Los italoamericanos ( en italiano : italoamericani ) son estadounidenses que tienen ascendencia italiana total o parcial. Según la Asociación de Estudios Italoamericanos, la población actual es de aproximadamente 18 millones, un aumento de los 16 millones en 2010, lo que corresponde a aproximadamente el 5,4% de la población total de los Estados Unidos . Las mayores concentraciones de italoamericanos se encuentran en las áreas metropolitanas urbanas del noreste y del medio oeste industrial , con comunidades significativas que también residen en muchas otras áreas metropolitanas importantes de EE. UU. [10]
Entre 1820 y 2004, aproximadamente 5,5 millones de italianos emigraron a los Estados Unidos durante la diáspora italiana , en varias oleadas distintas, y la mayor cantidad llegó en el siglo XX desde el sur de Italia . Al principio, la mayoría de los hombres solteros, los llamados "pájaros de paso", enviaban remesas a sus familias en Italia y luego regresaban a Italia.
La inmigración comenzó a aumentar durante la década de 1880, cuando inmigraron más del doble de italianos que en las cinco décadas anteriores juntas. [11] [12] Continuando desde 1880 hasta 1914, la mayor oleada de inmigración trajo más de 4 millones de italianos a los Estados Unidos. [11] [12] La mayor cantidad de esta ola provino del sur de Italia, que en ese momento era en gran parte agrícola y donde gran parte de la población se había empobrecido por siglos de dominio extranjero y pesadas cargas impositivas. [13] [14] Este período de inmigración a gran escala terminó abruptamente con el inicio de la Primera Guerra Mundial en agosto de 1914. En la década de 1920 llegaron 455.315 inmigrantes. [15] Llegaron bajo los términos de las nuevas restricciones de inmigración basadas en cuotas creadas por la Ley de Inmigración de 1924 . [16] Los italoamericanos tuvieron una influencia significativa en la sociedad y la cultura estadounidenses, haciendo contribuciones a las artes visuales, la literatura, la gastronomía, la política, los deportes y la música. [17]
Los italianos en los Estados Unidos antes de 1880 incluían varios exploradores, empezando por Cristóbal Colón , y unos pocos asentamientos pequeños. [18]
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Los navegantes y exploradores italianos [19] desempeñaron un papel clave en la exploración y colonización de las Américas por parte de los europeos . El explorador genovés Cristóbal Colón ( en italiano : Cristoforo Colombo [kriˈstɔːforo koˈlombo] ) completó cuatro viajes a través del océano Atlántico para los Reyes Católicos de España , abriendo el camino para la exploración y colonización europea generalizada de las Américas.
Otro italiano, John Cabot ( en italiano : Giovanni Caboto [dʒoˈvanni kaˈbɔːto] ), junto con su hijo Sebastian , exploraron la costa este de América del Norte para Enrique VII a principios del siglo XVI. En 1524, el explorador florentino Giovanni da Verrazzano ( en italiano: [dʒoˈvanni da (v)verratˈtsaːno] ) fue el primer europeo en explorar la costa atlántica de América del Norte entre Florida y Nuevo Brunswick en 1524. [20] El explorador italiano Amerigo Vespucci ( en italiano: [ameˈriːɡo veˈsputtʃi] ) demostró por primera vez alrededor de 1501 que el Nuevo Mundo no era Asia como se conjeturó inicialmente sino un continente diferente ( América lleva su nombre). [21]
Varios navegantes y exploradores italianos al servicio de España y Francia participaron en la exploración y cartografía de sus territorios y en el establecimiento de asentamientos; pero esto no condujo a la presencia permanente de italianos en América. En 1539, Marco da Nizza exploró el territorio que más tarde se convertiría en los estados de Arizona y Nuevo México .
El primer italiano registrado como residente en el área correspondiente a los actuales EE. UU. fue Pietro Cesare Alberti , [25] considerado comúnmente como el primer italoamericano, un marinero veneciano que, en 1635, se estableció en la colonia holandesa de Nueva Ámsterdam , lo que eventualmente se convertiría en la ciudad de Nueva York .
Una pequeña ola de protestantes, conocidos como valdenses , que eran de ascendencia francesa y del norte de Italia (específicamente piamonteses ), ocurrió durante el siglo XVII. Los primeros valdenses comenzaron a llegar alrededor de 1640, y la mayoría llegó entre 1654 y 1663. [26] Se extendieron por lo que entonces se llamaba Nueva Holanda , y lo que se convertiría en Nueva York, Nueva Jersey y las regiones del Bajo Río Delaware. Actualmente se desconoce la población valdense estadounidense total que emigró a Nueva Holanda; sin embargo, un registro holandés de 1671 indica que, solo en 1656, el Ducado de Saboya cerca de Turín , Italia, había exiliado a 300 valdenses debido a su fe protestante.
Enrico Tonti (Henri de Tonti), junto con el explorador francés René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle , exploraron la región de los Grandes Lagos. De Tonti fundó el primer asentamiento europeo en Illinois en 1679 y en Arkansas en 1683, conocido como Poste de Arkansea , lo que lo convirtió en "El Padre de Arkansas". [23] [24] Con LaSalle, cofundó Nueva Orleans y fue gobernador del Territorio de Luisiana durante los siguientes 20 años. Su hermano Alphonse de Tonty (Alfonso de Tonti), con el explorador francés Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac , fue el cofundador de Detroit en 1701 y fue su gobernador colonial interino durante 12 años.
España y Francia eran países católicos y enviaron muchos misioneros para convertir a la población nativa americana. Entre estos misioneros había numerosos italianos. Entre 1519 y 1525, Alessandro Geraldini fue el primer obispo católico de las Américas, en Santo Domingo . El padre François-Joseph Bressani (Francesco Giuseppe Bressani) trabajó entre los pueblos algonquino y hurón a principios del siglo XVII. El sudoeste y California fueron explorados y cartografiados por el sacerdote jesuita italiano Eusebio Kino (Chino) a finales del siglo XVII y principios del XVIII. Su estatua , encargada por el estado de Arizona, se exhibe en el Centro de Visitantes del Capitolio de los Estados Unidos .
La familia Taliaferro (originalmente Tagliaferro ), que se cree que tiene raíces en Venecia , fue una de las primeras familias en establecerse en Virginia . La Casa Wythe , una histórica casa georgiana construida en Williamsburg, Virginia en 1754, fue diseñada por el arquitecto Richard Taliaferro para su yerno, el padre fundador de los Estados Unidos George Wythe , quien se casó con la hija de Richard, Elizabeth Taliaferro. El mayor de los Taliaferro diseñó gran parte de la Williamsburg colonial , incluido el Palacio del Gobernador , el Capitolio de la Colonia de Virginia y la Casa del Presidente en el College of William & Mary . [27]
Francesco Maria de Reggio, un noble italiano de la Casa de Este que sirvió bajo el mando francés como François Marie, Chevalier de Reggio , llegó a Luisiana en 1747, donde el rey Luis XV lo nombró capitán general de la Luisiana francesa , hasta 1763. [28] Vástago de los De Reggio, una primera familia criolla de Luisiana de la parroquia de San Bernardo, Luisiana , la nieta de Francesco Maria, Hélène Judith de Reggio, daría a luz al famoso general confederado P. GT Beauregard . [29]
Un comerciante colonial, Francis Ferrari de Génova, se naturalizó como ciudadano de Rhode Island en 1752. [30] Murió en 1753 y en su testamento habla de Génova , su propiedad de tres barcos, cargamento de vino y su esposa Mary, [31] quien pasó a ser dueña de una de las cafeterías más antiguas de Estados Unidos, la Merchant Coffee House de Nueva York en Wall Street en Water St. Su Merchant Coffee House se mudó al otro lado de Wall Street en 1772, conservando el mismo nombre y patrocinio. [32]
Hoy en día, los descendientes de los Alberti-Burtis, Taliaferro, Fonda, Reggio y otras familias antiguas se encuentran por todo Estados Unidos. [33]
En este período llegó un pequeño grupo de personas procedentes de Italia. Algunos de ellos trajeron conocimientos sobre agricultura y fabricación de vidrio, seda y vino, mientras que otros aportaron conocimientos musicales. [34]
Entre 1773 y 1785, Filippo Mazzei , médico, filósofo, diplomático, promotor de la libertad y escritor, fue amigo íntimo y confidente de Thomas Jefferson. Publicó un panfleto que contenía la frase: «Todos los hombres son por naturaleza igualmente libres e independientes», [35] que Jefferson incorporó esencialmente intacta a la Declaración de Independencia .
Los italoamericanos sirvieron en la Guerra de la Independencia de Estados Unidos como soldados y oficiales. Francesco Vigo ayudó a las fuerzas coloniales de George Rogers Clark al ser uno de los principales financistas de la Revolución en la frontera del noroeste. Más tarde, fue cofundador de la Universidad de Vincennes en Indiana.
Tras la independencia de Estados Unidos llegaron numerosos refugiados políticos, entre los que destacan: Giuseppe Avezzana , Alessandro Gavazzi , Silvio Pellico , Federico Confalonieri y Eleuterio Felice Foresti . Giuseppe Garibaldi residió en Estados Unidos entre 1850 y 1851. Por invitación de Thomas Jefferson, Carlo Bellini se convirtió en el primer profesor de lenguas modernas en el College of William & Mary , entre los años 1779 y 1803. [36] [37]
En 1801, Philip Trajetta (Filippo Traetta) fundó el primer conservatorio de música del país en Boston, donde, en la primera mitad del siglo, también estuvieron activos el organista Charles Nolcini y el director Louis Ostinelli. [38] En 1805, Thomas Jefferson reclutó a un grupo de músicos de Sicilia para formar una banda militar, que más tarde se convertiría en el núcleo de la US Marine Band . Los músicos incluían al joven Venerando Pulizzi , quien se convirtió en el primer director italiano de la banda, y sirvió en esta capacidad desde 1816 hasta 1827. [39] Francesco Maria Scala , un ciudadano estadounidense naturalizado nacido en Italia, fue uno de los directores más importantes e influyentes de la US Marine Band, desde 1855 hasta 1871, y se le atribuye la organización instrumental que la banda aún mantiene. Joseph Lucchesi, el tercer líder italiano de la Banda de la Marina de los EE. UU., sirvió desde 1844 hasta 1846. [40] El primer teatro de ópera del país abrió en 1833 en Nueva York gracias a los esfuerzos de Lorenzo Da Ponte , antiguo libretista de Mozart, que había inmigrado a Estados Unidos y se había convertido en el primer profesor de italiano en el Columbia College en 1825.
Durante este período, los exploradores italianos continuaron activos en Occidente. Entre 1789 y 1791, Alessandro Malaspina trazó un mapa de gran parte de la costa oeste de las Américas , desde el Cabo de Hornos hasta el Golfo de Alaska . Entre 1822 y 1823, Giacomo Beltrami exploró la región de la cabecera del río Misisipi en el territorio que luego se convertiría en Minnesota, que nombró un condado en su honor.
Joseph Rosati fue nombrado el primer obispo católico de San Luis en 1824. Entre 1830 y 1864, Samuel Mazzuchelli , un misionero y experto en lenguas indígenas, ejerció su ministerio entre los colonos europeos y los nativos americanos en Wisconsin y Iowa durante 34 años y, tras su muerte, fue declarado Venerable por la Iglesia Católica. El padre Charles Constantine Pise , un jesuita, sirvió como capellán del Senado de 1832 a 1833, [41] [42] el único sacerdote católico elegido para ejercer esta función.
En 1833, Lorenzo Da Ponte , ex libretista de Mozart y ciudadano estadounidense naturalizado, fundó el primer teatro de ópera en los Estados Unidos, la Ópera Italiana en la ciudad de Nueva York, que fue la predecesora de la Academia de Música de Nueva York y de la Ópera Metropolitana de Nueva York. Los misioneros de las órdenes jesuita y franciscana estuvieron activos en muchas partes de América. Los jesuitas italianos fundaron numerosas misiones, escuelas y dos colegios en el oeste. Giovanni Nobili fundó el Santa Clara College (ahora Universidad de Santa Clara ) en 1851. La Academia San Ignacio (ahora Universidad de San Francisco ) fue fundada por Anthony Maraschi en 1855. Los jesuitas italianos también sentaron las bases para la industria vitivinícola que luego florecería en California. En el este, los franciscanos italianos fundaron hospitales, orfanatos, escuelas y el St. Bonaventure College (ahora Universidad San Bonaventure ), establecido por Panfilo da Magliano en 1858.
En 1837, John Phinizy (Finizzi) se convirtió en alcalde de Augusta , Georgia. Samuel Wilds Trotti, de Carolina del Sur, fue el primer italoamericano en servir en el Congreso de los EE. UU. (un mandato parcial, del 17 de diciembre de 1842 al 3 de marzo de 1843). [43] En 1849, Francesco de Casale comenzó a publicar el periódico italoamericano L'Eco d'Italia en Nueva York, el primero de muchos que eventualmente seguirían. En 1848, Francis Ramacciotti , inventor y fabricante de cuerdas de piano, emigró a los EE. UU. desde la Toscana.
A partir de 1863, los inmigrantes italianos fueron uno de los principales grupos de trabajadores no cualificados, junto con los irlandeses, que construyeron el Ferrocarril Transcontinental al oeste de Omaha, Nebraska. [44] En 1866, Constantino Brumidi completó los frescos del interior de la cúpula del Capitolio de los Estados Unidos en Washington, y pasó el resto de su vida ejecutando otras obras de arte para embellecer el Capitolio. La primera celebración del Día de Colón fue organizada por italoamericanos en la ciudad de Nueva York el 12 de octubre de 1866. [45]
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Giovanni Martino o Giovanni Martini, también conocido como John Martin, fue un soldado y trompetista que sirvió tanto en Italia con Giuseppe Garibaldi como en el Ejército de los Estados Unidos , famosamente en el 7º Regimiento de Caballería bajo el mando de George Armstrong Custer , donde se hizo conocido como el único sobreviviente de la compañía de Custer en la Batalla de Little Bighorn .
Un inmigrante, Antonio Meucci , trajo consigo un concepto para el teléfono. Muchos investigadores le atribuyen el mérito de ser el primero en demostrar el principio del teléfono en una advertencia de patente que presentó a la Oficina de Patentes de los Estados Unidos en 1871; sin embargo, existía una considerable controversia en relación con la prioridad de la invención, ya que también se le concedió esta distinción a Alexander Graham Bell . (En 2002, la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos aprobó una resolución sobre Meucci (HR 269) que declaraba que "su trabajo en la invención del teléfono debería ser reconocido"). [46]
Durante este período, los italoamericanos establecieron varias instituciones de educación superior. El Las Vegas College (ahora Regis University ) fue fundado por un grupo de jesuitas italianos exiliados en 1877 en Las Vegas, Nuevo México. El jesuita Giuseppe Cataldo fundó el Gonzaga College (ahora Gonzaga University ) en Spokane, Washington en 1887. En 1886, el rabino Sabato Morais , un inmigrante italiano judío, fue uno de los fundadores y primer presidente del Seminario Teológico Judío de América en Nueva York. También durante este período, hubo una creciente presencia de italoamericanos en la educación superior. Vincenzo Botta fue un distinguido profesor de italiano en la Universidad de Nueva York de 1856 a 1894, [47] y Gaetano Lanza fue profesor de ingeniería mecánica en el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts durante más de 40 años, a partir de 1871. [48]
Anthony Ghio se convirtió en alcalde de Texarkana , Texas en 1880. Francis B. Spinola , el primer italoamericano en ser elegido para la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos , se desempeñó como representante de Nueva York de 1887 a 1891. También sirvió como general en el Ejército de la Unión durante la Guerra Civil estadounidense . Después de la guerra, Spinola fue banquero y agente de seguros y se convirtió en una figura influyente entre la creciente comunidad de inmigrantes italianos en el área de la ciudad de Nueva York. Volvió a ser miembro de la Asamblea Estatal (condado de Nueva York, 16.º distrito) en 1877 , 1881 y 1883 .
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Entre 5.000 y 10.000 italoamericanos lucharon en la Guerra Civil estadounidense . [49] La gran mayoría de los italoamericanos, tanto por razones demográficas como ideológicas, sirvieron en el Ejército de la Unión (incluidos los generales Edward Ferrero y Francis B. Spinola ). Algunos estadounidenses de ascendencia italiana del disuelto Ejército de las Dos Sicilias derrotado por Giuseppe Garibaldi después de la Expedición de los Mil lucharon en el Ejército Confederado , como el general William B. Taliaferro (de ascendencia angloamericana y angloitaliana ) y el PGT Beauregard . [29] Seis italoamericanos recibieron la Medalla de Honor durante la guerra, entre los que se encontraba el coronel Luigi Palma di Cesnola , quien más tarde se convirtió en el primer director del Museo Metropolitano de Artes de Nueva York (1879-1904).
