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The songs in Chapter 2 describe the celebrity status of Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini from the viewpoint of the working-class Italian immigrants whom these stars attracted to the Metropolitan and Manhattan opera houses. They highlight the contrast between those immigrants' sincere but noisy appreciation of opera and the more refined by less genuine response of elite operagoers. Gus Edwards's “My Cousin Caruso” emerges as an influential model for the topical operatic novelty song.

The writers of the autobiographies in this last chapter have achieved success as doctors, professors, or business people, so they belong to a different social class than the rest of the immigrant autobiographers. All share the work ethic that defined earlier groups of Italian immigrants, but because of intelligence, luck, perseverance, or an indescribable mix of those and other qualities, they have gone on to varying degrees of what we would consider to be success—social, educational, and economic. They view the United States as a land of opportunity, but their standards and their achievements were on a different level from those of the average workers. The autobiographers in this chapter are the ones who are most aware of the tensions between the Italian self and the American society that will become the main topic for many Italian/American writers of second generation.

The Italian immigrants' documented limited presence — at times, absence — in the American schools was due to cultural heritage. The idea that Italians were far less likely than others to receive an extended education has been echoed by many scholars who stress the minimal school arrangements in rural southern Italy from which most Italian immigrants originally came, together with their propensity to return to their homeland. The educational interests that immigrant women expressed in both Italy and the United States were inevitably diverse but certainly remarkable. Although the stories of the lives of these four women in this chapter cannot be generalized, they may be used to widen the narrow picture of immigrant women in America.

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 explores U.S.-produced films from the first decades after World War II through two competing themes—World War II and Italian style—which together influenced how new Italian immigrant women were shaped on screen. The chapter argues that Italian American women had been previously gendered in cinematic representations, but that the gendering had occurred around issues of domesticity, religion, labor, and family rather than lasciviousness and exotica. However, these postwar films turned Italian actors such as Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, and Pier Angeli into hyper-sexualized immigrant characters: provocatively out-of-place war brides, nannies, and prostitutes each sexually willing and exoticized through visual and narrative emphases on their bodies, physical abandon, and illicit behavior.

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.

The Italo-American Women's Club of Williamsburg staged a homegrown play entitled Why, It's Mother and was set in 1938 depicting the then gloomy situation of the first-generation female Italian immigrant. The establishment of Italian Mothers' Clubs was a short-lived twentieth century phenomenon. These clubs filled a need for many first-generation Italian immigrant women. To understand the development of Italian Mothers' Clubs, one must understand a woman's role in the family structure of southern Italy. Italian families were nuclear families headed by the father or eldest male. One's family also included one's in-laws, other nuclear families to whom one was related by marriage. Historians dealing with the Italian family also generally agree that Mezzogiorno culture was “patriarchal.” Italian Mothers' Clubs functioned for a brief time in New York, but in that time Italian women completed their transformation into Italian-American women.

The magnitude of Italian imports in the United States before World War II reflected the role that immigrants played in fostering the commercial flows. Italian immigrants’ conspicuous fondness of imported goods, from cigars to laces to olive oil, witnessed their attempt at articulating their diasporic nostalgia, identity, and taste through shopping, as well as the centrality of consumption in the project of diasporic nationalism—regularly encouraged as it was by the local/transnational immigrant mercantile elites and their supporters in the Italian government abroad. The chapter expands on scholarship by historians such as Lizabeth Cohen and Meg Jacobs who describe consumption’s role as a complex but ultimately successful tool of U.S. nation and citizenship building. The chapter concludes that, instead, by buying and consuming items from Italy, immigrants acted as transnational consumers who formed their national identities around goods from their homeland, as well as around those in their host countries. It was not only Italians’ participation in U.S. consumer culture that turned migrants toward consumption; rather, it was also migrants’ transnational familial, community, and national sentiments that made consumption increasingly acceptable among a people more used to saving than spending. The consumption of Italian exports abroad in some cases strengthened migrants’ ties to their homeland, while fostering a more distinct ethnic and Italian identity in the United States.

