“We’re Still Americans. We Speak English,” boasted a handmade sign in the window of a corner grocery store in East Baltimore, near Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The reason for the sign was a couple of blocks away: A Korean-American couple had set up business in a similar establishment, presenting new competition for the proprietor who boasted of speaking English.
I decided to visit both places and ask questions.
The man who owned the store with the “We Speak English” sign claimed another man, known as Willie the Whale, had made it as an expression of unhappiness with the way the historically white neighborhood had changed. First came Blacks, then Latinos, and now an Asian couple had taken over a corner convenience. “You’re the only American left around here!” the Whale supposedly told the store owner.
Down the street, the Korean-American man at the other store told me — in accented English — that he and his wife were well aware of the “We Speak English” sign, and they had decided to ignore it. “What am I going to do, start something?” he said. “I don’t care. Why should I? You hear me, I speak English.”
I went back to the first store, the one with the jingoistic sign, and asked the owner where his father was from.
“Highlandtown,” he said.
“I mean, where was he born?”
“Munich, Germany.”
Of course Germany.
German immigrants were the largest immigrant population in Baltimore in the 19th and 20th centuries, and most of them spoke little English when their ships arrived at Locust Point.
Many Americans have suffered from a lack of perspective and an ear for irony when it comes to their hostile or paranoid attitudes toward new arrivals. And that condition persists. Those who held “Mass Deportation Now” signs at the Republican National Convention in 2024 undoubtedly had immigrant branches in their family trees.
The East Baltimore anecdote I just shared is from 40 years ago, early spring 1986, during a time when we had a Republican president who actually praised immigrants.
In fact, the conservative Ronald Reagan proposed (and Congress overwhelmingly approved) something that would be considered political suicide for Republicans in the Trump-MAGA era: Amnesty and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 pulled 2.7 million people out of the shadows and gave them an opportunity to become citizens.
Today, in stark contrast, the American president pushes an aggressive effort to purge the country of immigrants and refugees who arrived here without authorization and even those who gained legal status under previous administrations. The Trump administration also wants to denaturalize some people, like the Korean-American store owner earlier mentioned, who had become citizens.
I note all this as the Washington National Opera prepares to stage “West Side Story” at the Lyric Baltimore, the grand old opera house where the Baltimore Opera Company operated for nearly 60 years before its financial collapse during the Great Recession.
“West Side Story,” in my book the greatest American musical, premiered on Broadway in 1957. Its storyline, while inspired by Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet,” plays out in the darkness of the nation’s long history of racial and ethnic prejudice — a history we are living through in the time of Trump.
Instead of Verona, it’s New York City after the first waves of immigrants arrive from Puerto Rico. Instead of feuding noble families, it’s Jets versus Sharks, whites from earlier immigrant waves openly hostile to new arrivals who speak with accents.
“It speaks volumes about ‘the other,’ about the outsider. I mean, that’s at the core of the story,” says Francesca Zambello, the WNO’s artistic director who has brought Leonard Bernstein’s masterpiece to life on stage 14 times. “Even though it’s based on ‘Romeo & Juliet,’ and the musical is 70 years old, the themes are still with us, even more profoundly. The social justice issues that Leonard Bernstein and his collaborators thought about are still speaking through the piece. It really makes people think about how we respond to immigration, and we’re still facing those issues.”
In “West Side Story,” it’s ethnic tribalism, gang versus gang, that creates the tension, and in deeply personal and eventually violent ways.
In Trump’s America, the state is the aggressor, a roving federal force in flak jackets that engages in Supreme Court-authorized racial profiling to grab immigrants off streets and out of their homes.
Given Trump’s racist and hostile statements about immigrants of color, it should not be hard to see ICE as the Jets in “West Side Story.”
“The Jets are very much about people who were here first,” says Zambello.
The Washington National Opera is in Baltimore because of Trump and his takeover of the Kennedy Center, the opera’s home since the early 1970s. In January, the WNO joined the long list of artists who cancelled performances at the center in the wake of new policies put in place by Trump-appointed leadership.
Like the Amy Sherald exhibit that set attendance records at the Baltimore Museum of Art after the artist opted out of a show of her works in Trump’s Washington, having the WNO at the Lyric is Baltimore’s gain.
The WNO’s “West Side Story” production, fully staged for four performances May 8 through 10, comes with a 50-piece orchestra directed by Marin Alsop.
“And we are recreating the original Jerome Robbins choreography,” says Zambello. “This is a chance to see an American masterpiece with a superb cast, amazing dancing, big orchestra, great voices, a mix of classical and musical theater voices. You’re just not going to see or hear this anywhere else.”
West Side Story: May 8 and 9 at 7:30 pm, with matinees May 9 and 10 at 2 pm, at the Lyric Baltimore, 140 West Mount Royal Ave. For tickets: https://washnatopera.org/tickets
Dan Rodricks writes on local topics each week for Baltimore Fishbowl. His columns on national affairs are on Substack. He can be reached via danrodricks.com
