La Merica: Images Of Italian Greenhorn Experience

Preface

PREFACE In this book I look at the phenomenon of the emigration of Italian men to the United States prior to the First World War from the perspective of the participants in the event, the migrants themselves. The focus is restricted to the greenhorn years-the initial encounter with the immigrant status. The first exposure to the host country was the most trying and turbulent period for the immigrant as he strove to make a functional adjustment to his new environment. What he experienced during the first months and years and the way he responded to those experiences served to shape his immigrant personality and to determine, to a large extent, his subsequent behavior and actions. I have sought in this book to engage the reader with the immigrants' world, to see their world as they saw it and to understand their behavior in terms of their own values and priorities. Other books and articles have examined transatlantic Italian emigration from a number of points of view and have employed various data sources and methodologies. There have been numerous statistical analyses as well as historical surveys and monograph studies of Italian colonial life. And there is a substantial critical literature in Italian and in English. Taken together, these publications represent an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the entire process of migration. But a numrer of lacunae continue to exist. More attention should be directed to the individual. Much can be learned by turning the lens on the immigrant himself and allowing him to tell his own story without conceptual encumbrances. Specialists in the field of immigration studies have often referred to the need for further documentation of the subjective impressions of the migrants. Richard N. Juliani has noted that studies of Italian migration have largely focused upon the larger institutional conditions without an adequate examination at the level of the individual. I Rudolph 1. Vecoli speaks of the development of the history of the "inner life" of the immigrants,2 and Rudolph M. Bell recognizes the value of the historical biography in any analysis of the dynamics of migratory movements.3 In recent years the use of the first-person account in Italian immigration studies has become increasingly more common. Virginia x PREFACE Yans-McLaughlin4 and JosefF. Barton5 collected interview data as part of their studies of Buffalo and Cleveland. Richard N. Juliani made extensive use of in-depth interviews in his investigation of the Philadelphia Italians.6 Ann Cornelisen combined the techniques of observation and the unstructured interview for a successful study of the adjustment patterns of Italo-Germans.7 There have been several oral history projects, including one by John Bodnar8 of first- and secondgeneration workers in Pennsylvania and a study by Nuto Revelli 9 of 270 Italian emigrants, born between 1880 and 1915, who returned to their native northern province of Cuneo. The literature produced by the Italian immigrants themselves is not voluminous, but it does exist. There are autobiographies, diaries, letters, interviews, and a large number of Italian colony newspapers and pamphlets, as well as the published observations of Italian officials , journalists, and travelers to America, some of which are excellent in their depictions of everyday immigrant life. These materials represent the primary data for this book, especially the autobiographical works by Italian immigrant men in which they describe their lives in Italy prior to emigration and their first few years in the United States. Most of these men were young and single; if they were married , they had left their families at home. They worked in the rural labor camps, and they lived in the cities. They were sojourners who returned to Italy after a few years, or immigrants looking for a new life, or young men who had been lured across the Atlantic by what America promised. Each one experienced his own America, and the book focuses on those experiences. Life histories as human documents have been called "the most perfect type of sociological material." 10 The advantages of life histories are many: they serve to give substance and detail to the general histories, and to give motive and purpose to impersonal documents and aggregate statistics; actions and attitudes can be more fully understood and more deeply analyzed, since the life history presents the development of a real person and reveals that which accounts for behavior . Yet every data source has drawbacks, and the life historywhether it is offered by the immigrant or sought by the researcher-is no exception. If the source...