Donna R. Gabaccia | Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History …
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Journal of American History
Is Everywhere Nowhere?
Nomads, Nations, and
the Immigrant Paradigm
of United States History
Donna R. Gabaccia
Like the migrants they study, historians of migration step across national
1
boundaries. Like migrants, too, they thus expose themselves to what Gérard
Noiriel calls "the tyranny of the national."1 National historiography dominates our
discipline. As students of transnational phenomena, however, historians of
migration must master more than one national "field." They are simultaneously
historians of the world, of several nations, and of the ethnic, religious, and regional
loyalties that sustain—and sometimes motivate—migration.
Historians of migration view human movement as an ordinary, rather than
2
exceptional, dimension of human life and as an almost universal human
experience. Yet modern historiography makes migration a significant theme
mainly when it constructs nations. The immigrant paradigm of American history
provides a familiar example.2 This historical interpretation defines the United
States as a nation of immigrants, in which incorporation of foreigners symbolizes
the promise and accomplishments of American democracy. The paradigm
transforms migrants, and their historians, into "nowhere men," occupying a
historiographical nowhere land.
Certainly, the migrants I have studied from Italy and Sicily were mobile people 3
for whom migration was more often a way of life than a moment of transition from
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one national identity to another. One early scholar of international migrations
noted that the residents of Italy had been leaving home "since time immemorial."
Migrations from what is now Italy attracted negative attention as early as the
1830s.3 They peaked in the years between 1890 and 1914, fell to nineteenthcentury levels in the interwar years, and then grew to a mass movement again after
World War II.
Most migrants who left Italy returned, although not from any love of their
nation. Before 1861 there was no country of Italy; thereafter, observers noted, it
was necessary to "make Italians." Modern Italian nationalism developed after
unification, consolidating under fascism and the postwar Italian republic. Yet some
scholars still deny Italy is a nation; others expect it to collapse.4 Until World War
I, few migrants from Italy had strong national identities. They migrated through
networks of kin and neighbors (paesani) from particular small towns; their
strongest ties were to family and paesani. What surprises the modern student of
these migrants is how effectively illiterate people with such particularist loyalties
could communicate on a global scale, bridging continents.5
Migrants from Italy pioneered ways of life that scholars today call transnational
because they link human experience in more than one nation. Yet migrants also
came face to face with the increasing power of nation-states during their wideranging migrations. The persons who appear as "emigrants," "expatriates," and
returners in one nation's statistics appear as immigrants in a dozen other nations—
notably Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, France,
Switzerland, Germany, and Tunisia.6 As they went about the mundane task of
finding work, migrants responded to states' demands for passports, health
inspections, taxes, military service, departure, naturalization, and loyalty. Many
became "Italian" only when they left home; when they returned, neighbors called
them "germanesi" or "americani."7 During the extended warfare of the twentieth
century, however, sending and receiving countries alike expected greater loyalty
from migrants, and national identities became a source of difference among former
kin and neighbors.
In this paper, I draw on a decade-long, collaborative project (Italian Workers
around the World, dubbed informally "Italians Everywhere") on the global
migrations of 27 million migrants from Italy. My goal is to query the tyranny of
the national in the discipline of history. Some postmodernist critics hold historians
themselves responsible for national tyranny through their participation in nationbuilding projects. The critics Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari go so far as to
argue that "history is always written from a sedentary point of view and in the
name of a unitary State apparatus." They thus call for "a Nomadology" to replace
history. In sharp contrast, the historian Ernst Renan—writing in the middle of a
great era of nation building a century ago—argued that "omission and historical
error" produce nations and their foundational myths. For Renan, "the
advancement of historical knowledge" was a "threat to nationhood," not an act of
nation building.8
The study of migration allows us to explore in some detail these two rather
different understandings of the relation of historiography and modern nations.
While historical practice and the lives of historians of Italy's migration have
become more transnational, the hegemony of national historiographies has
persisted. We do have transnational categories—notably diasporas and
internationalism—that promise a release from the tyranny of the national. These
categories also facilitate critiques of national historiographies—I use the immigrant
paradigm of United States history as my example—and the role of historians in
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creating or perpetuating their hegemony.
Still, even historians who recognize the tyranny of the national often find that
their research reveals global human movements as simultaneously threatening and
sustaining nations. Migration is a human activity that takes place on many
geographical scales, including those "above" and "below" nations.9 For migrants
in the twentieth century, however, the national remains an important scale. When
we write transnational histories of modern migration, we produce a world history
in which nations and nation states continue to be important constituent elements
and explanatory forces.
8
What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been
The professional lives of many historians are increasingly transnational, but
training and teaching obligations remain dominated by national fields of expertise.
For students trained in United States history, transnational study of migration
emerged in part from a national historiography in which immigration is a central
theme no textbook dares ignore. Indeed one can speak—as I will below—of a
distinctive interpretation of United States history that explains how immigration
created the American nation.
Transnational approaches to the history of migration seemed perfectly
compatible with the immigrant paradigm when I began graduate school in the
mid-1970s. The "new ethnicity" of the late 1960s had challenged scholars to
rethink linkages between national history and the histories of subnational ethnic
groups and to write the histories of particular ethnic groups, including Italians. The
labor historian Herbert Gutman had encouraged young labor historians to view the
peasant cultures of Europe as foundations for immigrant working-class
communities in the United States. Ethnic history traced the origins of American
ethnic diversity and American pluralism to origins of Americans in Europe,
Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Not surprisingly, historians of Italian and other
immigrants began to do significant research in the immigrants' homelands and in
their native languages.10
Alternative, and transnational, approaches to the history of the American nation
also proliferated as scholars from other nations explored migration from their own
perspectives. Scholars in Europe rediscovered what the first immigration historians
of the United States had also argued—that immigration was the American
expression of a European story of emigration. Ernesto Ragionieri, Frank
Thistlethwaite (who called on scholars to breach the saltwater curtain), and Dirk
Hoerder all wrote about migration within an Atlantic, capitalist, and world
economy. For them, migration was no first step in the making of Americans but
rather a connection between nations or among Karl Marx's "workers of the
world." But while historians of the colonial empires and of the African slave trade
soon made a similar Atlantic perspective a mainstream approach for students of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians of the modern United States
largely ignored the Atlantic perspective pioneered by colleagues abroad.11
The transformation of United States immigration experts into transnational
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historians was often a product of biography, as Bruno Ramirez demonstrates in
"Clio in Words and in Motion" in this issue. Like many historians of United States
immigration, I am the descendant of immigrants. But unlike others in that very
large category, my life in the 1970s and 1980s became that of an academic labor
migrant reversing in eerie fashion the peregrinations of my Italian, German, and
Swiss grandparents. Historiography encouraged me to accommodate both a
personal interest in seeking roots (in Italy) and the studies of a Europeanist
husband (in Germany). After fieldwork in Sicily, research in Rome and New
York, lectures and seminars in Ann Arbor and Tübingen, an academic
appointment as a historian of the United States followed at the Free University of
Berlin. There, an inter-university project, "The German Workers of Chicago,"
introduced me to several scholarly collaborations focused on migration.12 After
three years in the United States, I returned with a Fulbright grant to work with the
Labor Migration Project at the University of Bremen.13 Even after a more
permanent return to the United States, my professional networks continued to
resemble a scholarly Atlantic Economy.