La Guardia Garibaldi reclutó voluntarios para el Ejército de la Unión de Italia y otros países europeos para formar el 39.º Regimiento de Infantería de Nueva York . [50] Al estallar la Guerra Civil estadounidense, Giuseppe Garibaldi era una figura muy popular. El 39.º Regimiento de Infantería Voluntaria de Nueva York , de cuyos 350 miembros eran italianos, fue apodado Guardia Garibaldi en su honor. La unidad vestía camisas rojas y plumas de bersaglieri . Llevaban consigo tanto una bandera de la Unión como una bandera italiana con las palabras Dio e popolo, que significa "Dios y el pueblo". [51] En 1861, el propio Garibaldi ofreció sus servicios al presidente Abraham Lincoln . A Garibaldi se le ofreció una comisión de mayor general en el Ejército de los EE. UU. a través de la carta del Secretario de Estado William H. Seward a HS Sanford , el Ministro de los EE. UU. en Bruselas , el 17 de julio de 1861. [52]
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Entre 1880 y 1914, 13 millones de italianos emigraron de Italia , [53] convirtiendo a Italia en el escenario de una de las mayores emigraciones voluntarias de la historia mundial registrada. [54] Durante este período de migración masiva, 4 millones de italianos llegaron a los Estados Unidos, 3 millones de ellos entre 1900 y 1914. [55] Vinieron en su mayoría del sur de Italia: las regiones de Abruzzo , Campania , Apulia , Basilicata y Calabria y de la isla de Sicilia . [56] La mayoría planeaba quedarse unos años, luego tomar sus ganancias y regresar a casa. Según el historiador Thomas J. Archdeacon , el 46% de los italianos que ingresaron a los EE. UU. entre 1899 y 1924 regresaron permanentemente a casa. [57]
Los inmigrantes sin habilidades industriales encontraron empleo en trabajos manuales de bajos salarios. En lugar de buscar trabajo por su cuenta, la mayoría utilizó el sistema de padrones , por el cual intermediarios italianos (padroni) encontraban trabajo para grupos de hombres y controlaban sus salarios, transporte y condiciones de vida a cambio de una tarifa. [58] [59]
Según el historiador Alfred T. Banfield:
En términos del modelo de inmigración de tipo push-pull, [61] Estados Unidos proporcionó el factor de atracción con la perspectiva de empleos que podían realizar los campesinos italianos sin formación ni capacitación. Los campesinos acostumbrados al trabajo duro en el Mezzogiorno, por ejemplo, aceptaron empleos en la construcción de ferrocarriles y edificios, mientras que otros aceptaron empleos en fábricas que requerían poca o ninguna capacitación. [62]
El factor de expulsión provino principalmente de las duras condiciones económicas del sur de Italia. Entre los principales factores que contribuyeron al gran éxodo se encontraban el malestar político y social, la débil economía agrícola del sur basada en el anticuado sistema latifundista que databa del período feudal , una alta carga impositiva, el agotamiento y la erosión del suelo y el reclutamiento militar que duraba siete años. [14] La mala situación económica en el siglo XIX se volvió insostenible para muchos aparceros, agricultores arrendatarios y pequeños empresarios y propietarios de tierras. Multitudes optaron por emigrar en lugar de enfrentarse a la perspectiva de una pobreza cada vez más profunda. Un gran número de ellos se sintieron atraídos por los Estados Unidos, que en ese momento estaba reclutando activamente trabajadores de Italia y otros lugares para cubrir la escasez de mano de obra que existía en los años posteriores a la Guerra Civil. A menudo, el padre y los hijos mayores se iban primero, dejando a la madre y al resto de la familia atrás hasta que los miembros masculinos pudieran pagar el pasaje.
El factor de atracción más fuerte era el dinero. [63] Los inmigrantes esperaban ganar grandes sumas de dinero en unos pocos años de trabajo, lo que les permitiría vivir mucho mejor cuando regresaran a casa, especialmente si compraban una granja. La vida real nunca había sido tan dorada: los italianos ganaban muy por debajo de la media. Sus ingresos semanales en la industria y la minería en 1909 ascendían a 9,61 dólares, en comparación con los 13,63 dólares de los inmigrantes alemanes y los 11,06 dólares de los polacos. [64] El resultado fue una sensación de alienación de la mayor parte de la cultura estadounidense y un desinterés por aprender inglés o asimilarse de alguna otra manera. [65] No vinieron muchas mujeres, pero las que lo hicieron se convirtieron en devotas de las costumbres religiosas tradicionales italianas. [66] Cuando estalló la guerra mundial de 1914-1918, los inmigrantes europeos no pudieron volver a casa. Los salarios se dispararon y los italianos se beneficiaron enormemente. La mayoría decidió quedarse de forma permanente y florecieron en la década de 1920. [67]
Muchos buscaron alojamiento en los barrios más antiguos de las grandes ciudades del noreste, distritos que llegaron a ser conocidos como " Pequeñas Italias ", con frecuencia en viviendas precarias y superpobladas que a menudo estaban mal iluminadas y con calefacción y ventilación deficientes. La tuberculosis y otras enfermedades contagiosas eran una amenaza constante para la salud de las familias inmigrantes que se veían obligadas por las circunstancias económicas a vivir en estas viviendas. Otras familias inmigrantes vivían en viviendas unifamiliares, lo que era más típico en áreas fuera de los enclaves de las grandes ciudades del noreste y también en otras partes del país.
Se estima que el 49 por ciento de los italianos que emigraron a las Américas entre 1905 (cuando comenzaron las estadísticas de migración de retorno) y 1920 no se quedaron en los Estados Unidos. [68] Estos llamados "pájaros de paso" tenían la intención de quedarse en los Estados Unidos solo por un tiempo limitado, seguido de un regreso a Italia con suficientes ahorros para restablecerse allí. Si bien muchos regresaron a Italia, otros optaron por quedarse o se les impidió regresar debido al estallido de la Primera Guerra Mundial en 1914. [69]
Los inmigrantes italianos varones en las Pequeñas Italias se empleaban con mayor frecuencia en trabajos manuales y estaban muy involucrados en obras públicas , como la construcción de carreteras, vías férreas, alcantarillas, metros, puentes y los primeros rascacielos en las ciudades del noreste . Ya en 1890, se estimaba que alrededor del 90 por ciento de los empleados de obras públicas de la ciudad de Nueva York y el 99 por ciento de los de Chicago eran italianos. [70] Las mujeres trabajaban con mayor frecuencia como costureras en la industria textil o en sus hogares. Muchas establecieron pequeños negocios en las Pequeñas Italias para satisfacer las necesidades diarias de sus compañeros inmigrantes.
Un artículo del New York Times de 1895 ofrece una visión de la situación de la inmigración italiana a finales del siglo XX. El artículo afirma:
En mayo de 1896, el New York Times envió a sus periodistas a caracterizar el barrio de Little Italy/Mulberry:
Las masas de inmigrantes italianos que entraron en los Estados Unidos (1890-1900) plantearon un cambio en el mercado laboral, lo que impulsó al padre Michael J. Henry a escribir una carta en octubre de 1900 al obispo John J. Clency de Sligo , Irlanda ; advertencia: [73]
El Brooklyn Eagle en un artículo de 1900 abordó la misma realidad: [73]
A pesar de las dificultades económicas de los inmigrantes, la vida civil y social floreció en los barrios italoamericanos de las grandes ciudades del noreste. Teatro italiano, conciertos de bandas, recitales corales, espectáculos de marionetas, sociedades de ayuda mutua y clubes sociales estaban a disposición de los inmigrantes. [74] Un evento importante, la "festa", se convirtió para muchos en una conexión importante con las tradiciones de sus pueblos ancestrales en Italia. La festa implicaba una elaborada procesión por las calles en honor a un santo patrón o a la Virgen María en la que un equipo de hombres llevaba una gran estatua, con músicos marchando detrás. Seguida de comida, fuegos artificiales y alegría general, la festa se convirtió en una ocasión importante que ayudó a dar a los inmigrantes un sentido de unidad e identidad común.
Los destinos de muchos de los inmigrantes italianos no eran sólo las grandes ciudades de la Costa Este , sino también regiones más remotas del país, como Florida y California. Fueron atraídos allí por las oportunidades en la agricultura, la pesca, la minería, la construcción de ferrocarriles, la explotación maderera y otras actividades que se desarrollaban en ese momento. A menudo, los inmigrantes se contrataban para trabajar en estas zonas del país como condición para el pago de su pasaje. No era raro, especialmente en el sur, que los inmigrantes fueran sometidos a explotación económica, hostilidad y, a veces, incluso violencia. [75] A los trabajadores italianos que fueron a estas áreas, en muchos casos se les unieron más tarde sus esposas e hijos, lo que dio lugar al establecimiento de asentamientos italoamericanos permanentes en diversas partes del país. Varias ciudades, como Roseto, Pensilvania, [76] Tontitown, Arkansas, [77] y Valdese, Carolina del Norte [78] fueron fundadas por inmigrantes italianos durante esta época.
Los italoamericanos fundaron varias empresas importantes. Amadeo Giannini originó el concepto de sucursal bancaria para servir a la comunidad italoamericana en San Francisco. Fundó el Banco de Italia, que más tarde se convirtió en el Banco de América . Su banco también proporcionó financiación a la industria cinematográfica que se estaba desarrollando en la Costa Oeste en ese momento, incluida la de Blancanieves de Walt Disney , la primera película animada de larga duración que se hizo en los EE. UU. Otras empresas fundadas por italoamericanos, como Ghirardelli Chocolate Company , Progresso , Planters Peanuts , Contadina , Chef Boyardee , los vinos Italian Swiss Colony y Jacuzzi , se convirtieron en marcas conocidas a nivel nacional con el tiempo. A un inmigrante italiano, Italo Marciony (Marcioni), se le atribuye la invención de la primera versión de un cono de helado en 1898. Otro inmigrante italiano, Giuseppe Bellanca , trajo consigo en 1912 un diseño de avión avanzado, que comenzó a producir. Uno de los aviones de Bellanca, pilotado por Cesare Sabelli y George Pond, realizó uno de los primeros vuelos transatlánticos sin escalas en 1934. [79] Varias familias, entre ellas Grucci , Zambelli y Vitale , trajeron consigo su experiencia en exhibiciones de fuegos artificiales, y su preeminencia en este campo ha continuado hasta nuestros días.
Siguiendo los pasos de Constantino Brumidi, otros fueron comisionados para ayudar a crear los impresionantes monumentos de Washington. Un inmigrante italiano, Attilio Piccirilli , y sus cinco hermanos tallaron el Monumento a Lincoln , que comenzaron en 1911 y completaron en 1922. Los trabajadores de la construcción italianos ayudaron a construir la Union Station de Washington, considerada una de las más hermosas del país, que se inició en 1905 y se completó en 1908. Las seis estatuas que decoran la fachada de la estación fueron talladas por Andrew Bernasconi entre 1909 y 1911. Dos maestros talladores de piedra italoamericanos, Roger Morigi y Vincent Palumbo, pasaron décadas creando las obras escultóricas que embellecen la Catedral Nacional de Washington. [80]
Los directores italianos contribuyeron al éxito temprano de la Metropolitan Opera de Nueva York (fundada en 1880), pero fue la llegada del empresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza en 1908, quien trajo consigo al director Arturo Toscanini , lo que hizo que el Met fuera conocido internacionalmente. Muchos cantantes y directores de ópera italianos fueron invitados a actuar para el público estadounidense, en particular, el tenor Enrico Caruso . El estreno de la ópera La Fanciulla del West el 10 de diciembre de 1910, con el director Toscanini y el tenor Caruso, y con la presencia del compositor Giacomo Puccini , fue un gran éxito internacional, así como un evento histórico para toda la comunidad italoamericana. [81] Francesco Fanciulli (1853-1915) sucedió a John Philip Sousa como director de la United States Marine Band , cargo que ocupó desde 1892 hasta 1897. [82]
Los italoamericanos se involucraron en el mundo del espectáculo y los deportes. Rodolfo Valentino fue uno de los primeros grandes íconos del cine. La música de jazz Dixieland tuvo varios innovadores italoamericanos importantes, siendo el más famoso Nick LaRocca de Nueva Orleans, cuyo quinteto realizó la primera grabación de jazz en 1917. El primer jugador de béisbol profesional italoamericano, Ping Bodie (Francesco Pizzoli), comenzó a jugar para los Chicago White Sox en 1912. Ralph DePalma ganó las 500 Millas de Indianápolis en 1915.
Los italoamericanos se involucraron cada vez más en la política, el gobierno y el movimiento obrero. Andrew Longino fue elegido gobernador de Mississippi en 1900. Charles Bonaparte fue secretario de la Marina y más tarde fiscal general en la administración de Theodore Roosevelt , y fundó el FBI . [83]
Joe Petrosino fue un oficial del Departamento de Policía de la Ciudad de Nueva York (NYPD) que fue pionero en la lucha contra el crimen organizado . Las técnicas de lucha contra el crimen que Petrosino inició todavía se practican en las agencias de aplicación de la ley. Salvatore A. Cotillo fue el primer italoamericano en servir en ambas cámaras de la Legislatura del Estado de Nueva York y el primero en servir como juez de la Corte Suprema del Estado de Nueva York.
Fiorello La Guardia fue elegido para el Congreso por Nueva York en 1916. Fue elegido alcalde de la ciudad de Nueva York entre 1934 y 1946 como republicano. En una encuesta de 1993 a historiadores, politólogos y expertos urbanos realizada por Melvin G. Holli, de la Universidad de Illinois en Chicago, La Guardia fue clasificado como el mejor alcalde de una gran ciudad estadounidense que ejerció su cargo entre los años 1820 y 1993. [84]
Numerosos italoamericanos estuvieron a la vanguardia en la lucha por los derechos de los trabajadores en industrias como la minería, la industria textil y la confección, siendo los más notables entre ellos Arturo Giovannitti , Carlo Tresca y Joseph Ettor . [85] [86]
Sarah Wool Moore , una profesora estadounidense que había estudiado en Italia, estaba tan preocupada por los estafadores que atraían a los inmigrantes a casas de huéspedes o contratos de trabajo en los que los jefes recibían sobornos que presionó para que se fundara la Sociedad para la Protección de los Inmigrantes Italianos (a menudo llamada la Sociedad para los Inmigrantes Italianos). La Sociedad publicó listas de lugares de alojamiento y empleadores aprobados. Más tarde, la organización comenzó a establecer escuelas en los campos de trabajo para ayudar a los inmigrantes adultos a aprender inglés. [87] [88] Wool y la Sociedad comenzaron a organizar escuelas en los campos de trabajo que empleaban a trabajadores italianos en varios proyectos de presas y canteras en Pensilvania y Nueva York. Las escuelas se centraban en enseñar frases que los trabajadores necesitaban en sus tareas diarias. [89] Debido al éxito de la Sociedad en ayudar a los inmigrantes, recibieron una distinción del Comisionado de Emigración del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores italiano en 1907. [90]
Estados Unidos entró en la Primera Guerra Mundial en 1917. La comunidad italoamericana apoyó incondicionalmente el esfuerzo bélico y sus jóvenes, tanto nacidos en Estados Unidos como nacidos en Italia, se alistaron en gran número en el Ejército estadounidense. [91] Se estimó que, durante los dos años de la guerra (1917-18), los militares italoamericanos representaron aproximadamente el 12% del total de las fuerzas estadounidenses, un porcentaje desproporcionadamente alto del total. [92] Un soldado de infantería estadounidense nacido en Italia, Michael Valente , fue galardonado con la Medalla de Honor por su servicio. Otros 103 italoamericanos (83 nacidos en Italia) recibieron la Cruz de Servicio Distinguido , la segunda condecoración más alta. [93] Los italoamericanos también representaron más del 10% de las bajas de guerra de la Primera Guerra Mundial, a pesar de representar menos del 4% de la población estadounidense. [94]
La guerra, junto con la restrictiva Ley de Cuotas de Emergencia de 1921 y la Ley de Inmigración de 1924 , restringieron fuertemente la inmigración italiana. La inmigración anual total se limitó a 357.000 en 1921, se redujo a 150.000 en 1924, y se asignaron cupos sobre una base nacional en proporción a la participación existente de la nacionalidad en la población. La Fórmula de Orígenes Nacionales , que buscaba preservar la composición demográfica existente de los Estados Unidos y generalmente favorecía la inmigración del noroeste de Europa, calculó que los italianos eran el quinto origen nacional más grande de la población estadounidense en 1920, asignándoseles el 3,87% de los cupos anuales de inmigrantes. [95] [96] A pesar de la implementación de la cuota, la afluencia de inmigrantes italianos se mantuvo entre el 6 o el 7% de todos los inmigrantes. [97] [98] [99] Y cuando el restrictivo sistema de cuotas fue abolido por la Ley de Inmigración y Nacionalidad de 1965 , los italianos ya habían crecido hasta convertirse en el segundo grupo de inmigrantes más grande en Estados Unidos, con 5.067.717 inmigrantes de Italia admitidos entre 1820 y 1966, lo que constituye el 12% de todos los inmigrantes a los Estados Unidos, más que los de Gran Bretaña (4.711.711) y los de Irlanda (4.706.854). [11]
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En el período de entreguerras, los italoamericanos encontraron cada vez más trabajo como policías, bomberos y funcionarios públicos, mientras que otros encontraron empleo como fontaneros, electricistas, mecánicos y carpinteros. Las mujeres encontraron trabajo como funcionarias públicas, secretarias, modistas y oficinistas. Con trabajos mejor pagados, se mudaron a barrios más ricos fuera de los enclaves italianos. La Gran Depresión (1929-1939) tuvo un gran impacto en la comunidad italoamericana y revirtió temporalmente algunos de los avances anteriores. Muchos hombres desempleados y algunas mujeres encontraron trabajo en los programas de trabajo del New Deal del presidente Franklin Roosevelt , como la Works Progress Administration y la Civilian Conservation Corp.