This chapter examines the conflict over food that pitted New York-born Italians against their immigrant parents during the period 1920–1930. It begins with a discussion of how food became a symbol of both domesticity and ethnicity for Italian Americans in East Harlem by focusing on the domestic conflicts that arose between first- and second-generation Italian immigrants, and particularly the food conflicts in the immigrant home. It then explores the factors that fueled the clash of values and tastes between immigrant children and their parents, including the former's fascination for a modern popular culture that disregarded immigrant ways of life as backward and inferior, and the parents' desire to own a home—which meant mobilizing all of a family's resources, including children's paychecks—and sacrificing other investments in social mobility such as education. It also considers how food and food rituals were used in the construction of the Italian American family, with its emphasis on solidarity, strong gender roles, a commitment to work, suspicion toward abstract ideas, and an appreciation of the limits of happiness.

This chapter offers a general overview of the Italian radical movement in the United States. It begins by mapping the social and political scene in Italy after the struggle for unification in 1861, focusing particularly on the rise of anarchism and revolutionary socialism. It then turns to the United States and the emergence of the Italian immigrant radical movement from the first anarchist and socialist clubs at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the great Italian immigration began, to the fight against fascism and the movement's eventual decline after the 1930s. The story of Italian American radicalism begins with the massive emigration of Italians who entered the New World between 1880 and 1920. More than five million migrated to the United States during this period. The radicalization of thousands of Italian immigrant workers can be traced back to their exposure to ethnic discrimination and economic exploitation in America.

This chapter provides a glimpse into the Italian communities of New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by mapping out where Italian immigrants lived, the cultural institutions and networks they built, and the types of employment they found. Moreover, it provides a detailed breakdown of the multifaceted Italian language press in New York City and its impact and importance for the immigrant community. Examining the role of prominenti such as Carlo Barsotti, the chapter argues that Italian language newspapers played a vital role in shaping immigrant attitudes toward race, color, civilization, class, and identity. The press had united the provincial Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians—among whom the social, cultural, and educational divides from back home had persisted even in a new country—into a single Italian consciousness.

This chapter discusses how the Watts Towers is as much about Italian immigrants in California as it is about its creator, Italian immigrant Simon Rodia. Italian American immigrant novels and autobiographies of the era reveal that one common measure of success in the New World was how much wealth the immigrant could amass in the shortest amount of time. However, Rodia's life and Towers must be located on that other side of the success story, transcending the mere pursuit of riches in the New World. Ultimately, what is important about the Towers is that Rodia's site, like the over 100-year history of Italian American literature, expresses not only Italian immigrants' aspirations but conflicted recollections of their past in the Old World.

This chapter addresses, first, Rodia's life and worldview as an Italian immigrant and, second, the Italian cultural practices and imagery embedded in his art. That is, it examines Rodia's life and the Towers in Watts through the prism of Italian diaspora history and southern Italian peasant cultural practices, imaginaries, and worldviews seemingly adapted by Rodia in California. It listens for Rodia's expressions of personal longing and enduring cultural myths and seeks to identify his hidden landscapes of memory. It considers the possible sources of his topographies—both mythic and physical. It focuses on the symbolic culture embedded therein—for example, bell towers, ships, gardens, hearths, treasure—and explores cultural practices of devotion, such as village celebrations (e.g. the Gigli of Nola) and ex-votos, to consider how the Towers might be considered a street festival or conversely a tangible expression of gratitude for “graces received”.

This chapter examines how, during the period 1930–1940, Italian immigrants in East Harlem articulated new food-based strategies aimed at controlling the mobility of immigrant children by delaying their embrace of middle-class values. It considers how the family table became a place for negotiating generational conflicts between immigrant parents and their American-born children by expounding on the so-called generational contract, whereby children were granted much greater autonomy in public in exchange for showing allegiance to the family through regular participation in the gatherings centered on ritual food consumption that brought families together. The chapter asks why immigrants insisted on such family food rituals in exchange for relinquishing control of their children's public life, and why younger Italian Americans agreed. It shows that the Italian American family's ritual Sunday dinner was not only about eating but also about the discursive articulation of nation and ethnic identity in the diasporic private sphere.