My transnational professional and personal life quickly alerted me to problems
in American studies of Italian immigration. I did my initial research in the 1970s in
Sicilian "red towns" alive with discussions of Eurocommunism, which demolished
what I had learned about the cultural familism of southern Italians.14 I also quickly
learned that dialects and regionalism were not quirks of my family (with its roots
in Piemonte, its peculiar understanding of itself as more French than Italian, and its
disdain for Italy's southerners). I stopped thinking of Italians as a primordial
nation, and I began wondering how residents of Italy had become Italians. I
ceased writing of immigrants and emigrants in order to take migrants' complex
experiences more seriously. Finally, I stopped thinking of emigration from Italy as
immigration to the United States. Most of Italy's migrants did not go to the United
States. Instead, I adopted Samuel Baily's village-outward methodology, which
held the promise of tracing migrants from Italy to the five continents to which they
emigrated in significant numbers.15
My first two books were transnational studies that raised at least some
reviewers' hackles for sidestepping the immigrant paradigm and its well-worn
paths of immigration and adaptation to the United States in order to focus on
connections and linkages between Old and New worlds. Still, neither book
captured the continuous, multidirectional, and circular character of migrations from
Italy, for both focused exclusively on Sicilian migration to and from the United
States and the connections it created between people in the two places.16 My
methodological conservatism in this regard is painfully easy to explain: I was
looking for work repeatedly through the 1980s, and on the job market I was asked
all too often whether I was really an Americanist or really a historian of Italy.
(More than once, I imagined interviewers writing on my file "lacks focus.")
Only with a new job and with tenure finally and firmly in hand after thirteen
years did I abandon my worries about losing my professional identity as a
historian of the United States and think of tackling research on Italians
everywhere. Organized as an international project together with Fraser Ottanelli of
the University of South Florida, the project Italian Workers around the World
rapidly introduced all its participants to the tyranny of the national in the writing of
history.
The main objective of Italians Everywhere was to tell the dramatic story of a
migration of 27 million humble workers who left Italy between 1789 and the
1970s. These 27 million migrants formed one of the largest migration systems in a
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very mobile modern world. A century of migration from Italy involved a
population almost as large as that of Italy itself in 1861. It represented about 10
percent of global migrations 1830-1930—a century when at least 10 percent of the
world moved across national boundaries, and even larger numbers moved within
them. Recognizing the era of international migration as a period of ascending
nationalism, we hypothesized that migration shaped sending and receiving nations
alike.
Because Italy's migrants traveled in so many directions, collaborative research
seemed a necessity. Fortunately, we had good models for collaboration.17 Italians
Everywhere led to communication with 150 colleagues studying emigration from
Italy or immigrants from Italy in Europe, Australia, and the Americas. Between
1993 and 1996, six newsletters (Italian Workers around the World) circulated
ongoing research. In April 1996, a working conference of twenty scholars
convened in the multiethnic cigar makers' community of Ybor City (Tampa,
Florida) with its rich heritage of radical labor activism. The conference submitted
case studies of Italian workers to the scrutiny of comparativists. The collaboration
will produce two books. The first ("For Us There Are No Frontiers") collects
essays on workers and labor activism on three continents. The second ("Foreign,
Female, and Fighting Back") focuses on women and work on four continents. In
addition, I have written a monograph, Italy's Many Diasporas, as a synthesis of
the Italians Everywhere project.18
Ottanelli and I began this project determined to wrench the story of Italy's
migrants from its earliest moorings in national historiographies. Deconstructing the
"Italian" that Italian history takes for granted was a first necessity. Before 1920,
half of Italy's migrants were illiterates; few spoke "Italian" (that is, the Tuscan
dialect first adopted by Italy's intellectuals and later by its nation-state as a national
language).19 Most had familial, local, regional, and religious—but not national—
identities: they were Catholics, Sicilians, or Sambucari. Nor was the United States
the destination of most of Italy's migrants. Of the national historiographies that had
generated research on Italy's migrations, however, the most important was that of
the United States, not Italy. Before 1914, the largest group—a little less than a
third of the total—did go to the United States. But almost half of these were not
immigrants; they were male sojourners who returned home. Nearly a quarter of
Italy's migrants before World War I went to Argentina and Brazil, and the largest
number (just under half) went to other European countries. The proportions of
migrants leaving Italy for the United States declined to under a quarter after World
War I and to 10 percent after 1945.20
Extricating the study of Italy's migrations from the history of a particular nation
did not mean ignoring nations and national states. Our collaborators all worked
either within the history of Italy (or one of its distinctive regions) or in the history
of one receiving nation. In addition, nation-states had touched almost every
dimension of the migrants' lives. With increasing vigor, states defined borders,
differentiating emigrants and immigrants from natives and generating much of the
information we used to study them.
National loyalties among Italy's migrants also became more pronounced,
especially between 1910 and 1960. Nationalist movements emerging in Italy in the
1880s and 1890s culminated in the fiercely nationalist fascist dictatorship of
Benito Mussolini, and during his reign both fascists and antifascists claimed to
represent "the true Italians," including those living abroad.21 After World War II,
too, the Italian republic continued to view migrants as part of the Italian nation
(although we also found interesting an upswing in regionalism that followed the
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devolution of funding for many migration-related programs from national to
regional governments after 1970). Receiving nations, too, demanded loyalty from
Italy's migrants in the interwar years, and as a result Argentines who are
descended from migrants from Italy have national identities significantly different
from those of Frenchmen and Americans (in Canada and the United States) of
"Italian" descent. Our goal then was not to sidestep the tyranny of the national but
to problematize it.
The publications generated by Italians Everywhere juxtaposed, compared, and
connected the histories of migrants in Italy, France, Belgium, Germany,
Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil. The
exercise made obvious the many omissions and errors Renan had claimed were
necessary to foster national myths. In decidedly different, and thus telling, ways,
each national historiography touched by Italy's migrants distorted their experiences
to tell the history of a single nation and its making.
There is, of course, a large specialized literature on Italian emigration written by
Italians.22 General histories of the nation of Italy, however, view migration either
as an expression of the economic crisis in the Italian South between 1870 and
1914 or as a transfer of southerners to the Italian North in the 1950s and 1960s.23
In both cases, migration is posited as an expression of the vexing problem of
economic backwardness in the Italian South—a region understood to be part of,
but also fundamentally different from, the rest of the Italian nation.24 In Italy, the
complex history of migration more often finds effective incorporation within the
historiography of particular regions, including those in the center and north of
Italy. Regional historiography in Italy documents, without ever truly resolving,
very lively debates over the meaning and nature of the nation of Italy.25
The place of migration in general accounts of Italy's national history are
fundamentally incorrect. In fact, the majority of Italy's migrants before World War
II were from the more developed north and center regions—not the South—and
many more of these migrants went to Europe than to the Americas.26 Returners—
the majority of all emigrants from Italy—scarcely appear in Italian national
historiography (although they can sometimes be found in regional histories), and
they never appear as the grandparents and parents of a sizable proportion (if not a
majority) of the current nation of Italians.27 Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that
national histories written by non-Italian historians sometimes treat migration more
extensively and more accurately than those by historians in Italy.28
The historiographies of countries that "received" Italy's migrants divide sharply
between those that acknowledge and those that deny migration as makers of their
modern nations. Histories of Germany and Switzerland completely ignore
migration, although foreigners were substantial components of their work forces
(10 percent in Germany) and populations (15 percent in Switzerland) by early in
the twentieth century.29 This is scarcely surprising, as neither viewed itself as an
immigration country, granted citizenship to children born on its soil, or allowed for
the easy naturalization of foreigners. Migrants to those two countries became—
and remained—"Italians."
