Migrant Marketplaces

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Zanoni

Migrant Marketplaces explores how connections between Italian people and foods in Italy, the United States, and Argentina influenced migrants’ consumer experiences and identities in New York and Buenos Aires during the age of mass migration. The book analyzes discussion about and representations of foodstuffs in the migrant press to characterize New York and Buenos Aires as “migrant marketplaces,” urban spaces defined by transnational linkages between mobile people and goods. As migrant marketplaces, New York and Buenos Aires were global and gendered sites where Italians interacted with foods from their home and host countries in ways that shaped migrants’ consumer identities and practices, the consumer cultures in which they were enmeshed, and wider transatlantic commodity networks. Over the course of the twentieth century, migrant marketplaces feminized, as World War I, tariffs, immigration restriction, and U.S. business interests in Latin America shifted ties between food consumption and notions of Italianness from single male laborers to female consumers and families. Using a comparative perspective, the book also examines race making and the evolution of tipo italiano, or Italian-style, foods in New York and Buenos Aires to identify nation-specific networks of meanings and experiences associated with Italian trade goods. Migrant Marketplaces of the Americas argues that Italians constructed changing and competing links between gender, nationalism, race, and ethnicity through the global foods they sold and consumed.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Zanoni

Chapters Five and Six focus on the interwar years, when a worldwide depression, intensifying restrictions against mobile people and products, and rising nationalisms changed the global geography of migrant marketplace connections. After World War I, U.S. economic expansion in South America and U.S. immigration restriction, which redirected Italians to Argentina, intensified North-South links between Italians in New York and Buenos Aires. Migrants in Buenos Aires expressed concern that the growing presence of U.S. capital and consumer goods threatened the Italian export market. After having targeted Italians as consumers in New York, U.S. food corporations like Armour and Company began targeting Italians in Buenos Aires as well. Meanwhile they capitalized on links between consumption and femininity made during the war to depict migrant marketplaces as predominately female.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Zanoni

The Introduction defines migrant marketplaces, the book’s theoretical framework, as urban spaces characterized by material and imagined transnational linkages between mobile people and goods. As one of the most mobile ethnic groups during the age of mass migration, Italians in the United States and Argentina illuminate the historical formation of migrant marketplaces. It situates the book within the fields of transnational and comparative migration history, gender and food history, and the history of globalization. The introduction contends that Italian-language commercial newspapers, including La Patria degli Italiani in Buenos Aires, Il Progresso Italo-Americano in New York and publications of Italian Chambers of Commerce in these two cities, make an examination of migrant marketplaces possible because they ground global migratory and commercial flows in specific cities.


Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1253-1271
Author(s):  
TALBOT C. IMLAY

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.


Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith

This chapter examines the end of the international gold standard during World War I. The creation of the Federal Reserve System—with its idea of centralized banking carried out by twelve central banks—ended the United States's long struggle to perfect a sensible, conservative monetary system. Everywhere in the industrial countries money of whatever kind was now exchangeable, without pretense or delay, into gold. The chapter considers how the major industrial participants—Germany, France, Britain, Austria—suspended specie payments and went off the gold standard when World War I broke out; the dumping of securities on the New York market in the first nervous days of the war; the shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange; and how the United States eventually abandoned the gold standard. The increase in whole prices in the United States during all the war years is also discussed.


Author(s):  
Patrick Frank

In chapter 4, Frank traces the changing styles of Noé and Macció. These two won travel awards from the Di Tella Foundation that took them to New York and Paris. Perhaps because of their absence from the disorder of Buenos Aires, the paintings of both artists evolved toward consideration of formal issues, such as the potential of flat color planes and the integrity of the surface of the work. Jorge de la Vega created the important Anamorphic Conflict series, influenced by Italian artist Enrico Baj and a response to conflicts between Argentine military factions. Frank rebuts critic Clement Greenberg’s comments about the provincialism of the Argentinian art world in 1964. (Greenberg had made a trip to Buenos Aires to judge an art competition.) Frank also discusses solo shows by Noé, de la Vega, Macció, and Deira and their participation in important exhibitions in the United States at the Guggenheim Museum and the Walker Art Center.


Author(s):  
Barbara McCloskey

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.


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