In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[30] [ Two ] Family Migrations My immigrant forebears and their children have long ago completed their journeys from dust to dust. It is too late to make amends for blithely skating by my family’s story for most of my life. Like Spindle City’s history, I grew up with only patchy knowledge of my grandparents’ ordeals: their flights from Italy and the Azores and their labors to survive before and after Spindle City’s demise. I didn’t fully comprehend my own parents’ reverence for their parents. Nor did I appreciate what my parents endured to make their way in a one-industry city that had buckled under the weight of greed and southern competition. Even after I became a professional historian of New England, I remained disengaged from my family’s story—not to mention the larger drama of the mass immigration that transformed the region. I chose to specialize on early New England. Only much later did I realize that this decision partly represented a way of distancing myself from my family history, which always seemed inconsequential to the official pageant of America’s past. Some mills grind slowly. I now see my choice as a denial of my roots—an attempt by an outsider from gritty Fall River to stride toward becoming something of an insider. Fortunately, my oldest brother, John, interviewed my parents about our Italian and Portuguese family history and took helpful notes. We also discovered a few surviving family documents after my parents died. These pieces of evidence—fragments of multilayered lives—called on my skills as a historian to reconstruct as best I could another story that, like Spindle City’s, I never knew or cared about. What follows is perhaps “burnt offerings” to my family. [] The first member of my family who set foot in Fall River was a bastard. My grandfather, Salvatore Giuseppe Conforti, was the illegitimate son of a pharmacist in San Pietro, one of the rock-strewn hill towns in the prov- Family Migrations [31] ince of Reggio, which is part of Calabria—mainland Italy’s southernmost region. Beyond Reggio lay the Straits of Messina and Sicily, long a site of cultural crossings. As my grandfather entered his teenage years, he began to spend more time around his father’s shop, much to the displeasure of the pharmacist’s wife. In 1893, at the age of seventeen, Salvatore set out for America, his voyage perhaps financed by his father as a way of ridding a living irritant to his wife. The early 1890s marked an upsurge in southern Italian immigration to Massachusetts. Already paesani were staking a claim to Boston’s North End. In the very year my grandfather left San Pietro and arrived in the Bay State, the popular New England writer Samuel Adams Drake seethed over what he observed at the Paul Revere House and its environs in the North End. “The atmosphere is actually thick with the vile odors of garlic and onions—of macaroni and lazzaroni,” he erupted in a book titled Our Colonial Homes. “The dirty tenements swarm with greasy voluble Italians. One can scarce hear the sound of his own English mother-tongue from one end of the square to the other.” My grandfather bypassed Boston and made his way to Fall River because other immigrants from San Pietro, some of whom were related to him, had already settled in Spindle City. Historians call this chain migration —the human links that guide the destinations and destinies of people like Salvatore Conforti who dislodge themselves from their native soil and set their sights on a new world thousands of miles away. One earlier immigrant from San Pietro had moved to Fall River after living in New York, where he had been naturalized. He emerged as one of the first leaders of Fall River’s small Italian community, meeting newcomers at the Fall River Line Pier and helping them find jobs and housing, usually in triple-decker tenements where groups of solitary male immigrants huddled together. My grandfather probably worked at a variety of jobs before he acquired the skills of a hatter, which would be his calling once he decided to put down roots in Fall River. By the turn of the century, and now in his midtwenties, Salvatore was back in San Pietro, but he would not be one of the “birds of passage,” the Italian immigrants who shuttled back and forth between the United States and the Old Country. Salvatore seems to...

Share