URBAN ODYSSEY

Book excerpt: The first book to focus on the migrant and immigrant experience in the District, Urban Odyssey traces the growth and transformation of ethnic and cultural communities - Native American, African American, European, Latino, and Asian American - throughout the city's history. Seventeen essays, accompanied by more than fifty photographs, challenge stereotypes and draw out common threads from the richly woven fabric that is Washington. Urban Odyssey reflects upon the changing demographics of contemporary urban America, where ethnic groups mingle and overlap in fertile and surprising ways. Identifying a common quest among all groups to establish community, to transplant cultural traditions, and to rebuild familiar social and institutional networks on unfamiliar terrain, the authors illustrate the diverse ways in which each migrant or immigrant community has reconstructed Washington's cultural and built landscape and redefined the meaning of American pluralism.