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Afterword to the Paperback Edition Since the publication of the hardcover edition ten years ago, men and women of Italian ancestry are still choosing (along with the 40-50,000 others from across the nation) to make their homes in the Las Vegas area each year. Unlike during the years immediately following World War II, though, Italian Americans are no longer disproportionately represented among the migrants, and those who come are rarely from the fast-disappearing Italian neighborhoods of East Coast and Great Lakes cities and are often retirees from California. Some are drawn to Las Vegas as an exciting sunbelt city in which to retire, and others come for the job opportunities presented by one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States. Most of the Italian Americans who have moved to Las Vegas in the last quarter of the twentieth century do not join any of the several ItalianAmerican organizations in Las Vegas Oust like most of their ancestors who settled in Las Vegas did not), and many are probably not aware of La Voce, a monthly newspaper begun in 2001 primarily for Italian-American readers. Still, there are 300-400 active members in these Italian-American organizations, with scores in leadership positions, and anywhere from 9,000-14,000 are perusing the monthly issues of La Voce at least occasionally. It's likely that among the more than 130,000 Las Vegas-area residents who identify themselves as at least partly Italian, some-maybe most-are partaking of their native food at the bounty of Italian restaurants located throughout the Las Vegas area. Perhaps, too, they are noting, with some pride, the great impact of Italy, past and present, on the Las Vegas Strip. One development of the past six years in terms of the multifaceted Italian impact on Las Vegas has been the broadening of Italian-language and -culture courses at the Community College of Southern Nevada (CCSN) and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Two Italian-born professors, Walter Centuori at CCSN and Giuseppe Natale at UNLV, have nurtured and expanded the already existing modest programs so that southern Nevadans can learn as much Italian as they wish, in addition to Italian history and culture, and each has recruited almost exclusively native-Italian speakers as adjunct faculty to instruct the growing number of courses each academic year. Centuori and Natale both recognized that the great majority of potential students would be working adults and so offered a flexible schedule of introductory- and intermediate-level Italian 135 136 Beyond the Mafia courses. Italian Americans are well represented among the students enrolled in the Italian courses at CCSN and UNLV, often constituting at least 20 percent of a particular class and occasionally almost 50 percent. Thanks to the efforts of Tom Barberini, students at Eldorado High School and Shadow Ridge High School have had the opportunity to enroll in Italian-language courses. Barberini, a New York native with a degree from Columbia University, initiated the instruction of elementary Italian in 1998, two years after being appointed principal at Eldorado High School, and then introduced Italian courses at Shadow Ridge High School, located in fast-growing northwest Las Vegas, after becoming principal there in the spring of 2005. He was pleased to tell me that the response to the Italian courses has been quite positive, with 120 students enrolled in three sections of elementary Italian for the 2005-2006 school year. Barberini's goal is to expand offerings each year by adding intermediate- and then advancedlevel Italian courses. An Italian-language course was also offered at Spring Valley High School during the 2004-2005 school year, and two Italian courses during the 2005-2006 school year. The era in which most Strip hotels were widely associated in the minds of both Las Vegas residents and the city's many visitors with a particular personality (the Desert Inn and owner Moe Dalitz, for example) has passed, as the corporate ownership that began slowly in the late 1960s and then accelerated in subsequent decades has firmly taken hold, with the only exceptions being Steve Wynn's Wynn Las Vegas and Sheldon Adelson's The Venetian. So, too, has the era passed of so many of the managerial personnel in the casinos being of Italian ancestry, though there are many men and women with Italian surnames in the executive suites in supervisory positions or on the casino floor. Gambling is now legal in forty-eight of the...

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