Italian American

Introduction

Nearly 16 million strong, Italian Americans are often identified with the tide of poor immigrants who arrived in the early 20th century and built cohesive communities in large cities. Italians, however, were coming to this continent before the United States existed as an independent nation: among them, explorers, artists, and educators. This entry explores the full range of the Italian presence in the United States, with a particular focus on how the immigrant community related to the mainstream culture during more than a century.

Discussion

History

The presence of Italians in what would become the United States begins with explorers and adventurers who journeyed here almost 5 centuries before Italy itself united and became a modern nation.

Social Patterns

In adapting to life in the United States, Italians continued to rely primarily on their extended families (la famiglia). Relatives were their principal focus of social life, and they usually regarded non-Italians as outsiders, rarely developing true interethnic friendships. Moreover, they did not encourage individual achievement, which was a U.S. tradition. More important were family honor, group stability, and social cohesion and cooperation. Each member of the family was expected to contribute to the economic well-being of the family unit.

In the old country, absentee landowners had commonly exploited Italian tenant farmers, as priests and educators silently supported this inequitable system, rarely welcoming peasant children in the schools. Landowner resistance to the political unification of Italy, which finally occurred in 1871, further increased the hardships of tenant farmers and small landholders. Consequently, Italian immigrants generally mistrusted priests and educated people.

In the United States, as in Italy, the common people—especially males—had little involvement with the church. In the early 20th century, for the most part, Irish priests staffed the churches in the Italian immigrant neighborhoods. These priests typically practiced—at least as the Italians perceived—a strange and harsh form of Catholicism, thus making them less receptive to clergy for whom they felt no affinity. In turn, the Irish priests had little empathy for the extensive veneration of the Madonna and local saints that the Italians displayed.

Similarly, Italian newcomers regarded education as having only limited practical value. Their children thus typically attended school for just as long as the law demanded and then, under their parents' encouragement, went to work to increase the family income. A few families did not follow this pattern, but most second-generation Italian Americans who attended college did so against the wishes of their families.

Furthermore, the outside world was one of deprivation and exploitation. Not only did their employers exploit them with low wages for long hours under harsh working conditions, but often so did one of their own—the padrone or agent who acted as their representative in the labor market. Seeking help from elsewhere was unlikely, for Italians were reluctant to approach the non-Italians who ran the social agencies and the political machines. Surrounded by strangeness, the immigrants tried to retain the self-sufficiency of the family circle as much as they could. They also founded a number of community organizations that supported ...