anathema to you America with… take all the brave young men.”[endnoteRef:74] There is a sense of mourning and grievance. A further Greek inscription in the dormitory takes the same theme (translated by Maria Spanos): [74: Column 310, South-West face. Translation by Maria Spanos, June 2018.]

Αναστάσιος καρατζιάς εκ χορίον ντσιβα

…τον ευρισκόμενον…

Ελληνον εν τη φυλακή αυτή

…τις αμαρτίες του τόπου

…η αμερική με τα …

Πήρε όλα τα παιδιά .. πλανόμεθα οι φουκαράδες

Για να κάνομεν παράδες μην…

Η ξενιτιά ή φρμάκια η σκλαβιά…

Ταξιδεύοντα εις τον οκεανόν…

…μας βλάζει στη στεριά

…στο καστινγκάρι αμερικκής…την άδικον φυλακήν

Αναστάσιος Καρατζιάς

Ντσιβα

Anastasios Karatzias from village of

…Ntsiva

…located…Greek in this prison

…the sins of the land…America with the…took all the young men…

we are wandering, the poor souls, in order to make money…

The foreign lands, the pains, the slavery…

Travelling in the ocean…To get to dry land…

In Kasigkari of America in the unfair prison

Anastasios Karatzias

From Ntsiva[endnoteRef:75] [75: Column 314, West face. Translation by Maria Spanos, June 2018.]

It is notable that the bitterest and bleakest messages, like this one, which one might expect to be anonymous, are often signed. The messages had the partial smoke-screen of languages with which staff may have been unfamiliar. Here, the message by Anastasios Karatzias begins like a formulaic description of identity, and ends similarly with a repetition of his name and place of origin. He refers to Ellis Island with a version of the name “Kastingari”, a Greek corruption of “Castle Garden”, the name of Ellis Island’s predecessor.[endnoteRef:76] This is telling as it evokes the port of New York as a place imagined before encountered: somewhere talked of, over the years, back in Greece. The implied audience is other Greek detainees, present or future, who would understand his language, sympathise with his circumstances and recognise his home district and village. The imagined audience may also have included past detainees, those who had already left their mark on the walls. Writing his message close to other Greek inscriptions on the column suggested solidarity with them. This visual representation of camaraderie on the walls was perhaps a comfort. Karatzias writes of a collective: “we are wandering”. The message is not intended to be read by officials, but by friends. The power that is railed against is not the prosaic reality of immigration inspectors, but a more mythic and generalised “America”. [76: Helen Ross, manuscript of unpublished memoir, 156 (Statue of Liberty National Monument Library, New York, NY).]

The appeal to an audience of compatriots gives the graffiti a colloquial quality. Ilaria Serra, in her study of first-generation Italian-American autobiographies, notes that “less-educated writers often translate onto paper their oral tonalities, such as repetition, redundancy and direct appeal to the reader.”[endnoteRef:77] The impulse to reassert home loyalties, and invoke camaraderie based on these, may have been felt more keenly by those facing exclusion. Another, barely legible, Greek message from the dormitory is addressed to absent friends, presupposed to be wondering about the writer’s fate. The translation, by Eleni Ntanou, includes the fragment: “eight day that you heard of me, my brothers…who am inside”.[endnoteRef:78] The empathetic audience conjured by this may have been, at the moment of writing, imaginary or absent. [77: Ilaria Serra, The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 40.] [78: Column 310, South East face. Translation by Eleni Ntanou, July 2017. ]

An Italian message also describes Ellis Island as a prison. Inscribed on one of the dormitory columns, it appears to be a bilious message of grumbling and frustration. It has been very difficult to decipher: one translator thought it included Calabrian dialect (consistent with the home village of Gasperina), another that it simply showed extremely poor literacy. A tentative transcription and translation, by Sara Roman, is as follows:

Questo la fattoVoci Pasquale di Gasperina sicasomai che capitassi corchi [?]…bocchiste galera forte o capitasto io adio madio [or “ma dio”] mio sempre pure li cani dentro cuegli piducchiE non tormentatiConforti che pizza e fichi

