Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California, 1915-99

Introduction

Introduction We asked for workers but human beings came. —Max Frisch, 1961 Here is how it was. The families came from Italy for a better life. In Italy there was nothing. The women couldn’t work. There was no work. Only fishing. That was for the men. So the families got together. They sent the father or the son first. My grandfather went in 1912. He went to Chicago, because we had cousins there and he could stay with them and get on his feet. A lot of men would come and live together and save up their money to bring the rest of the family over. Some women came and some didn’t. The women who came, came because they wanted to keep their families together, not raising them with the father in America and the mother in Italy. They took a chance. They were very brave to leave like that. But they wanted to work, to have a better life, and they couldn’t do that in Italy. They knew there was work for women in America. You could work if you wanted to. My grandmother worked in a factory in Chicago sewing pants. My mother went to work in a factory when she was eleven years old doing piecework. Then, when the uncles moved to Monterey to fish again, the women all worked in the canneries here [in Monterey]. They did a good job. They didn’t bother the government. They raised their children and their children worked and bought homes. They took a risk. But it all turned out all right. —Interview with Nancy Mangiapane, August 3,฀1994 The preceding narrative of a Sicilian family migration to Monterey, California , in 1915 suggests a migration story similar to countless others in latenineteenth - and early-twentieth-century America: induced by economics, negotiated within families, and usually characterized by itinerant factory labor. However, when Sicilians settled in Monterey they remembered that they were fishing people, not factory workers. They recalled and reinvented their identity in a powerful way that fused ethnicity with fishing, and with Monterey itself. 00.intro.1-12_McKib.indd฀฀฀1 10/27/05฀฀฀4:06:36฀PM 2฀ Introduction The re-creation of Sicilian Americans’ identity was a deliberate process. Sicilians had to overcome many kinds of differences among themselves and challenges from outsiders in order to accomplish their goal of creating a self-identified ethnic fishing community comfortably situated within the context of modern American life. Sicilian women played a leading role in imagining an identity of Sicilians as ethnic fishers, bringing families together to build a strong community around that identity, and ensuring that the settlement in Monterey was permanent and deeply rooted politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Sicilian women participated not only in the industrialization of fishing but were also largely responsible for this reinvention of identity as fisherpeople and an adherence to it even without its economic context. Sicilian women expressed their cultural affiliation as fisherpeople in a profound attachment to the landscape of Monterey itself. Their economic, social, and political choices demonstrated how and why this American immigration developed as it did, weaving ethnic identity with a fishing identity. It is tempting for observers to assume that a community is automatically in place when large numbers of ethnics live in one locale, especially if there is an occupational connection among them. This study of Sicilian migrant fishing people will show that immigrants of a similar ethnicity do not automatically constitute an ethnic community. Rather, ethnicization and community building are step by step, and often arduous, processes. Most important , this story of the migration of Sicilian fisherpeople to Monterey demonstrates that women in ethnic groups must have an active role in creating identity and community in order for migration to become a settlement of people who consider themselves connected along ethnic and occupational lines. Sicilian migration, both incoming and outgoing, happened continuously throughout the period between 1914 and the present, although not always at the international level, and was made up overwhelmingly of people who considered themselves fishers. Sicilians moved within the triangle of Pittsburg ,Martinez,and San Francisco,California,as well as to and from the East and Midwest. Global migration was affected by legislation that restricted flows from time to time, such as in 1924 and during World Wars I and II. Still,the regular,constant migration flow meant that there was no clean break between migration and settlement,or a clear connection between generation and a particular...