Italian Immigrants in Portland, Maine, 1880-1920

Home , In Little Italy, Lettomanoppello, Little Italy, Padrone system, The Middle Men

Robin Rae Svendsen

2017

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this work to Rudolph “Rudy” DiPietro, who passed away just one week after our meeting of round-table storytelling in the Cantina at the Italian Heritage Center.

Rudy was a unique character, a stalwart of the past, and his lively storytelling will be missed by this researcher. Also, to my father, Joseph DiDominicus “Chessi,” whose tales of stickball, lobster and strong women in this Italian enclave kept my imagination full of curiosity as a child, and my feminist backbone strong. He was a loving father who survived the early death of his father, childhood poverty, three wars, and four teenagers to instill his old-world lessons of la famiglia in his children which are woven through many of the tales in this research.

MIGRATORY RESISTANCE COMMUNITIES

ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS IN PORTLAND, MAINE, 1880-1920

Robin Rae Svendsen

ABSTRACT

This thesis seeks to illuminate the resistance communities that existed in the rural southern villages of the Mezzogiorno region of Italy, specifically Lettomanoppello, before and after Italian Unification and removed to Portland, Maine in the United States to re-establish their matrilineal subsistence culture. Through multiple lines of evidence, including previous scholarship, documents, past interviews with immigrants and current personal communication with descendants of immigrants, this research contextualizes the presence of resistance in the immigrant’s initial interaction with capitalism. The research follows the immigrant’s continued resistance to capitalism including the concept of individualism that attacked their familial organization and sacredly held joy of communal time. From their first interaction with the new capital economy in their villages to the erosion of their old country ways, immigrants from

Lettomanoppello clung to their pre-capital lives through language, subsistence farming, and la famiglia, and sought to transplant these ways in their new enclave of Portland, Maine in the

United States.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis examines the deep ties that family, la famiglia, inhales and exhales, the give and take that happens instantaneously, over moments, years, and lifetimes that give us the courage to be our best selves, achieve things we never thought possible, and the love to do it regardless. For my family, Kenneth Svendsen, Erik Svendsen and Monique Svendsen, your sacrifice and love got me to the finish line. I am eternally grateful for your support to accomplish a life-long goal of earning my graduate degree.

I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Daniel Sayers, and Dr. Nina

Shapiro-Perl for providing support and mentorship throughout my studies at American

University and in particular with this project. My path back to graduate school and anthropology has been my greatest academic challenge, and these professionals provided me with unwavering insight, feedback, and encouragement. Dr. Sayers challenged me with high theoretical standards and required diligent self-reflection throughout this process. His profound grasp and relentless pursuit of theoretical excellence made me a more diligent student and inquisitive human being.

Dr. Shapiro-Perl introduced me to the process of digital storytelling and the StoryCorp concept of “life through the words of the individual.” She showed me that one’s passion for assisting participants to discover and tell their personal story creates a deeper experience for storyteller and listener alike. Through her example and devotion to the process, I became a better listener, a more passionate researcher, and a genuinely self-reflexive academic who understands my position inside and outside of that process.

My deepest gratitude goes to the Italian Heritage Center and the Italian American community in Portland, Maine for their graciously open-hearted stories and for access to their archival interviews of those who struggled to cross the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean over one century ago and bravely recreated family and home on the other side. Their stories, struggles, iii

victories and losses are the fabric of this country and the heart of this thesis. Without these archived interviews done by Mr. Tom Profenno and his team, their precious memories would have been lost to time, and their voices would not grace the pages of this research. I would specifically like to thank Mr. James DiBiase, the Italian Heritage Center’s cultural liaison, for his dedication to the community and the stories he shared of his parents’ migrations and relocation in Portland, Maine. Your paesani are grateful for your passion keeping the memories of these sojourners alive and the culture relevant for future generations.

