Patterns of Italian Immigration to the United States

Fired by the Ideal

10.5406/illinois/9780252041051.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Marcella Bencivenni

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Historical Context ◽

The United States ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Italian Immigration ◽

The Social ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The Ideal

This chapter details the social, political and historical context out of which Italian anarchism emerged in New York City. Embracing a transnational approach, she charts the movement's early roots, its main leaders, geopolitical spaces and distinctive subculture starting from the late nineteenth century when the great Italian immigration to the United States began through the 1920s when the movement started to decline under the blows of governmental repression and postwar nativist calls for 100 percent Americanism.

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New Italian Migrations to the United States

10.5406/illinois/9780252040955.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

The United States ◽

Immigration Reform ◽

Cultural Significance ◽

White Ethnicity ◽

Italian Americans ◽

Italian Immigration ◽

Migration History ◽

Immigrant Narrative ◽

The Cold War

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.

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Sources for the History of Italian Immigration to the United States

Roman Sources for the History of American Catholicism, 1763–1939 ◽

10.2307/j.ctvpj750b.13 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 169-176

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

The United States ◽

Italian Immigration ◽

History Of

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New Italian Migrations to the United States

10.5622/illinois/9780252041396.001.0001 ◽

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.

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