Samuel L. Baily

The Adjustment of Italian Immigrants in Buenos Aires and New York, 1870-1914

AMEDEO CANUTI AND GIUSEPPE TRIMORA left Italy for the Americas at the turn of the past century. Amedeo was born in the tiny Adriatic fishing village of Sirolo in 1865. When the towns fishing industry came upon hard times during the latter part of the nineteenth century, he and his three brothers went to Buenos Aires. In 1894 Amedeo was recorded in the membership lists of a leading mutual aid society as a literate, twenty-nine-year old sailor who lived with six fellow villagers at 175 Calle La Madrid in the Boca, the center of Argentinas maritime industry. He later married and moved with his family to the nearby town of Quilmes, where he became the owner of a grocery store. Giuseppes background was somewhat different. As an unmarried Sicilian of thirty-two, he migrated to New York in 1896. The census of 1900 records him as living with eighty other individuals, all but five of whom were Italian, in a tenement house at 228 Elizabeth Street in the heart of one of the citys many Sicilian colonies. Guiseppe could not read, write, or speak English. He listed his occupation as laborer, but at the time of the census he had been unemployed for several months. 1 Amedeo and Guiseppe were joined by millions of their countrymen who migrated to Argentina and the United States before World War I. Some remained permanently in their adopted country. Others returned home. Still others went back and forth many times. By 1914, however, nearly a million Italians lived in Argentina and a million and a half in the United States. In each country, the Italian immigrants settled primarily in the urban areas, especially in the rapidly growing commercial and industrial port cities of Buenos Aires and New York. When World War I broke out, three hundred and twelve thousand Italians-one-third of the total in Argentina-lived in Buenos Aires, and three hundred and seventy

Secondary Cities of Argentina: The Social History of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza, 1850-1910.

This study of three Argentine provincial capitals introduces a new concept in Latin American urban studies: the historical role of secondary cities, settlements large enough to possess all the elements commonly associated with urban areas and yet too small to figure among a countrys major cities. The principal contribution of the book is to explain how and why smaller cities grew. What determined and shaped their growth? How did local inhabitants, and especially the dominant social elites, react to internal and external influences? To what extent were they able to control growth? What relationships developed with the surrounding regions and the outside world? The study shows that secondary cities linked rural economies and inhabitants with the outside world while insulating the traditional rural environment from the changing character of large urban centers. In this intermediate position, economic relationships and social structure changed slowly, and only in response to outside innovations such as railroads. Continuity within the secondary centers thus reinforced conservatism, accentuated the gap between the major cities and the rest of the country, and contributed to the resistance to change that characterizes much of Latin American today. The book is illustrated with photographs and maps.

The Role of Two Newspapers in the Assimilation of Italians in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, 1893–1913

Focusing on the Italian language press in Argentina and Brazil, this article explores the role of the foreign language press in the immigrant process of acculturation. Specifically, the author evaluates La Patria degli Italiani of Buenos Aires and Fanfulla of São Paulo. These two papers, in their respective communities, retained the largest circulation and were generally acknowledged to be the most influential. The author probes the Italian communities in each country, examines the functions of the newspapers and estimates their respective influence.

Immigrants in the Land of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914

Prologue: Migration from a Participant Familys Perspective Introduction: The Comparative Study of Transnational Italian Migration PART I: THE ITALIAN DIASPORA AND THE OLD AND NEW WORLD CONTEXTS OF MIGRATION 1. Italy and the Causes of Emigration 2. The Italian Migrations to Buenos Aires and New York City 3. What the Immigrants Found PART II: THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE ITALIANS IN BUENOS AIRES AND NEW YORK CITY 4 Fare I America 5. Residence Patterns and Residential Mobility 6. Family, Household, and Neighborhood 7. Formal Institutions before the Mass Migration Era 8. Formal Institutions during the Mass Migration Era 9. Constructing a Continuum

Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (review)

unchanging image, the figure demonstrated women’s willingness to internalize the dictates of consumer culture to make themselves into spectacles of the self. Moreover, the flapper, independent and rebellious, was both a standardized image and an individualized one, as young women adopted a stance that made them both subjects of the gaze and objects of it. Recently there has been much writing on adolescent women in the 1920s, including work by Grace Palladino on adolescence (Teenagers: An American History, 1985), and by Kelly Schrum (Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920–1945, 1996). The enormous vogue of adolescent and pre-adolescent pop stars like Britney Spears, in all probability, has inspired this work. Conor stands in this trend, although her adolescent woman emerges as a curiously static and theoretical creature, with an agency that is at best attenuated. And how do we interpret this creature over time? That, after all, is the particular province of the historian. Does she disappear in the 1930s, when the “mature woman” image dominates fashion? What relationship do all of these images have to modernity—or was modernity only a facet of the 1920s? Finally, Conor has included an obligatory chapter on “whiteness” as the prevailing model of women in the 1920s and tribal women as outside any category of beauty. Here she pays attention to the aboriginal women of Australia, a group subjected to a particularly virulent racism. Yet there has been a “counterhegemonic” discourse in the West celebrating “Orientalism” and “darkness” that Conor overlooks. It is evident in the great popularity in 1920s movies of the vamp, a dark, “orientalized” individual iconized on the movie screen in Pola Negri, Vilma Banky, and Natasha Rambova.

Book Review: Italia y AmericaItalia y America. By AlbonicoAldo and RosoliGianfausto. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1994. Pp. 449.

LydioE Tomasi and Mark J.Millerexpress a cautious optimism that European countries will be able to coordinate, if not harmonize, their immigration policies into one future European immigration policy. They believe that such a policy would be based on two pillars, namely a renewed policy for the integration of foreign residents and a control or regulation policy combined with foreignpolicy initiatives, trade and development assistance. They dismiss the pessimistic scenarios of both a Europe overrun by migrants and of a militarized Fortress Europe. But they admit that the outcome is uncertain and that their optimism may be wishful thinking. However, they explicitly state the problems faced by Europe and show how international migration, long considered to be low politics, has become an urgent matter of great national significance, a matter ofhigh politics. Two more articles should be mentioned. Giuseppe Calovi, head of the unit for Freedom of Movement and Migration Policy, in a valuable insider-report describes the European Commissions recent work on migration issues. Finally; Father Klinar, Slovenian Professor of Sociology; in a long article thoroughly discusses the factors determining emigration from post-socialist societies (the former USSR and Yugoslavia as well as other East European countries). A new Europe is under construction, and a new era ofinternational migration may also be under way.Authors of this volume discuss the uncertainty about future migration from the East and the South, the strong quest for immigration control, and the present Europeanization of traditional national migration policies. They thereby give a most valuable contribution to the growing literature dealing with the great changes technological, political and economic which are taking place in Europe, both between the nation states and within them.

Book Review: L'Italia nella Società ArgentinaL'Italia nella Società Argentina. Edited by DevotoFernando J. and RosoliGianfausto. Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione, 1988. Pp.310. L.35.000.

chapter is purely descriptive. Wilpert, for instance, explores the relation between religious and ethnic belongingness of immigrants from Turkey. She poses a number of important theoretical questions on the formation ofidentity, but unfortunately she does not really manage to satisfactorily answer the questions, as she herself acknowledges. In all, this volume may be instructive as far as it goes for people who wish to familiarize themselves with the position of Muslims in Europe, but I suspect most scholars wish to go beyond the level ofdescription.