And, finally, I am indebted to the Muffin Club of the Italian Heritage Center for sharing their memories of the neighborhood in the old days and keeping the struggles and joys of their parents and grandparents alive in the room for the day. Your conversations helped to create multi-dimensional human beings who braved the seas to transplant their village existence and culture on new land during this great wave of migration. They live on the pages of this thesis only because of you. Grazie!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... vii

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Migratory Resisters ...... 1

CHAPTER 2 HISTORY ...... 5

Shift from Feudalism to Capitalism ...... 5 The Power of the Witch ...... 6 Vergil and the People that Time has Forgotten ...... 9 The Land of Confusion ...... 14 The New Political Economy ...... 16 Lady Liberty and her Lifted Skirt ...... 19 Culturally “Italian” ...... 21 The Returners: “Americani” ...... 22

CHAPTER 3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ...... 26

Marx and the History of Capital ...... 26 Marxist Critique: Social Reproduction Theory ...... 29 Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation ...... 32

CHAPTER 4 DATA ...... 40

Villages of the South: Hit Last and Hit Hard ...... 40 Cutting out the Middle Man ...... 42 Better Wages in L'America ...... 44 Birds of Passage ...... 45 Boarding Houses ...... 49 Cultural Resistance ...... 59 Surveillance of a Community ...... 63 Taking Back Subsistence ...... 69

Vegetable Gardens ...... 69 Catching the Blackbird ...... 71 Subsistence Farms and Wine Making ...... 74 Chickens in the Yard ...... 76

Community in Transition ...... 78 Italian Soldiers in the Casco Bay ...... 81 Post World War II – Progress in America ...... 82 The "American Dream" – Capitalism and Home Ownership ...... 83

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION ...... 87

Community Memory ...... 87 Additional Research ...... 89

REFERENCES ...... 91

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Portrait of First Century Pompeii Couple, Baker Terentius Neo and his Wife. Pompeii, AD 55–79...... 12

Figure 2: Giulia and Child, Carlo Levi’s Painting from 1936 of his housemaid. (Carlo Levi "La-Santarcangelese" 1936 Olio su tela Matera Centro Carlo Levi) ...... 13

Figure 3: View from Green Head, Stonington, Maine, ca. 1915 ...... 46

Figure 4: Hallowell Italian Granite Works, carvers (scalpolini), ca. 1895 ...... 46

Figure 5: Ship Manifest S.S. Trojan Prince, passenger Giacomo DiBiase, April 14, 1902...... 47

Figure 6: Ship Manifest, S.S. California, passenger Raffaele Del Ponte, April 9, 1902...... 50

Figure 7: Raffaele Del Ponte photograph from family collection of Ambrose DiBiase Jr., ca. 1930s ...... 51

Figure 8: 101 Fore Street, Portland, Maine, photograph from Mainememory.net collection, ca. 1924 ...... 53

Figure 9: 67 Fore Street, Portland, Maine, photograph from Mainememory.net collection, ca. 1924...... 55

Figure 10: Ship Manifest, S.S. Duilio, passenger Clorinda Ferrante DiBiase, July 25, 1928, p. 1...... 61

Figure 11: Ship Manifest, S.S. Duilio, passenger Clorinda Ferrante DiBiase, July 25, 1928, p. 2...... 62

Figure 12: U.S. Alien Registration Card, front cover, Anna DiBiase, Feb. 21, 1942 ...... 64

Figure 13: U.S. Alien Registration Card with finger prints, photograph and signature, Anna DiBiase, Feb. 20, 1942 ...... 64

Figure 14: U.S. Alien Registration Card, front cover and page 1, Chiara Del Ponte, Feb. 16, 1942...... 65

Figure 15: U.S. Alien Registration Card with finger prints, photograph and signature, Chiara Del Ponte, Feb. 16, 1942 ...... 65

Figure 16: U.S. Naturalization Petition Paperwork, Anna Del Ponte DiBiase, Sep. 29, 1941 .... 67