En 1920, numerosas Pequeñas Italias se habían estabilizado y se habían vuelto considerablemente más prósperas, ya que los trabajadores podían conseguir empleos mejor remunerados, a menudo en oficios especializados. En las décadas de 1920 y 1930, los italoamericanos contribuyeron significativamente a la vida y la cultura estadounidenses, la política, la música, el cine, las artes, los deportes, el movimiento obrero y los negocios.
En política, Al Smith (forma anglicanizada del apellido italiano Ferraro) se convirtió en el primer gobernador de Nueva York de ascendencia italiana, aunque los medios lo caracterizaron como irlandés. Fue el primer católico en recibir una nominación presidencial de un partido importante, como candidato demócrata a la presidencia en 1928. Perdió bastiones protestantes en el sur, pero dinamizó el voto demócrata en los centros de inmigrantes en todo el norte. Angelo Rossi fue alcalde de San Francisco entre 1931 y 1944. En 1933-34, Ferdinand Pecora dirigió una investigación del Senado sobre el desplome de Wall Street de 1929 , que expuso importantes abusos financieros y animó al Congreso a controlar la industria bancaria. [100] El líder liberal Fiorello La Guardia sirvió como republicano y alcalde de Fusion de la ciudad de Nueva York entre 1934 y 1945. En la extrema izquierda, Vito Marcantonio fue elegido por primera vez al Congreso en 1934 por Nueva York. [101] Robert Maestri fue alcalde de Nueva Orleans en 1936-1946. [102]
La Metropolitan Opera continuó floreciendo bajo la dirección de Giulio Gatti-Casazza , cuyo mandato se prolongó hasta 1935. Rosa Ponselle y Dusolina Giannini , hijas de inmigrantes italianos, actuaron regularmente en la Metropolitan Opera y se hicieron conocidas internacionalmente. Arturo Toscanini regresó a los Estados Unidos como director principal de la Orquesta Filarmónica de Nueva York (1926-1936) e introdujo a muchos estadounidenses a la música clásica a través de sus transmisiones de radio con la Orquesta Sinfónica de la NBC (1937-1954). Ruggiero Ricci , un niño prodigio nacido de padres inmigrantes italianos, dio su primera actuación en público en 1928 a la edad de 10 años, y tuvo una larga carrera internacional como violinista de concierto.
Entre los cantantes populares de la época se encontraba Russ Columbo , que estableció un nuevo estilo de canto que influyó en Frank Sinatra y otros cantantes que le siguieron. En Broadway, Harry Warren (Salvatore Guaragna) escribió la música de 42nd Street y recibió tres premios Óscar por sus composiciones. Otros músicos e intérpretes italoamericanos, como Jimmy Durante , que más tarde alcanzó la fama en películas y televisión, participaron activamente en el vodevil . Guy Lombardo formó una popular banda de baile, que tocaba anualmente en la víspera de Año Nuevo en Times Square de la ciudad de Nueva York .
La industria cinematográfica de esta época incluyó a Frank Capra , quien recibió tres premios Óscar por dirección y Frank Borzage , quien recibió dos premios Óscar por dirección. Los dibujantes italoamericanos fueron responsables de algunos de los personajes animados más populares: el Pato Donald fue creado por Al Taliaferro , el Pájaro Loco fue una creación de Walter Lantz (Lanza), Casper el Fantasma Amistoso fue co-creado por Joseph Oriolo , y Tom y Jerry fue co-creado por Joseph Barbera . La voz de Blancanieves fue proporcionada por Adriana Caselotti , una soprano de 21 años.
En el arte público, Luigi Del Bianco fue el principal tallador de piedra del Monte Rushmore entre 1933 y 1940. [103] Simon Rodia , un trabajador de la construcción inmigrante, construyó las Torres Watts durante un período de 33 años, de 1921 a 1954.
En los deportes, Gene Sarazen (Eugenio Saraceni) ganó los torneos de la Asociación Profesional de Golf y el Abierto de Estados Unidos en 1922. Pete DePaolo ganó las 500 Millas de Indianápolis en 1925. Tony Lazzeri y Frank Crosetti comenzaron a jugar para los Yankees de Nueva York en 1926. Tony Canzoneri ganó el campeonato de boxeo de peso ligero en 1930, y Rocky Marciano es el único campeón de peso pesado invicto en la historia. Lou Little (Luigi Piccolo) comenzó a entrenar al equipo de fútbol de la Universidad de Columbia en 1930. Joe DiMaggio , que estaba destinado a convertirse en uno de los jugadores más famosos de la historia del béisbol, comenzó a jugar para los Yankees de Nueva York en 1936. Hank Luisetti fue tres veces jugador de baloncesto All-American en la Universidad de Stanford de 1936 a 1940. Louis Zamperini , el corredor de distancia estadounidense , compitió en los Juegos Olímpicos de 1936 y más tarde se convirtió en el tema del libro superventas Unbroken de Laura Hillenbrand , publicado en 2010, y una película de 2014 del mismo título.
Los empresarios italoamericanos se especializaron en el cultivo y venta de frutas y verduras frescas, que se cultivaban en pequeñas extensiones de tierra en las zonas suburbanas de muchas ciudades. [104] [105] Cultivaban la tierra y cultivaban productos, que se transportaban en camiones a las ciudades cercanas y a menudo se vendían directamente al consumidor a través de mercados de agricultores. En California, se fundó la Corporación DiGiorgio , que creció hasta convertirse en un proveedor nacional de productos frescos en los Estados Unidos. Los italoamericanos de California eran los principales productores de uvas y productores de vino. Muchas marcas de vino conocidas, como Mondavi , Carlo Rossi , Petri, Sebastiani y Gallo , surgieron de estas primeras empresas. Las empresas italoamericanas eran importantes importadoras de vinos italianos, alimentos procesados, textiles, mármol y productos manufacturados. [106] Los italoamericanos continuaron su importante participación en el movimiento obrero durante este período. Entre los organizadores laborales más conocidos se encontraban Carlo Tresca , Luigi Antonini , James Petrillo y Angela Bambace . [107]
El crimen organizado italiano surgió a finales del siglo XIX en Nueva York como una rama de la mafia siciliana. Evolucionó hasta convertirse en una entidad separada, parcialmente independiente de la mafia original en Sicilia, y con el tiempo abarcó o absorbió a otros gánsteres y grupos criminales italianos (como la Camorra estadounidense ) activos en los Estados Unidos y Canadá que no eran de origen siciliano . [108] [109]
Al Capone fue el jefe del crimen organizado más infame de Estados Unidos en la década de 1920. Alcanzó notoriedad durante la era de la Prohibición como cofundador y jefe de la Chicago Outfit . El crimen más famoso fue la Masacre del Día de San Valentín de 1929, cuando los hombres de Capone, vestidos de policías, masacraron a siete miembros de una pandilla rival. Su reinado de siete años como jefe del crimen terminó cuando fue a prisión federal a la edad de 33 años. Algunos estadounidenses étnicos lo veían como un héroe, viéndolo como el epítome del éxito hecho a sí mismo, un defensor de los ideales estadounidenses, un hombre de familia y un filántropo. Su estatura los ayudó a justificar sus propias violaciones de las leyes de prohibición contra el licor. [110]
El régimen fascista de Benito Mussolini en Italia intentó construir una base de apoyo popular en los Estados Unidos, centrándose en la comunidad italiana. Sus partidarios superaban en número a sus oponentes, tanto dentro de la comunidad italoamericana, entre todos los católicos y entre el liderazgo estadounidense en general. [111] [112] )
Según Stefano Luconi, en las décadas de 1920 y 1930 "numerosos italoamericanos se convirtieron en ciudadanos estadounidenses, se registraron para votar y emitieron su voto para presionar al Congreso y a la Presidencia en nombre del fascismo y para apoyar los objetivos de Mussolini en política exterior". [113]
Según Fraser Ottanelli, Roma también trabajó para mejorar la reputación de Italia a través de una serie de acciones muy visibles, como la participación en la feria mundial Century of Progress (1933-1934) en Chicago; los espectaculares vuelos transatlánticos de Italo Balbo ; y la donación de una estatua a Chicago. Una pequeña minoría de italoamericanos se opuso firmemente a estas acciones porque se oponían fervientemente al fascismo. Promovieron una medida fallida en el Congreso que condenaba la intromisión de Italia en los asuntos internos de Estados Unidos y pedía la revocación de la ciudadanía estadounidense a las personas que juraban lealtad a Mussolini. Alberto Tarchiani, el primer embajador de Italia en Estados Unidos después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, solicitó la eliminación de cualquier exhibición que honrara al régimen fascista, pero con poco éxito. Muchos monumentos conmemorativos permanecen en el siglo XXI. [114]
Como miembro de las potencias del Eje , la Italia fascista declaró la guerra a los Estados Unidos el 11 de diciembre de 1941, cuatro días después de que Japón atacara Pearl Harbor . Como consecuencia, la Orden Ejecutiva 9066 exigió la reubicación obligatoria de más de 10.000 italoamericanos y restringió los movimientos de más de 600.000 italoamericanos en todo el país. [118] Fueron atacados a pesar de la falta de pruebas de que los italianos estuvieran realizando operaciones de espionaje o sabotaje en los Estados Unidos. [119] [120] [121] [122]
Aunque la gran mayoría de los italoamericanos admiraban a Mussolini en la década de 1930, muy pocos, si es que hubo alguno, demostraron algún deseo de transferir la ideología fascista a Estados Unidos. [94] Cuando Italia entró en la guerra del lado de la Alemania nazi en 1940, "la mayoría de los italoamericanos se distanciaron del fascismo". [123]
Los expatriados italianos antifascistas en los Estados Unidos fundaron la Sociedad Mazzini en Northampton, Massachusetts, en septiembre de 1939 para trabajar por poner fin al régimen fascista en Italia. Estos refugiados políticos del régimen de Mussolini no estaban de acuerdo entre ellos sobre si aliarse con los comunistas y anarquistas o excluirlos. La Sociedad Mazzini se unió a otros expatriados italianos antifascistas en las Américas en una conferencia en Montevideo , Uruguay, en 1942. Promovieron sin éxito a uno de sus miembros, Carlo Sforza , para convertirse en el líder posfascista de una Italia republicana. La Sociedad Mazzini se dispersó después de la caída de Mussolini , ya que la mayoría de sus miembros regresaron a Italia. [124] [125]
Se cree que entre 750.000 y 1,5 millones de personas de ascendencia italiana sirvieron en las fuerzas armadas de los EE. UU. durante la guerra, aproximadamente el 10% del total, y 14 italoamericanos recibieron la Medalla de Honor por su servicio. [126] [127] Entre ellos se encontraba el sargento John Basilone , uno de los militares más condecorados y famosos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial , que luego apareció en la serie de HBO The Pacific . El coronel de los Rangers del ejército Henry Mucci lideró una de las misiones de rescate más exitosas en la historia de los EE. UU., que liberó a 511 sobrevivientes de la Marcha de la Muerte de Bataan de un campo de prisioneros japonés en Filipinas, en 1945. En el aire, el capitán Don Gentile se convirtió en uno de los principales ases de la guerra, con 25 aviones alemanes destruidos. El director de cine, productor y escritor Frank Capra realizó una serie de documentales sobre la guerra conocidos como Why We Fight , por los que recibió la Medalla de Servicio Distinguido de los Estados Unidos en 1945 y la Medalla de la Orden del Imperio Británico en 1962.
Biagio (Max) Corvo, un agente de la Oficina de Servicios Estratégicos (OSS) de los Estados Unidos, trazó planes para la invasión de Sicilia y organizó operaciones tras las líneas enemigas en la región del Mediterráneo durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Dirigió la rama de inteligencia secreta italiana de la OSS, que pudo contrabandear a cientos de agentes tras las líneas enemigas, abastecer a los combatientes partisanos italianos y mantener un enlace entre los comandos de campo aliados y el primer gobierno posfascista de Italia. Corvo fue galardonado con la Legión del Mérito por sus esfuerzos durante la guerra. [128] Otros italoamericanos como Edward E. Boccia ≤https://ghostarmy.org/roster/Edward-Eugene-Boccia/≥ sirvieron en el Ejército Fantasma ≤https://ghostarmy.org/≥. Las Tropas Especiales del Cuartel General y la Compañía Especial de Señales 3133, compuestas por estudiantes de artes visuales, arquitectos, diseñadores y otros creativos, llevaron a cabo 25 engaños en el campo de batalla en Francia, Luxemburgo, Bélgica, Alemania e Italia y todos fueron galardonados con la Medalla de Honor del Congreso.
El trabajo de Enrico Fermi fue crucial en el desarrollo de la bomba atómica . Fermi, físico nuclear ganador del Premio Nobel , que emigró a los Estados Unidos desde Italia en 1938, dirigió un equipo de investigación en la Universidad de Chicago que logró la primera reacción nuclear en cadena sostenida del mundo , lo que demostró claramente la viabilidad de una bomba atómica. Fermi se convirtió más tarde en un miembro clave del equipo del Laboratorio de Los Álamos que desarrolló la primera bomba atómica. Posteriormente se le unió en Los Álamos Emilio Segrè , uno de sus colegas de Italia, que también estaba destinado a recibir el Premio Nobel de Física.
Tres destructores estadounidenses de la Segunda Guerra Mundial recibieron el nombre de ítaloamericanos: el USS Basilone (DD-824) recibió el nombre del sargento John Basilone; el USS Damato (DD-871) recibió el nombre del cabo Anthony P. Damato , quien recibió la Medalla de Honor póstumamente por su valor durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial; y el USS Gherardi (DD-637) recibió el nombre del contralmirante Bancroft Gherardi , quien sirvió durante la guerra mexicano-estadounidense y la guerra civil estadounidense .
La Segunda Guerra Mundial puso fin al desempleo masivo y a los programas de ayuda que caracterizaron la década de 1930, abriendo nuevas oportunidades de empleo para un gran número de italoamericanos, que contribuyeron significativamente al esfuerzo bélico de la nación. Gran parte de la población italoamericana se concentró en áreas urbanas donde se ubicaron las nuevas plantas de material bélico. Muchas mujeres italoamericanas aceptaron trabajos de guerra, como Rose Bonavita, quien fue reconocida por el presidente Roosevelt con una carta personal en la que la elogiaba por su desempeño como remachadora de aviones. Ella, junto con otras trabajadoras, proporcionó la base del nombre, "Rosie la Remachadora", que llegó a simbolizar a los millones de trabajadoras estadounidenses en las industrias bélicas. [129] Chef Boyardee , la empresa fundada por Ettore Boiardi , fue uno de los mayores proveedores de raciones para las fuerzas estadounidenses y aliadas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Por su contribución al esfuerzo bélico, Boiardi recibió una orden de excelencia de estrella de oro del Departamento de Guerra de los Estados Unidos .
