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.
Patterns of Italian Immigration to the United States