This was made by Voci Pasquale from Gasperina

In case it happened to me that I have something to eat and drink in this horrible jail or if it happened that I have also to farewell forever the dogs inside here and their lice

[You] don’t suffer comfort yourself with pizza and figs[endnoteRef:79] [79: Column 314, East face. Translation by Sara Roman, July 2017. An alternative suggestion for how to translate part of the message is: “Just in case another request of the prison, by God, where I have found myself. But God is sending dogs chasing me.” A third suggestion, by Joel Cole of the Italian Genealogical Institute, is: “This was done by Voci Pasquale of Gasperina, in case you ended up in jail, like I did and that I hate. Do not feel sorry if it happens, and always remember it... [illegible].”]

The message is enclosed in a looping line, and this ‘page’ has been extended with a second loop to include the final comment, giving the impression that this was an afterthought. Above the inscription is a drawing of a bearded man, in profile, wearing a hat and smoking a pipe. Next to it are a few words, including “Bar/bone” (“barbone” means tramp, vagrant, or “long beard”). It seems likely to be a disparaging caricature, perhaps of an inspector, a sailor, or even himself. On an adjacent face of the column, there is a second caricature, this time of a military figure. The spider-like hands and bulbous eyes are drawn in a similar style. The second figure has small dashes over its clothes, face and sword. It gives the impression that the drawing was busily worked into, with multiple gouges of the pencil.

While there is bitterness, frustration and grumbling in the men’s dormitory graffiti, the bleakest messages are from a Special Inquiry waiting room on the third floor. Detainees scratched and pencilled messages into the metal doors. Part of an extension built in 1911, the messages date from 1911-1914.[endnoteRef:80] There are punches in the doors which once held signs. A 25-line Greek inscription was written down the side of one of these notices, filling the gap, like an unofficial notice. The 1980s translation, by TTI Ltd. (whose work does not include transcriptions), is as follows: [80: There are dates from 1911-1914 in the inscriptions, and the conservator inferred that the doors were painted after this point. Beyer, Blinder, Belle/Anderson, Notter, Finegold, Ellis Island, Historic Structure Report, 213-14. “’As Found’ Drawing: Third Floor Plan,” folder 5 ‘Christy Cunningham’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection. Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 24, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti on Ellis Island. Williams, “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Immigration for the Port of New York [1911]”, 3. ]

27…1912…Cretan

Here it is much better that no one should come because one would suffer very much… When shall I go away from the torture of this country…[endnoteRef:81] [81: Technical Translation International Ltd. (TTI Ltd.), “303/515, 1/31, 18D – Door, Translation from Greek,” folder 1 ‘Graffiti Translations’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.]

The graffiti are evocative of detainees’ restlessness and mental anguish as they waited: whether for hearings, for appeals, or for ships to take them back. In such circumstances, as Ethan Blue has argued, time might feel “elastic”, the uncertainty and disempowerment of the situation causing anxiety and distress.[endnoteRef:82] A fragmentary Arabic inscription on another metal door from this Special Inquiry waiting room appears to have a similarly bleak tone: “All those who don’t return from this… complete”.[endnoteRef:83] It was also echoed in another Greek inscription, translated by TTI Ltd. thus: [82: Ethan Blue, “Strange Passages: Carceral mobility and the liminal in the catastrophic history of American deportation,” National Identities, vol. 17, 2 (May 2015): 185.] [83: Technical Translation International Ltd. (TTI Ltd.), “303, Door 18, 5/4, Translation from Arabic,” folder 1 ‘Graffiti Translations’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.]

…you will come to this Hell.Please stay in your country.The GreekElias Vasilopoulosfrom the County of Ilias[endnoteRef:84] [84: Technical Translation International Ltd. (TTI Ltd.), “303/302, 1/21, 18A – Door, Translation from Greek,” folder 1 ‘Graffiti Translations’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection.]