This chapter examines how the fondness of New York City's Italian immigrants for imported foods helped make the food import business crucial to the project of diasporic Italian nationalism. It argues that the Italian state, especially the fascist regime after 1922, and its representatives in New York supported the business of importing food in order to expand the country's economic and political influence in the United States. The chapter first provides an overview of New York's food imports from Italy during the period 1890–1920, along with the food import crisis and the Italian Chamber of Commerce's “Buy Italian!” campaign of 1935–1936. It then considers how food frauds, imitations, and canned symbols sparked a feud between Italian food importers, on the one side, and domestic Italian food producers and grossieri, on the other. It also explains how supplying immigrants with “authentic” Italian food helped strengthen relations between Italy and America and created a tangible economic dimension that complemented ideological and emotional diasporic nationalism.

This chapter examines how Italian restaurateurs used food to represent Italian American identity and nation outside the community. In the interwar years, the position of Italian Americans in the larger life of New York City was still far from secure and subject to a complicated range of attitudes. The exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924 was filled with fearful allusions to the racial inadequacy of Italian immigrants and their inability to make good American citizens. At the same time, however, Italian immigrant restaurateurs and restaurant workers were beginning to transform cultural differences into highly marketable products for mass consumption. This chapter first provides an overview of the economy of Italian restaurants during the period 1900–1940 before discussing how popular culture, race, and performance converged at such establishments. It also considers customer–worker relations in Italian restaurants and shows that Italian restaurants attracted non-Italian middle-class customers by offering popular Italian food in an original and ultimately appealing ethnic narrative.

This chapter argues that a network of Italian American organizations was influential in helping to secure the passage of the Refugee Relief Act in 1953. The organizations exploited American anxieties regarding the stability of Italy’s democratic government to support its passage. The resulting Refugee Relief Program allowed for 60,000 Italian refugees and relatives of American citizens to immigrate to the U.S. outside of regular quota allocations. This chapter explores the variety of ways Italian American organizations worked to optimize Italian immigration under the program. Among other activities, ACIM and its affiliate organizations provided community education and administrative assistance, coordinated with Italian government officials, and worked with sponsors and applicants to ensure the utilization of all 60,000 Italian quotas. It also successfully secured an amendment to the terms of the law to benefit nonrefugee Italian immigrants who faced long waiting periods under the National Origins System. This chapter asserts that those efforts combined were intended to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the National Origins System itself and the need for more Italian immigration opportunities.

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.

This chapter reveals the artistic contributions of Italian immigrants in the Río de la Plata Basin of South America—Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil—which ran parallel to the lifetime of Simon Rodia in the United States. It outlines how, through the eyes of Italian immigrants, the common value of the everyday became manifest in hybridized expressions. It also identifies the differences in modes of expression of two major groups of contributors in South America. The first grouping of artists concentrated more on social themes through pictorial narratives that were often poignant critiques of everyday life in their countries as experienced by the working-class natives, former slaves, and immigrants. The second major grouping included avant-garde artists whose works were far less narrative and more abstract in aesthetic expression. Interwoven into these narratives are questions regarding issues of marginality and displacement: When does an individual, a group of people, or a work of art make the transition from the margins to the center of society? What are the factors that allow such a radical change? Who determines when and under what terms this transition may happen?

This chapter explores the interrelationships among food, place, and race in Italian Harlem and shows that the Italian immigrant community was also a race-inflected geography of food consumption. During the 1930s, Italian Americans were hit hard by the Depression. Italians were disproportionately represented among the recipients of city and federal subsidies, particularly in Harlem, where the poorest among them lived. However, in those same years, Italian immigrants and their children managed to make East Harlem their home in America through a careful deployment of social, material, and emotional responses. This chapter examines how Italians in Harlem carved distinctive Italian foodscapes into “their” neighborhood that gave the community a secure sense of place. Italian Americans created around them a sensually familiar world filled with the tastes, aromas, and colors of Italian food, provided by “ethnic” restaurants, food stores, and street markets that dotted the neighborhood. In Italian Harlem, the production, commerce, preparation, and consumption of food gave rise to a distinct urban ethnic foodscape and smellscape that shaped social identities.