By contrast, the historiographies of Argentina, France, Canada, and Australia,
like that of the United States, acknowledge immigration while differing in the role
they assign migrants and their descendants in nation building. (All of those
countries at particular times had higher proportions of immigrants in their
populations than did the United States, past or present.) French and Argentine
histories note the arrival of large numbers of immigrants at the turn of the century
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or in the interwar years. Both also describe immigrants finding rapid incorporation
into the nation, which quickly rendered them invisible as distinctive social or
cultural groups. In the French view, migrants and their children joined the nation
by becoming French speakers and French citizens. In the history of Argentina,
they helped create a culturally hybrid nation in the crisol de razas (melting pot).30
In neither nation is there a history of migrants' descendants as a distinctive
subgroup within the nation. The United States may have invented the concept of
the melting pot (as Nancy L. Green discusses in "Le Melting-Pot" in this issue),
but both France and Argentina have at times claimed to be more successful
melting pots than the United States.
In very sharp contrast, the historiographies of the United States, Canada, and
26
Australia all trace the impact of immigration on nation building over the longer
term of the country's history. They all describe Italy's migrants acquiring dual
identities as they became citizens. Historians of those three countries portray the
descendants of migrants as members of ethnic, cultural, or religious minorities. In
all three English-speaking countries, the identities of Italy's migrants remain
"Italian," and their ethnic identity coexists peacefully with the civic nationalism of
these self-consciously multiethnic nations.31
The Italians Everywhere project thus revealed two different agendas inherent in 27
transnational history. One is to reject the tyranny of the national by seeking
alternative concepts and alternative scales for writing history above, below, within,
or outside individual nations—whether as global or regional histories. The other is
to use transnational history to critique national historiographies from the outside
and to insist that historians of particular nations recognize how histories focused
on nation building distort the past. Each agenda generates useful insights into the
connection between nation building and the predominance of national
historiographies in our discipline.
We Are the World
Two dramatic themes entwined in the story of Italy's migrations. One—the
28
conflict of labor and capital in a globalizing economy—seemed to require the
writing of world history on a grand scale. The other—the transformation of
intimates of single villages into Italians, Argentines, and Italo-Canadians—
required a comparative approach that could simultaneously call into view many
nodes in spatially extensive networks of migrants. History, as a discipline, has
limited tolerance for the grand theories of global change that the anthropologist
Janet Abu-Lughod has also dismissed as "global-babble." Even comparative
history has its critics. Still, two concepts—diasporas and Karl Marx's international
proletariat—seemed promising starting places for an empirical, and historical, but
transnational project such as Italians Everywhere.32
Long used for the forced scattering of nations without their own states (Jews, 29
African slaves), the term diaspora has recently attracted wider usage among
advocates of global and transnational studies.33 Social scientists studying
contemporary migrations generally assume that new technologies of
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communication and transportation allow transnational migrants to create diasporas,
and to remain connected to each other and to their homelands, in ways unavailable
in the past.34 Indeed, scholars now use the term diaspora to describe almost all
migrants in order to highlight the transnationalism of their lives.
While some see transnationalism and globalization today as inherent threats to
the power and hegemony of nation-states, theorists of diasporas and transnational
ways of life also assume the strength, and centrality, of national identities formed
in migrants' homelands. They thus increasingly talk of diasporas as "nations
unbound" (by migration) or even as "deterritorialized nation states," in which
migrants living outside the national territory remained politically engaged as voters
and officeholders in the governments of sending societies.35 For much of the era
of Italy's mass migrations, however, there was no nation of Italy; at most there was
an Italian state. Can one speak of an Italian diaspora before there was an Italian
nation? Ultimately, I decided to write of Italy's many diasporas, not a history of the
Italian diaspora.
The advantage of the term diaspora for the study of Italy's migration is that it
forces scholars to attend precisely to the movement's distinguishing
characteristics—its circularity, continuity, and multidirectionality. However, it
seemed more sensible to ask whether migrant networks resembled diasporas than
to assume that they did. Without clear national identities in the nineteenth century,
Italy's migrants could scarcely form a single "Italian" diaspora. They did,
however, form many village- and region-based diasporas that overlapped and
intersected in particular neighborhoods and workplaces in many receiving
countries around the world. Transnational family economies linking wage-earning
men abroad and women and children at home maintained the strength of local ties
during international migrations but also gave them their global "reach." Italy's
diasporas were diasporas of residents of a single town, such as the biellesi from
Biella, or of a region, such as the siciliani from Sicily. Most communication within
these diasporas, furthermore, occurred between the home village and its colonies
(as Italians called them) abroad; there was limited circulation of people from one
diaspora satellite to another.36
Village and regional diasporas of migrants quickly became important sites for
Italian nation building, especially in the early twentieth century. Even as Italy
became an independent state, optimistic intellectuals portrayed settlements of
migrants abroad as colonies through which Italy could extend its civilizing cultural
and commercial influence (as it had in the late middle ages).37 Emilio Franzina has
also rightly observed that migrants become "living agents" of Italian nationalism
because so many migrants became Italian only when they encountered
government record keepers, people from other parts of Italy, and anti-Italian
sentiment abroad.38
Initiatives to create an "Italian" diaspora emerged from all of Italy's nationalist
movements. First Catholic, then secular, nationalists insisted that Italy's
government protect its migrants and provide support (through consuls) so that they
could learn Italian language, history, and culture and feel pride in their homeland.
In 1912, Italy changed its laws so that migrants and their children born abroad
remained citizens.39
On this basis, Mussolini in the 1920s expanded diaspora initiatives enormously.
The temptation was overwhelming: there were nine million Italians living abroad
at that time; together with their children, they were almost half as large a group as
Italy's resident population. Mussolini attracted the support of many migrants,
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especially in the English-speaking world, for his imperialist adventures.40 But
vigorous efforts by antifascists also contested Mussolini's efforts at nation building
throughout the diaspora. In doing so, the antifascists substituted their own more
democratic claims for the imagined community of Italians at home and abroad;
they did not question the existence of a nation of Italians or the sentiments that
linked those at home to those abroad.41
After World War II, the new Italian republic was somewhat more circumspect
in its relations to migrants, perhaps because talk of Italy's "colonies" now raised
painful memories of fascism and imperialism. Abandoning references to the
colonies, Italy's postwar governments referred instead to "gli italiani nel mondo"—
a diaspora of "Italians around the world."42 Only in the second postwar era is it
possible to talk of Italy as a nation "unbound" by migration, or of an Italian
diaspora as a "de-territorialized nation state." And, even in this period, the Italian
state hesitated to promote much political participation among citizens abroad.43
Viewing Italy's migrations exclusively as a diaspora-in-formation also had one
large drawback for understanding the lives of Italians everywhere. It privileged
interactions among migrants from Italy and the formation of an Italian nation, and
thus—ironically—reproduced rather than released scholarship from the tyranny of
the national by ignoring migrants' interactions with peoples of other backgrounds.
