Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California

6. The Ethnic Edge: The Economy of Matrimonial Strategies and Family Culture

 115  chapter six The Ethnic Edge The Economy of Matrimonial Strategies and Family Culture This chapter and the following two examine how Piedmontese winemakers Pietro Carlo Rossi, Secondo Guasti, and the Gallo brothers attempted to create and then dominate a mass wine market in the United States by investing in various family, community, and ethnic relational networks and by exercising sensibilities, expectations, and visions of the world that were rooted in their ethnic heritage. These immigrant winemakers had little choice but to accumulate such social and cultural capital, and use their imaginations to make the most of it, due to their late arrival on the California wine scene and their lack of significant startup capital or winemaking skills. Their behavior and mentality represented a unique combination of attitudes that had been shaped in the rural culture of Piedmont, on the one hand, and new, original responses to the socioeconomic conditions they encountered in California. The latter included an enthusiasm for the kind of Americanism that was defined by the individual pursuit of economic success, capitalism, the mass market, and a positivistic faith in technology and innovation. As with their “cooperative 116  The Ethnic Edge spirit,” addressed in chapter 4, the concentrated investment in social and cultural capital of Piedmontese winemakers was only one of the reasons they stood out among other, equally motivated competitors, though it did characterize and propel their agency to a significant degree. Marriage choices and strategies represented one of the most popular ways for Piedmont-born immigrants to build their social capital, as proven by their remarkably high rates of endogamy. The biographical entries included in Cleto Baroni’s Gente italiana in California (Italian People in California) and the interviews collected in Maurizio Rosso’s Piemontesi nel Far West (The Piedmontese in the Far West) both reveal that the vast majority of immigrants from this region who arrived in California in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries chose spouses who were also born in Piedmont. Some of the male immigrants even returned to Italy for the sole purpose of marrying a woman from their hometown and bringing her back with them to California. Endogamy among Piedmontese immigrants was partly the consequence of a deep-seated rural culture that disapproved of marriage to people from other towns or villages—worse yet from other Italian regions. Such unions were considered a dangerous personal hazard and a threat to the native community, which would be impoverished by the loss of someone eligible for continuing social reproduction. Not only did a number of nineteenth-century Piedmontese proverbs stigmatize marriage with “foreigners,” but in some parts of the region, those who violated endogamy rules were subjected to an age-old ritual of public mockery and verbal abuse known throughout the subalpine area as the ciabra or the scampanata .1 In California, however, such traditional attitudes were also attended by limited access to other brides or grooms due to differences in language, ethnicity, religion, class, and neighborhood. The Ethnic Edge  117 In the specific case of those who entered the wine trade, the inclination toward endogamy coincided with matrimonial strategies meant to optimize available resources and join forces between families active in the same trade. The marriages of Pietro Carlo Rossi with Amélie Caire and Secondo Guasti with Louisa Amillo were crucial for the two men’s careers: not only did their wives guarantee them new and important social connections, but they also turned out to be excellent business partners. Another relevant example is the case of Edoardo Seghesio, whom Pietro Carlo Rossi summoned to Asti, California, in 1886 (the two had grown up together in Dogliani, and Rossi’s father’s second wife was a Seghesio ). In 1892, Edoardo was about to return to Dogliani to look for a wife when the daughter of Luigi Vasconi, the Italian Swiss Colony ’s head winemaker at the time, arrived in Asti, California, from her birthplace on Lake Maggiore. The two families arranged a wedding shortly thereafter. By 1902, Edoardo and Angela Seghesio had used their family resources to open a winery that is still running today, led by a third generation of Seghesios.2 One of Edoardo and Angela’s daughters also married Enrico Prati, the superintendent at Asti in the late 1910s who later (in 1923) bought the entire block of Italian Swiss Colony shares with brothers Edmund and Robert Rossi.3 Not long after Edoardo Seghesio...