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3 An American Foodscape Food, Place, and Race in Italian Harlem Food and Place(s) in Italian Harlem The 1930s were difficult years for Italian Harlem. In New York, the Depression hit Italian Americans—the most proletarianized of the European ethnic groups in the city—especially hard. Italians were disproportionately represented among the recipients of city and federal subsidies, particularly in Harlem, where the poorest among them lived. Covello estimates that “more than 75 percent of the people in the community [were] being sustained, at present [1938], through Home Relief Bureaus and other organizations assisting in the amelioration of conditions due to unemployment.”1 Joblessness, a deteriorating housing stock, crime, and disease (the annual tuberculosis mortality rate in East Harlem was almost double that of New York City) kept conditions of life in the neighborhood extremely grim.2 However, in those same years, Italian immigrants and their children managed to make East Harlem their home in America through a careful deployment of social, material, and emotional responses. Inside the cold-water “railroad flats” of bleak pre-twentieth-century tenements, Italian Harlem was born from the shared ethnic working-class culture that revolved around the private bastion of the family and the public arena of the community. To be sure, the system of mores and values that bound the people of Italian Harlem together should not be romanticized; the costs of complying with the unwritten rules of the “culture” were huge and often painful. Yet out of the shared poverty that marked life in a strange environment, there arose a common system of meaning, a community spirit, and a sense of solidarity that turned a distressed urban settlement setting into a relatively dependable sanctuary. Defying what the rest of the world may have thought about Italian Harlem, its inhabitants shared a considerable pride 3. an american foodscape · 73 in their neighborhood.3 As a lifelong resident attempted to convey about the essence of life in the community, “the neighborhood was one big family. Doors were kept open, everybody socialized with each other, everybody borrowed from each other, and everybody paid back what [they] had borrowed.”4 The most significant way that Italians articulated their love for Italian Harlem was investing in it—emotionally and materially. Love requires devotion, sacrifice, and time, and Italian lovers of the neighborhood went to great lengths to show that they were ready to pay its price. As early as the 1880s, the construction workers who predominated among early Italian immigrants freely put their labor and skills at the service of the construction in the neighborhood of a new “Italian” church.5 By building the Church of the Madonna of Mount Carmel, they planted deep roots in the swampland along the East River, roots watered with their own sweat. The church was meant to last, as it has, long after they were gone. While the building of churches was important, Italians in Harlem invested in their neighborhood most heavily by acts of consumption, using their hardearned money not only to express how they saw themselves, what they cared about, and what they wanted to become, but also to make sense of the place in which they lived. They did so notably with regard to food. Italian immigrants spent extravagantly on food for communal events such as baptisms, first communions , wedding parties, and funerals, all to be held in local churches, restaurants, apartments, and funeral homes. The consumption of food, on which New York Italians spent vastly more than any other ethnic group, was at base a strategy for the production of place, as an investment in, and an expression of love for, the local community.6 In Italian Harlem, the production, commerce, preparation, and consumption of food created a distinct urban ethnic foodscape and smellscape that shaped social identities. Italian Americans created around them a sensually familiar world, surrounded every hour by the tastes, aromas, and colors of Italian food. Routine and festive food events alike not only cemented family and community relationships but also helped Italians to call their gridded zone of Upper Manhattan home, turning otherwise anonymous streets and buildings into familiar objects of affection and helping Italians draw mental, cultural, and political boundaries between themselves and other groups. Ironically, Italian Harlem was home to some sixty-four other ethnic groups, from Jews and Hungarians to West Indians, Chinese, and Finns, all of whom mingled with one another and with Italians. This large corner of Manhattan was constructed, understood, and represented as Italian Harlem not...

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