Internationalism and the related Marxist category of an international proletariat
(workers of the world) proved helpful correctives, suggesting a very different
global history, focused comparatively on the evolution of modern labor
movements. Modern labor movements in many countries struggled to organize
work forces of mixed native and foreign-born workers. By doing so, they
pioneered modes of incorporating foreigners that nation-states would borrow later
in the twentieth century.44
The history of Italy's migrants reveals internationalism as much more than an
abstraction of socialist theorists of the Second International. The best-known
leaders of Italy's movement for national independence—Giuseppe Garibaldi and
Giuseppe Mazzini—were both migrant exiles and—in very differing ways—
passionate internationalists. Italy's labor movement was "born anarchist" in the
1860s; the mass migrations from Italy overlapped with, and became an issue of
debate in, the Second, or Socialist, International between 1889 and 1914. In the
interwar years, Mussolini's nationalist imperialism faced sharp international
opposition from antifascist migrants, many of whom linked national liberation for
Italy to the internationalism of the Comintern.
One need not view migrants from Italy as a rootless international proletariat to
appreciate their internationalism. In fact, most of Italy's migrants were not factory
workers, nor were they completely dependent on wage labor for their survival.
Italy's labor migrants were overwhelmingly male (60-90 percent), and as "men
without women" were tied by sentiment and economic interdependence to the
"women who waited." Women's work in agricultural subsistence production
underwrote men's departures and returns, and subsistence production remained an
important dimension of family economies during Italy's mass migrations.45
As workers, Italy's migrants engaged in three forms of international organizing,
only one of which linked migrants into an Italian diaspora. In Germany and
Switzerland, members of Italy's trade federations, Socialist Party activists, and
activist exiles became involved in binational collaborations with the Swiss and
German trade federations that organized industries employing large numbers of
Italian migrants. Their experiments represented the Second International's best
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response (sparked by Italian Socialists' demands) to migrants' wage depression and
scabbing. This form of internationalism ultimately sought to organize workers into
multinational unions open to citizens of several countries and operating in several
lands.46
In a second form of internationalism, common in France, Austria, and the
40
Americas, Italy's migrants instead became active in multiethnic experiments in
organizing national labor movements. The American Federation of Labor (AFL)
and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States, the
Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA) in Argentina, France's
Confédération Général du Travail (CGT), and the socialist unions of Austria all
admitted foreign-born workers. In the American AFL and (briefly) the French
CGT, and in the United States, Argentine, and Austrian Socialist parties,
foreigners (or citizens speaking distinctive languages) initially found incorporation
in ethnic or language locals within multiethnic national organizations. The
American IWW, the Argentine FORA, and the Brazilian Workers' Federation
instead created culturally hybrid but unitary organizations with multiethnic
memberships they often termed cosmopolitan.47
Only the third form of internationalism among Italy's migrants contributed to
41
the formation of an Italian diaspora. Anarchists from Italy faced special
disadvantages as exiles and migrants. Tainted by their early support for terrorism,
Italian anarchists lived under constant police surveillance, and they repeatedly fled
from one country or continent to another.48 They forged networks of Italianspeaking anarchists in order to survive. Interlocking subscriptions linked hundreds
of their ephemeral Italian-language newspapers (published on every continent
except Antarctica) into a global network. These facilitated the development of a
worldwide, Italian-language discourse that linked in mortal combat followers of
Errico Malatesta's anarcho-syndicalism and libertarians opposed to all forms of
organization. This was a deterritorialized but distinctively Italian anarchism—an
Italian-language ideology unbound by migration. But one hesitates to call this
network of anarchists a national or even "Italian" diaspora. Anarcho-syndicalists
and libertarians were both vehement opponents of nationalism and of all national
states, including Italy's.
While concepts such as diaspora or internationalism promised an escape from 42
the tyranny of the national and promised new ways of writing world histories of
migration, both also documented the many linkages of local, national, and
transnational in migrants' lives. Becoming central to migrants' identities only rather
belatedly, nationalism and national states shaped local and global histories for
much longer. Internationalism among workers allowed Germany to deny it was a
nation of immigrants. It created ethnic segmentation in nations that would later
celebrate their multiculturalism. It linked anarchists into a distinctive "Italian"
diaspora. And it blended native- and foreign-born workers into unitary labor
movements that ignored cultural differences—as would the nations of Argentina
and France themselves. Even in nomadology, the national finds its place.
Bringing It All Back Home
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World histories organized around such concepts as diaspora and internationalism
allow historians to examine and critique national historiographies as outsiders.
Italians Everywhere provided ample materials for revising the historiographies of
many nations. By way of conclusion, I suggest how American immigration history
and the immigrant paradigm of United States history hold up under such scrutiny.
To simplify somewhat, the immigrant paradigm defines a particular
interpretation of American exceptionalism. It portrays the United States as the
world's first democracy and its most open frontier in the nineteenth century and as
the world's strongest industrializing economy in the twentieth. These exceptional
traits made the United States extraordinarily attractive to humble settlers, seeking
freedom and prosperity, from abroad. Second, it views the incorporation of
immigrants as the key to the American character—we are a "nation of
immigrants." Since the 1970s, the most important critics of the immigrant
paradigm have been students of the country's racial minorities. They rightly point
to long-term, rigid, and institutionalized exclusion on a racial basis as the central
theme—and central tragedy—of American nation building and American
democracy. Most see immigration history, and immigration historians, as
guardians of an immigrant paradigm they view as a destructive national myth.49
Curiously, however, the immigrant paradigm of American history is not a
product of immigration history; it originates in a critique of racial nationalism
within the Chicago School of Sociology.50 Rejecting social Darwinist notions that
an overheated melting pot was unable to absorb immigrants from eastern and
southern Europe, the Chicago School documented immigrants' rapid "straightline" assimilation in American cities.51 The first immigration historians began
writing around the same time. But unlike the Chicago sociologists, Carl Wittke,
Theodore Blegen, and Marcus Lee Hansen studied older immigrations (German,
British, Scandinavian) to nineteenth-century rural America. They focused a great
deal of attention on migration as a transnational, and local, phenomenon.52
It was Oscar Handlin's study of Irish immigrants in the urban East that
produced the classic statement of the immigrant paradigm by a historian in his
1951 book The Uprooted.53 To this day, Handlin's book along with the Chicago
sociologists and analyses of Amerian pluralism—beginning with J. Hector St.
John de Crèvecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville, and continuing through Frederick
Jackson Turner and Louis Hartz and David Hollinger—are the works most cited
by critics of the immigrant paradigm.54
Rather than inventing the immigrant paradigm, immigration historians, since
Rudolph Vecoli's seminal article "Contadini in Chicago," have been critics of it.
Recovering the histories of immigrant ethnic groups, immigration historians
rejected sociologists' theories of "straight-line" assimilation to document instead
ethnicity's persistence and the transformation of immigrants into ethnics. In 1985,
John Bodnar summarized their work by substituting transplanting for
Handlin's uprooting.55 As critics of the immigrant paradigm, immigration
historians have established mainly that the acquisition of an ethnic identity
accompanied foreigners' successful incorporation into the American nation.56 This
has been their main contribution to contemporary discussions of American
pluralism.
Unlike immigration history and its critics, Italians Everywhere treated the
United States as one of an impressive number of countries employing Italian labor
and grappling with the threat mass migrations seemed to pose for nation building.
In this transnational approach, the United States is unexceptional, just one of many
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44
45
46
47
48
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receiving countries. Through comparison of connected cases, transnational study
also makes it possible to ask what—if anything—is distinctive about migrants'
experiences in the United States, thus raising different questions, from the outside,
about the validity and contours of the immigrant paradigm. Like other critiques,
Italians Everywhere points to fundamental ways that the immigrant paradigm gets
the facts wrong.