Desde el inicio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, y particularmente después del ataque a Pearl Harbor , los italoamericanos fueron cada vez más sospechosos. Grupos como el Consejo de Clubes de Mujeres de California de Los Ángeles solicitaron al general DeWitt que colocara a todos los extranjeros enemigos en campos de concentración de inmediato, y el Club de Jóvenes Demócratas de Los Ángeles fue un paso más allá, exigiendo la expulsión de los italianos y alemanes nacidos en Estados Unidos (ciudadanos estadounidenses) de la costa del Pacífico. [130] Estos llamados, junto con una importante presión política del Congreso, dieron como resultado que el presidente Franklin D. Roosevelt emitiera la Orden Ejecutiva N.º 9066 , así como que el Departamento de Justicia clasificara a los italoamericanos no naturalizados como " extranjeros enemigos " bajo la Ley de Extranjería y Sedición . Miles de italianos fueron arrestados y cientos de italianos fueron internados en campos militares, algunos por hasta 2 años. [131] Se exigió a otros 600.000 que llevaran tarjetas de identidad que los identificaran como "extranjeros residentes". Miles de personas más en la Costa Oeste se vieron obligadas a trasladarse al interior, perdiendo a menudo sus hogares y negocios en el proceso. Varios periódicos en italiano se vieron obligados a cerrar. [132] Dos libros, Una Storia Segreta de Lawrence Di Stasi y Uncivil Liberties de Stephen Fox, y una película, Prisoners Among Us, documentan estos acontecimientos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
El 7 de noviembre de 2000, Bill Clinton firmó la Ley sobre Violaciones de las Libertades Civiles de los Italoamericanos en Tiempo de Guerra. [130] [133] Esta ley ordenó que el Fiscal General de los Estados Unidos realizara una revisión exhaustiva del trato dado a los Italoamericanos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Las conclusiones fueron las siguientes:
En 2010, California emitió oficialmente una disculpa a los italoamericanos cuyas libertades civiles habían sido violadas. [134]
Los italianos continuaron emigrando a los Estados Unidos, y se estima que llegaron unos 600.000 en las décadas posteriores a la guerra. Muchos de los recién llegados tenían formación profesional o eran expertos en diversos oficios. Después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, un pequeño número de italianos de Istria e italianos dálmatas también emigraron a los Estados Unidos durante el éxodo istrio-dálmata , abandonando sus países de origen, que fueron perdidos por Italia y anexados por Yugoslavia después del Tratado de Paz con Italia de 1947. [ 136] Entre los exiliados istrio-dálmatas notables que emigraron a los Estados Unidos se encuentran Mario Andretti y Lidia Bastianich . [137] [138]
El período de posguerra fue una época de grandes cambios sociales para los italoamericanos. Muchos aspiraban a una educación universitaria, que se hizo posible para los veteranos que regresaban a través del GI Bill . Desde los años 60, mucha gente abandonó Italia y se fue a América del Norte principalmente, América del Sur y Europa, la migración europea fue estacional y permanente. [139] Con mejores oportunidades laborales y mejor educación, los italoamericanos entraron en la vida estadounidense convencional en gran número. Los enclaves italianos fueron abandonados por muchos que optaron por vivir en otras áreas urbanas y en los suburbios. Muchos se casaron fuera de su grupo étnico, con mayor frecuencia con otros católicos étnicos, pero cada vez más también con personas de diversos orígenes religiosos y étnicos. [140] [141] Según el Dr. Richard D. Alba, director del Centro de Análisis Social y Demográfico de la Universidad Estatal de Nueva York en Albany , el 8 por ciento de los estadounidenses de ascendencia italiana nacidos antes de 1920 tenían ascendencia mixta, pero el 70 por ciento de ellos nacidos después de 1970 eran hijos de matrimonios mixtos. En 1985, entre los estadounidenses de ascendencia italiana menores de 30 años, el 72 por ciento de los hombres y el 64 por ciento de las mujeres se casaron con alguien sin antecedentes italianos. [142] Numerosos italoamericanos son personas de color birraciales , uno de los más notables es el corredor de los Pittsburg Steelers Franco Harris . [143]
Los italoamericanos aprovecharon las nuevas oportunidades que se abrieron a todos en las décadas posteriores a la guerra e hicieron muchas contribuciones importantes a la vida y la cultura estadounidenses.
Numerosos italoamericanos se involucraron en la política a nivel local, estatal y nacional en las décadas de posguerra. Entre aquellos que se convirtieron en senadores de los Estados Unidos se encuentran: John Pastore de Rhode Island, quien fue el primer italoamericano elegido para el Senado en 1950; Pete Domenici , quien fue elegido para el Senado de los Estados Unidos por Nuevo México en 1972, y cumplió seis mandatos; Patrick Leahy , quien fue elegido para el Senado de los Estados Unidos por Vermont en 1974, y ha servido continuamente desde entonces; y Alfonse D'Amato , quien sirvió como senador de los Estados Unidos por Nueva York de 1981 a 1999. Anthony Celebrezze sirvió durante cinco mandatos de dos años como alcalde de Cleveland, de 1953 a 1962 y, en 1962, el presidente John Kennedy lo nombró Secretario de Salud, Educación y Bienestar de los Estados Unidos (ahora el Departamento de Salud y Servicios Humanos). Benjamin Civiletti se desempeñó como Fiscal General de los Estados Unidos durante el último año y medio de la administración Carter, de 1979 a 1981. Frank Carlucci se desempeñó como Secretario de Defensa de los Estados Unidos, de 1987 a 1989, en la administración del presidente Ronald Reagan .
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Decenas de italoamericanos se convirtieron en cantantes famosos en el período de posguerra, entre ellos: Frank Sinatra , Mario Lanza , Perry Como , Dean Martin , Tony Bennett , Frankie Laine , Bobby Darin , Julius La Rosa , Connie Francis y Madonna . Los italoamericanos que presentaron populares programas de televisión musicales y de variedades en las décadas de posguerra incluyeron: Perry Como (1949 a 1967), el virtuoso del piano Liberace (1952-1956), Jimmy Durante (1954-1956), Frank Sinatra (1957-1958) y Dean Martin (1965-1974). Las estrellas musicales de Broadway incluyeron a: Rose Marie , Carol Lawrence , Anna Maria Alberghetti , Sergio Franchi , Patti LuPone , Ezio Pinza y Liza Minnelli .
En composición musical, Henry Mancini y Bill Conti recibieron numerosos premios de la Academia por sus canciones y bandas sonoras cinematográficas. Los compositores clásicos y operísticos John Corigliano , Norman Dello Joio , David Del Tredici , Paul Creston , Dominick Argento , Gian Carlo Menotti y Donald Martino fueron distinguidos con premios Pulitzer y premios Grammy .
Numerosos italoamericanos se hicieron famosos en el cine, tanto como actores como directores, y muchos recibieron premios Oscar. Entre los directores de cine se encuentran: Frank Capra , Francis Ford Coppola , Michael Cimino , Vincente Minnelli , Martin Scorsese y Brian De Palma .
Los italoamericanos participaron activamente en los deportes profesionales como jugadores, entrenadores y comisionados. Entre los entrenadores de béisbol profesionales más conocidos en las décadas de posguerra se incluyen: Yogi Berra , Billy Martin , Tony La Russa , Tommy Lasorda y Joe Torre . En el fútbol profesional, Vince Lombardi estableció el estándar de excelencia que todos los entrenadores debían seguir. A. Bartlett Giamatti se convirtió en presidente de la Liga Nacional de Béisbol en 1986 y en Comisionado de Béisbol en 1989. Paul Tagliabue fue Comisionado de la Liga Nacional de Fútbol Americano de 1989 a 2006.
En el fútbol universitario, Joe Paterno se convirtió en uno de los entrenadores más exitosos de la historia. Siete jugadores italoamericanos ganaron el Trofeo Heisman : Angelo Bertelli de Notre Dame , Alan Ameche de Wisconsin , Gary Beban de UCLA , Joe Bellino de Navy , John Cappelletti de Penn State , Gino Torretta y Vinny Testaverde de Miami .
En el baloncesto universitario, varios italoamericanos se convirtieron en entrenadores famosos en las décadas de la posguerra, entre ellos: John Calipari , Lou Carnesecca , Rollie Massimino , Rick Pitino , Jim Valvano , Dick Vitale , Tom Izzo , Mike Fratello , Ben Carnevale y Geno Auriemma .
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Los italoamericanos se hicieron conocidos a nivel nacional en otros deportes diversos. Rocky Marciano fue el campeón invicto de boxeo de peso pesado de 1952 a 1956; Ken Venturi ganó los campeonatos de golf británico y estadounidense en 1956; Donna Caponi ganó los campeonatos de golf femenino estadounidense en 1969 y 1970; Linda Frattianne fue campeona estadounidense de patinaje artístico femenino cuatro años seguidos, de 1975 a 1978, y campeona mundial en 1976 y 1978; Willie Mosconi fue 15 veces campeón mundial de billar; Eddie Arcaro fue 5 veces ganador del Derby de Kentucky; Mario Andretti fue 3 veces campeón nacional de carreras de autos; Mary Lou Retton ganó la medalla de oro en el concurso completo de gimnasia olímpica femenina; Matt Biondi ganó un total de 8 medallas de oro en natación olímpica; y Brian Boitano ganó una medalla de oro en patinaje artístico individual masculino olímpico.
Los italoamericanos fundaron muchas empresas exitosas, tanto pequeñas como grandes, en las décadas de posguerra, entre ellas: Barnes & Noble , Tropicana Products , Zamboni , Transamerica , Subway , Mr. Coffee y Conair Corporation . Otras empresas fundadas por italoamericanos fueron Fairleigh Dickinson University , Eternal Word Television Network y el equipo de baloncesto Syracuse Nationals , que más tarde se convertiría en los Philadelphia 76ers . Robert Panara fue cofundador del Instituto Técnico Nacional para Sordos y fundador del Teatro Nacional para Sordos . Reconocido como pionero en los estudios de la cultura sorda en los Estados Unidos, fue honrado con un sello conmemorativo estadounidense en 2017.
Ocho italoamericanos se convirtieron en premios Nobel en las décadas de la posguerra: Mario Capecchi , Renato Dulbecco , Riccardo Giacconi , Salvatore Luria , Franco Modigliani , Rita Levi Montalcini , Emilio G. Segrè y Carolyn Bertozzi .
Italian Americans continued to serve with distinction in the military, with four Medal of Honor recipients in the Korean War and eleven in the Vietnam War,[144] including Vincent Capodanno, a Catholic chaplain.
At the close of the 20th century, 31 men and women of Italian descent were serving in the U.S. House and Senate and 82 of the 1,000 largest U.S. cities had mayors of Italian descent, and 166 college and university presidents were of Italian descent.[145] Two Italian Americans, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, were serving as U.S. Supreme Court justices. Over two dozen Italian Americans were serving in the Catholic Church as bishops. Four—Joseph Bernardin, Justin Rigali, Anthony Bevilacqua, and Daniel DiNardo—had been elevated to Cardinals. Italian Americans had served with distinction in all of America's wars, and over thirty had been awarded the Medal of Honor. A number of Italian Americans were serving as top-ranking generals in the military, including Anthony Zinni, Raymond Odierno, Carl Vuono, and Peter Pace, the latter three having also been appointed Chief of Staff of their respective services. Over two dozen of Italian descent had been elected as state governors including, most recently, Paul Cellucci of Massachusetts, John Baldacci of Maine, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and Donald Carcieri of Rhode Island.
Italian Americans have influenced the American culture and society in a variety of ways, such as: foods,[146][147] coffees and desserts; wine production (in California and elsewhere in the U.S.); popular music, starting in the 1940s and 1950s, and continuing into the present;[148] operatic, classical and instrumental music;[149] jazz;[150] fashion and design;[151] cinema, literature, Italianate architecture, in homes, churches, and public buildings; Montessori schools; Christmas crèches; fireworks displays;[152] sports (e.g. bocce and beach tennis).
The historical figure of Christopher Columbus is commemorated on Columbus Day and is reflected in numerous monuments, city names, names of institutions, and the poetic name, "Columbia", for the United States itself. Italian American identification with the Genoese explorer whose fame lay in his grand voyages departing Europe across the Atlantic Ocean to make discoveries in the New World—playing an important role in American history and identity, but of negligible significance to the history of Italy—typifies Italian Americans' limited sense of nationalism and generally loose attachment to Italy itself as a foreign country, in contrast to e.g. the preoccupations of Irish Americans with the political situation in Ireland throughout the 20th century, or American Jews' deep personal investment in the fate of Israel.[94]
In the 1930s, Italian Americans voted heavily Democratic.[153]Carmine DeSapio in the late 1940s became the first to break the Irish Catholic hold on Tammany Hall since the 1870s. By 1951 more than twice as many Italian American legislators as in 1936 served in the six states with the most Italian Americans.[154] Since 1968, voters have split about evenly between the Democratic (37%) and the Republican (36%) parties.[155] The U.S. Congress includes Italian Americans who are leaders in both the Republican and Democratic parties. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) became the first woman and Italian American Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Former Republican New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was a candidate for the U.S. presidency in the 2008 election, as was Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo. Rick Santorum won many primaries in his candidacy for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. In the 2016 election, Santorum and New Jersey governor Chris Christie ran for the Republican nomination, as did Ted Cruz and George Pataki, who both have a smaller amount of Italian ancestry. Mike Pompeo, American politician, diplomat, businessman, and attorney, served as the 70th United States secretary of state from 2018 to 2021. Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida since 2019, is of Italian ancestry.
Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman on a major party ticket, running for Vice President as a Democrat in 1984. Two justices of the Supreme Court have been Italian Americans, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. Both were appointed by Republican presidents, Scalia by Ronald Reagan and Alito by George W. Bush.
The Italian American Congressional Delegation currently includes 30 members of Congress who are of Italian descent. They are joined by more than 150 associate members, who are not Italian American but have large Italian American constituencies. Since its founding in 1975, the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) has worked closely with the bicameral and bipartisan Italian American Congressional Delegation, which is led by co-chairs Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey and Rep. Pat Tiberi of Ohio.
The NIAF hosts a variety of public policy programs, contributing to public discourse on timely policy issues facing the nation and the world. These events are held on Capitol Hill and other locations under the auspices of NIAF's Frank J. Guarini Public Policy Forum and its sister program, the NIAF Public Policy Lecture Series. NIAF's 2009 public policy programs on Capitol Hill featured prominent Italians and Italian Americans as keynote speakers, including Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, and Franco Frattini, Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Republic of Italy.
By the 1890s Italian Americans in New York City were mobilizing as a political force. They helped elect Fiorello La Guardia (a Republican) as mayor in 1933, and helped reelect him in 1937 and 1941. They rallied for Vincent R. Impellitteri (a Democrat) in 1950, and Rudolph W. Giuliani (a Republican) in 1989 (when he lost), and in 1993 and 1997 (when he won). All three Italian Americans aggressively fought to reduce crime in the city; each was known for his good relations with the city's powerful labor unions.[156] La Guardia and Giuliani have had the reputation among specialists on urban politics as two of the best mayors in American history.[157][158] Democrat Bill de Blasio, the third mayor of Italian ancestry, served as the 109th mayor of New York City for two terms, from 2014 to 2021. Mario Cuomo (Democratic) served as the 52nd Governor of New York for three terms, from 1983 to 1995. His son Andrew Cuomo was the 56th Governor of New York and previously served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1997 to 2001 and as the Attorney General of New York from 2007 to 2010.
However, in contrast to other ethnic groups, Italian Americans demonstrate a marked lack of ethnocentrism and long history of political individualism, eschewing ethnic bloc voting, preferring to vote based on individual candidates and issues, embracing maverick political candidates over ethnic loyalties. Popular New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in fact underperformed among his own demographic; in 1941, La Guardia even lost the Italian vote to his Irish opponent William O'Dwyer. In 1965, when New York Democrats backed Mario Procaccino, an Italian-born candidate for city comptroller, Procaccino lost the Italian vote and only won his election due to support in Jewish voter precincts. In the 1973 New York City mayoral election, the son of Italian immigrants Mario Biaggi failed to unite Italian voters as an ethnic bloc the way his Jewish opponent Abraham Beame could do to win the Democratic primary.[94]
In the 1962 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, incumbent Italian American Governor John Volpe lost his re-election campaign by a razor-thin 0.2%—a final margin that could be more than sufficiently explained by Volpe polling only 51% among the state's significant population of Italian Americans, roughly half of whom voted for old-line Anglo-Saxon Protestant Endicott Peabody over a fellow ethnic.[94]
The pragmatic maverick streak of Italian American voters, reacting to individual candidates and circumstances, emerged clearly amid the urban race riots of the 1960s. Black Republican Edward Brooke won more than 40% of the Italian vote running for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. And a majority of Italian voters living in mostly white rural Upstate New York backed black Democratic nominee Basil A. Paterson for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1970—but not Italian voters who lived in racially diverse metro New York City. In urban environments, race relations deteriorated severely over Italian American support for law and order policies against urban riots and crime. In the 1968 presidential election, independent George Wallace won 21% of the Italian vote in Newark, New Jersey, 29% of the Italian vote in Cleveland, Ohio, and more than 10% of the Italian American vote nationwide—compared to 8% among non-Southern Whites as a whole—presaging the rightward shift of Italian Americans away from the Democratic Party, first as Reagan Democrats, then ultimately realigning with the Republican Party.[94]
Italian Americans have played a prominent role in the economy of the United States, and have founded companies of great national importance, such as Bank of America (by Amadeo Giannini in 1904), Qualcomm, Subway, Home Depot and Airbnb among many others. Italian Americans have also made important contributions to the growth of the U.S. economy through their business expertise. Italian Americans have served as CEO's of numerous major corporations, such as the Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Corporation by Lee Iacocca, IBM Corporation by Samuel Palmisano, Lucent Technologies by Patricia Russo, The New York Stock Exchange by Richard Grasso, Honeywell Incorporated by Michael Bonsignore and Intel by Paul Otellini. Economist Franco Modigliani was awarded the Nobel prize in Economics "for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets."[159] Economist Eugene Fama was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013 for his contribution to the empirical analysis of portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis.
