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3. Family, Conflict, Community What is family here? I will tell you what it became. It became this interlocking network of fishermen. There was this intensive activity, intermarriage, so that the community is truly linked by blood. Family was the entire group. We were put together by age groups. Children were raised together as cousins. We had the same values, traditions—we even had the same thing for dinner every night— right down to material possessions. Everyone had the same thing. Everyone is related to everyone. —Interview with Peter Cutino, August 12, 2004 In Monterey it was family to family. That’s how we got along. —Interview with Vita Crivello Davi, October 2, 1998 The preceding narratives from Peter Cutino andVita Crivello Davi expressed the passion and power of Sicilian family and community life in Monterey. It was echoed by narrators who also described extremely close connections between individuals and couples that began in their childhoods. It was clear from the narratives that while women and men acted together to accomplish their goal of community building, Sicilian women actually did much more to shape their families into a clearly defined ethnic fishing community. They arranged social get-togethers, influenced choices of marriage partners, and even followed the same pattern of family dinner menus. They needed to do so. Records of marriage licenses issued in Monterey between 1906 and 1979 suggested that high rates of intermarriage with outsiders early on may have stimulated Sicilians to be purposeful,to create as closed a community among themselves as they could in order to resist complete assimilation into mainstream American culture.It was clear from their efforts that the preservation of Sicilian values and culture was of critical import to them. The records showed that the highest levels of intermarriage with nonSicilians , mostly Spanish/Mexicans, occurred in the 1906–23 and 1923–26 recording periods. In fact, in the period 1923–26, twenty-nine out of the fifty Sicilians sampled who acquired marriage licenses married non-Sicilians. Eleven of the twenty-nine marriages were with people with Spanish/Mexican 03.57-74_McKib.indd฀฀฀57 10/27/05฀฀฀4:07:34฀PM 58฀ beyond฀cannery฀row surnames, and ten of the twenty-nine were cases of Sicilian girls marrying non-Sicilians. One would expect the opposite: the lowest rates of intermarriage in the earliest years of immigration, and the highest rates of intermarriage only over time, and after generations of settlement. One might also expect to see very low rates of intermarriage, if any, between Sicilian girls and non-Sicilian boys.1 This random sampling of marriage licenses suggests an assimilation process by way of marriage into the larger Monterey community that coincided with first migrations and early settlement.It was abruptly reversed after 1926. The period 1926–42 showed a marked decline in marriages outside the Sicilian community, with only twelve of the fifty marriage licenses issued with non-Sicilians. That pattern persisted until 1967, when once again, marriages with outsiders surpassed marriages with other Sicilians. The years between 1926 and 1967 marked the time when community building was at its peak, and the least intermarriage occurred.2 The fact that Sicilians did not arrive in Monterey as one group or at one moment in time, but came from rival fishing villages in Sicily, was their first challenge. They needed to move beyond boundaries based on village loyalty to come into a new perception of who they were as Monterey Sicilian fishers. The second major challenge to community building involved class differences . Sicilians faced marked economic distinctions from the moment they arrived, and they needed to find creative ways to come together as a community of equals, although some families had so much more in the way of property and material goods than others, in contrast to Mr. Cutino’s assertion in the opening narrative. Sicilians needed to overcome all sorts of differences among themselves in order to create some semblance of a real, rather than assumed, community of Monterey Sicilian fishers. The proximity of other peoples in Monterey, both in neighborhoods and in the canneries, made community building based on ethnic solidarity far more difficult than if this group of Sicilian fishers interacted only with one another. Portuguese, Mexican, Spanish, and Asian peoples threatened the formation of an ethnic enclave of fishers by their very presence and participation in the fishing industry. While Sicilians used marriage to resolve con- flicts over village and class among themselves,conflicts between...

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