The warning appears to speak to people back in Europe, who have not yet set sail. Detention records show that the writer, Elias Vasilopoulos, was a 19-year-old farm laborer, who arrived alone on September 18, 1912. He was rejected as “physically defective” and likely to become a public charge. On the ship’s manifest, his health had been recorded as “good” at the port of departure, but then annotated, presumably at Ellis Island, with “Legs – lack of phys. develop.”[endnoteRef:85] The transcript of the Special Inquiry notes that there were three Board members present and an interpreter. Elias’ responses, as translated and transcribed, are monosyllabic. When told that a negative decision was imminent, and asked if he had any further statement, he is recorded as replying, or perhaps saying, “Nothing.”[endnoteRef:86] It is here that the graffiti prove most valuable: in providing a direct voice for the detainee, and one which encapsulates the pain and anger absent from the official record. [85: “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival,” S.S. Laura from Patras, Greece, arrived New York September 18, 1912, Microfilm Roll 1937, Microfilm Serial T715, pages 85-86, line 13, Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1920-1957. ] [86: “VASILOPULOS, ELIAS, age 19 in 1912, Greece,” File no. 53475/827, Record Group 85 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.).]

One of the most poignant messages on the doors, also originally in Greek, was translated by TTI Ltd as follows:

Stavros Grigorioudated in Castrigari 10 [?] September 1912

Lads, I have been here for eight days and I don’t know what to do.For what reason they... the poor man.Fellow-countrymen, I feel like busting with distress because they won’t let me telephone and I don’t know what to do.You, fellow-countrymen, I wish you…blasted America.[endnoteRef:87] [87: Technical Translation International Ltd. (TTI Ltd.), “303/302, 18A, 1/18 Translation from Greek,” folder 1 ‘Graffiti Translations’, New Box #79, Metaform Research Collection. ]

If a sympathetic audience had been physically present, there may have been little need to write. Instead there is this appeal into nothingness, written onto the building itself. The oral history archive, albeit weighted towards childhood memories, gives the impression of the detention areas as often intimidating and alienating. Sadie Carilli said that her family did not mingle with other detainees: “each one took care of their own, like, understand?”[endnoteRef:88] Barbara Barondness remembered having “no communication with the other people that were there because everybody was so full of their own fright.”[endnoteRef:89] Herman Gold remembered that in the dormitory: “It got very cold…. All of a sudden in the middle of the night feeling a jerk and somebody took off your blankets because was strongest made sure that he was warm.”[endnoteRef:90] A newspaper article made reference to “thieving and skylarking” in the dormitories.[endnoteRef:91] Michael Ciansi said Ellis Island had a “different atmosphere. Kind of, what would you say, it was kind of scary, yeah.”[endnoteRef:92] It’s possible that the camaraderie and solidarity evoked by some of the inscriptions, and represented visually through the accumulation of messages on the walls, was a comfort of the imagination, rather than a concrete reality. [88: Sadie Carilli, (born in Italy, arrived at Ellis Island 1904, aged 9), interview by Dana Gumb, Oct 11, 1985, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.] [89: Barbara Barondess, (born U.S., travelling from Russia via Liverpool through Ellis Island, aged 14 in 1921, ship ‘The Celtic), interview by Edward Applebome, Aug 15, 1985, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.] [90: Herman Gold (arrived at Ellis Island 1924, aged 16), interview by Nancy Dallett, Oct 24, 1985, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.] [91: Newspaper article dated July 1, 1923, no title or author included in cutting, folder “Bunks (+ Bars)”, box 81, Metaform Research Collection (Statue of Liberty National Monument Library, New York, NY).] [92: Michael Ciansi (Italian, born Argentina, arrived at Ellis Island 1923, aged 15, on ‘The Columbo’), interview by Paul Sigrist, April 28, 1992, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.]

Writing, Language and Eligibility

While many messages give voice to dissent and despair, others suggest a more accommodating response to the power of the immigration authorities at Ellis Island. The implied audience of these messages was compatriots from the same region, which might include not only fellow detainees but also staff and immigrant aid society workers. In an environment where the multitude of languages could be disorienting and isolating, finding someone with a common language raised possibilities of support and friendship. Angela Weinkam, who was detained for a month, said:

You try to make friends, but, you know, it’s very difficult because everyone is speaking a different language, you see, so if I met some Italian speaking then we would kind of get friendly because of the language, but then the language barrier stopped us from getting friendly with other people.[endnoteRef:93] [93: Angela Weinkam, (born in Italy, arrived at Ellis Island 1924, aged 12, on the ship ‘The Giuseppe Verdi’), interview by Nancy Dallett, Feb 4, 1986, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.]