About two thirds of America's Italian immigrants arrived during 1900–1914. Many were of agrarian backgrounds, with little formal education and industrial skills, who became manual laborers heavily concentrated in the cities. Others came with traditional Italian skills as: tailors; barbers; bricklayers; stonemasons; stone cutters; marble, tile and terrazzo workers; fishermen; musicians; singers; shoe makers; shoe repairers; cooks; bakers; carpenters; grape growers; wine makers; silk makers; dressmakers; and seamstresses. Others came to provide for the needs of the immigrant communities, notably doctors, dentists, midwives, lawyers, teachers, morticians, priests, nuns, and brothers. Many of the skilled workers found work in their speciality, first in the Italian enclaves and eventually in the broader society. Traditional skills were often passed down from father to son, and from mother to daughter.
By the second-generation approximately 70% of the men had blue collar jobs, and the proportion was down to approximately 50% in the third generation, according to surveys in 1963.[160] By 1987, the level of Italian-American income exceeded the national average, and since the 1950s it grew faster than any other ethnic group except the Jews.[161] By 1990, according to the U.S. census, more than 65% of Italian Americans were employed as managerial, professional, or white-collar workers. In 1999, the median annual income of Italian-American families was $61,300, while the median annual income of all American families was $50,000.[162]
A University of Chicago study[163] of fifteen ethnic groups showed that Italian Americans were among those groups having the lowest percentages of divorce, unemployment, people on welfare and those incarcerated. On the other hand, they were among those groups with the highest percentages of two-parent families, elderly family members still living at home, and families who eat together on a regular basis.
Italian Americans have been responsible for major breakthroughs in virtually all fields of science, including engineering, medicine and physics. Physicist and Nobel-prize laureate Enrico Fermi was the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and among the leading scientist involved in the Manhattan Project during WW2. One of the main Fermi's collaborators, Franco Rasetti, was awarded the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal by the National Academy of Sciences for his contributions to Cambrian paleontology. Federico Faggin developed the first micro-chip and micro-processor. Robert Gallo led research that identified a cancer-causing virus. Anthony Fauci in 2008 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.[164] Astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources. Virologist Renato Dulbecco won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oncoviruses. Pharmacologist Louis Ignarro was co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for demonstrating the signaling properties of nitric oxide. Microbiologist Salvador Luria won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for his contribution to major discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Physicist William Daniel Phillips in 1997 won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to laser cooling. Physicist Emilio Segrè discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton, a subatomic antiparticle, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. Nine Italian Americans, including a woman, have gone into space as astronauts: Wally Schirra, Dominic Antonelli, Charles Camarda, Mike Massimino, Richard Mastracchio, Ronald Parise, Mario Runco, Albert Sacco and Nicole Marie Passonno Stott. Rocco Petrone was the third director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, from 1973 to 1974.
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Italian women who arrived during the period of mass immigration had to adapt to new and unfamiliar social and economic conditions. Mothers, who had the task of raising the children and providing for the welfare of the family, commonly demonstrated great courage and resourcefulness in meeting these obligations, often under adverse living conditions. Their cultural traditions, which placed the highest priority on the family, remained strong as Italian immigrant women adapted to these new circumstances.
To assist the immigrants in the Little Italies, who were overwhelmingly Catholic, Pope Leo XIII dispatched a contingent of priests, nuns and brothers of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo and other orders. Among these was Sister Francesca Cabrini, who founded dozens of schools, hospitals and orphanages. She was canonized as the first American saint in 1946.
Married women typically avoided factory work and chose home-based economic activities such as dressmaking, taking in boarders, and operating small shops in their homes or neighborhoods. Italian neighborhoods also proved attractive to midwives, women who trained in Italy before coming to America.[165] Many single women were employed in the garment industry as seamstresses, often in unsafe working environments. Many of the 146 who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 were Italian-American women. Angela Bambace was an 18-year-old Italian American organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York who worked to secure better working conditions and shorter hours for women workers in the garment industry.
The American scene in the 1920s featured a widespread expansion of women's roles, starting with the vote in 1920, and including new standards of education, employment and control of their own sexuality. "Flappers" raised the hemline and lowered the old restrictions in women's fashion. The Italian-American media disapproved. It demanded the holding of the line regarding traditional gender roles in which men controlled their families. Many traditional patriarchal values prevailed among Southern European male immigrants, although some practices like dowry were left behind in Europe. The community spokesmen were shocked at the notion of a woman marking her secret ballot. They ridiculed flappers and proclaimed that feminism was immoral. They idealized an old male model of Italian womanhood. Mussolini was popular with readers and subsidized some papers, so when he expanded the electorate to include some women voting at the local level, the Italian American editorialists applauded him, arguing that the true Italian woman was, above all, a mother and a wife and, therefore, would be reliable as a voter on local matters but only in Italy. Feminist organizations in Italy were ignored, as the editors purposely associated emancipation with Americanism and transformed the debate over women's rights into a defense of the Italian-American community to set its own boundaries and rules.[166] The ethnic papers featured a woman's page that updated readers on the latest fabrics, color combinations, and accessories including hats, shoes, handbags, and jewelry. Food was a major concern, and recipes were presented which adjusted to the availability of ingredients in the American market. Food supplies were limited in Italy by poverty and strict import controls, but abundant in America, so new recipes were needed to take advantage.[167]
In the second and third generations, opportunities expanded as women were gradually accepted in the workplace and as entrepreneurs. Women also had much better job opportunities because they had a high school or sometimes college education, and were willing to leave the Little Italies and commute to work.[168] During World War II large numbers of Italian American women entered the workforce in factories providing war materiel, while others served as auxiliaries or nurses in the military services.
After World War II, Italian American women acquired an increasing degree of freedom in choosing a career, and seeking higher levels of education. Consequently, the second half of the 20th century was a period in which Italian American women excelled in virtually all fields of endeavor. In politics, Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman vice-presidential candidate, Ella Grasso was the first woman elected as a state governor and Nancy Pelosi was the first woman Speaker of the House. Mother Angelica (Rita Rizzo), a Franciscan nun, in 1980 founded the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a network viewed regularly by millions of Catholics. JoAnn Falletta was the first woman to become a permanent conductor of a major symphony orchestra (with both the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra). Penny Marshall (Masciarelli) was one of the first women directors in Hollywood. Catherine DeAngelis, M.D. was the first woman editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Patricia Fili-Krushel was the first woman president of ABC Television. Bonnie Tiburzi was the first woman pilot in commercial aviation history. Patricia Russo was the first woman to become CEO of Lucent Technologies. Karen Ignagni has, since 1993, been the CEO of American Health Insurance Plans, an umbrella organization representing all major HMO's in the country. Nicole Marie Passonno Stott was one of the first women to go into space as an astronaut. Carolyn Porco, a world recognized expert in planetary probes, is the leader of the imaging science team for the Cassini probe, presently in orbit around Saturn.
The National Organization of Italian American Women (NOIAW), founded in 1980, is an organization for women of Italian heritage committed to preserving Italian heritage, language and culture by promoting and supporting the advancement of women of Italian ancestry.
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The works of a number of early Italian American authors and poets, born of immigrant parents, were published in the first half of the 20th century. Pietro Di Donato, born in 1911, was a writer best known for his novel, Christ in Concrete, which was hailed by critics in the United States and abroad as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America. Frances Winwar, born Francesca Vinciguerra in 1907 in Sicily, came to the United States at age ten. She is best known for her series of biographies of 19th-century English writers. She was also a frequent translator of classic Italian works into English, and published several romantic novels set during historical events. John Ciardi, born in 1916, was primarily a poet. Among his works is a highly respected English-language rendition of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. John Fante, born in 1909, was a novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
Later in the century, a growing number of books by recognized Italian-American authors, such as Don DeLillo,[169] Paul Gallico (Poseidon Adventure), Gilbert Sorrentino, Gay Talese, Camille Paglia and Mario Puzo (The Fortunate Pilgrim) found a place in mainstream American literature. Other notable 20th-century authors included: Dana Gioia, executive director of the National Endowment for the Arts; John Fusco, author of Paradise Salvage; Tina DeRosa; and Daniela Gioseffi, winner of the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, and The American Book Award; and Josephine Gattuso Hendin (The Right Thing to Do). Poets Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert and Kim Addonizio were also winners of the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from Italian Americana, as was writer Helen Barolini and poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan.[170] These women have authored many books depicting Italian American women in a new light. Helen Barolini's The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985) was the first anthology that pulled together the historic range of writing from the late 19th century to the 1980s. It exhibited the wealth of fiction, poetry, essays, and letters, and paid special attention to the interaction of Italian American women with American social activism.[171] Italian American poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso played a prominent role in the Beat Generation. Ferlinghetti was also the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore, a San Francisco bookstore and publishing company that published much of the work of other Beat Generation writers.[172] Many of these authors' books and writings are easily found on the internet, as for example on an archive of Contemporary Italian American authors, as well as in bibliographies online at Stonybrook University's Italian American Studies Department in New York,[173] or at the Italian American Writers Association website.[174]
A scholarly literature has also emerged that critiques the literary output. Common themes include conflicts between marginal Italian American and mainstream culture, and tradition-bound immigrant parents opposed by their more assimilated children.[175] Mary Jo Bona provided the first full-length scholarly analysis of the literary tradition. She is especially interested in showing how authors portrayed the many configurations of family relationships, from the early immigrant narratives of journeying to a new world, through novels that stress intergenerational conflicts, to contemporary works about the struggle of modern women to form nontraditional gender roles.[176]
Among the scholars who have led the renaissance in Italian-American literature are professors Richard Gambino, Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo Giordano, and Fred Gardaphé. The latter three founded Bordighera Press and edited From the Margin, An Anthology of Italian American Writing, Purdue University Press. At Brooklyn College, Dr. Robert Viscusi founded the Italian American Writers Association, and is an author and American Book Award winner himself. As a result of the efforts of magazines like Voices in Italian Americana, Ambassador, a publication of the National Italian American Foundation and Italian Americana, edited by Carla Simonini, Italian Americans have been reading more works of their own writers. A supplemental website at www.italianamericana.com to the journal Italian Americana, edited by novelist Christine Palamidessi Moore, also offers historical articles, stories, memoirs, poetry, and book reviews. Dana Gioia, was Poetry Editor of Italian Americana from 1993 to 2003, followed by poet Michael Palma, who also selects poems for Italian Americana's webpage supplement.[177] Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Daniela Gioseffi and Paul Mariani, are among the internationally known authors who have been awarded The John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry during Michael Palma's tenure as Poetry Editor. Daniela Gioseffi, with Alfredo De Palchi, founded The Annual $2000 Bordighera Poetry Prize[178] to further the names of Italian American poets in American literature. As of 1997, twelve books have been published in the bilingual series from Bordighera Press.[179]
In the field of academic cinema studies, Peter Bondanella, Peter Brunette and Frank P. Tomasulo have made significant contributions to film scholarship as authors, editors, and educators.
Italian Americans have written not only about the Italian American experience but, indeed, the human experience. Some of the most popular inspirational books have been authored by Italian Americans – notably, those of Og Mandino, Leo Buscaglia and Antoinette Bosco.[180] A series of inspirational books for children has been written by Tomie dePaola. Contemporary best-selling fiction writers include David Baldacci, Kate DiCamillo, Richard Russo, Adriana Trigiani, and Lisa Scottoline.
The majority of Italian Americans are Catholics, although Catholic affiliation among Italian American adults has fallen from 89% in 1972 to 56% in 2010 (-33 percentage points).[181] By 1910, Italian-Americans had founded 219 Catholic churches and 41 parochial schools, served by 315 priests and 254 nuns, 2 Catholic seminaries and 3 orphanages.[182] Four hundred Italian Jesuit priests left Italy for the American West between 1848 and 1919. Most of these Jesuits left their homeland involuntarily, expelled by Italian nationalists in the successive waves of Italian unification that dominated Italy. When they came to the West, they ministered to Indians in the Northwest, Irish-Americans in San Francisco and Mexican Americans in the South West; they also ran the nation's most influential Catholic seminary, in Woodstock, Md. In addition to their pastoral work, they founded numerous high schools and colleges, including Regis University, Santa Clara University, the University of San Francisco and Gonzaga University.[183]
In some Sicilian American communities, primarily Buffalo and New Orleans, Saint Joseph's Day (March 19) is marked by parades and celebrations, including traditional "St. Joseph's tables", where meatless dishes are served for the benefit of the communities' poor. Columbus Day is also widely celebrated, as are the feasts of some regional Italian patron saints. In Boston's North End, the Italian immigrants celebrate the "Feast of all Feasts" Saint Anthony's Feast. Started by Italian immigrants from Montefalcione, a small town near Naples, Italy in 1919, the feast is widely considered the largest and most authentic Italian Religious festival in the United States. Over 100 vendors and 300,000 people attend the feast over a 3-day period in August. San Gennaro (September 19) is another popular saint, especially among Neapolitans. Santa Rosalia (September 4), is celebrated by immigrants from Sicily. Immigrants from Potenza celebrate the San Rocco's Day (August 16) feast at the Potenza Lodge in Denver the third weekend of August. San Rocco is the patron saint of Potenza, as is San Gerardo. Many still celebrate the Christmas season with a Feast of the Seven Fishes. The Feast of the Assumption is celebrated in Cleveland's Little Italy on August 15. On this feast day, people will pin money on a Blessed Virgin Mary statue as a symbol of prosperity. The statue is then paraded through Little Italy to Holy Rosary Church. For almost 25 years, Cleveland Bishop Anthony Pilla participated in the parade and Mass to celebrate his Italian heritage. Bishop Pilla retired in April 2006, but continues to participate.
While most Italian-American families have a Catholic background, about 19% self-identified as Protestant in 2010.[181] In the early 20th century, about 300 Protestant missionaries worked in urban Italian American neighborhoods. Some have joined the Episcopal Church, which still retains much of the Catholic liturgical form. Some have converted to evangelical churches. Fiorello La Guardia was raised Episcopalian; his father was Catholic, and his mother was from the small but significant community of Italian Jews. There is a small charismatic denomination, known as the Christian Church of North America, which is rooted in the Italian Pentecostal Movement that originated in Chicago in the early 20th century. A group of Italian immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey and Wakefield, Mass. built their own small Baptist Chapel and converted to the Baptist denomination. The Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite), a denomination of the Latter Day Saint movement, which is headquartered in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, counts significant numbers of Italian Americans in its leadership and membership.[184] The town of Valdese, North Carolina was founded in 1893 by a group of Italians of Waldensian religion, originally from the Cottian Alps in Italy.
The Jewish emigration from Italy was never of a magnitude that resulted in the formation of Italian-Jewish communities in the United States. Religious Italian Jews integrated into existing Jewish communities without difficulty, especially in Sephardic communities; and those who were secular found Jewish secular institutions in the United States ready to welcome them. Despite their small numbers, Italian American Jews have had a great impact on American life,[185] starting with Lorenzo Da Ponte (born Emanuele Conegliano), Mozart's former librettist, opera impresario and the first Professor of Italian at Columbia College in New York where he lived from 1805 to his death in 1838.
From a religious point of view the figure of greatest influence is that of Rabbi Sabato Morais who, at the end of the nineteenth century, was the leader of the large Sephardic community of Philadelphia and, in 1886, he became one of the founders of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, where he became its first dean. Two other Italian Jews achieved prominence in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century: Giorgio Polacco was the principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera House (1915–1917), and the Chicago Civic Opera (1921–30); and Fiorello La Guardia was a member of the U.S. Congress (1917–1919 and 1923–1933), and a popular Mayor of New York (1934–1945). A descendant on his mother's side of the great Italian rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto, La Guardia could address his constituency in both Italian and Yiddish.
