A Hero and His Newspaper: Unsettling Myths of Italian America

Italian American ethnic identity has long been constituted by struggles and inequalities endured by Italians in post-unification rural Italy and their subsequent racialized oppression in urban centers of the US North in the era of mass migration. Until now, the presumed stability of mass migration identity has created the general terms for understanding Italian America. In this essay, a New Orleans microhistory illuminated through the 1849 newspaper Il Monitore del Sud, the first Italian-language newspaper published in the United States, reshapes foundational understandings of Italian American identity. The newspaper's antebellum account of New Orleans Italian America includes nationalist aesthetic expressions and political affiliations that American political discourse has not yet found an adequate language to describe and that Italian American studies has not yet confronted. In bringing this prehistory to light, my work with antebellum Italian Americans complicates understandings of multi-ethnic collectivity by examining how intercultural myth-making underwrites communal historiography. Together, the ethnic perceptions memorialized in Il Monitore del Sud and the power operations revealed in concurrent civic records expose how collective conditions of white supremacy come to be naturalized and forgotten, becoming history's flotsam. The creation of Italian America's communal historiography, I argue, shows us something larger about the operations of US white supremacy: how its emotional logic depends simultaneously on the exploitation of vulnerable others and the enactment of vulnerability from within the exploiting group.