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I have been down to America today.” Enrico Sartorio overheard this phrase more than once in the early decades of the twentieth century, uttered by Italian women who had ventured a few blocks outside of the ethnic enclave where they lived.1 Lillian Betts studied Italian immigrants in the Mulberry Street area of New York City in the early 1900s and noted that “within this limit of territory . . . all worked, all their social affiliations were established and it was all of America they knew.”2 Sartorio saw this isolation as a form of self-preservation; “as soon as they step outside of the Italian colony they are almost as helpless as babies, owing to their lack of knowledge of the language, customs and laws of this country.”3 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes immigrants to France using tactics to adapt their neighborhoods to their needs. “A North African living in Paris or Roubaix (France),” he says, “insinuates into the system imposed on him by the construction of a low-income housing development or of the French language the ways of ‘dwelling’ (in a house or a language) peculiar to his native Kabylia. He . . . creates for himself a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language.” Forced into poor living conditions in cities by both economics and prejudice, Italian immigrants adapted to the constraints placed on them. They re-created the familiar elements of the villages and towns of their home country; established bakeries, macaroni shops, stores that sold Italian wine and oil; and re-created rituals, such as religious festivals and processions that honored patron saints.4 Even behavior patterns were transplanted to the new world. Observed one inhabitant, “People do exactly as they did in Cinisi. . . . [I]f someone varies, he or she will be criticized.”5 According to de Certeau and Pierre Mayol, “as a 97 Going to “America”  Italian Neighborhoods and the Newark Free Public Library, 1900–1920 ellen m. pozzi “ result of the practical everyday use of this space” the public space of the neighborhood becomes a “private, particularized space.”6 The public streets and shops became a private space that extended immigrants’ limited living spaces. According to Pozzetta, “streets were the meeting places providing a setting for an intricate network of social relationships.”7 Inside the boundaries of the ethnic enclave, and within the private, public spaces that provided the physical space for the creation of networks, there existed a conceptual space for gathering information, coexistent with the geographical enclave, or what can be called an information neighborhood.8 The Italian neighborhoods of Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1900s contained the various sources, or information nodes, that comprised an information neighborhood, including print and oral material available in libraries, bookstores, newspapers, and religious or other institutions; from social support services; passed on by friends, acquaintances, or community leaders; and circulated through ethnic communication networks. Situating the library within the information neighborhood creates a framework for understanding the library in the life of immigrants and answering Wayne A. Wiegand’s call to write about the “role of the library in the life of the user” rather than the “role of the user in the life of the library.”9 Exploring the information neighborhood provides a way to approach the study of immigrant library users from their perspective. Enclaves As Italian immigration to the United States burgeoned in the 1880s and continued to grow in the early twentieth century, enclaves known as Little Italies began to appear in cities, including Newark, New Jersey. From the 1880s to the 1920s, the Italian portion of Newark’s population grew from one of the smallest to one of the largest, outpacing even the earlier German settlement, and by 1920 the city had the fifth-largest Italian population in the United States, even though Newark was not ranked in the top ten most populated cities; only New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston had larger Italian populations.10 The Italians near the business center of Newark settled in three main enclaves as shown in a map produced in 1911 detailing their locations and sizes.11 The First Ward was the home of the first Italians who settled in Newark. Another large enclave along the Passaic River was nicknamed the Ironbound or Down Neck section. The smallest neighborhood, home to later arrivals, only a few streets wide and deep, was referred to as the 14th Avenue...

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