Under Mussolini's Racial Laws of 1938, Italian Jews, who had lived in Italy for over two millennia, were stripped of most of their civil liberties. Finding refuge in the U.S. as a result of the Fascist persecutions during the 1930s and 1940s, roughly two thousand Italian Jews landed in America and continued their work in a wide range of fields.[186] Many achieved international importance, including: Giorgio Levi Della Vida, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Vittorio Rieti, Bruno Rossi, Emilio Segre, Giorgio Cavaglieri, Ugo Fano, Robert Fano, Guido Fubini, Eugene Fubini, and Silvano Arieti. Of particular importance also are the contributions of the Italian Jewish women Maria Bianca Finzi-Contini, Bianca Ara Artom, and Giuliana Tesoro, who opened the fields of university and scientific research to Italian American women. After the war, four Italian-American Jews received the Nobel prize: Franco Modigliani, Emilio Segre, Salvador Luria, and Rita Levi Montalcini. Also of significance are the contributions of communication specialist Andrew Viterbi, journalist/writer Ken Auletta and economist Guido Calabresi. The international recognition of the work of Primo Levi and other Italian-Jewish authors, such as Giorgio Bassani and Carlo Levi, has increased the interest in the United States in Italian Judaism, as demonstrated by the opening in 1998 of the Primo Levi Center of New York.[187]
During the era of mass immigration, rural families in Italy did not place a high value on formal education since they needed their children to help with chores as soon as they were old enough. For many, this attitude did not change upon arriving in America, where children were expected to help support the family as soon as possible.[188] This view toward education steadily changed with each successive generation. The 1970 census revealed that those under age 45 had achieved a level of education comparable to the national average,[189] and within six decades of their peak immigration year, Italian Americans as a whole had equaled the national average in educational attainment.[190] Presently, according to Census Bureau data, Italian Americans have an average high school graduation rate, and a higher rate of advanced degrees compared to the national average.[191] Italian Americans throughout the United States are well represented in a wide variety of occupations and professions, from skilled trades, to the arts, to engineering, science, mathematics, law, and medicine, and include a number of Nobel prize winners.[192]
There are two Italian international schools in the United States, La Scuola International[193] in San Francisco, and La Scuola d'Italia Guglielmo Marconi in New York City.[194]
According to the Sons of Italy News Bureau, from 1998 to 2002 the enrollment in college Italian language courses grew by 30%, faster than the enrollment rates for French and German.[200] Italian is the fourth most commonly taught foreign language in U.S. colleges and universities behind Spanish, French, and German. According to the U.S. 2000 Census, Italian (including Sicilian) is the sixth most spoken language in the United States (tied with Vietnamese) after English with over 1 million speakers.[201]
As a result of the large wave of Italian immigration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Italian and Sicilian were once widely spoken in much of the U.S., especially in northeastern and Great Lakes area cities like Buffalo, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee, as well as San Francisco, St. Louis and New Orleans. Italian-language newspapers exist in many American cities, especially New York City, and Italian-language movie theatres existed in the U.S. as late as the 1950s. L'Idea is a bilingual quarterly published in Brooklyn since 1974. Arba Sicula (Sicilian Dawn) is a semiannual publication of the society of the same name, dedicated to preserving the Sicilian language. The magazine and a periodic newsletter offer prose, poetry and comment in Sicilian, with adjacent English translations.
Today, prizes like the Bordighera Annual Poetry Prize,[202] founded by Daniela Gioseffi, Pietro Mastrandrea and Alfredo di Palchi, with support from the Sonia Rraiziss-Giop Foundation and Bordighera Press, which publishes the winners in bilingual editions, have helped to encourage writers of the diaspora to write in Italian. Chelsea Books in New York City and Gradiva Press on Long Island have published many bilingual books due to the efforts of bilingual writers of the diaspora like Paolo Valesio,[203] Alfredo de Palchi,[204] and Luigi Fontanella. Dr. Luigi Bonaffini[205] of the City University of New York, publisher of The Journal of Italian Translation at Brooklyn College, has fostered Italian dialectic poetry throughout Italy and the U.S. Joseph Tusiani of New York and New York University,[206] a distinguished linguist and prize-winning poet born in Italy, paved the way for Italian works of literature in English and has published many bilingual books and Italian classics for the American audience, among them the first complete works of Michelangelo's poems in English to be published in the United States. All of this literary endeavor has helped to foster the Italian language, along with Italian opera, of course, in the United States. Many of these authors and their bilingual books are located throughout the internet.
Author Lawrence Distasi argues that the loss of spoken Italian among the Italian American population can be tied to U.S. government pressures during World War II. During World War II, in various parts of the country, the U.S. government displayed signs that read, "Don't Speak the Enemy's Language". Such signs designated the languages of the Axis powers, German, Japanese and Italian, as "enemy languages". Shortly after the Axis powers declared war on the U.S., many Italian, Japanese and German citizens were interned. Among the Italian Americans, those who spoke Italian, who had never become citizens and who belonged to groups that praised Benito Mussolini, were most likely to become candidates for internment. Distasi claims that many Italian language schools closed down in the San Francisco Bay Area within a week of the U.S. declaration of war on the Axis powers. Such closures were inevitable since most of the teachers in Italian languages were interned.
Despite previous decline, Italian and Sicilian are still spoken and studied by those of Italian American descent and it can be heard in various American communities, especially among older Italian Americans. The official Italian taught in schools is Standard Italian, which is based on 14th century literary Florentine.[207] However, the "Italian" with which Italian Americans are generally acquainted is often rooted in the Regional Italian and Italo-Dalmatian languages their immigrant ancestors brought from Italy to American, primarily southern Italian and Sicilian dialects of pre-unification Italy.[208]
Despite it being the fifth most studied language in higher education (college and graduate) settings throughout America,[209] the Italian language has struggled to maintain being an AP course of study in high schools nationwide. It was only in 2006 that AP Italian classes were first introduced, and they were soon dropped from the national curricula after the spring of 2009.[210] The organization which manages such curricula, the College Board, ended the AP Italian program because it was "losing money" and had failed to add 5,000 new students each year. Since the program's termination in the spring of 2009, various Italian organizations and activists have attempted to revive the course of study. Most notable in the effort is Margaret Cuomo, sister of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. She provided the impetus for the program's birth in 2006 and is currently attempting to secure funding and teachers to reinstate the program. It is also worth noting that Italian organizations have begun fundraisers to revive AP Italian. Organizations such as the NIAF and Order Sons of Italy in America have made strides in collecting money, and are prepared to aid in the monetary responsibility any new AP Italian program would bring with it.
Web-based Italian organizations, such as ItalianAware,[211] have begun book donation campaigns to improve the status and representation of Italian and Italian American literature in the New York public libraries. According to ItalianAware, the Brooklyn Public Library is the worst offender in New York City.[212] It has 11 books pertaining to the Italian immigrant experience available for checkout, spread across 60 branches. That amounts to one book for every six branches in Brooklyn, which (according to ItalianAware) cannot supply the large Italian/Italian American community in the borough. ItalianAware aimed to donate 100 books to the Brooklyn Public Library by the end of 2010.
Italian American pidgin or Italian American slang is a pidgin language thought to have developed in the early 1900s in American cities with a large Italian population, primarily New York and New Jersey. It soon spread to many Italian communities across cities and metropolitan areas in both the U.S. and Canada. It is not a language in its own right but is a mix of the various Italian dialects and American English.[213][214]
Italian Americans have profoundly influenced the eating habits of America. An increasing number of Italian dishes are well known and enjoyed. Italian American TV personalities, such as Mario Batali, Giada DeLaurentiis, Rachael Ray, Lidia Bastianich, and Guy Fieri have hosted popular cooking shows featuring Italian cuisine.
While heavily influenced by and sharing common dishes with Italian cuisine, especially the Neapolitan and Sicilian traditions of typical Italian immigrants to the United States, Italian American cuisine differs in several respects. The greater availability of meat in quantity led to new staples such as spaghetti and meatballs, while pizza evolved regionally into styles as diverse as Chicago-style deep dish and New York thin crust.
One of the most characteristic and popular of Italian American cultural contributions has been their feasts. Throughout the United States, wherever one may find an "Italian neighborhood" (often referred to as "Little Italy"), one can find festive celebrations such as the well-known Feast of San Gennaro in New York City, the unique Our Lady of Mount Carmel "Giglio" Feast in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, Italian feasts involve elaborate displays of devotion to Jesus Christ and patron saints. On the weekend of the last Sunday in August, the residents of Boston's North End celebrate the "Feast of all Feasts" in honor of St. Anthony of Padua, which was started over 300 years ago in Montefalcione, Italy. Perhaps the most widely known is St. Joseph's feast day on March 19. These feasts are much more than simply isolated events within the year. Feast (Festa in Italian) is an umbrella term for the various secular and religious, indoor and outdoor activities surrounding a religious holiday. Typically, Italian feasts consist of festive communal meals, religious services, games of chance and skill and elaborate outdoor processions consisting of statues resplendent in jewels and donations. The celebration usually takes place over the course of several days, and is communally prepared by a church community or a religious organization over the course of several months.
Currently, there are more than 300 Italian feasts celebrated throughout the United States. Notable is Festa Italiana, held in Milwaukee every summer. These feasts are visited each year by millions of Americans from various backgrounds who come together to enjoy Italian music and food delicacies. In the past, as to this day, an important part of Italian American culture centers around music and cuisine.
Numerous American television personalities are of Italian descent. Talk-show hosts include Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, Kelly Ripa, Maria Bartiromo, Adam Carolla, Neil Cavuto, Kelly Monaco, Jai Rodriguez, Annette Funicello, Victoria Gotti, Tony Danza, Giuliana DePandi, Giuliana Rancic, Bruno Cipriani.[215]
Generoso Pope (1891–1950), the owner of a chain of Italian language newspapers in major cities, stands out as the epitome of the Italian American ethnic political broker. He bought Il Progresso Italo-Americano in 1928 for $2 million; he doubled its circulation to 200,000 in New York City, making it the largest Italian-language paper in the country. He purchased additional papers in New York and Philadelphia, which became the chief source of political, social, and cultural information for the community. Pope encouraged his readers to learn English, become citizens, and vote; his goal was to instill pride and ambition to succeed in modern America. A conservative Democrat who ran the Columbus Day parade and admired Mussolini, Pope was the most powerful enemy of anti-Fascism among Italian Americans. Closely associated with Tammany Hall politics in New York, Pope and his newspapers played a vital role in securing the Italian vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democratic tickets. He served as chairman of the Italian Division of the Democratic National Committee in 1936, and helped persuade the president to take a neutral attitude over Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. He broke with Mussolini in 1941 and enthusiastically supported the American war effort. In the late 1940s Pope supported the election of William O'Dwyer as mayor in 1945 and Harry S. Truman as president. His business concerns continued to prosper under New York's Democratic administrations, and in 1946 he added the Italian-language radio station WHOM to his media holdings. In the early years of the Cold War, Pope was a leading anti-Communist and orchestrated a letter-writing campaign by his subscribers to stop the Communists from winning the Italian elections in 1948.[216]
Voters did not always vote the way editorials dictated, but they depended on the news coverage. At many smaller papers, support for Mussolini, short-sighted opportunism, deference to political patrons who were not members of the Italian-American communities, and the necessity of making a living through periodicals with a small circulation, generally weakened the owners of Italian-language newspapers when they tried to become political brokers of the Italian American vote.[217]
James V. Donnaruma purchased Boston's La Gazzetta del Massachusetts in 1905. La Gazzetta enjoyed a wide readership in Boston's Italian community because it emphasized detailed coverage of local ethnic events and explained how events in Europe affected the community. Donnaruma's editorial positions, however, were frequently at odds with the sentiments of his readership. Donnaruma's conservative views and desire for greater advertising revenue prompted him to court the favor of Boston's Republican elite, to whom he pledged editorial support in return for the purchase of advertising space for political campaigns. La Gazzetta consistently supported Republican candidates and policy positions, even when the party was proposing and passing laws to restrict Italian immigration. Nevertheless, voting records from the 1920s–1930s show that Boston's Italian Americans voted heavily for Democratic candidates.[218][219]
Carmelo Zito took over the San Francisco newspaper Il Corriere del Popolo in 1935. Under Zito, it became one of the fiercest foes of Mussolini's fascism on the West Coast. It vigorously attacked Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and its intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Zito helped form the Italian-American Anti-Fascist League and often attacked certain Italian prominenti like Ettore Patrizi, publisher of L'Italia and La Voce del Popolo. Zito's paper campaigned against alleged Italian pro-Fascist language schools of San Francisco.[220]
In 1909, Vincenzo Giuliano, an immigrant from Calabria, Italy and his wife Maria Oliva founded La Tribune Italiana d'America, known today as The Italian Tribune, which circulates throughout southeastern Michigan. A second newspaper founded by a Catholic order of priests, La Voce del Popolo also served the Metro Detroit community until the 1920s, when that newspaper merged with La Tribuna Italiana d'America. Upon Giuliano's death in the 1960s, his family continued the paper.
Italian-American organizations include:
In 1944, the creation of the American Relief for Italy, Inc (ARI) functioned as an umbrella organization until 1946. The ARI collected, shipped, and distributed over $10 million of relief materials donated by other Italian organizations and individuals from all over Italy. Catholic charities, labor unions, cultural clubs, and fraternal organizations all responded in helping to raise money for the ARI. These relief materials were donated to Italians in need and helped to provide humanitarian assistance. All remaining donations were distributed to Italian soldiers at war. This organization was one of the first steps in the lengthy process of political and economic stabilizations in postwar Italy.[222]
Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, the American Committee on Italian Migration (ACIM) was one of the largest, most active Italian American organizations in the United States. They gave assistance to Italian immigrants living in the United States threatened by political instability and provided recovery for those in need. Frequently, money and supplies were sent back home to those who were unable to migrate or were in the process of migrating to the United States. Most of these people were the women and children Italian men left behind in hopes of starting a new life in America. The ACIM grew rapidly with hundreds of thousands of members being both donors and beneficiaries.[222]
The National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) worked with ACIM on legislative campaigns and immigration projects. In 1951, members from NCWC, ACIM, as well as other Italian Americans joined in efforts to create an organization that specifically benefited and focused on assisting Italian immigrants. After a vast effort in 1953, the Refugee Relief Act (RRA) was passed allowing the entrance of over two hundred thousand Italian immigrants into the United States. The RRA provided these Italian immigrants with many opportunities to start their new life in America. Job opportunities, a place to live, and proper education for immigrants children were provided.[222]
The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) [223] – a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. – works to represent Italian Americans, spread knowledge of the Italian language, foster U.S./Italy relations and connect the greater Italian American community. Additionally, two major Italian American fraternal and service organizations, Order Sons of Italy in America and Unico National, actively promote knowledge of Italian American history and culture.
The Italian Heritage and Culture Committee – NY, Inc. was founded in 1976, and has organized special events, concerts, exhibits and lectures celebrating Italian culture in New York City. Each year it focuses on a theme representative of the history and culture of Italy and Italian Americans.
The Italic Institute of America[224] is dedicated to fostering and preserving knowledge of the classical Italian heritage of American society, through the Latin language and Greco-Roman-Etruscan civilization, as well as five centuries of contributions to American society by Italians and their descendants.
There are several museums in the United States, dedicated to Italian American culture:
During the period of mass immigration to the United States, they were often victims of prejudice, economic exploitation, and sometimes even violence, particularly in the South. In the 1890s, more than 20 Italians were lynched.[230] The hostility was often directed toward the Southern Italians and Sicilians who began immigrating to the United States in large numbers after 1880.[231]
A journalist asked a West Coast construction boss if the Italian was a white man, to which the boss replied: "No sir, an Italian is a Dago".[232] This response reflected the xenophobic attitude of the time defining the idea of Whiteness in the United States. There was a social hierarchy within the various white American communities in which a different degrees of "whiteness" was associated with each group. Some European immigrants, such as Italians, were considered less white than the early European settlers and, therefore, were less accepted in American society.
Italian stereotypes abounded as a means of justifying the maltreatment of the immigrants. The print media greatly contributed to the stereotyping of Italians with lurid accounts of secret societies and criminality. Between 1890 and 1920, Italian neighborhoods were often depicted as violent and controlled by criminal networks. Two highly publicized cases illustrate the impact of these negative stereotypes:
In 1891, eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans were lynched due to their alleged role in the murder of the police chief David Hennessy. This was one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history. The lynching took place after nine of the immigrants were tried for the murder and acquitted. Subsequently, a mob broke into the jail where they were being held and dragged them out to be lynched, together with two other Italians who were being held in the jail at the time, but had not been accused in the killing.
In 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were accused of robbery and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts. Many historians agree that they were given a very unfair and biased trial because of their anarchistic political beliefs and their Italian immigrant status. During the next few years, sporadic protests were held in major cities all around the world calling for their release, especially after Portuguese migrant Celestino Madeiros confessed to committing the crime absolving them of participation. The Supreme Court refused to upset the verdict, and Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller denied the men clemency. In spite of worldwide protests, Sacco and Vanzetti were eventually executed in 1927.
While the vast majority of Italian immigrants brought with them a tradition of hard work and were law-abiding citizens, as documented by police statistics of the early 20th century in Boston and New York City which show that Italian immigrants had an arrest rate no greater than that of other major immigrant groups,[233] a very small minority brought a very different custom. This criminal element preyed on the immigrants of the Little Italies, using intimidation and threats to extract protection money from the wealthier immigrants and shop owners, and were also involved in a multitude of other illegal activities. When the Fascists came to power in Italy, they made the destruction of the Mafia in Sicily a high priority. Hundreds fled to America in the 1920s and 1930s to avoid prosecution.
Prohibition, which went into effect in 1920, proved to be an economic windfall for those in the Italian American community already involved in illegal activities, and those who had fled from Sicily. This entailed smuggling liquor into the country, wholesaling it, and then selling it through a network of outlets. While other ethnic groups were also deeply involved in these illegal ventures, and the associated violence, Chicago mobster Al Capone became the most notorious figure of the Prohibition era. Though eventually repealed, Prohibition had a long-term effect as the spawning ground for later criminal activities.
