Memories of Work and the Definition of Community: The Making of Italian Americans in the Mahoning Valley

Henry Glassie, noted American folklorist, describes history as “stories we tell about the past in the present to define our future.”¹ Nowhere is that notion of telling a story more poignant or more important than in the recovery and retention of the history of work. Work and workplaces, and the communities that workers construct are fundamentals of the human experience. The work that people do and the associations that they create around their workplaces shape not only workers’ lives but the lives of their immediate and extended families. The memories and stories that they recall are also interwoven into the lives of their succeeding generations. This impact is particularly evident in the development of two Italian American enclaves in northeastern Ohio at the end of the nineteenth century whose foundations rested on the region’s burgeoning steel industry. Smoky Hollow in Youngstown and the east side of Niles, though physically distinct, are remarkably similar in character, memory, and experience. While the oral accounts of their inhabitants appear straightforward and frankly discuss the events and attitudes that permeated their lives, they also reveal an interesting tension between reality and memory.

The way people remember their past is an important consideration in the construction of identity. Oral historian Alessandro Portelli, in his important essay, “The Death of Luigi Trastulli,” examined memories of the death of Italian steelworker Luigi Trastulli in Terni, Italy. Most of Portelli’s interviewees recalled Trastulli dying during a demonstration over layoffs at the local steel mill in 1953 rather than his actual demise at an anti-NATO rally in 1949. For Portelli, meaning and significance lie beyond the “facts” of Trastulli’s life and death, and he states: “Its importance lies, rather, in the fact that it became the ground upon which collective memory and imagination built a cluster of tales, symbols, legends and imaginary reconstructions.”² Oral history interviews can and do reveal much not only about people’s lives and experiences, but also how they make meaning for themselves and their posterity out of those memories. Two recent works utilizing the voices of Italians and Italian Americans are Anthony V. Riccio’s The Italian American Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories and Mary Ellen Mancina Batinich’s Italian Voices: Making Minnesota Our Home, which acknowledge that one of the few ways that the generations can connect is through memory.³ As Riccio stated, “Because the Italian American oral tradition—that body of fables, proverbs and life experience stories by which a family learns its past—is rarely recorded but kept in memory, the legacy fades as generations pass on.”⁴ Not only are these memories valuable within families, but they also help scholars paint a richer and more inclusive view of the past.

The use of oral histories to examine the predominately Italian American neighborhoods of Smoky Hollow in Youngstown, and Niles, Ohio, reveal complex networks of relationships that have their nuclei in workplaces but extend beyond into their everyday lives and the processes of self-identification. The residents and former residents speak of life in their neighborhoods as well as their experiences in the workplace. The interviewees include those who emigrated from Italy and those of Italian heritage who were born in the United States. The stories are very rich and several tropes emerge as dominant in the evolving construction of their identities. The first are those representing their attitudes about work and their workplaces, and the second are their own socioeconomic achievements and those of their offspring. These recollections were often tied to their efforts at community building. The third theme revealed by the interviews detailed ongoing concerns about the nature of discrimination and prejudice within the immigrants’ adopted communities and the selective preservation of their ethnic heritage. The narratives clearly illustrate the dichotomy frequently encountered within immigrant communities as they navigate between their desires to retain their ethnic identities and to obtain acceptance in the mainstream culture. As the interviewees discussed the role of their Italian culture in...