scholarly journals Italian Immigrants and Working-Class Movements in the United States: A Personal Reflection on Class and Ethnicity

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolph J. Vecoli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Important Work ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Italian Immigrants ◽  
American Radicalism

Abstract The article argues that the locus of the most interesting and important work in the fields of immigration and labor history lies precisely at the intersection of class and ethnicity. In developing this thesis, particularly with respect to Italian immigrant working-class movements in the United States, the author draws on his experiences as a working-class ethnic and historian as well as his readings of the literature. In the course of his research on Italian immigrants in Chicago, the author stumbled upon the submerged, indeed suppressed, history of the Italian American left. Italian-American working-class history has since been the focus of his work. Since mainstream institutions had neglected the records of this history, the recovery of rich documentation on Italian American radicalism has been a source of particular satisfaction. These movements had also been "forgotten" by the Italian Americans themselves. Despite important work by a handful of American scholars, relatively few Italian American historians have given attention to this dimension of the Italian American experience. Curiously the topic has received more attention from scholars in Italy. Mass emigration as much as revolutionary movements was an expression of the social upheavals of turn-of-the-century Italy. As participants in those events, the immigrants brought more or less inchoate ideas of class and ethnicity to America with them. Here they developed class and ethnic identities as Italian-American workers. The construction of those identities has been a process in which the Italian immigrants have been protagonists, filtering cultural messages through the sieve of their own experiences, memories, and values. Historians of labor and immigration need to plumb the sources of class and ethnic identity more imaginatively and sensitively, recognizing that personal identity is a whole of which class and ethnicity are inseparable aspects. The author calls upon historians to salvage and restore the concepts of class and ethnicity as useful categories of analysis.

The American Nightmare: Reading and Teaching Pietro di Donato's Ethnographic Novel Christ in Concrete

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Rose De Angelis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Course

In the interdisciplinary course entitled The Italian-American Experience, Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete is examined, explored, and analyzed within historical, socio-political, and literary contexts. The novel becomes a point of focus for the discussion of immigrant life and working-class people in a broader and contextualized understanding of Italian Americans. Students read Christ in Concrete in conjunction with essays documenting the history of workers' struggles in the United States. Read as cultural artifact, Christ in Concrete documents with historical clarity and brutal honesty the way in which the American Dream turned nightmare. Using language, religion, and social politics as focal points, the paper looks at Italian-Americans, their virtues and flaws, their struggles and triumphs, as it underscores the culture's unique contributions to the American mosaic not only in the lived lives of the novel's characters but also in the poetics of its discourse.

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.

The Italian Immigrant Working-Class Experience in the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcella Bencivenni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
World War ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Political Events ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Steel Industries

Close to seventeen million people in the United States, approximately 6 percent of the total population, identified themselves as Italian Americans in the 2016 census. Constituting the nation’s fifth largest ancestry group, they are the descendants of one of the greatest diasporas in human history. Since 1860, twenty-nine million Italians have left their homeland for better opportunities worldwide. Close to six million of them have settled in the United States with about five million arriving prior to World War I. Along with other European groups of the great transatlantic migrations of 1870–1920—Jews, Poles, Croatians, and Finns—they became an essential part of the American working class, building, shaping, and enriching its life and culture. Among the most ubiquitous of the early foreigners, Italians were initially confined to unskilled and manual jobs but gradually made their way into the ranks of semi-skilled operatives in mass-production manufacturing. By 1910, they constituted a vital segment of the American multinational workforce in the mining, garment, and steel industries and played key roles in the labor struggles of the early 20th century, providing both key leadership and mass militancy. Like other ethnic groups, Italian immigrant workers lived deeply transnational lives. Their class consciousness was continually informed by their ethnic identity and their complicated relationship to both Italy and the United States, as they sought to transform, and were transformed by, the political events, industrial conditions, and cultures of the two countries. The story of how Italian immigrant workers became “American” sheds light not only on their experience in the United States but also on the transnational character of the labor movement and the interplay of class, race, gender, and ethnic identities.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Ruberto ◽  
Joseph Sciorra
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Brain Drain ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Migration History ◽  
European Migration

