Hazleton, Coal Town, New America

Hazleton sits on a high plateau in the southern anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, and its history is essentially a compressed version of American immigration across two centuries. The town was incorporated as a borough in eighteen fifty-seven, when it had only about one thousand residents of mostly English and German descent. Then coal happened.

The demand for anthracite to heat American homes and power American industry drove a massive recruitment of labor from across Europe. From the eighteen eighties through World War One, Hazleton absorbed waves of immigrants from Hungary, Poland, Italy, Slovakia, Lithuania, and dozens of other nations. By nineteen twenty the population had grown from about twelve thousand to thirty-two thousand. The ethnic churches, social clubs, and language newspapers of eastern and southern European communities defined the town's character for generations. When you drove through Hazleton in the mid-twentieth century, you could identify the neighborhoods by the church steeples: Polish Catholic on one block, Italian Catholic on the next, Greek Orthodox around the corner.

Anthracite coal powered Hazleton's growth, and when the coal economy collapsed after World War Two, it powered its decline. The population peaked at thirty-eight thousand in nineteen forty and then fell steadily for sixty years.

Then, in the early two thousands, Hazleton was transformed again. Secondary chain migration, primarily from the Dominican Republic, brought a new wave of residents to a city with cheap housing and available work. By the two thousands, Hispanics accounted for more than half the population. The speed of the demographic shift generated a political backlash, including an ordinance the city passed in two thousand six targeting undocumented immigrants. Federal courts struck it down.

Hazleton's story, in other words, is the American immigration story on a fast cycle: arrival, struggle, assimilation, and then the next arrival.