Figure 17: Carey Lane, Portland, Maine's Little Italy, ca. 1924 ...... 72

Figure18: 1930 U.S. Federal Census Portland, Maine, Feato Family ...... 75

vii

Figure 19: Joe DiDominicus (Chessi) on the stairs at 6 Fox Street in Portland, Maine’s Little Italy, from the author’s personal collection, ca. 1940s...... 77

viii

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Migratory Resisters

For the immigrants of Southern Italy, their engagement with capitalism, an economic fortress from which they had escaped for nearly 300 years, pulled generations apart, reorganized their village and left it empty of young workers for nearly 50 years. The departure of young men to cities in the United States was the answer to a long battle of resistance to capitalism that had come to an end. When Industrial Capitalism roared into their village after Unification, the villager’s failed to thwart the redefinition of their subsistence culture. Now the rural peasants depended upon “jobs” for the cash wages needed to pay the burdensome taxation imposed by their northern oppressors. This new economy pushed the peasants in a corner that they could not overcome.

Migration was their resistance in action, their protest to low wages, and the only way they knew to continue fighting the outside forces that oppressed them. The families of rural villages in

Southern Italy speculated that the income from L’America, as the peasants called her, was worth the challenges and cost of travel across the Atlantic and back, boarding abroad, and the traumatic separation from one another. The latter would test them in ways they could have never imagined.

This research has engaged with an immigrant community that migrated predominately from the small, hilltop village of Lettomanoppello and more broadly from the Province of

Pescara in the region of Abruzzo to the port town of Portland, Maine in the United States. The original migrants are mostly gone, but thanks to a few interviewers from their Italian Heritage

Center, the immigrants’ stories told in their own words remain. Additionally, documents, 1

photographs and historical accounts through informal discussions with the second generation were used to fill in the gaps and answer questions that left their stories incomplete or untold.

Often, Southern Italian immigrants kept personal information private. They believed that there were things that you simply did not tell, so their descendant’s stories helped to create a more thorough account of the immigrant’s lives.

The immigrants sought to recreate village life on new land which seemed simple enough, however, they failed to account for the new economic culture that would engage them, indoctrinate their children, and rearrange their communal lifestyle, which had survived for thousands of years. The immigrants needed to adopt capital’s narratives of salvation through opportunity, individuality and personal empowerment in order to become fully “American”.

These narratives stood in direct opposition to the Southern Italian immigrants way of life and they often refused to change. The immigrants and their new country often clashed and sparred over releasing their communal ways seen by L’America as backwards, antiquated, and

“uncivilized”. The predominant narrative in western, “enlightened” culture is pervasive in general social discussions regarding immigration and assimilation.

In the long narrative of capital’s “civilized” society, “grand cultures” come to a space where the “uncivilized” reside and lift those communities to a higher, more cultured and

“civilized” existence. In other narratives, the same “grand cultures” go to an “uncivilized” location, extract its inhabitants and transplant the “uncivilized” to a new space, an area that gives them an opportunity for prosperity, a chance to remake themselves and become more “civilized”.

In the case of economic migrants, the capital narrative supports a story of “rags to riches” for the uncouth, uneducated, wretched characters who are given the opportunity to lift themselves, often by the boot-straps, out of their squalor and into a shiny new space, that “place

on the hill” that all the poor long to reach, long to achieve. Is this narrative disingenuous? Was it a romanticized creation to support a new economic system trying to find its foothold?

What if we flipped the narrative of impoverished, filthy, infantilized characters disembarking on Ellis Island with their battered trunks and empty lives, to trade themselves in for shiny new Americans, and replaced it with determined peoples who protested their oppressive economic and human conditions, as Donna Gabaccia claimed in her books, Italy’s

Many Diasporas and Italian Workers of the World, with angry and “determined feet.” The newly created State of “Italy” was set in a binary of “its minority of rich and bourgeois urban dwellers and its poor majority in the countryside.” (Gabaccia 2001:24). Many of the poor majority in the countryside were dislodged from their homeland begrudgingly, but not tragically for the reasons we assume. They transplanted their way of life in a new space, sent for their circle of family, including neighbors with whom they shared community, and replicated their space on new soil. Could they find such a space in L’America for their new community that would allow them to cling to their village ways? Would they create lasting change in their new space or would it change them?