First and foremost, the United States was considerably less attractive to Italy's
migrants than to most other mobile Europeans (two-thirds of whom traveled to the
United States).57 American land did not attract Italians before or after 1890.
Industrialization made the country more attractive after 1890, but even then only a
third of Italy's migrants sought work in the United States. After 1914, the
magnetism of the United States disappeared beneath draconic and discriminatory
immigration restrictions.
Nor did the United States present Italy's migrants with the most promising
work opportunities. In the United States, as many as three-quarters of male
migrants from Italy worked in seasonal unskilled jobs, mainly in construction.
Mining, agriculture, and skilled trade and petty commerce were of some, if
secondary, importance, but factory employment remained quite limited among
male migrants. The much smaller numbers of women and children migrating from
Italy were more likely to find work as factory operatives in garment, textile, shoe,
and cigar industries. By contrast, in Argentina and Brazil, the majority of Italian
migrants were semiskilled industrial workers, skilled tradesmen, petty merchants,
and white-collar workers. Independent farmers and sharecroppers were also much
better represented than in the United States. In Europe, the numbers of Italian
miners, skilled craftsmen, and semiskilled industrial workers (especially in
Germany and France) equaled those working in seasonal, unskilled, construction
jobs (more common in Switzerland).58
Italy's migrants scarcely differentiated images of opportunity in the United
States from other distant magnets. Less than 10 percent of the republican exiles
who fled Italy during fifty years of revolts and wars before Italy's unification
sought freedom in the United States.59 For labor migrants later in the century, any
transoceanic destination where jobs beckoned was "l'America," whether it was the
United States, Canada, or Argentina. A woman who went to Melbourne even
insisted "I migrated to America. It did not occur to me that Australia was not in
fact America."60
The United States attracted migrants from the poorest parts of Italy, where
illiteracy and unemployment were high. Its job market proved attractive mainly to
ambitious and hardworking but poor Sicilians and southern Italians who—already
disparaged within Italy and Europe for their poverty, "African origins," and
criminality—found few closer work opportunities. Southerners were three-quarters
of the Italians bound for the United States and Africa, slightly more than half of
those migrating to Latin America, but only about a third of migrants to Europe.61
Permanent settlement in the United States was not always a financially
advantageous choice even for impoverished southerners. The wages of unskilled
men stretched further in Italy than in the United States, where high costs of living
accompanied relatively high American wages. In the United States, the average
unskilled Italian man earned only a third of a family's minimum living costs, and it
could take ten years or more of wage earning by all family members to save
enough to purchase a house. In Italy, by contrast, the thousand lire many men
could save during a three- to five-year sojourn in the United States represented
two to three times a typical peasant family's annual cash income, and it was
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50
51
52
53
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sufficient to erect a modern, if modest, dwelling.62 Permanent settlement in the
United States became possible when women and children worked for wages
outside the family group. Italian migrants thus settled permanently mainly in
American cities with light industries and high rates of female employment. Yet
even in the twentieth century, women were less likely to migrate to the United
States than to Argentina, and higher proportions worked in Argentina than in the
United States.63
Rates of return are slippery indicators of migrants' satisfactions with life in the
United States, because so many left Italy intending to return. (Statistical evidence,
furthermore, is uneven.) Still, rates of return from the United States were high
when costs of oceanic journeys are considered. With the village home nearby for
the Europe-bound, vast majorities (two-thirds to 90 percent) returned after short
seasonal "campaigns" north of the Alps. Estimated at 49 percent 1905-1920, only
slightly higher than rates from Argentina, return rates from the United States rose
sharply thereafter. Between 1920 and 1945, returners soared to 83 percent of new
arrivals in the United States, while return rates from Europe and South America
instead dropped.64
Dino Cinel has offered a provocative interpretation of the migrants from Italy
who remained in the United States to become Italian Americans. He argues that
hyphenated, defensive, and insecure identities were a logical outcome of a sense
of failure among a group that did not achieve the goal of return. Others disagree
with Cinel, arguing instead that, as Euro-Americans, the descendants of Italy's
migrants confirm the immigrant paradigm and are firmly part of the American
mainstream. Yet even Richard Alba, who wrote of the "twilight of ethnicity"
among Italian Americans in the 1970s, found that well over half of the
grandchildren of Italian immigrants still claimed a "hyphenated" or ethnic "ItalianAmerican" identity.65
It is this plurality that distinguished nation building in the United States,
Canada, and Australia from that of other migrant-receiving nations from the 1920s
to the 1980s. In 1985, Robert F. Harney suggested that it reflected "Italo-phobia,"
which he deemed "an English-speaking disease." While hyphenated identities may
reflect voluntary choice, multinational comparisons suggest it is, instead, "the state
that makes the nation" in this particular multiethnic form.66
In the United States, the making of hyphenated identities among Italy's
migrants seems intimately related to the history of immigration restriction, not to
the promise of America democracy. Restriction of Asian and European labor
migrations to the United States differed, of course, but largely in degree. The
United States excluded, first, Chinese laborers (but not merchants) in 1882; in
1885, the Foran Act (unsuccessfully) excluded all contract laborers, including
those from Europe. In 1899, the United States began categorizing all immigrants
by social Darwinist racial groups, dividing migrants from Italy into northern Italian
"Alpine" and southern Italian "Mediterranean" races. In 1917, the country
excluded illiterates. In 1921 and 1924, while barring all Asians, it imposed
discriminatory "national origins quotas" on many Europeans. The goal was to
reduce the immigration of nations (such as Italians) not among the country's
original settlers.67 Discriminatory quotas persisted until 1965, when they fell to the
same critique of racial nationalism that produced domestic civil rights legislation.
Migrants became Italian Americans during years when state policy restricted their
migrations as undesirable. Restriction of European migrations took slightly
different forms in Canada and Australia and was suspended immediately after
World War II rather than persisting as it did in the United States until 1965, but it
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55
56
57
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had pursued similar discriminatory ends in the interwar years.68
The United States shares with other English-speaking countries its early efforts 58
to label Asians and some migrants from Europe as unworthy to enter while
remaining willing to accept the children of both restricted (European) and
excluded (Asian) immigrants as native-born citizens. The English-speaking
countries in turn share with France and Argentina a sense of civic nationalism that,
since the 1940s, increasingly encourages and allows migrants to naturalize and to
develop new national identities as Americans, Canadians, or Argentines. Unlike
France and Argentina, however, the English-speaking countries retain a firm sense
of some migrants as culturally different ethnics, and they left open civil and social
spaces for foreigners to organize autonomously and to reproduce homeland
loyalties. Over the long term, migrants' descendants in English-speaking countries
found themselves living in countries that trumpet their multiethnicity (usually
called multiculturalism) and culturally plural citizenries as a symbol of democratic
nationalism. France instead consciously insists that its model of incorporation
without attention to race, religion, ethnicity, or origin is a better model for
republican nations.69
France, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Argentina are just as much nations of 59
immigrants as the United States is, yet none has generated an equivalent of the
immigrant paradigm as symbol of their nation's distinctiveness. Here is the only
truly American exceptionalism revealed by Italians Everywhere. Histories of
Argentina, Brazil, and France show limited interest in migrants once they have
become citizens and entered the nation. And Germans and Swiss simply deny that
theirs are nations of immigrants at all. Other self-consciously multiethnic and
multicultural histories, such as those of Canada and Australia, view migration as
only one of many "makers" of their nations.
