Introduction
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.