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Conclusion Monterey, California, is a special place. It is richly diverse, both culturally and environmentally, offering scholars a unique opportunity to peer into a microcosm, to explore a complex process such as immigration in a remarkable but manageable milieu. Once the capital of Alta California,Monterey soon became less important politically, but its economic significance grew, primarily for its role in commercial fishing, which linked California to global markets. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Monterey attracted a host of immigrant fishing people looking for new resources. Chinese came looking for abalone, Russians hunted sea otters, while Portuguese hunted whales all before 1900. Japanese abalone divers and Italian and Slovenian salmon and deep-sea fishermen found a rich and diverse natural environment well into the twentieth century. Immigrant peoples discovered that Monterey was conducive to settlement and family life as well. A mild climate and beautiful landscape attracted people used to living near the sea.Although Monterey was always populated, beginning with Native Americans and continuing with Mexicans and Spanish colonialists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenthand twentieth-century immigrations of fishing people created a diversity of population that kept society from becoming stultified. Instead, Monterey felt both welcoming and fluid to new immigrants, with what appeared to be unlimited economic opportunity in fish species. By the first part of the century and certainly by mid-century,Monterey became not only a demographic mix, pulling diverse peoples into a new and heterogeneous mainstream, but also an urban center with ethnic enclaves, with Sicilian immigrants as the most prominent. 06.conc.118-126_McKib.indd฀฀฀118 10/27/05฀฀฀4:08:47฀PM ฀ Conclusion฀ 119 By 1915 the economic downturn in Sicily was growing ever more serious. Sicilians discovered that their native fish species, sardines, were available in abundance in Monterey Bay, and they too joined the migration streams of ethnic fishing peoples eagerly exploiting Monterey’s plentiful resources.Then they did something different from everyone else. They drove a collective stake into Monterey that accomplished two goals: (1) redefining Sicilian immigrants as a new community of ethnic fishers,and (2) redefining Monterey as part of Sicilian cultural heritage. I focused on the Sicilian experience in Monterey to show why and how immigration can be a deliberate process in community building and ethnic identity formation. First and foremost, I argue that women were central to every part of the process of forging and maintaining an ethnic identity; building community; and responding to all sorts of political, social, economic , and familial challenges in the course of the settlement experience beginning in 1915 and continuing into the present day. In turn, the community made room for women to act independently, even encouraged them to play central roles in everything from household finances to public displays of ethnic identity in the Santa Rosalia Festa. The period between 1915 and 1970 was a time when forces came together to alter a people, Sicilian migrant fisherpeople, and a landscape, the city of Monterey,forever.Two world wars created huge demands for canned sardines to feed the military and also connected Monterey to national as well as global markets. In spite of increasingly restrictive legislation, immigrants flooded into California in this period and supplied the new sardine industry with a cheap, reliable labor force, which included women in the canneries and men on the fishing boats. The Sicilian people who migrated to Monterey during this time came from specific, economically depressed villages on the west coast of Sicily. They made decisions to move based on a long history as migrant fisherpeople. Sicilian fisherwomen eagerly participated in this particular migration because Monterey presented a uniquely hospitable environment for them as women, as laborers, and as those experienced in the ways of fishing. From the moment of decision to migrate, Sicilian fisherwomen participated actively in the long-term processes of migration and settlement in crucial ways. Their efforts resulted in a permanently altered life for themselves and their families, and in a changed Monterey. They created an identity as Sicilian fisherpeople and kept it—even as they changed from being migrants to immigrants,from fisherpeople, in fact, to fisherpeople mostly in memory. Sicilian women and men purposefully changed Monterey as well, from a village of native borns to an industrialized city of working-class immigrant groups. They viewed that transformation as progress. Sicilians shared an 06.conc.118-126_McKib.indd฀฀฀119 10/27/05฀฀฀4:08:48฀PM [3.145.186.6] Project...

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