Italian Voices: Making Minnesota Our Home

Chapter 4. The Boarders

· 4 · The Boarders Ad ogni uccello il suo nido a bello. To each bird his own nest is beautiful. Italian proverb The custom of having boarders was generally unknown in Italy. In the rural areas, stranieri (strangers) were not admitted into the closeknit family circle. When my grandmothers, Vittoria and Maria, came to America, having boarders was something new to them, as it was to many other Italian women. Among them was Marietta Brama, who arrived from Orsano, Umbria, in 93 with a baby and a young child. She did not expect to find that her new home was a shack complete with boarders; to her surprise, “I found six men to take care of! Then for many years, I cook and clean, I sew and wash the men’s clothes for three dollars [each] month! My husband got [the] bordanti—he found [them] before I come here!” Very few immigrants could live on the household head’s wages, and taking in boarders was often both a necessary supplement to a meager family income and the only income option available to immigrant women.1 The Italian boardinghouse thrived wherever there were men who needed someone to cook their food, wash and patch their clothes, and provide a bed after a grueling ten-hour workday. Because many Italian men immigrated alone, there was a steady supply of boarders . The boardinghouse system was a practical substitute for normal family, social, and cultural patterns. In both large and small communities, Italian immigrants lived in Italian boardinghouses, 77 usually with a padrona (female boss), sometimes with a padrone (male boss). Minnesota’s Italians generally did not have boardinghouses in the ordinary sense of the word but “kept” boarders, who lived with the family in their own home—convitto (family-style) arrangement on an individual basis, as Antoinette DeBenardi Thompson of Ely termed it. Because the mining companies in northern Minnesota and Michigan owned the land, controlled housing rentals, and were aware of the huge need for places to board unattached workers, many married Iron Range miners could find work or rent a home only if their wives took boarders. Elio Varani, whose mother Rosilia kept boarders from 909 to 950 in Eveleth, noted that the men preferred this to having their wives work outside the home.2 Living conditions were extremely primitive in most mining locations on the Iron Range, with no gas or electricity, running water, or other modern comforts. Varani recalled sleeping in a frigid bedroom with frost-covered blankets, peeking through ice-glazed windows, and running downstairs to dress by the house’s only stove. Only after the water was heated could he wash his face without shivering.3 As a child of seven, I heard my grandmother Maria’s stories of having to draw water from the central pump in Eveleth. During the winter , the ice buildup on the ground around the pump was like a skating rink. iww activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn vividly described her stay at an Italian boardinghouse while she worked on the Iron Range during the 96 strike, when local hotels refused lodging to strike activists. The wife of the family cooked and cleaned for a group of boarders—twelve or fourteen men—who slept, barracks fashion, in one big attic room. . . . She banished her husband to this masculine retreat [and] took me in with her, in a little bedroom. . . . The dining room . . . was festooned with their clothes. . . . The men sat up late, playing cards, drinking wine and talking about the strike. Finally they clumped off to bed. . . . [But early in the morning they were] cheerily making coffee and starting out for the picket line in the gray dawn.4 The Boarders 78 Regardless of whether they were single or had left families behind in the Old Country, men were drawn to the ambience of the boardinghouse : a family environment, Italian cuisine, a familiar language, and having a woman around to serve them reminded them of life back in Italy. Many Italian families throughout Minnesota took in boarders in the first three decades of the twentieth century. According to a 97 study of St. Paul’s Italian households, over 30 percent contained boarders; in the Mesabi Range town of Eveleth, 85 percent of Italian housewives cared for boarders in 922.5 Italian women were making a vital and unrecognized contribution . Census workers did not count keeping boarders as “work,” but a...