West Side Story

West Side Story is about racial tensions imposed on families of struggling immigrants. In fact, the musical was originally called East Side Story, and was supposed to tell the story of the Irish Catholic Jets and their anti-Semitic aggression toward the Israeli Jewish gang, the Emeralds, on the Lower East Side of New York. The Jets are not, as is commonly assumed, the “white” gang. Like most inhabitants of the working-class neighborhoods in 1950s New York, the Jets are second-generation immigrants–the children of Irish, Polish, and Italian families (and others) who came to the United States for new opportunities. In the mid-twentieth century United States, these immigrants are not considered “white,” which is something that original Broadway audiences would have recognized and that is often lost in revivals. Bernardo refers to Tony as “an ‘American.’ Who is really a Polak” (38). The Puerto Rican teens understand the slipperiness of the term “American” and of American national identity. Despite the fact that Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, defining Puerto Rico as a US territory and granting citizenship to Puerto Ricans, the Sharks are not treated as if they are U.