The intriguing question about American exceptionalism, then, is why the
60
United States, alone among immigrant-receiving and even self-consciously
multicultural countries, has generated an immigrant paradigm to explain the
making of its nation. In fact, the history of migration from Italy to the United
States bears but limited resemblance to the immigrant paradigm. Many of the
"immigrants" of the past were not immigrants at all; they were not particularly
interested in becoming American or even in migrating to the United States rather
than to some other destination. Canada, Australia, and the United States shared
unresolved tensions between territorial and racial definitions of their nations,
expressed in a sharp contrast between restrictive and discriminatory public policies
toward undesirable immigrants and increasingly inclusive definitions of citizenship.
The immigrant paradigm, I believe, is the product of the unique manner in
61
which the United States has grappled with that ambivalence to create an American
nation. The United States shares with Canada and Australia a long history of
subjecting and excluding the indigenous peoples it conquered. Like Canada,
furthermore, the United States has incorporated territories of several empires
(French and English in the case of both; Spanish in the case of the United States).
What makes the United States different from Canada and Australia is its long
history of slavery as a source of significant national disunity. It is this history, I
believe (along with many critics of the immigrant paradigm), that explains the
creation of an immigrant paradigm in the United States and not in the other
English-speaking countries. By focusing our attention on race, exclusion, and state
policy, Italians Everywhere raises many of the same critiques of the immigrant
paradigm developed by historians of this country's racial minorities. The racial
dynamics of the United States best explain the creation and persistence of an
immigrant paradigm that ignores, when it does not also falsify, the history of
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African Americans.
I have presented United States history, with its immigrant paradigm, less as
62
myopic nationalism than—as Renan might have predicted—a highly selective tale.
The most important and negative legacy of the immigrant paradigm is that it
historically divides the histories of Americans into the histories of immigrants and
others. Students of the country's racial minorities rightly note that, as a myth of
nation building, the immigrant paradigm repeatedly serves to exclude racial
minorities (especially Native Americans and the descendants of African slaves)
from the American nation, despite their native birth. Ironically, this was never the
intention of most immigration historians, who were not the creators of the
immigrant paradigm, but critics of it.
While transnational history allows us to mount a critique of the immigrant
63
paradigm that shares much with existing ones, it also offers something new.
Through an incredible sleight-of-historiography, the immigrant paradigm forces
into the American nation migrants that the nation not only sought to exclude but
whose histories are scarcely paeans to the promise and triumph of American
democracy. Criticisms of the immigrant paradigm by historians of immigration are
important because they bring into dialogue histories of immigrant and racial
minorities that evolved as separate and competing interpretations of United States
history. If a more-perfect American pluralism requires a new tale of nation
formation, transnational historians could participate in its making. Histories of
migration and immigration to the United States provide evidence that the
acquisition of an ethnic or racial identity—while often a response to exclusion—
can sometimes be transformed into an element in national belonging. They show
that there have been many paths into the American nation and that exclusionary
obstacles of many sorts have been part of many of these paths. They demonstrate,
finally, that no one path links all immigrants or separates one homogeneous
category of immigrants from either Americans or racial outsiders.
For historians who reject responsibility for reproducing nations (and I include 64
myself in this group), projects such as Italians Everywhere reveal the promise and
perils of that choice. Much of human history refuses to fall within the confines of
nations and national historiographies. Counterbalancing the marginality of life
"outside" a national historiography are transnational scholarly practices that
promise to redefine the historical nowhere and the many worlds humans have ever
occupied above and below nations and their states.
Notes
Donna R. Gabaccia is Charles H. Stone Professor of American History at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte.
I wish to thank Nancy Green, Dirk Hoerder, Fraser Ottanelli, Walter Nugent, and participants in the
Amsterdam-Cambridge transnational "gig" of June 1998—especially Dave Thelen—for their helpful
feedback on earlier versions of this essay.
Readers may contact Gabaccia at [email protected].
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1
Gérard Noiriel, La tyrannie du national: Le droit d'asile en Europe (1793-1993) (The tyranny of
the national: The right of refuge in Europe, 1793-1993) (Paris, 1991). Because I assume most readers
are historians of the United States, I have limited citations when possible to works in English.
Translations from non-English sources are my own.
2
Donna R. Gabaccia, "Do We Still Need Immigration History?," Polish American Studies, 55 (Spring
1998), 54-55.
3
Imre Ferenczi, International Migrations, ed. Walter F. Willcox (2 vols., New York, 1929), I, 811.
Emilio Franzina, Gli italiani al nuovo mondo (Italians in the New World) (Milan, 1995), 87-140;
John E. Zucchi, The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century
Paris, London, and New York (Montreal, 1992).
4
Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, "Stato senza nazione" (State without nation), in La costruzione dello stato in
Italia e Germania (The construction of the state in Italy and Germany), by L. Ambrosoli et al.
(Manduria, 1993). G. E. Rusconi, Se cessassimo di essere una nazione (If we ceased to be a nation)
(Bologna, 1993); Giorgio Calcagno, ed., Bianco, rosso, e verde: L'identità degli italiani (White, red,
and green: The identity of the Italians) (Rome, 1993).
5
Denis Mack Smith, "Regionalism," in Modern Italy, ed. Edward R. Tannenbaum and Emiliana P.
Noether (New York, 1974); Carl Levy, ed., Italian Regionalism: History, Identity, and Politics
(Oxford, 1996). Michael Kearney, "The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization
and Transnationalism," Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995).
6
Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational
Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York, 1992).
Robert Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times (1919; New York, 1968).
7
Vito Teti, "Noti sui comportamenti delle donne sole degli 'americani' durante la prima emigrazione
in Calabria" (Notes on the comportment of women left alone by the "Americans" during the first
period of emigration from Calabria), Studi emigrazione (Rome), 24 (no. 87, 1987), 13-46; René del
Fabbro, Transalpini: Italienische Arbeitswanderung nach Süddeutschland im Kaiserreich 18701918 (The transalpinians: Italian labor migration to southern Germany during the reign of the
kaisers 1870-1918) (Osnabrück, 1996), 266-67.
8
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis, 1987), 23. Ernst Renan cited in Noiriel, Tyrannie du national, 1. See also Ian Tyrrell,
"Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire," Journal of
American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1015-44.
9
Richard White, "The Nationalization of Nature," Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999),
976-86; and Bruno Ramirez, "Clio in Words and in Motion: Practices of Narrating the Past," ibid.,
987-1014.
10
Joseph Lopreato, Italian Americans (Austin, 1970); Luciano J. Iorizzo and Salvatore
Mondello, The Italian-Americans (New York, 1971); Humbert S. Nelli, From Immigrants to Ethnics:
The Italian Americans (New York, 1983); Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five
Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York, 1992). Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture,
and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History
(Oxford, 1977). Josef Barton, Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an
American City, 1890-1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and
Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, 1977); John W. Briggs, An Italian
Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890-1930 (New Haven, 1978).
11
Ernesto Ragionieri, "Italiani all'estero ed emigrazione di lavoratori italiani: Una tema di storia
movimento operaio" (Italians abroad and the emigration of Italian workers: A theme in the history of
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the labor movement), Belfagor, Rassegna di Varia Umanità (Florence), 17 (no. 6, 1962), 640-69;
Frank Thistlethwaite, "Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,"
in A Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930, ed. Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke
(Urbana, 1991). Dirk Hoerder, ed., American Labor and Immigration History 1877-1920s: Recent
European Research (Urbana, 1986).
