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2018 Midterm2 (assignment) Index to Sample Student Midterm2 Answers Part 3. Research Report Starts |
LITR 4340
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Clark
Omo
1
April 2018
Viaggio nel Nuovo Mondo: The Italian American’s Story Part I
More
Italians have migrated to the United States than any other European ethnic group
(“Italian Immigration”). As a result, their story for why they decided to come
to the New World via the United States stands as a unique and impacting one for
American History. How they have contributed to the story of the United States,
as well as they have lent their own unique color to American Culture. On a
personal note, the history of the Italian’s immigration the US stands as a
subject of interest because of my own family history. My mother’s side of the
family (né Arvello), is of predominant Italian heritage through my grandfather,
Salvador Arvello, whose own family migrated from Sicily. The struggles that my
own family’s ancestors went through, as well as the reasons that prompted them
to leave their own homes and come to America, opens a window into the history of
a truly unique subtext within American history, as well as America’s own
cultural makeup. The Italian American, through hardship and endurance, came to
America to escape the adverse conditions of their homeland of century upon
century, and chose to assimilate to a culture so different from their own. Their
story is an inspiring as well as harrowing one, and the Italian Immigrant’s
story is not only a story of themselves, but one of and for America as well.
The
reasons for Italian Immigration were immensely dire. As stated before, more
“Italians have migrated to the United States than any other Europeans” (“Italian
Immigration”). Poverty, overpopulation, as well as natural disaster, caused the
Italians to leave their homeland and seek solace in the United States (“Italian
Immigration”). Beginning the 1870s, the birthrates in Italy had experience a
monumental increase, while death rates, in reverse, had rapidly declined
(“Italian Immigration”). As a result, population pressures became extremely
severe, especially in Il Mezzogiorno, the southern and poorest provinces of the
Island (“Italian Immigration”). In addition, the education in Italy had also
underwent a drastic decline. The illiteracy rate in Italy around this period was
70%, ten times that of England, France or Germany (“Italian Immigration”).
Besides economic hardship and deficiencies in education, natural disasters also
lent their destructive hands to worsening the living conditions in Italia. Mount
Vesuvius erupted at one point and buried the town of Naples. Mount Etna then
erupted not long after, followed by an earthquake and resulting tidal wave that
killed over 100,000 people in the city of Messina alone (“Italian Immigration”).
Governmental abuse also contributed, with the government being dominated mostly
by northerners, with southerners having to pay high taxes and high protective
tariffs on northern industrial goods (“Italian Immigration”). Southerners also
suffered from a lack of cultivatable soil, as well as mineral resources
(“Italian Immigration”). With conditions so dire and dismal, the Italian
immigrant realized that he, along with his family, had to leave their home in
search of a new. And so, the Italian Immigrant abandoned such adversity and
trial to seek solace in America.
With
such suffering left behind the horizon, the Italian Immigrant was left to follow
the sun toward America, but they originally did not intend to come to make
America their permanent home. The Italian immigrants were part of the “New
Immigration”, the third and largest wave of immigration to the United States
(Molnar). However, the journey was not free of obstacles. Originally, most the
Italian Immigrants from the southern portion of the nation did not plan on
staying in country (Colella, “Italian Immigration”). In fact, they were called
“Birds of Passage” to denote their initial intent of merely staying to find
labor rather than to remain as permanent residents (Colella). 75% of Italians
were farmers, but they had no desire to farm in America permanently (Colella).
Instead, they went to the cities where labor was needed and wages were high
(Colella). As Nicole Colella notes, such a migration could not be defined as
total rejection of the homeland (Colella). Rather, they planned on making enough
money to send back to the homeland to preserve the traditional way of life
(Colella). They came to America to get enough money so that they could return
home to buy land, and America, abundant in land and money, was tempting as it
was promising (Molnar). The Italian Immigrant, much like the Cuban Immigrant
studied earlier in this class, did not intend to stay. They came to escape
political and financial hardship, and, by coming to America, they hoped to
acquire enough money so they could return home and purchase their own land.
In
the midst of this massive migration appears a subtext within the subtext: the
story of the Sicilian Immigrant. As mentioned in the introduction, my
grandfather’s relatives migrated from this island off the toe of Italy’s boot.
As Laura Rudolph states, Sicilians have had recorded presence in the US for over
300 years (Rudolph). The first significant wave of Sicilian immigration occurred
in the late 1880s (Rudolph), but Sicilian immigration did not become especially
large until 1906, when 100,000 left for the States in that one year (Rudolph).
In fact, one out of every four of the 4.5 million Italians that immigrated to
the US was a Sicilian (The numbers would have undoubtedly been larger than this,
but the US Immigration Act of 1924 greatly impeded these numbers, reduction the
total number of immigrants from Italy to just barely 4,000 (Rudolph). Like the
other Italians mentioned above, the Sicilians left their part of Italy for
social and economic reasons and hope to return one day with money in hand to
improve their lot in their homeland. But Sicily suffered as well. An
agricultural crisis left a grievous mark on the grain and citrus markets
(Rudolph), along with heavy economic exploitation by the government (Rudolph).
Thus, the Sicilians left their home behind and migrated to the US. The heaviest
concentrations of Sicilians settled in were New York, Chicago, Boston, New
Orleans, and San Francisco, where jobs for unskilled workers were easily
obtainable (Rudolph). They also settled in rural areas such as Bryant, Texas,
where over 1,000 Sicilians settled (Rudolph). And so, the Sicilians, persecuted
and suffering like their other fellow Italians, found refuge within America as
they also tried to make their future.
The
Italian Immigrant’s story is one fraught with hardship and adversity. Their
homeland, rife with natural, economic, social, and political turmoil, was no
longer a place worthy to live in for many Italians. So instead, they sailed for
America where they hoped to find jobs in the cities that would pay them enough
to send back to Italy to preserve their old way of living, and so that they may
return to Italy with enough financial backing to buy their own land. And as a
footnote to the general Italians coming to America, came the Sicilians, who,
like their other fellow Italians, also left behind a land of political and
economic upheaval in search of a land where the could make enough money to
rebuild their futures. The struggles that the Italian Immigrants underwent to
leave their homes must have been unimaginably immense. And the trials they
experienced, such as prejudicial and religious, will be covered in the next part
of this report, along with how the Italians overcame such trials and managed to
impact American culture in their own unique and colorful way.
Works
Cited
Colella, Nicole. “Southern Italian Immigration.”
Italiamerica.
http://www.italiamerica.org/id49.htm. Accessed 2 April 2018.
“Italian Immigration.” Digital History.
2016. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/voices/italian_immigration.cfm. Accessed
2 April 2018.
Molnar, Alexandra. “History of Italian Immigration.”
www.mtholyoke.edu. 15 December 2010.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~molna22a/classweb/politics/Italianhistory.html.
Accessed 2 April 2018.
Rudolph, Laura C. “Sicilian Americans.”
www.everycultur.com.
https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/italian3.html.
Accessed 2 April 2018.
