The Italian American Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories (review)

Anthony Riccio's recently published compilation of photos and oral histories provides a much-needed portrait of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italian American life in New Haven, Connecticut: a city which, combined with the neighboring Bridgeport, is home to one of the largest Italian diaspora communities in North America.

In this important project, comprised of materials collected over a period of nine years and text, Riccio brings his previous experience in chronicling the history of an Italian American neighborhood, Boston's North End, to a more personal terrain: that of his hometown, New Haven. In so doing, he makes manifest his personal commitment to this community through the preservation of testimonies and photos of elderly residents, including his parents and other members of his family. The fragility of such testimony is borne out in the anecdote Riccio shares in the acknowledgments:

Going to the novena one day, I noticed an elderly woman sitting in the congregation who I had interviewed six years earlier when she was 88 years old, in 1999. When the service ended, she waited for me in the vestibule and, amidst the crowd of exiting churchgoers, called out to me: "Hey, Anthony, when are you gonna finish that book? How much more time you think I got over here? I'm 94 years old!" My only regret is that some of the storytellers did not live long enough to see the stories and photographs in print they so graciously contributed to the project.

(xv)

With this in mind, not only does the word deadline reassume a measure of its literal meaning, it also becomes clear that a historical portrait of one's own ethnic community is inevitably to some extent a family history, and by extension, also an autobiography. Recognition of the arbitrary nature of these points of departure in the documenting the history of a community, however, only serves to accentuate the thousands of different personal networks that could provide parallel narratives.

Each chapter chronicles, from a variety of personal perspectives, those historical topics that are central to Italian American studies: arrival from Italy in the context of national unification and economic inequality between North and South, work in American factories, unionization, the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and mass participation in World War II. Riccio also considers memories of everyday neighborhood life, domestic culture, language, assimilation and discrimination, as well as discussions of interethnic relations relevant to comparative ethnic studies; for example, interaction with Jewish bosses, African American neighbors, newer arrivals from Puerto Rico, and even Native American healers, whom Riccio compares to traditional Italian herbalists.

The results of Riccio's painstaking documentation illustrate in concrete terms how the life of Italian Americans in this region differed somewhat in comparison to better-known Little Italies in New York and Boston. Southern Connecticut, with its small-scale patchwork of cities, suburbs, and rural towns, provided alternatives to more densely populated urban environments. Backyard gardens, for example, allowed for many of the traditions of rural Italy, such as winemaking and the cultivation of orchards, gardens, and the raising of animals to be continued; as Anthony Fiondella relates, "everybody wanted to live in the country in those days. They wanted to have their own garden and down on Wooster Street you couldn't plant a garden" (91). Moreover, as the twentieth century progressed, increased mobility minimized distances, while resettlement in the suburbs in the period of postwar prosperity and urban development permanently altered the demographic patterns of Italian Americans in the region. This explains why many of Riccio's oral histories were collected not only in New Haven proper, but also in the surrounding areas that later became home to the majority of Italian Americans in southern Connecticut.

In sum, The Italian American Experience in New Haven is an important contribution to Italian diaspora studies, above all in its potential...