12
Three projects (in Munich/Berlin, Hamburg, and Bochum) produced Hartmut Keil and John Jentz,
eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850-1910: A Comparative Perspective (DeKalb,
1983); Günter Moltmann, Deutsche Amerikaauswanderung im 19. Jahrhundert: sozialgeschicht.
Beitr. (German migration to America in the nineteenth century: Social historical contributions)
(Stuttgart, 1976); and Wolfgang Helbich, Walter D. Kamphoefner, and Ulrike Sommer, News from
the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, 1991).
13
From a long list of publications, see Dirk Hoerder and Inge Blank, eds., Roots of the Transplanted
(2 vols., Boulder, 1994); Dirk Hoerder, ed., Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the
Immigrant Experience, 1840-1930 (New York, 1993); and Christiane Harzig et al., Peasant Maids,
City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, 1997).
14
Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Ill., 1958); William
Muraskin, "The Moral Basis of a Backward Sociologist: Edward Banfield, the Italians, and the
Italian-Americans," American Journal of Sociology, 79 (no. 6, 1974), 1484-96.
15
Samuel L. Baily, "The Future of Italian-American Studies: An Historian's Approach to Research in
the Coming Decade," in Italian Americans: New Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity,
ed. Lydio Tomasi (Staten Island, 1985), 193-201.
16
Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian
Immigrants, 1880-1930 (Albany, 1984); Donna Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians
Become Italian Workers (New Brunswick, 1988).
17
Bruno Bezza, ed., Gli italiani fuori d'Italia: Gli emigrati italiani nei movimenti operai dei paesi
d'adozione 1880-1940 (The Italians outside of Italy: Italian emigrants and the labor movements of
receiving countries 1880-1940) (Milan, 1983); George E. Pozzetta and Bruno Ramirez, eds., The
Italian Diaspora: Migration across the Globe (Toronto, 1992); Lydio F. Tomasi, Piero Gastaldo,
and Thomas Row, eds., The Columbus People: Perspectives in Italian Immigration to the Americas
and Australia (New York and Turin, 1994).
18
The archive Web address of the project Italian Workers around the World is [http://
unccvx.uncc.edu/~DRGABACC/]. Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World
of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985 (Urbana, 1987). Donna
Gabaccia, Italy's Many Diasporas: Elites, Exiles, and Workers of the World (Seattle, forthcoming).
19
Tullio De Mauro, "Linguistic Variety and Linguistic Minorities," in Italian Cultural Studies: An
Introduction, ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley (Oxford, 1996).
20
Gianfausto Rosoli, ed., Un secolo di emigrazione italiana, 1876-1976 (A century of Italian
emigration, 1876-1976) (Rome, 1978); Annuario statistico italiana (Italian statistical annual)
(Rome, 1927).
21
Antonio Bechelloni, "Anti-Fascist Resistance in France from the 'Phony War' to the Liberation:
Identity and Destinies in Question," in "For Us There Are No Frontiers," ed. Donna R. Gabaccia and
Fraser Ottanelli (manuscript). A second collection of essays from the project Italian Workers around
the World is being edited by Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, "Foreign, Female, and Fighting
Back."
22
Franzina, Italiani al nuovo mondo; Ercole Sori, L'emigrazione italiana dall'unità alla seconda
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guerra mondiale (Italian emigration from unification to the Second World War) (Bologna, 1979);
Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, L'emigrazione nella storia d'Italia, 1868-1975: Storia e documenti (Emigration
in the history of Italy, 1868-1975: History and documents) (Florence, 1978);
Franca Assante, ed., Movimento migratorio italiano dall'unità ai giorni nostri (Italian migratory
movements from unification to our own times) (2 vols., Geneva, 1978).
23
Spencer Di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present (Boulder, 1995);
Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, coord., Storia d'Italia (History of Italy) (Turin, 1972-1976);
Giuseppe Galasso, dir., Storia d'Italia (History of Italy) (Turin, 1979).
24
Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, eds., The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno
Revisited (Exeter, U.K., 1997).
25
Giuseppe Galasso and Rosario Romeo, Storia del mezzogiorno (History of southern Italy) (Rome,
1991); Storia d'Italia: Le regioni dall'unità a oggi (History of Italy: The regions from unification to
the present) (Turin, 1989- ).
26
Donna Gabaccia, "Two Great Migrations: American and Italian Southerners in Comparative
Perspective," in The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History,
ed. Rick Halpern and Enrico del Lago (New York, forthcoming).
27
Donna Gabaccia, "Italian history and Gli italiani nel mondo, Part I," Journal of Modern Italian
Studies, 2 (no. 1, 1997), 45-66; and Donna Gabaccia, "Italian History and Gli italiani nel mondo,
Part II," ibid., 3 (no. 1, 1998), 73-97.
28
Gilles Pécout, Naissance de l'Italie contemporaine (1770-1922) (The birth of contemporary Italy,
1770-1922) (Paris, 1997); Richard Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World (New York, 1996).
29
Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany (Ann Arbor,
1984); Madelyn Holmes, Forgotten Migrants: Foreign Workers in Switzerland before World War I
(Rutherford, 1988).
30
Gérard Noiriel, "Immigration and National Memory in the Current French Historiography," IMSBeiträge, 10 (1999), 39-55. Gino Germani, "Mass Immigration and Modernization
in Argentina," in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, ed. Jorge Dominguez (New York, 1994);
Arnd Schneider, "Discours sur l'altérité dans l'Argentine moderne" (Discourse on otherness in modern
Argentina), Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie (Paris), 105 (1992), 341-60.
31
Besides works cited in n. 10 above, see Bruno Ramirez, The Italians in Canada (Ottawa, 1990);
Neil Bissondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto, 1994);
Stephen Castles, ed., Australia's Italians: Culture and Community in a Changing Society (Sydney,
1992); and George M. Fredrickson, "America's Diversity in Comparative Perspective," Journal of
American History, 85 (Dec. 1998), 868-69.
32
Janet Abu-Lughod, "Going beyond Global Babble," in Culture, Globalization, and the WorldSystem: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King
(Minneapolis, 1997). Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, "Diaspora or International
Proletariat? Italian Labor, Labor Migration, and the Making of Multiethnic
States, 1815-1939," Diaspora, 6 (Spring 1997), 51-84.
33
James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthropology, 9 (Aug. 1994), 302-38; Robin Cohen, Global
Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, 1997).
34
Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on
Migration.
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35
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton,
1993); Khachig Tölölyan, "Rethinking Diasporas: Stateless Power in
the Transnational Moment," Diaspora, 5 (Spring 1996). Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and
Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and
Deterritorialized Nation-States (Amsterdam, 1994).
36
Gabaccia, Italy's Many Diasporas, ch. 4.
37
Leone Carpi, Della colonie e dell'emigrazione d'italiani all'estero sotto l'aspetto dell'industria,
commercio, ed agricoltura (About colonies and Italian emigration abroad with regard to industry,
commerce, and agriculture) (4 vols., Milan, 1874), I, II; Gerolamo Boccardo, L'emigrazione e le
colonie (Emigration and colonies) (Florence, 1871).
38
Franzina, Italiani al nuovo mondo, 15.
