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This chapter and the next treat representations of Italian immigrants in operatic novelty songs. Chapter 1 examines songs in which lowbrow Italian Americans assert a right of ownership to opera that is represented as being more authentic than that of the social elite that aspired to such ownership. These songs are best understood in the context of period concepts of whiteness, in which lower-class southern Italians were construed to be closer to African Americans than to Anglo-Americans. Songs that quote Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana attest to that opera's popularity, and transformations, in the United States.

In this chapter the author summarizes the historiography on Italian-American women within the context of women's studies generally, while emphasizing potential connections between this research and topics of interest to many Italian-Americanists. As is true of immigration studies generally, surveys of Italian-American life — from scholarly reviews to more popular accounts — have often failed to incorporate women's experiences extensively. This reflects something other than the paucity of research on Italian immigrant women and their descendants. Literary studies of Italian-American women have focused on autobiography, oral history, and fiction for insight into women's authentic experiences and subjectivity. Scholars in cultural studies raise troubling questions about the existence of any such self, with its own authentic subjectivity. As the fields change, so will Italian-American women's studies as well.

This book is proof of the reversal of Giuseppe Prezzolini's 1963 conclusions about Italian immigrant autobiography and his claim that the immigrants did not want to remember their past and that they left no written word. This book is full of evidence of how ardently these people wanted their memories preserved. Italian American autobiographical material has existed all along, but its study was hampered by the fact that it did not match the heroic claims of greatness that fit with the mid-twentieth-century view of what was worthy material for an autobiography. This group of some sixty Italian Americans who tell their stories here experienced universal struggles shared by everyone, and suffered immigration traumas comparable to those that many ethnic immigrant groups have faced. In this way one can see many universal truths in these examples. These stories of Italian American lives offer local color and cultural detail that isn't provided by immigration statistics, something even more vivid and illustrative than photographs of immigrants.

Autobiographies provide the most real and sincere account of the process and effects of immigration that one could have. This chapter examines autobiographies as documents of an internal view of history to show how immigration has been experienced by its protagonists and how their experiences capture the scent of an era and a way of seeing the world. These stories reveal the immigrant's philosophy of hard work, a melancholic optimism, homesickness, and will. The discovery of autobiographies in the homes of unschooled workers tells us that immigrants were so concerned with their self-image that it propelled them to portray themselves, rather than passively accepting representations and cliches by others. It demonstrates that first-generation Italian Americans did not only work constantly, they also found the time and motivation for literary pursuits, as humble as they might be. Finally, it offers proof of the deep humanity of first-generation immigrants, who have often been seen as mere working beasts, through insulting nicknames and deviant stereotypes.

Arno Press has published an impressive and valuable array of materials on Italian Americans in the United States with its thirty-nine-volume series, The Italian American Experience. The series is as diverse as the community it depicts. In view of the current interest in women's history and women's roles, it is unfortunate that the Arno series contains few works dealing with women. Not one of the thirty-nine volumes is devoted exclusively to women. Despite this neglect, the careful reader can uncover a wealth of information on Italian women scattered throughout the Arno series. Most Italian women who worked outside the home were blue collar or industrial workers. Some of the most useful insights about Italian women are those of novelists. While women do not figure prominently in many academic studies in the Arno series, they are very prominent in virtually every novel, indicating their central importance in the “real,” world.

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 linkages among food, culture, and identity have long occupied small numbers of folklorists and anthropologists. Among Italian Americans, food and cooking are powerful expressions of their ties to the past and their current identities. Many seem to believe that they are much, much more than what they eat, and that too many negative stereotypes link Italians and food. Cookbooks remain some of the most fascinating and ubiquitous texts that describe their eating habits. Italian Americans invite cooks, collectors, and scholars among Italian Americana readers to take cooking and eating seriously.

This chapter examines the layered worlds of the Italian food business and consumer marketplace in East Harlem. In order to understand the central role of food in the making of Italian American identity, it is necessary to look at how Italian American food entrepreneurs in New York sought to link food with ethnic identity. This chapter first discusses the history of American-made Italian food and food consumption among Italian migrants between 1890 and 1920, along with the development of the U.S. food industry at the turn of the twentieth century. It then looks at the emergence of a new generation of consumers and food businesses during the period 1920–1940. It also considers the marketing strategies of Italian food producers and the response of Italian American consumers in the interwar years in relation to ethnicity and modernity. It shows that the centrality of food created an entrepreneurial ethnic middle class based in the food trade, which nurtured—and in turn supported by—the symbolic connection between the consumption of Italian food and the construction of diasporic Italian identities.

At the same time that Italian Americans began to promote increasing Italian immigration to the country, Americans largely reaffirmed a policy of limited and restricted immigration with the passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. In order to more effectively organize against immigration policies that continued to be based on National Origins System quotas, and to meet the needs of Italian Americans who wanted to expand access to immigration opportunities for Italians, Italian Americans formed the American Committee for Italian Migration (ACIM). ACIM became the leading organization that helped to bring together a number of Italian American individuals and groups who were concerned about immigration reform in the postwar period. This chapter therefore explores the Italian American immigration reform lobby’s origins, scope, and ideological foundations.