This introductory essay documents the data of Italian migration to the United States from 1945 to the present and offers organizational categories through which to better conceptualize these seventy years of migration. Post-World War II Italians were mostly working class immigrants and constituted town-based Italian diasporas, while the last four decades have witnessed elite immigrants, or professionals considered a brain drain, leaving Italy for the United States (and elsewhere). Immigrant replenishment by new or “real Italians” greatly impacted the preexisting and still-developing sense of Italian American identity with its changing notions of race and style, and patterns of consumerism. By reconceptualizing migration history, this essay seeks to assess more generally how ongoing European migration is related to the continual development of postmodern notions of Italian ethnicity.

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.

Placing and Preserving Labor History

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-83
Author(s):  
Rachel Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Working Class History

This article focuses on the significance of sites and landscapes of labor history in public history, particularly in the fields of preservation and interpretation. Through the preservation of labor history sites, public historians can educate various audiences about the diversity of the working-class experience in the United States. Although sites of work have long been identified as historically significant, all too often the workers have been excluded from these narratives. By understanding which sites are important in working-class history and by bringing workers’ voices into the act of protecting, commemorating, and interpreting sites of labor, we can achieve a more inclusive view of labor history—one that connects these stories to the national narrative and illustrates the centrality of labor and labor activism to American history.

Writing Working-Class History from the Bottom Up and Beyond

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-34
Author(s):  
Talitha L. LeFlouria
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Book ◽  
Made In

This essay recognizes the important role the Working Class in American History book series has played in shaping our understanding of the historical experiences of African American and women workers in the United States. It outlines the advancements historians have made in the field of working-class labor history and challenges scholars to incorporate the stories of informal, enslaved, and incarcerated workers.

scholarly journals Italian Americans, Education, and Italian Language: 1880–1921

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Pretelli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Drop Out ◽  
Italian Language ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Migrant Families ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
The Relationship

Italian migrants in the United States have been often associated to the tendency to neglect the importance of culture as an instrument of upward social mobility. Traditionally perceiving culture as a hegemonic tool of the elites, Italian migrants in the United States, who had a predominantly peasant background, were supposedly uninterested in educating their children, rather preferring that they drop out school to add with their work a supplemental income necessary to face the daily necessities of migrant families. Based on a long-standing prejudice, this supposed Italian-American disinterest towards culture and education has been revisited by some scholars, who have revaluated the migrant attitude towards the cultural realm. In the first part, this essay will offer an overview of the different scholarly views on the relationship between Italian-Americans, culture and education. In the second part, it will discuss how Italian-Americans approached the usage of the Italian language, the native idiom that was disappearing in the Little Italies with the progression of newer generations, which inevitably favoured the recourse to English. Finally, the essay will take into account how Italian governments in the Liberal Age (1861–1921) connected to the communities of the Italians in the United States through programs addressed to fostering the Italian language overseas as a way to preserve the Italianità, namely the Italian character of migrants.

Machines are Us: Joseph Papaleo and the Literature of Sprawl

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Dennis Barone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Ethnic Heritage ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Fiction Writer

This essay examines the work of Italian American fiction writer Joseph Papaleo in the context of suburbanization, globalization, and ethnic heritage and identity. In doing so I demonstrate that Papaleo's fiction provides understanding of how Italian Americans have looked at Italy as they experienced the alienation of a consumer culture. Papaleo's fiction presents a mixed nostalgia for what Italy represents and recognition that it, too, like the United States, confronts continuous auto-dependent sprawl. Papaleo adds a suburban focus to the more frequently urban-centered literature of Italian Americans and he adds an ethic perspective to the predominantly Anglo American literature of the suburbs. His 1970 novel Out of Place depicts a materially successful Italian American, Gene Santoro, who cannot fill a deeper spiritual need in either the United States or Italy.

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