From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia

SUNY Series in Italian/American Culture

by Stefano Luconi

From Paesani to White Ethnics analyzes the process by which people of Italian descent renegotiated their sense of community and ethnic self-perception in Philadelphia from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. At the turn of the century, Italian immigrants who arrived in Philadelphia originally formed allegiances and social clusters based on their localistic, provincial, or regional ties. By the late 1930s, however, the emergence of Italian nationalism together with the end of mass immigration from Italy and the appearance of an American-born second generation of individuals with loose ties to the land of their parents contributed to bring together Italian Americans from disparate local backgrounds and helped them to develop a common national identity that they had lacked upon arrival in the United States. Luconi explains how Italian Americans continued to distance themselves from other European minorities throughout the early postwar years until ethnic defensiveness against the alleged encroachments of African Americans as well as racial tensions over housing forced them to extend the boundaries of their ethnic identity in the 1960s and to redefine it within the broader context of the white ethnic movement. This process climaxed as Philadelphia polarized along racial lines on issues such as public education and crime in the late 1960s and a

Genres: History

274 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2001

Reviews

[0 · Rating 3 out of 5]

if you read this book alongside noel ignatiev's "how the irish became white," you can begin to understand some of the historical underpinnings of white racism in philadelphia. ignatiev laments the fact that it's often those whites that were initially marginalized who become the most beholden to racism, in attempts to maintain what little power they were able to cement.

philadelphia saw an influx of european immigrants throughout the 1800s. these immigrants settled into distinct neighborhoods allowed them to maintain their native cultures in a new place. anti-immigrant sentiment from anglo-saxon "native" americans waxed and waned at different periods in philadelphia's history. in the 1830s-50s, it targeted mostly irish immigrants. in the 1910s-40s, it targeted italians.

these european immigrants, in philadelphia and elsewhere, were once divided into distinct "ethnic" categories of italian, russian, polish, and irish. faced with the threat of increasing black organizing and migration to philadelphia, those separate ethnic groups banded together to form a pan-european "white" identity that sought to maintain racially segregated schools, neighborhoods, and jobs from "thugs, thieves, and hoodlums." one example is the 1945 philadelphia transportation company strike of white workers who protested the promotion of black workers to positions blacks were previously excluded from. the five-day strike lasted until the military took control of the transportation system and arrested the strike's leaders. another example is the election of frank rizzo to mayor in 1971 by italian, polish, irish, and jewish whites. rizzo campaigned on a "law and order" platform that promised to suppress civil rights agitators and the philadelphia chapter of the black panthers. he refused to campaign in black neighborhoods, and urged philadelphians to "vote white."

a similar dynamic of racial concretion had occurred 300 years ago, along colonial pennsylvania's western frontier throughout the late 1700s, when an ever-increasing influx of various "ethnic" european settlers coalesced into a "white" racial category for the purpose of dispossessing the indigenous people of the susquehanna valley of their land.

it's interesting, and frustrating, to see the same dynamics play out again and again in different geographical and historical situations.