As a child while growing up in my Franco-American, language segregated community of Lowell’s Lower Centralville, I was raised to accept and even expect the economic challenges that, naturally, tugged upon the purse strings of all my relatives, including those in the hands of my mother and father. However, our family lot blended nicely into the usual, first and second generation tragic saga, which most of the city’s immigrant groups (Greeks, Poles, Irish, French Canadians, etc.) were still experiencing some forty to sixty years after their arrival to these American shores usually from desperate, agrarian failures in their country of birth.
Discoveries & Lessons in a Ghetto Town
Lowell: Immigrant town on Merrimack River had all the answers