Tipo Italiano: The Production and Sale of Italian-Style Goods, 1880–1914
Chapter Three compares the development of tipo italiano products—substitution Italian-style foods manufactured abroad—to explore changing meanings of nationality, ethnicity, and authenticity in migrant marketplaces. Italian migrant entrepreneurs in New York took advantage of the United States’ more industrialized society to manufacture cheaper tipo italiano foods for savings-oriented migrants in transnational family economies. In Argentina’s less industrially mature and import-dependent economy, Italian merchants fretted more about tipo italiano foods made in other European countries, especially “Latin” countries like Spain and France. Migrant makers and sellers of tipo italiano foods successfully navigated their liminal positions at the interstices of national and transnational economies, and migrant and non-migrant consumers, while maximizing their own economic and social standing in diasporic communities.