39
Silvano M. Tomasi, "Scalabriniani e mondo cattolico di fronte all'emigrazione italiana (18801940)" (Scalabrinians and the Catholic world confront Italian emigration, 1880-1940), in Italiani
fuori d'Italia, ed. Bezza, 145-62; Ronald S. Cunsoli, "Enrico Corradini and the Italian Version of
Proletarian Nationalism," Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism (Charlottetown), 12 (no. 1,
1985), 47-63. Lucio Fabi, "La riforma della legge sulla cittadinanza italiana" (Reform of the Italian
citizenship law) Gli italiani nel mondo (Rome), 21 (March 1965).
40
Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans and Fascism, 1921-1929 (West
Lafayette, 1999); Alan Cassels, "Fascism for Export: Italy and the United States
in the Twenties," American Historical Review, 69 (April 1964), 707-12.
41
Nadia Venturini, "'Over the Years People Don't Know': Italian Americans and African Americans in
Harlem in the 1930s," in "For Us There Are No Frontiers," ed. Gabaccia and Ottanelli; Fraser M.
Ottanelli, "'If fascism comes to America we will push it back into the ocean': Italian-American
Antifascism during the 1920s and 1930s," ibid.
42
Carlo Morandi, "Per una storia degli italiani fuori d'Italia (A proposito di alcune note di A.
Gramsci)" (Toward a history of Italians living outside Italy, referring to some notes by
A. Gramsci), Rivista storica italiana, 3 (1949), 379-84; Varo Varanini, "Gli Italiani nel mondo"
(Italians around the world), in Cento anni di vita italiana 1848-1948 (One hundred years of Italian
life 1848-1948), ed. Corrado Barbagallo (2 vols., Milan, 1948), I, 495-536.
43
Italiani nel mondo (Rome), 31 (March 1975); ibid. (April 1975); ibid. (Oct. 1975); ibid., 36 (Jan.
1980).
44
Gabaccia and Ottanelli, "Diaspora or International Proletariat?"
45
Robert Harney, "Men without Women: Italian Migrants in Canada, 1885-1930," in The Italian
Immigrant Woman in North America, ed. Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi
(Toronto, 1978), 79-101; Caroline Brettell, The Men Who Migrate and the Women Who Wait:
Population and History in a Portuguese Parish (Princeton, 1986). Donna Gabaccia and Franca
Iacovetta, "Work, Women, and Protest in the Italian Diaspora: An
International Research Agenda," Labour/Le Travail (Toronto), 42 (Fall 1998), 161-82.
46
Donna Gabaccia, "Worker Internationalism and Italian Labor Migration,
1870-1914," International Labor and Working-Class History, 45 (Spring 1994), 63-79.
47
Angelo Trento, "'Wherever We Work, That Land Is Ours': Italian Anarchists and Working-Class
Solidarity in São Paulo," in "For Us There Are No Frontiers," ed. Gabaccia and Ottanelli; Carina
Silberstein, "Labor and Migration in an Agricultural Economy: Italians in Argentina," ibid.; Michael
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Miller Topp, "The Lawrence Strike and the Defense Campaign for Ettor and Giovannitti: The
Possibilities and Limitations of Italian American Syndicalism," ibid.
48
Gabaccia, "Worker Internationalism and Italian Labor Migration."
49
George J. Sanchez, "Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies," Journal of
American Ethnic History, 18 (Summer 1999), 66-84. Early and later criticisms of the paradigm are
Robert Blauner, "Colonized and Immigrant Minorities," in A Nation of Nations, ed. Peter I. Rose
(New York, 1972), 243-58; and Michael Omi and Howard Wynant, Racial Formation in the United
States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York, 1986).
50
See Gary Gerstle, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American
Nationalism," Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1280-1307.
51
John Gjerde, "New Growth on Old Vines: The State of the Field of the Social History of
Immigration to and Ethnicity in the United States," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 (Summer
1999), 40-65; Donna Gabaccia, "Ins and Outs: Who Is an Immigration Historian?," ibid, 126-35.
52
These authors may not be familiar to historians outside of immigration history—a telling reminder
of their fate in American historiography. See Carl Wittke, We Who Built America: The Saga of the
Immigrant (Cleveland, 1939); Theodore Blegen, Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860
(Northfield, Minn., 1931); Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 1940).
For a discussion of their works, see Gjerde, "New Growth on Old Vines."
53
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration that Made the American
People (Boston, 1951).
54
The works of these historians, by contrast, will be well known to many Americanists, and all are
still in print in recent editions. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835, 1840, in
French; New York, 1999); J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782;
New York, 1997); Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History
(1894; Madison, 1984); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of
American Political Thought since the Revolution (1955; San Diego, 1991). For a more recent
discussion of these issues, see David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism
(New York, 1995); and Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans," Journal of
American History, 84 (Sept. 1997), 524-58.
55
Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted," Journal of American
History, 51 (Dec. 1964), 404-17. John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban
America (Bloomington, 1985).
56
Ewa Morawska, "In Defense of the Assimilation Model," Journal of American Ethnic History, 13
(Winter 1994), 76-87; Elliott R. Barkan, "Race, Religion, and Nationality in American Society: A
Model of Ethnicity: From Contact to Assimilation," ibid., 14 (Winter 1995), 38-74; Russell A. Kazal,
"Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in Ethnic History," American
Historical Review, 100 (April 1995), 437-71; James R. Barrett, "Americanization from the Bottom
Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930," Journal
of American History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 996-1020.
57
Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (Bloomington, 1992);
Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington,
1992), 147-53.
58
Foerster, Italian Emigration of Our Times; Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise:
Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914 (Ithaca, 1999).
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59
Donna Gabaccia, "Class, Exile, and Nationalism at Home and Abroad: The Italian Risorgimento,"
in "For Us There Are No Frontiers," ed. Gabaccia and Ottanelli.
60
M. Triaca, Amelia: A Long Journey (Richmond, 1985), 35, quoted in Bosworth, Italy and the
Wider World, 134.
61
Gabriella Gribaudi, "Images of the South: The Mezzogiorno as Seen by Insiders and Outsiders," in
Lumley and Morris, eds., New History of the Italian South; John Dickie, "Stereotypes of the Italian
South, 1860-1900," ibid. Gabaccia, "Two Great Migrations."
62
Gabaccia, Italy's Many Diasporas, ch. 4.
63
Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise, 63, 159.
64
Del Fabbro, Transalpini, 4; Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants, 155-63. Rosoli, ed., Secolo di
emigrazione italiana, table XX; Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise, table 3.4; Betty Boyd
Caroli, Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900-1914 (New York, 1973), 49-50.
65
Dino Cinel, National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870-1929 (Cambridge, Eng.,
1991), 233. Herbert Gans, "Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in
America," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2 (1979), 1-10; Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing
Identities in America (Berkeley, 1990); Richard Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White
America (New Haven, 1990); a sensible response is George E. Pozzetta, "What Then Is the European
American, This New Man? Ethnicity in Contemporary America," Altreitalie (Turin), 3 (Nov. 1991),
114-17. Richard Alba, Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, 1985).
66
Robert F. Harney, "Italophobia: An English-speaking Malady?," Polyphony, 7 (March 1985).
Marshall Pilsudski cited in E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 44-45.
67
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New York, 1965).
68
A. C. Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy (Melbourne, 1967); Donald H.
Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1994 (Toronto, 1995).
69
Nancy L. Green, "Le Melting-Pot: Made in America, Produced in France," Journal of American
History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1188-1208.
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