New Italian Migrations to the United States

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
White Ethnicity ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Migration History ◽  
Immigrant Narrative ◽  
The Cold War

This book challenges the conventional Italian immigrant narrative through a re-evaluation of the political, social, and cultural significance of Italian emigration to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Interdisciplinarity and transnationalism serve as the book’s operating approaches to documenting and evaluating aspects of this underexplored history and analyzing how on-going Italian immigration to the United States relates to community development, politics, group identity, and consumerism. The essays in this collection focus on such topics as immigration reform during the Cold War on the part of the Italian government and Italian Americans organized by the American Committee on Italian Migration (ACIM), women’s struggles for family reunification in light of the McCarran-Walter Act, a micro-analysis of immigrant replenishment in Boston’s North End, the emergence of a new-second generation Guido youth culture in Brooklyn, and ethnic-political brokers’ mobilization of dual citizens to vote in both U.S. and Italian elections. The afterword discusses the book’s articles on working-class immigrants and elite immigrants in relationship to migration history and periodization. At its most basic, this collection contributes to a larger conversation about the complex understanding of U.S. white ethnicity as multivalent, unstable, and at times contradictory, rather than as a fixed category following a universal historical process that leads to white privilege and ethnic assimilation.

Italian American Identity and Politics: World War II To the Cold War

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Danielle Battisti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines Italian American loyalty campaigns during World War II as well as postwar campaigns to promote the democratic reconstruction of Italy. It argues that even though Italian Americans had made great strides toward political and social inclusion in the United States, they were still deeply concerned with their group’s public identity at mid-century. This chapter also demonstrates that in the course of their increased involvement with their homeland politics in the postwar period, Italian Americans gradually came to believe that the successful democratization of Italy (and therefore their own standing in the United States) was dependent upon relieving population pressures that they believed threatened the political and economic reconstruction of Italy. That belief played an important role in stirring Italian Americans to action on issues of immigration reform.

New Italian Migrations to the United States

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Italian Studies ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Critical Conversation

This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States continues the critical conversation with its predecessor by exploring Italian immigration to the United States from 1945 to the present, focusing on cultural expressivity, artistic productions, community engagement, and media representations. The book challenges our understanding of art and culture created by and about Italian Americans in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries by considering ongoing Italian migratory flows. Each new group of Italian migrants and their descendants creates fresh models of Italian American culture, impacts preexisting ones, and continually reboot Italian America. The essays herein focus on such topics as transnational intimacy aided by an Italian-language radio program that broadcast messages from family members in Italy, the exoticized actors like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli who helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty, the constellation of cement figures crafted by a self-taught artist outside of Detroit, a folk-revival performer who infuses tarantella with New Age and feminist tonalities, the role of immigrant cookbook writers like Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture, and a review of current literature on the Italian “brain drain” and its impact on university Italian Studies. The afterword discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.

Italy, Italian Americans, and the Politics of the McCarran-Walter Act

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Luconi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Truman Administration ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian Government ◽  
Italian Immigrants ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This chapter reconstructs the eventually fruitless efforts by which the Italian government of Alcide De Gasperi and Italian Americans pursued changes to the U.S. legislation that would have let a larger number of Italian immigrants move to the United States in the early 1950s. It focuses specifically on the exploitation of the anti-communist climate of the Cold War during the Truman administration in a campaign to prevent the passing of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a measure that reaffirmed the national origins system discriminating against prospective Italian newcomers. The essay concludes that this operation ultimately failed because Washington allowed exceptions to its restrictive immigration laws almost exclusively for expatriates from countries under Communist rule, which was not the case of Italy.

Symbiotic Brain Drains

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
International Students ◽  
Knowledge Worker ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Educational Exchange ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Permanent Residency ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes immigration reform and the knowledge worker recruitment aspects of the Hart–Celler Act of 1965 to track the intensifying convergence of educational exchange programs, economic nationalism, and immigration reform. During the Cold War, the State Department expanded cultural diplomacy programs so that the numbers of international students burgeoned, particularly in the fields of science. Although the programs were initially conceived as a way of instilling influence over the future leaders of developing nations, international students, particularly from Taiwan, India, and South Korea, took advantage of minor changes in immigration laws and bureaucratic procedures that allowed students, skilled workers, and technical trainees to gain legal employment and eventually permanent residency and thereby remain in the United States.

Trust, but Verify

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.

Where Great Powers Meet

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Shambaugh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Stable Region ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
The Cold War

After the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if Southeast Asia would remain a geopolitically stable region within the American imperious for the foreseeable future. In the last two decades, however, the re-emergence of China as a major great power has called into question the geopolitical future of the region and raised the specter of renewed great power competition. As this book shows, the United States and China are engaged in a broad-gauged and global competition for power. While this competition ranges across the entire world, it is centered in Asia, and here this text focuses on the ten countries that comprise Southeast Asia. The United States and China constantly vie for position and influence in this enormously significant region, and the outcome of this contest will do much to determine whether Asia leaves the American orbit after seven decades and falls into a new Chinese sphere of influence. Just as important, to the extent that there is a global “power transition” occurring from the United States to China, the fate of Southeast Asia will be a good indicator. Presently, both powers bring important assets to bear. The United States continues to possess a depth and breadth of security ties, soft power, and direct investment across the region that empirically outweigh China’s. For its part, China has more diplomatic influence, much greater trade, and geographic proximity. In assessing the likelihood of a regional power transition, the book looks at how ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the countries within it maneuver between the United States and China and the degree to which they align with one or the other power.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

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