The chapter shows that the appreciation of so many Italian Americans for the material rewards that American liberalism had delivered to them was used as a transnational Cold War weapon—a means to convince Italians in Italy to choose the promise of American consumerism over communism in a crucial political moment in which the “homeland” was at the forefront of the clash between the two worlds. The chapter emphasizes how public campaigns like the mass letters and donations for Italian war relief that Italian Americans sent to their relatives in Italy to convince them to vote for anticommunist parties in the watershed elections of 1948 had in fact a double purpose: one international, influencing the self-determination of Italians in Italy and keeping the country in the U.S. sphere of influence; and one domestic, proving to other Americans that (despite indications or fears to the contrary) the levels of material consumption Italians had achieved in America had decisively won them to the cause of capitalism and Americanism. Furthermore, Italian Americans involved in organizations that worked to repeal the National Origins System quotas and reform American immigration policies set out to prove the fitness of Italians as both new immigrants and citizens in the 1950s and 1960s. One way they did so was to demonstrate that Italian immigrants who came to the United States after World War II adopted lifestyles that reflected the culture of mass consumption that prevailed in the United States.

The chapter chronicles how Italian American organizations provided employment, housing, and resettlement assistance to tens of thousands of Italian immigrants, especially refugees, after they arrived in the U.S. It argues that in assisting immigrants and helping newcomers project a public image of success, Italian American organizations were attempting to demonstrate the desirability of Italian immigrants, their ability to contribute to American economic growth, their ability to assimilate to American lifestyles, and their fitness for citizenship in a democratic society. Resettlement efforts also reveal conservative aspects of white ethnic activism. In focusing on resettlement initiatives, Italian American immigration reformers largely accepted the premise that the success of recently arrived Italian immigrants did not just reflect individual achievements. Instead, the ability of the national or ethnic group as a whole to immigrate, adjust, and thrive as Americans was at stake. In working to ensure that new immigrants were considered “desirable” or “fit” by other Americans, Italian Americans were not challenging long-standing cultural assumptions about the role of race and ethnicity in American society. They were only claiming that Italian ethnics be included within the boundaries of the privileged white, middle-class cultural mainstream.

This chapter examines ACIM’s attempts to continue to circumvent National Origins quotas through lobbying for further refugee legislation after the expiration of the Refugee Relief Act. The Refugee Relief Program proved to be a politically palatable way to both increase Italian immigration opportunities and to whittle away at the effectiveness of the National Origins System. This chapter looks at the varying degrees of success Italian Americans had with these campaigns, the eventual unsustainable nature of their arguments, and their turn toward advancing arguments to regulate immigration on the basis of family unification by the turn of the decade. That pivot was part of a broader shift among liberals who similarly had begun to advance family reunification legislation as a more egalitarian and moral way to regulate immigration than the National Origins System. This chapter shows that Italian American immigration reformers took part in this shift because of a combination of genuine ideological convictions but also did so opportunistically when previous strategies for achieving immigration opportunities via special legislation for Italians failed. It argues for the self-interested nature of Italian American lobbying and suggests the limitations of white ethnic liberalism.

This chapter explores the ideological foundations of Italian American attacks on the National Origins System and their corresponding defense of a regulatory system based primarily on the principle of family reunification in the 1960s. Italian Americans articulated both a secular liberal critique of the National Origins System and one based on Catholic social thought. However, there were limits to their particular brand of liberalism. Italian Americans also continued to employ the rhetoric of immigrant “contributionism” to make their case. In doing so, they continued to argue that certain immigrant or ethnic groups were worthy of immigration and citizenship opportunities not because all individuals deserved the same basic legal and political rights but because those groups had somehow earned those rights through past demonstrations of “good” or accepted behaviors.

This chapter illustrates the export of tarantella to the United States by focusing on the work of New York–based artist Alessandra Belloni, particularly her tarantella dance performance and her “Rhythm Is the Cure” dance workshop. The chapter examines Belloni’s work both within a world music framework and from a woman-centered, New Age perspective. This work includes a complex process of adaptation of the Southern Italian rhythms, since it enhances an exotic image of Italy as it often emerges in Anglo-American culture, while at the same time adding a woman’s perspective to it. Belloni’s reinterpretation of tarantella plays a particularly significant role within the Italian-American cultural scene. The second part of the chapter situates Belloni’s work within the larger process of post-WWII Italian migration to the United States, while also discussing larger issues of representation of (southern) Italian culture within the Anglo-American context.

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.

In this chapter the author focuses on the history of cookbooks written by, or for, immigrant cooks and their descendants, attending particularly to those cookbooks that offer information about the kitchens and cooking of Italian origin foods in the kitchens of Italian immigrants and their descendants. He interpreted Italian-American cookbooks against the backdrop of a much larger body of American cookbooks that introduced Italian recipes to cooks with no immigrants in their kitchens. Numerous books about Italian cooking are published in English in the United States and Canada, but few would agree that this makes them Italian-American. There are many ways to bridge the culinary worlds of Italy and America. The history of migrations from one land to another is just one bridge among many — and it is a complex bridge — but it is the one that most Italian Americans would probably choose to define a cookbook as Italian-American.