The priest Father Gambera recalled spending several hours each day wandering the halls, calling out in Italian to find “fellow countrymen” to whom to offer comfort and assistance.[endnoteRef:94] There is a sense of language being thrown out like a life buoy. Luigi Morelli recalled in an oral history interview: “on Sunday a lot of people come in this place. And one lady was Naples. Was in Italy, talk a little bit of Italian. I said, ‘Please do me a favour. Look on the office over there. Look at my case.’”[endnoteRef:95] Connections through shared language could offer hope and reassurance. The diverse languages marked on the walls in the graffiti implied alliances, communities of understanding (if not real, then wished for). [94: Gambera, A Migrant Missionary Story, 138.] [95: Luigi Morelli, Ellis Island Oral History Archive.]

The writing on the walls was perhaps also an informal way, without recourse to English, of demonstrating (and practicing) literacy and education. Migrants’ ability to read and write was recorded and racialized in immigration statistics, and from 1917 tested on entry: it was a marker of eligibility.[endnoteRef:96] Victoria Sarfatti Fernandez, who passed through Ellis Island in 1916, recalled “My father spoke Italian. If he met a Greek, he could speak Greek. If he met a Turk, he spoke Turkish. We were cosmopolitan, we could do anything.”[endnoteRef:97] There was a tension between such capability and intelligence and the milieu of mass processing, which treated migrants en masse as ignorant and uncomprehending. To demonstrate talent and education may have been a matter of personal pride (or frustration) or an attempt to impress other detainees or staff. [96: “Statement showing percentage of immigrants who cannot read as shown by the statistics for the fiscal years 1899, 1900, 1901,” Box 223, Folder 2, “Immigration Statistics, 1901-1904,” Terence V. Powderly Papers (American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Washington, D.C.). Sargent, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1902, 8. ] [97: Victoria Sarfatti Fernandez, (arrived at Ellis Island 1916, aged 4, from Macedonia, ship ‘The Grazia of Italia’), interview by Nancy Dallett on Dec 18, 1985, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.]

Some of the signatures on the dormitory columns, for example that of Dénes Preger, are in neat cursive handwriting with flourishes and swirls; what Martyn Lyons describes as a “cultivated signature”.[endnoteRef:98] Dénes Preger’s signature is repeated, with slightly different spellings and styles. There is also an ornate but abandoned “P” close by. It suggests that he was using the bare plaster as a jotting pad to rehearse his signature. Above an Italian inscription in beautiful handwriting, the name neatly underlined, is a drawing of a man’s jacket and tie. The clothes are beautifully drawn and presented. The writing, like formal clothes, seems designed to impress. Displaying literacy and education may have been a way for detainees to fashion themselves as desirable citizens. Unlike some of the cruder inscriptions, these signatures are in slender sharpened pencil almost indistinguishable from pen. Moreover, there are intriguing glimpses, in the graffiti, that sometimes children were better educated than their parents. There is a signature from the second-floor Special Inquiry detention room likely to be by 15-year-old Cesare Colosinio, detained in 1922 because his father, with whom he was travelling, was illiterate.[endnoteRef:99] Similarly, 14-year-old Michele Stoppiello recorded the presence of himself and his father Alfonso in detention. In a much later letter, he would refer to Alfonso as “my illiterate father”.[endnoteRef:100] [98: Martyn Lyons, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 187.] [99: “Record of Aliens held for Special Inquiry,” SS Europa, arrived at the port of New York, July 10, 1922, Microfilm Roll 3139, Microfilm Publication T715, page 200, line 16, Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897-1957.] [100: Letter from Michael Stuppiello to the United States Labor Dept. Citizenship Bureau, March 13, 1934, in “STUPIELLO, Michele,” C-6470722, Feb 25, 1947, Supreme Court, Register N.Y. (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, Washington, D.C.).]

