Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America by Elizabeth Zanoni (review)

The national drink of Argentina is the “Fernandito” or the Fernet con Coca, as Elizabeth Zanoni reminds us in the epilogue to her volume Migrant Marketplaces. As an image, the name captures very much what this book is about. Early male migrant consumers both retained tastes from the old world (Fernet) and modified them in the context of the new. Fernet and Coca-Cola were both imports, the first from Italy, where its makers reached out to Italian migrants in the hopes of bolstering markets abroad, and the second from a US multinational, which early on understood that consumer tastes abroad could be cultivated. The image points to one other important feature of Italian immigrants in Argentina: their sheer numbers and significant role as middle-class producers and vendors in Argentina influenced broader consumer tastes and culture in their adopted country. This was not the case in the United States, at least not before the Great War.

Four million Italians emigrated to the United States and two million to Argentina between 1880 and 1940. They became significant components of local, national, and international labor markets, and their remittances were vital for their families, towns, and the broader Italian economy in those years. We tend to forget, however, that these immigrants were also consumers in their destinations: they developed their own consumer tastes and made choices influenced by a variety of motives, and those in turn influenced tastes, allocation of resources, cultures, and identities in the diasporas, the destination cities and countries of those diasporas, and their original homeland. Elizabeth Zanoni argues that “the formation of migrants’ consumer habits and identities was transnational and gendered, and connected to food goods and to ideas about masculinity and femininity circulating in the Atlantic economy” (3).

Although the study alludes to other items such as textiles, it focuses on food and how both local, national (in the receiving country), and international markets (the home economy) were affected by Italian emigrants’ consumer behavior. Zanoni’s sources are conventional, primarily Italian immigrant newspapers and the publications of Italian chambers of commerce in Buenos Aires and New York, yet she deftly probes them to reveal a previously unconsidered world of migrant consumerism.

The volume is arranged chronologically, although each chapter is centered on a particular theme, whether it is mainly markets, trade policies, consumer culture, or comparisons of genuine Italian food products to Italian-style foods produced abroad, or the growing significance of women to migrant consumerism, or the impact of Fascism on migrant consumers. The book uses the novel prism of the marketplace, specifically of transnational immigrant markets, to probe the meanings not only of gender, ethnicity, race and nationhood, but also the connections among them. Although food is central to the monograph, this is not a book on foodways. It is a book about migrant consumption in a transnational context. If in the past historians have often linked ethnic identity to physical place—in particular, the US phenomenon of Little Italy—Zanoni connects identity to an imagined place, the marketplace.

The marketplace’s driving force was consumer tastes, and in particular those of women. If women had acquired consumer experience at home in Italy in the late nineteenth century as their sojourning husbands and sons sent home remittances, by the interwar period women were more savvy consumers. They had to contend constantly with the challenges of Italian statesmen and exporters who looked to Italian immigrant communities as a beachhead for reaching international markets. Likewise, they had to stay aware of Italian immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States and Argentina who produced tipo Italian (Italian-style) food products, or American multinational food producers who sought to use Italian immigrants in Argentina as an entry point to broader international markets. As Zanoni points out, when Mussolini came to power, his government reluctantly had to accept the fact that Italian women abroad had to...