Italian workers of the world : labor migration and the formation of multiethnic states / edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Gabaccia, Donna R., 1949-

Ottanelli, Fraser M.

Series:

Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italians--Foreign countries.

Italians.

Labor movement.

Cultural pluralism.

Nationalism.

Internationalism.

Physical Description:

xvi, 248 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2001]

Summary:

Offering a kaleidoscopic perspective on the experiences of Italian workers on foreign soil, Italian Workers of the World explores the complex links between international class formation and nation building.

Distinguished by an international panel of contributors, this wide-ranging volume examines how the reception of immigrants in their new countries shaped their sense of national identity and helped determine the nature of the multiethnic states in which they settled. In Argentina and Brazil, Italian migrants were welcomed as a civilizing influence and were instrumental in establishing and leading syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist labor movements committed to labor internationalism. In the United States, by contrast, where Italian workers were greeted by the American Federation of Labor's hostility to socialism, internationalism, and unskilled laborers, they organized in ethnically mixed unions, including the radical Industrial Workers of the World. The xenophobia they encountered in the "land of opportunity" ultimately encouraged sympathy among Italian Americans for Mussolini's modernizing, imperialist ambitions for the Italian state.

Covering the work of republican "Garibaldians" in South America and antifascist currents among Italian migrants in France and the United States, as well as such seminal events as the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, Italian Workers of the World shows how modes of incorporating (or excluding) foreign-born workers were carried over from nineteenth-century labor movements to twentieth-century nationstates. This volume also paves the way for new modes of collaboration across the boundaries of historical nationalism.

Contents:

Part 1 Italian Nationalism In An Age Of Exile And Labor Migration, 1789-1880

1. Class, Exile, and Nationalism at Home and Abroad: The Italian Risorgimento / Donna R. Gabaccia 21

2. Programs and Politics of the First Italian Elite of Buenos Aires, 1852-80 / Fernando J. Devoto 41

Part 2 Class, Nation, And Internationalism In An Era Of Proletarian Mass Migration, 1870-1920

3. La Patria degli Italiani and Social Conflict in Early-Twentieth-Century Argentina / Mirta Zaida Lobato 63

4. Migrants, Farmers, and Workers: Italians in the Land of Ceres / Carina Frid de Silberstein 79

5. "Wherever We Work, That Land Is Ours": The Italian Anarchist Press and Working-Class Solidarity in Sao Paulo / Angelo Trento 102

6. Radical Ethnic Brokers: Immigrant Socialist Leaders in the United States between Ethnic Community and the Larger Society / Elisabetta Vezzosi 121

7. The Lawrence Strike: The Possibilities and Limitations of Italian American Syndicalist Transnationalism / Michael Miller Topp 139

Part 3 Antifascism As An International Movement

8. Italian Antifascism and the Garibaldine Tradition in Latin America / Pietro Rinaldo Fanesi 163

9. "If Fascism Comes to America We Will Push It Back into the Ocean": Italian American Antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s / Fraser M. Ottanelli 178

10. "Over the Years People Don't Know": Italian Americans and African Americans in Harlem in the 1930s / Nadia Venturini 196

11. Antifascist Resistance in France from the "Phony War" to the Liberation: Identity and Destinies in Question / Antonio Bechelloni 214.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0252026594

OCLC:

45446460