Some of the pictures on the dormitory columns have been produced with the care and quality of portraits; they are by no means absent-minded doodles.[endnoteRef:101] The artistic skill transcends language. For example, there is a portrait of a beautiful girl, with a fashionable hairstyle and finely delineated features (figure 4). An awkward, outsize hand appears to have been added later by someone else. Despite this addition, the picture still has the power to impress through its skill. On an adjacent panel, in the same style, is the face of a young man. These beautiful portraits and cultivated signatures may be traces of power being accommodated: a form of courting and compliance, a hustling for eligibility. [101: Christiana Cunningham-Adams, “Conservation Treatment Report,” folder 27, box 2, Conservation Treatment Documentation of the Immigrant Graffiti.]

Figure 4: A portrait on a third-floor dormitory column. Courtesy of the Statue of Liberty NM / National Park Service.

In the 1920s, there were newspaper stories about detainees at Ellis Island who had used their artistic talent to impress their way into acceptance by the immigration authorities. For example, Jacob Zucker from Jerusalem, “began painting life sketches of the types of immigrants about him in the detention quarters” while awaiting exclusion. The Commissioner took a paternalistic “interest in the boy”, and he was eventually allowed to land “having literally painted his way into the United States.”[endnoteRef:102] For detainees who had artistic talent, yet fewer resources, the walls provided a blank canvas. Drawing was also, regardless of talent, a potential distraction. As Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum argue, for people in confinement creative activities could be a “therapeutic outlet”.[endnoteRef:103] Mauro Rio from Sicily, detained at Ellis Island for four days as a 22-year-old in 1921, remembered there being little to do in detention: “Just, uh, killed time the best we could.”[endnoteRef:104] The portrait of the girl, carefully shaded, with an intricate hairstyle, would have been absorbing and time-consuming to create. Onto the backstage space of the dormitory walls spilled out not only dissent, but idle thoughts and dreams. [102: “Artist Paints His Way Into U.S.,” The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, Feb 27, 1922, 2, Chronicling America (Library of Congress), http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058226/1922-02-27/ed-1/seq-2/. “Artist Plies Brush At Ellis Island as He Pleads to Enter U.S.,” New York Tribune, Sept 25, 1922, 20, Chronicling America (Library of Congress), http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1922-09-25/ed-1/seq-20/.] [103: Carr and Mytum, ed. Cultural History and Prisoners of War, 2.] [104: Mauro Rio (born in Italy, arrived at Ellis Island 1921, aged 22), interview by Edward Applebome, Oct 11, 1985, Ellis Island Oral History Archive, http://libertyellisfoundation.org/oral-history-library.]

Conclusion

Preserved on fragments of plaster in the archives, the graffiti at Ellis Island are part of a hidden history of the building, remnants of dormitories and detention rooms which have often been redeveloped beyond recognition. They provide an intriguing counterpoint to the ships’ manifests and Special Inquiry paperwork, giving glimpses of detainees’ emotions, loyalties, imagination and creativity. In the official documents, detainees’ voices were translated and transcribed. In contrast, the walls of dormitories and detention rooms provided a backstage space for personal musings, creativity, humour and low-level dissent. Despite the mass, communal conditions, detainees carved out space for personal messages on the walls. They marked their arrival and reaffirmed identities, under the pressure and flux of immigration detention, in an unmediated form and in their own languages. While resistance is implicit in the defacement of the walls of the institutional building and the vitriolic content of some inscriptions, the messages are nevertheless ambivalent as evidence of defiance and protest. Rather than directly confronting authority, some detainees gave voice to their emotions on the walls. It was a soft form of dissent: a coping strategy and distraction in the limbo of immigration detention. In their messages, they appealed to a sympathetic audience of compatriots, evoking a sense of community and solidarity which in this disorientating and mercurial environment may have been illusory. The act of writing was perhaps a small gesture of resilience, rather than resistance: a scintilla of self-expression, marking presence and identity in a precarious environment.

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