In the 1950s, the scope of Italian American organized crime became well known though a number of highly publicized congressional hearings that followed a police raid on a top-level meeting of racketeers in Apalachin, New York. With advanced surveillance techniques, the Witness Protection Program, the Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act, and vigorous and sustained prosecution the power and influence of organized crime were greatly diminished in the decades that followed. Two Italian American prosecutors, Rudy Giuliani and Louis Freeh, were instrumental in bringing this about. Freeh was later appointed director of the FBI, while Giuliani would serve two terms as Mayor of New York City.
From the earliest days of the movie industry, Italians have been portrayed as violent criminals and sociopaths.[235] This trend has continued to the present day. The stereotype of Italian Americans is the standardized mental image which has been fostered by the entertainment industry, especially through commercially successful movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Casino; and TV programs such as The Sopranos.[236] This follows a known pattern in which it is possible for the mass media to effectively create universally recognized, and sometimes accepted, stereotypes.[237]
A highly publicized protest from the Italian-American community came in 2001 when the Chicago-based organization AIDA (American Italian Defamation Association) unsuccessfully sued Time Warner for distribution of HBO's series The Sopranos.[238]
The DreamWorks animated film, Shark Tale, was widely protested by virtually all major Italian-American organizations as introducing the mob genre and negative stereotyping into a children's movie.[239] In spite of the protests, which started during its early production, the movie was produced and released in 2004.
In 2009, MTV launched a reality show, Jersey Shore,[240] which prompted severe criticism from Italian American organizations such as the National Italian American Foundation, Order Sons of Italy in America, and Unico National for its stereotypical portrayal of Italian Americans.
In 2019, Made in Staten Island lasted just three episodes, also on MTV, before a public outcry from residents of the borough in general, and Italian-American residents therein in particular, forced the show's cancellation.
The effective stereotyping of Italian Americans as being associated with organized crime was shown by a comprehensive study of Italian American culture on film, conducted from 1996 to 2001 by the Italic Institute of America.[224] The findings showed that over two-thirds of the more than 2,000 films studied portray Italian Americans in a negative light. Further, close to 300 movies featuring Italian Americans as criminals have been produced since The Godfather, an average of nine per year.[241] According to the Italic Institute of America:
In actuality, according to recent FBI statistics,[243] Italian American organized crime members and associates number approximately 3,000; and, given an Italian American population estimated to be approximately 18 million, the study concludes that only one in 6,000 is active in organized crime (0.007% of Italian-Americans).[234]
Little Italies were, to a considerable extent, the result of Italophobia. The ethnocentrism and anti-Catholicism exhibited by the earlier Anglo-Saxon and northern European settlers helped to create an ideological foundation for fixing foreignness on urban spaces occupied by immigrants.[244] Communities of Italian Americans were established in most major industrial cities of the early 20th century, such as Baltimore, Maryland; New York City, New York; Newark, New Jersey; Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Hartford, Connecticut; Waterbury, Connecticut; New Haven, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; St. Louis, Missouri; Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and Kansas City, Missouri. New Orleans, Louisiana was the first site of immigration of Italians into America in the 19th century, before Italy was a unified nation-state. This was before New York Harbor and Baltimore became the preferred destinations for Italian immigrants. In sharp contrast to the Northeast, most of the Southern states (with the exception of Central and South Florida and the New Orleans area) have relatively few Italian-American residents. During the labor shortage in the 19th and early 20th centuries, planters in the Deep South did attract some Italian immigrants to work as sharecroppers, but they soon left the extreme anti-Italian discrimination and strict regimen of the rural areas for the cities or other states. The state of California has had Italian-American residents since the 1850s. By the 1970s, gentrification of inner city neighborhoods and the arrival of new immigrant groups caused a sharp decline in the old Italian-American and other ethnic enclaves.[245] Many Italian Americans moved to the rapidly growing Western states, including Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and California. Today, New York and New Jersey have the largest numbers of Italian Americans in the U.S. while smaller Northeastern cities such as Pittsburgh, Providence and Hartford have the highest percentage of Italian Americans in their metropolitan areas.
The New York-based daily newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano had a national audience and reflected the views of the leadership of the community. It was published 1880–1988.[246]
New York City is home to the largest Italian-American population in the country and the second-largest Italian population outside of Italy. Several Little Italy enclaves exist in New York City, including Little Italy, Manhattan; the Lower East Side in general; Italian Harlem, Morris Park, Belmont, Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, Ozone Park, Carroll Gardens, Greenwich Village, Middle Village, Italian Williamsburg, Bay Ridge, and the South Shore of Staten Island. Historically, Little Italy on Mulberry Street in Manhattan extends as far south as Canal Street, as far north as Bleecker, as far west as Lafayette and as far east as the Bowery.[247] The neighborhood was once known for its large population of Italians.[247] Today, it consists of Italian stores and restaurants.[248] The Italian immigrants congregated along Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Little Italy to celebrate San Gennaro as the Patron Saint of Naples. The Feast of San Gennaro is a large street fair, lasting 11 days, that takes place every September along Mulberry Street between Houston and Canal Streets.[249] The festival is as an annual celebration of Italian culture and the Italian-American community. Today, much of the neighborhood has been absorbed and engulfed by Chinatown, as immigrants from China moved to the area.Arthur Avenue in the Belmont section of New York City's northernmost borough, The Bronx, is one of the many neighborhoods considered the Bronx's "Little Italy", with Morris Park, Pelham Bay, Throggs Neck, and other Bronx neighborhoods also serving as centers of Italian-American culture. Robert De Niro's directing debut, A Bronx Tale, takes place within Little Italy, however, it was largely filmed in Astoria, Queens.[250] The series Third Watch was initially based on Arthur Avenue, with the first episode referring to the firehouse as "Camelot", based on its location at the intersection of King Street and Arthur Avenue. The 1973 film The Seven-Ups, starring Roy Scheider, was filmed on Arthur Avenue and Hoffman Street. In 2003, a scene from the HBO series The Sopranos was shot in Mario's Restaurant. Leonard, of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, grew up in this area. Much of the novel Underworld takes place near Arthur Avenue.[251] The author, Don DeLillo, himself grew up in that neighborhood.
Bensonhurst used to be heavily Italian-American, and it used to be considered the main "Little Italy" of Brooklyn. Since the late 1990s, most Italians have moved to Staten Island. The Italian-speaking community remains over 20,000 strong, according to the census of 2000. However, the Italian-speaking community is becoming "increasingly elderly and isolated, with the small, tight-knit enclaves they built around the city slowly disappearing as they give way to demographic changes".[252] Its main thoroughfare, 18th Avenue (also known as Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard) between roughly 60th Street and Shore Parkway, is lined with predominantly small, Italian family-owned businesses—many of which have remained in the same family for several generations. 86th Street is another popular local thoroughfare, lined by the arches of the elevated BMT West End Subway Line. The 18th Avenue Station was popularized in opening credits of Welcome Back, Kotter. Rosebank in Staten Island was another one of NYC's main areas of Italian immigrants since the 1880s, and their descendants have continued as its predominant ethnic group, exemplified by the location of the Garibaldi Memorial in the community. In recent years, the town has experienced an influx of other ethnic groups, including Eastern Europeans, various Latin nationalities as well as Asians, particularly from the Philippines. Today, the South Shore of Staten Island is the most heavily populated Italian area in the City of New York. Over 95% of the South Shore is Italian. The neighborhoods of the South Shore with large percentages of Italians are Huguenot, Annadale, Eltingville, and Tottenville. Howard Beach in the Queens is also home to a large Italian population.[253]
During the beginning of the Cold War, immigration into the United States from Italy was almost impossible. The American government did not want foreigners entering during an intense period of history, especially those immigrating to New York City. Americas were frightened that these immigrants could be terrorists, thus preventing Italians from gaining citizenship. As the Cold War continued, organization groups such as the Italian American Organization and the American Committee on Italian Migration (ACIM) started to form. They created vast efforts to provide assistance and aid to Italian immigrants coming into the United States. Throughout the Cold War, these organizations increased rapidly with many American Italian members as well as many new coming Italians. ACIM also took a leading role in directing the efforts of other Italian American and Catholic organizations that helped contribute to Italian immigration. These organizations provided new migrants with housing, clothing, access to job interviews, and education for children. Italians already living in America volunteered by making house visits to those immigrants who have just settled down in their new homes. These house visits made the intense and rigorous migration journey easier while allowing the Italian American community within New York City to grow. Immediately after the Cold War period, Italian Americans further consolidated and solidified their status as members of the American mainstream.[254]
Philadelphia's Italian American community is the second-largest in the United States. Italian Americans compose 21% of South Philadelphia's 163,000 people, and the area has numerous Italian stores and restaurants. Philadelphia is well known for its Italian Market in South Philadelphia. The Italian Market is the popular name for the South 9th Street Curb Market, an area of Philadelphia featuring many grocery shops, cafes, restaurants, bakeries, cheese shops, and butcher shops, many with an Italian influence. The "outdoor" market features bright, colorful metal awnings that cover the sidewalks where vendors of fruit, vegetables, fish, and housewares conduct business year round. Ground floor shops in traditional Philadelphia rowhouses line the street. Owners originally lived above their shops, and many still do.
South Philadelphia has produced many well-known Italian American popular singers and musicians, including:Tony Mottola (famous for the "Tony Mottola" or "Danger" Chord), Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Mario Lanza, Al Martino, Jim Croce, Fabian Forte, Joey DeFrancesco, Buddy DeFranco, Fred Diodati (lead singer of The Four Aces), Buddy Greco, Charlie Ventura, Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, Mark Valentino and Vinnie Paz, Vincent "Jimmy Saunders" LaSpada.
The North End in Boston since the early 20th century became the center of the Italian community of Boston. It is still largely residential and well known for its small, authentic Italian restaurants and for the first Italian cafe, Caffe Vittoria. The influx of Italian inhabitants has left a lasting mark on the area; many seminal Italian American.[255] Prince Pasta was begun by three Sicilian immigrants Gaetano LaMarco, Giuseppe Seminara, and Michele Cantella. Pastene was formed by Sicilian immigrant Luigi Pastene. Both companies have grown into million-dollar-a-year businesses, and continue to be successful to the present day. To fully understand the sheer size of the Italian immigrant population, one must look back at the groups that preceded them. The Irish, at their peak, numbered roughly 14,000 and the Jews numbered 17,000. The Italians, however, peaked at over 44,000.[255]
In its heyday, Seventh Avenue in Newark was one of the largest Little Italy neighborhoods in the U.S., with a population of 30,000, in an area of less than a square mile. The center of life in the neighborhood was St. Lucy's Church, founded by Italian immigrants in 1891. Throughout the year, St. Lucy's and other churches sponsored processions in honor of saints that became community events. The most famous procession was the Feast of St. Gerard, but there were also great feasts for Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Our Lady of Snow, the Assumption, and St. Rocco. Joe DiMaggio loved the restaurants of Seventh Avenue so much that he would take the New York Yankees to Newark to show them "real Italian food". Frank Sinatra had bread from Giordano's Bakery sent to him every week until his death, no matter where in the world he was. New York Yankees catcher Rick Cerone also grew up in the First Ward. One of the nation's largest Italian newspapers, The Italian Tribune, was founded on Seventh Avenue. Seventh Avenue produced stars such as Joe Pesci and Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons. Congressman Peter Rodino, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee during its impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon was a native of the First Ward as well. Seventh Avenue was notoriously devastated by urban renewal efforts during the 1950s. Eighth Avenue was obliterated by the city council, scattering the Italian American residents. Most of its businesses never recovered. The construction of Interstate 280 also served to cut the neighborhood off from the rest of the city. After the devastating urban renewal, some of the First Ward's Italians stayed in the neighborhood, while others migrated to other Newark neighborhoods like Broadway, Roseville and the Ironbound. [256]
The neighborhood around Chicago's Taylor Street has been called the port of call for Chicago's Italian American immigrants.[257] Taylor Street's Little Italy was home to Hull House, an early settlement house, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Starr in 1889. Chicago's Italian American experience begins with the mass migration from the shores of southern Italy, the Hull House experiment, the Great Depression, World War II, and the machinations behind the physical demise of a neighborhood by the University of Illinois in 1963.
Italian Americans dominated the inner core of the Hull House neighborhood, 1890s–1930s.[258] One of the first newspaper articles about Hull House (Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1890) is an invitation, written in Italian, to the residents of the Hull House neighborhood signed, "Le Signorine, Jane Addams and Ellen Starr".
The 1924 historic picture, Meet the "Hull House Kids", was taken by Wallace K. Kirkland Sr., one of the Hull House directors. It served as a poster for Jane Addams and the Hull House Settlement House. All twenty kids were first generation Italian Americans...all with vowels at the end of their names.
As suburbs grew in the post-World War II era, Chicago's Italian American population spread from the central city, such as to Elmwood Park. Harlem Avenue, "La Corsa Italia", is lined with Italian stores, bakeries, clubs and organizations. The Feast of our Lady of Mount Carmel, in nearby Melrose Park, has been a regular event in the area for more than one hundred years. The near-west suburbs of Melrose Park, Schiller Park, Franklin Park, River Grove, Norridge, Chicago Heights, and Harwood Heights are also home to many Italian Americans. West suburban Stone Park is home of Casa Italia, an Italian American cultural center.
Northwest of Chicago, the city of Rockford has a large population of Italian Americans. Other historical Italian American communities in Illinois include Peoria, Ottawa, Herrin, Quad Cities and the Metro East suburbs of Saint Louis, Missouri.
Italians first came to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the late 19th century. Then in the 19th and 20th centuries large numbers of Italian immigrants began to come in mainly from Sicily and southern Italy. Brady Street, the historic Third Ward and the east side of Milwaukee is considered the heart of Italian immigration to the city, where as many as 20 Italian grocery stores once existed on Brady Street alone. Every year the largest Italian American festival in the United States, Festa Italiana, takes place in Milwaukee. Italian Americans number at around 16,992 in the city, but in Milwaukee County they number at 38,286.[259] There is also an Italian newspaper called The Italian Times printed by the Italian Community Center (ICC).
Italian immigrants from the northern Italian region of Lombardy came to St. Louis in the late 19th century and settled in the region called The Hill. As the city grew, immigrants from Southern Italy settled in a different neighborhood north of Downtown St Louis. Professional baseball players Joe Garagiola and his boyhood friend, Yogi Berra, grew up on The Hill. Americans of Italian descent in St. Louis have contributed to local cuisine, i.e. Imo's Pizza and toasted ravioli. As of 2021 there are approximately 2,000 native born Italians living in St. Louis, few of whom live in The Hill neighborhood. Italians today live mostly throughout the St. Louis metropolitan region. The Italian Community of St. Louis (Comunita' Italiana di St. Louis), an organization which promotes the Italian language and culture, has several popular events which include Carnevale[260] which occurs every February and Ferragosto which occurs each August. The St. Louis Italian Language Program also exists on the Hill at Gateway Science Academy on Fyler Avenue.[261]
Los Angeles is home to the largest Italian American community in California (and on the West Coast), with 95,300 people identifying as Italian American.[262] San Pedro is Los Angeles's Little Italy, which is estimated to contain some 45,000 Italian-Americans. Most worked as fisherman during the first half of the 20th century. The traditional center of Los Angeles' Italian American community was the area north of the historic Los Angeles Plaza. It survived somewhat intact until the construction of Los Angeles Union Station, in 1939. The station was built in the center of Los Angeles' Old Chinatown, displacing half of the total Chinese community. The Chinese were allowed to relocate to Little Italy, where they quickly outnumbered the Italian community. Only a few relic-businesses survive, such as San Antonio Winery (the only winery, out of 92, to survive prohibition).[263] The Italian American Museum of Los Angeles opened in 2016 in the historic Italian Hall.[264] Lincoln Heights, northeast of Little Italy, also was a center of the Italian-American population in Los Angeles.
According to the 1940 census, 18.5% of all European immigrants were Italian, the largest in the city. North Beach is San Francisco's Little Italy, and has historically been home to a large Italian American population. The American Planning Association (APA) has named North Beach as one of ten 'Great Neighborhoods in America'.[265]
The first ethnic Italian in Detroit was Alphonse Tonty (Italian name: Alfonso Tonti), a Frenchman with an Italian immigrant father. He was the second-in-command of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who established Detroit in 1701. Tonti's child, born in 1703, was the first ethnic European child born in Detroit. Tonti became the commander of the Detroit fort after Cadillac left to return to France.
In order to preserve the fur trade, the French administrators and the British administrators discouraged immigration, so the Italian population had slow growth. Growth in immigration increased after Detroit became a part of the United States and the Erie Canal had been constructed. Armando Delicato, author of Italians in Detroit, wrote that Italian immigration to Detroit "lagged behind other cities in the East".
In 1904 the City of Detroit had 900 Italians. In Metro Detroit there were several thousand ethnic Italians by 1900. The concentrations of the population lived in Eastern Market and east of the area presently known as Greektown. Of those Italians in 1900 most originated from Genoa, Lombardy, and Sicily. Some Italians stayed in Detroit temporarily before traveling onwards to mines in northern Michigan.
