Dearborn, a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants on the outskirts of Detroit, is now the last bastion of what was once the largest American auto industry. Dearborn is home to the headquarters of Ford in fact, only one of the Big Three (as they are simply called here) able to stand on its own merits, without having to go bankrupt and be forced nationalization (General Motors) or seek the help of good Samaritans foreign (Chrysler).
(Detroit, Michigan: Obama Gas Station) None of this, however, for the glorious brand founded by Henry Ford, the brilliant inventor of the Ford Model T that powered America hated by the assembly line. Henry Ford in Dearborn - just - We were born, we had settled part of its industry, and we had to build his personal mansion.
course, Dearborn today is not that busy and optimistic than seventy years ago, when he could even boast an airport art, of course, named Ford, the first in the world with paved runways (in those days Ford produced even airplanes).
shadow of the headquarters of Ford, Dearborn is now a decent suburb committed to slip quietly - like most of America - from the middle and lower middle class, but not happy to share the terrible degradation of nearby Detroit.
(Detroit, Michigan: Detroit Engineering Institute) All this is told to give what is Dearborn Dearborn, namely that despite its limited international celebrity, this neglected suburbs of Detroit a real, massive pillar of the history of the USA, a sort of Holy Land secolarissima that gave birth to a top national passions, in turn a source of enduring myths in the stars and stripes: the journey by car.
So, in short, Dearborn is as American as apple pie (as they say here).
In golden years of this strip of Michigan, the (then) three major automakers in Detroit and attracted workers from around every corner of America. Indeed, on every corner of the world. And the workers flocked in droves, from everywhere. Whites and blacks from the American deep south, some to escape the endemic poverty of countries in arrears, for those who leave behind the racism and lynchings. And then other people landed even more strange, from even more distant and exotic lands.
It 's the same old story, we know well in Switzerland: call arms, and instead you get men. And dragging their luggage below, the physical ones held together by twine, and the cultural, spiritual, gastronomic even. And so, for those strange quirk of history, nell'americanissima Dearborn began to land the Arabs, many Arabs. Before Maronite Christians from Lebanon and Syria, and then, increasingly, Arab Muslims.
Bref today is of Arab origin thirty percent of the population of Dearborn (the highest in the U.S.). And in America as a very religious shrine not denied to anyone, and the venerable First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of worship, born here as long ago as 1937 (!) Zaydi the Yemeni Dearborn Mosque, the first mosque in Michigan and one of the first of the nation.
So far, so normal.
(Dearborn, Michigan: Islamic Center of America) More surprising, however, is that the construction of a second, large mosque - officially called Islamic Center of America - has been safely completed in 2005. That is, after Al Qaeda terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers.
It seems that in Dearborn, the new mosque, no one has done a pleated.
For those wishing to travel to visita, l'indirizzo è già un programma: la troverà al 19500 di Ford Road. Con elegante minareto fiancheggiato da Old Glory, la bandiera nazionale che si contorce al gelido vento del Michigan. Incastrata tra la chiesa apostolica armena (19300 Ford Road) e la chiesa ortodossa di San Clemente (19600 Ford Road).
(© VASCO DONES;
pubblicato nell'estate 2009 sul settimanale svizzero AZIONE)
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