The increase in the automobile industry resulted in the increase of the Italian population in the 20th century. By 1925, the number of Italians in the City of Detroit increased to 42,000. The historical center of Detroit's Italian-American community was in an area along Gratiot Avenue, east of Downtown Detroit. During that period, Italian immigrants and their children lived throughout the City of Detroit, and several neighborhoods had concentrations of Italian immigrants. There were larger numbers of southern Italians than those from the north. Armando Delicato, author of Italians in Detroit, wrote that "Unlike many other American cities, no region of Italy was totally dominant in this area". Steve Babson, author of Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town, wrote that "Many northern Italians, coming from an urban and industrialized society, had little in common with local Sicilians, who came from the rural and clannish south." In Detroit's history, within the crafts Italians concentrated on tileworking.
During World War II, Fort Wayne (Detroit) served as home to Italian prisoners of war (POWs) captured during the North African campaign. After Italy's surrender in September 1943, the POWs were given the opportunity to work as servants, cooks, and janitors. At the end of the war many chose to remain and settle in Detroit.
As of 1951, Detroit had about 150,000 Italians.
The National Italian American Foundation estimated that in 1990, Metro Detroit had 280,000 ethnic Italians. As of 2005 the closest remaining large Little Italy near Detroit was Via Italia in Windsor, Ontario and there was a group of remaining Italian shops and restaurants along Garfield Road in Clinton Township. In 2005 Delicato wrote that "Unlike some other national groups, like the Poles, who still look to Hamtramck, or the Mexicans, who have Mexicantown, Italian Detroiters no longer have a geographical center".
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Cleveland's Little Italy, also known as Murray Hill, is the epicenter of Italian culture in Northeast Ohio, a combined statistical area reporting 285,000 (9.9%)[266] Italian Americans.[267] Little Italy took root when Joseph Carabelli, immigrating in 1880, saw the opportunity for monument work in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery and established what soon became the city's leading marble and granite works. Most fresco and mosaic work in Cleveland was accomplished by Italian artist immigrants.[268] Local Cleveland industrial billionaire John D. Rockefeller took a special liking to the Italian immigrants of the neighborhood and commissioned the building of the community center Alta House, named after his daughter Alta Rockefeller Prentice, in 1900. In 1906, Italian immigrant Angelo Vitantonio invented the first hand-crank pasta machine, which made pasta much easier to produce by eliminating the need to flatten and cut it by hand.[269] Some other famous Italian Americans from Northeast Ohio included Anthony J. Celebrezze (49th Mayor of Cleveland), Ettore "Hector" Boiardi (Chef Boyardee), Frank Battisti (Federal Judge), and Dean Martin, born Dino Paul Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio.
Ohio's largest outdoor Italian American street festival, the Feast of the Assumption (Festa dell'assunzione), takes place the weekend of August 15 every year and draws over 100,000 people to the Little Italy neighborhood.[270] The festival is sponsored by the congregation of Holy Rosary Church, which was founded in 1892 with the current church built in 1905.
Attracted by employment in its growing railroad and meat packing industries, Italians primarily from Calabria and Sicily immigrated to Kansas City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Kansas City's Calabrese mainly passed through the port of New York, sometimes stopping in industrial cities like Pittsburgh along the way, en route to their final destination in the Midwest. Meanwhile, Kansas City's Sicilian community generally came through the port of New Orleans, staying there for a decade or more before bringing their families north. In Kansas City, these communities settled close to one another, often overlapping: the Sicilians taking root in what is now known as the River Market and Columbus Park neighborhoods, and the Calabrese mainly settling in the adjacent "Old Northeast" area.
Economics in Louisiana and Sicily combined to bring about what became known as the Great Migration of thousands of Sicilians. The end of the Civil War allowed the freed men the choice to stay or to go, many chose to leave for higher paying jobs, which in turn led to a perceived scarcity of labor resources for the planters. Northern Italy enjoyed the fruits of modern industrialization, while southern Italy and Sicily suffered destitute conditions under the system of absentee landowners. The peasant was still essentially the serf in the system. Emigration not only offered peasants a chance to move beyond subsistence living, it also offered them a chance to pursue their own dreams of proprietorship as farmers or other business owners. On March 17, 1866, the Louisiana Bureau of Immigration was formed and planters began to look to Sicily as a possible solution to their labor needs. Steamship companies advertisements were very effective in recruiting potential workers. Three steamships per month were running between New Orleans and Sicily by September 1881 at a cost of only forty dollars per person.
In 1890 the ethnic Irish chief of police, David Hennessy was assassinated. Suspicion fell on Italians, whose growing numbers in the city made other whites nervous. The March 14, 1891 New Orleans lynchings were the largest ever mass lynchings in Louisiana history. The use of the term "mafia" by local media in relation to the murder is the first-known usage of the word in print.
Italian immigrants first came to the area around Syracuse, New York (a city named for Siracusa, Sicily) in 1883 after providing labor for the construction of the West Shore Railroad. At first, they were quite transient and came and went, but eventually settled down on the Northside.[271] By 1899, the Italian immigrants were living on the Northside of the city in the area centered around Pearl Street.[272] The Italians all but supplanted the Germans in that area of the city and had their own business district along North State and North Salina Streets.[273] By September 2009, Syracuse's Little Italy district received millions of dollars of public and private investment for new sidewalks, streetscapes, landscaping, lighting and to set up a "Green Train" program, which trains men to work in green construction and renovation industries.[274] In recent years, the neighborhood is a mix of Italian shops, restaurants and businesses that cater to the area's South Asian and African population. Although the neighborhood is far less Italian than in past years, banners throughout the district still read Little Italy.[275] By 2010, demographics showed that 14.1% of the population in Syracuse was Italian descent.[276]
Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, is best known for its Italian American community and abundance of restaurants. The first two decades of the 20th century witnessed heavy Italian American immigration into Federal Hill. Though the area today is more diverse, Federal Hill still retains its status as the traditional center for the city's Italian American community. The neighborhood features a huge square dedicated to Giuseppe Garibaldi, a monumental gateway arch decorated with La Pigna sculpture (a traditional Italian symbol of welcome, abundance, and quality) and a DePasquale Plaza used for outdoor dining. Providence's annual Columbus Day parade marches down Atwells Avenue.
The community of Ybor City in Tampa, Florida is a cigar-centric company town founded in 1885 and originally populated by a unique mix of Spanish, Cuban, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, with most of the Italians coming from a small group of villages in southwestern Sicily. At first, Italians found it difficult to find employment in the insular and guild-like cigar industry, which had moved to Tampa from Cuba and Key West and was dominated by Hispanic workers. Many founded businesses to serve cigar workers, most notably small grocery stores in the neighborhood's commercial district supplied by Italian-owned vegetable and dairy farms located on open land east of Tampa's city limits.[277] The immigrant cultures in town became better integrated as time went by; eventually, approximately 20% of the workers in the cigar industry were Italian Americans. The tradition of local Italian-owned groceries continued, however, and a handful of such businesses founded in the late 1800s were still operating into the 21st century.[278] Many descendants of Sicilian immigrants eventually became prominent local citizens, such as mayors Nick Nuccio and Dick Greco.
Birmingham, Alabama, was representative of smaller industrial centers. Most Italians in the early 20th century came to work in the burgeoning iron and coal industries. Dorothy L. Crim founded the Ensley Community House in the Italian district in 1912 at the behest of the Birmingham City Mission Board. From 1912 to 1969, Ensley House eased the often difficult transition to American life by providing direct assistance such as youth programs and day care services, social clubs, and 'Americanization' programs.[279]
Historically, Little Italy in San Diego was the home to Italian fishermen and their families. Many Italians moved to San Diego from San Francisco after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in search of tuna and other deep-sea sport and commercial fish.[280] When Interstate 5 was constructed through Little Italy in the early 1970s, 35% of the neighborhood was destroyed and during the same time the California tuna industry was declining, which caused the neighborhood to suffer nearly 30 years of decline.[281] With the creation of the Little Italy Association in 1996, the neighborhood has gone through gentrification and has seen a renaissance as Community Benefit District specializing in Italian food, boutique shopping and maintenance that makes this shopping district the place to live in Downtown San Diego. Prior to gentrification, the neighborhood was mainly composed of low-density commercial businesses and single-family detached homes. Currently, the neighborhood is mainly composed of residential units, mostly mid-rises, high-rises, and lofts, with ground floor retail stores and a few commercial buildings.
Tens of thousands of Italians came to West Virginia during the late 1800s and early 1900s to work in the coal camps. As pick-and-shovel miners, Italians hold most of the state's coal production records. One Carmine Pellegrino mined 66 tons of coal by hand in a 24-hour period.[282] Italian miners created the pepperoni roll, a popular snack throughout the region. Many of these immigrants left for larger cities once they earned enough money, but some of their descendants remain, particularly in the north central counties. The communities of Clarksburg, Wheeling, and Bluefield each hold their own annual Italian Heritage Festival. Fairmont puts on a street festival every December that pays homage to the Feast of the Seven Fishes, an Italian tradition of eating seafood dishes on Christmas Eve instead of meat. The senior U.S. senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, is of Italian descent.
There was a historical trend of immigration of Italians into the U.S. state of Arkansas in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Austin Corbin, the owner of the Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, within the Arkansas Delta region, decided to employ Italians there during the post-Reconstruction period. The Mayor of Rome, Don Emanuele Ruspoli, connected to Corbin, found potential employees who originated in Emilia-Romagna, Marche, and Veneto, convincing them to go to Sunnyside. 98 families boarded the Chateau Yquem in Genoa with New Orleans as the destination. In November 1895, the ship docked in the United States, and the surviving passengers traveled onward to Sunnyside. The climate and drinking water conditions were difficult. A descendant of these Italians, Libby Borgognoni, stated that 125 of them died during the first year of operations. Corbin had misrepresented the nature of the plantation to the potential employees. Italians came to Sunnyside even after Corbin's death in 1896.
Italians later moved from the Arkansas Delta to the Ozarks, establishing Tontitown.[283]
Italians began to settle in Baltimore during the late 1800s. Some Italian immigrants came to the Port of Baltimore by boat. The earliest Italian settlers in Baltimore were sailors from Genoa, the capital city of the Italian region of Liguria, who arrived during the 1840s and 1850s. Later immigrants came from Naples, Abruzzo, Cefalù, and Palermo. These immigrants created the monument to Christopher Columbus in Druid Hill Park.[284] Many other Italians came by train after entering the country through New York City's Ellis Island. Italian immigrants who arrived by train would enter the city through the President Street Station. Because of this, Italians largely settled in a nearby neighborhood that is now known as Little Italy.
Little Italy comprises six blocks bounded by Pratt Street to the North, the Inner Harbor to the South, Eden Street to the East, and President Street to the West. Other neighborhoods where large numbers of Italians settled include Lexington, Belair-Edison, and Cross Street. Many settled along Lombard Street, which was named after the Italian town of Guardia Lombardi. The Italian community, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, established a number of Italian American parishes such as St. Leo's Church and Our Lady of Pompeii Church. The Our Lady of Pompeii Church holds the annual Highlandtown Wine Festival, which celebrates Italian-American culture and benefits the Highlandtown community association.[285]
The August 2016 Central Italy earthquake affected Baltimore's Italian community, as many Baltimore Italian-Americans have friends or relatives living in Italy. Most Italians in Baltimore are of Southern or Central Italian descent, especially from Abruzzo, a region of Southern Italy close to the epicenter of the earthquake. St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Little Italy held a vigil and sent prayers to the victims and survivors of the earthquake.[286]
Italians have settled in the state of Mississippi since colonial times, although numbers have increased over the years. Since the 18th and mainly the 19th century, Italian settlers have been located in cities and towns across Mississippi. In 1554, Mississippi began to have a real Italian presence, because of the Hernando de Soto expedition. The first Italians who visited Mississippi came in explorations conducted by the French and Spanish governments.
In the 19th century, many Italians entered the United States in New Orleans and traveled onwards to Mississippi.[287] Over 100 immigrants lived in Mississippi as the American Civil War started. In the late 19th century, Italian immigration increased in the United States, which made a tremendous impact on the area.[288] Some of them went to work in the so-called "Mississippi Delta" in the cotton plantations, and even helped the development of the blues music with their mandolins.
The late 19th century saw the arrival of larger numbers of Italian immigrants who left Italy seeking economic opportunities. Some Italians from Sicily settled as families along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in Biloxi, Ocean Springs, and Gulfport, preserving close ties with those in their homeland. They worked in the fishing and canning industries. Others were merchants, operating grocery stores, liquor stores, and tobacco shops. Biloxi's prosperous tourist industry in the early 20th century created opportunities for ambitious young (Italian) men ... Italians also settled in the Mississippi Delta. The first immigrants came there in the 1880s, working to repair levees and staying as hired farm laborers on plantations. Some of these families became peddlers selling goods to farmers. In 1895, the first Italians came to the Sunnyside Plantation, across the Mississippi River in the Arkansas Delta. That plantation would become the stopping off place for many Italian settlers along both sides of the river. They were mostly from central Italy and experienced in farm work. — Charles Reagan Wilson (University of Mississippi)[This quote needs a citation]
Large numbers of Italians first came to Colorado in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some settled in industrial Pueblo or in Welby, which was then a farming community, but the largest Italian community in twentieth century Colorado was in Northwest Denver, or as it was known at the time, "the North Side" or "North Denver."[289]
Italians first put down roots there because St. Patrick's Catholic Church, a largely Irish-descended congregation, already existed in the neighborhood. In 1894, the Italian community on the North Side formed its own Catholic church called Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.[289] The community remained strong through the early twentieth century, but in the decades after World War II, many Italian-Americans left Denver proper. Today, descendants of the old North Side Italian-American community are spread across metro Denver, particularly in its inner northwestern suburbs like Wheat Ridge, Westminster and Arvada.[290] The Sons of Italy's Denver-area lodge is on 32nd Avenue in Wheat Ridge.[291] Many Italian Americans without deep roots in Colorado have also settled in the Denver area and other parts of the state throughout the last decades of the twentieth century and in the new millennium.
Reminders of the old Italian community in Northwest Denver are few and far between today. Many of the remaining landmarks are on 38th Avenue. One is Gaetano's, a storied Italian American eatery on 38th Avenue and Tejon Street once owned by the Smaldone family, which was involved in bootlegging in Denver.[292] Many members of the Italian-American community in Northwest Denver could trace their roots to Potenza, a comune in Basilicata. A fraternal organization called the Potenza Lodge was founded in 1899 and still exists today on the corner of Shoshone Street and 38th Avenue.[293] Leprino Foods, a company founded by a Denver Italian-American which makes mozzarella cheese and other dairy products, has its global headquarters on 38th Avenue across Shoshone Street from the Potenza Lodge.[294]
Our Lady of Mt. Carmel is still important to some Italian-American families with roots in Northwest Denver, but there are Catholic churches with sizable Italian-American populations spread throughout the Denver area today.
There is a significant Italian American community in Las Vegas.[295]
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In the 2000 U.S. census, Italian Americans constituted the fifth largest ancestry group in America with about 15.6 million people, 5.6% of the total U.S. population.[10] As of 2006, the U.S. census estimated the Italian American population at 17.8 million persons, or 6% of the population,[296][297] constituting a 14% increase over the six-year period.
In 2010, the American Community Survey enumerated Americans reporting Italian ancestry at nearly 17.6 million, 5.8% of the U.S. population; in 2015, 17.3 million, 5.5% of the population. A decade thereafter, in 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau recorded slightly more than 16.5 million Americans reporting full or partial Italian ancestry, about 5.1% of the U.S. population.[298][2][3] As ancestry is self-reported, the decline in Italian identification in the 21st century may merely reflect growing Americanization and cultural assimilation of Italian Americans into the broader identity of White Americans, with younger generations increasingly intermixed with other European Americans: the number of Americans who reported being solely of Italian ancestry alone fell by 928,044—from 7,183,882 in 2010 to 6,652,806 in 2015 to 5,724,762 in 2020.[299][300][301] However, by contrast, the number of Americans who reported being of Italian ancestry mixed with another ancestry grew by 436,334—from 10,387,926 in 2010 to 10,632,691 in 2015 to 10,824,260 in 2020.[302][303][304]
U.S. states number and percentage Italian American in 2020[305][298][306][307]
The top 20 U.S. communities with the highest percentage of people claiming Italian ancestry are:[315]
Translated by Jefferson as follow:Tutti gli uomini sono per natura egualmente liberi e indipendenti. Quest'eguaglianza è necessaria per costituire un governo libero. Bisogna che ognuno sia uguale all'altro nel diritto naturale.
All men are by nature equally free and independent. Such equality is necessary in order to create a free government.
All men must be equal to each other in natural law
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)Chicago Press, 1943) focus on gangs in "Cornerville" (Boston's North End).