What if we called these ethnic enclaves areas of resistance and saw them through the eyes of the inhabitants instead of the definitions of those who construct social narrative? Would Little

Italy or Little Saigon be a space of poor, uneducated, desperate immigrants ignored by society until they weave their community into the American fabric through language, culture, and most importantly, economic acceptance and practices, or would those immigrant communities look entirely different from the inside out?

When we peel away the created narratives and immerse ourselves in the community, listen to the voices of the immigrants or the memories of their children, and enlist the documents

for additional clarification, we see a clearer picture of the immigrants, what kind of new life they created and why they created it. We clarify how the community saw itself and its interpretation of this binary. Seen from inside the community out, the immigrant’s view of the power structure who continually oppressed them, whether at home in the newly unified, fascist state of “Italy” or on the shores of North America, rarely changed. The Italian American community in Portland,

Maine’s Little Italy clung to the old-country structure of la famiglia (the family), paesani

(country-folk), and maintained an inward focus which kept the outside American world at bay for centuries.

Their culture was mainly defined by subsistence, pre-capital kin-based village life centered around the family and most importantly, the matriarch. They moved to the East End of

Portland’s downtown near the docks where the majority of labor jobs existed, and transformed that space into a new village, their own “Abruzzo” that would last for nearly two generations.

Eventually, their communal subsistence lifestyle yielded to strong capitalist propaganda of the

“American Dream” aimed at their children and grandchildren.

The slow and methodical tide of capital messaging rippled through the community with the promise of an easier life through technology and consumerism and backwashed ancient knowledge of survival, crashed in the promise of prosperity through progress, and receded with communal lands, flooded them with patriarchal rule and tossed woman’s power in the undercurrent and dragged her out to sea. Capital’s message must supplant the immigrant’s knowledge of the world viewed through the collective “we”, and replace it with the individual world-view of “me”. Resistance to the capital tide would be a burden that they must bear. How did their ancient knowledge and practices survive capital’s message for so many centuries?

Would they be able to, once again, keep capital at bay?

CHAPTER 2

HISTORY

Shift from Feudalism to Capitalism

To understand the journey these immigrants took and how they arrived in the United

States, we must backtrack to the moments that created a need for migration. Peoples have migrated to new spaces with more fertile lands, easier access to waterways, and richer food supply since humans were capable of movement, but rarely left what was comfortable and

“working” for an unknown. Thus, migration is not a new concept. What is new are the lines drawn around “Nation States” and “Countries”.

Arbitrary lines drawn in the historical past created the idea of immigrant and native born, insider and outsider. We are living today with those imaginary lines and their deadly implications. Nation States decide who is acceptable for membership and who must be kept away, however, when the United States of America lost many young lives during the Civil War, the country reached out to the poorest areas in southern and eastern Europe for low-wage laborers. When Karl Marx critiqued capitalism in the nineteenth century, he focused primarily on this Industrial phase of Capitalism and its effect on the laborers, however, the path to the acceptance of this oppressive form of labor meandered through all aspects of human existence and replaced particular lifestyles as it crossed their paths. The first stop on the path was the primary sources of subsistence, land.

In Chapter 27 and 28 of Capital Volume 1, Marx takes us on a journey through the installation of capitalism as the new economic system of the European world. The expropriation of land, not only from small farmers, but from, in one of his examples, an entire Gael clan, drove them from their lands north to Glasgow and the manufacturing towns. In 1814-1820, the 5

Duchess of Sutherland usurped 794,000 acres and pushed the clan to just 6,000 acres on the seashore, land that was nearly unusable. She divided the previous usurped land into 29 sheep farms inhabited now by single families and mostly English farmhands (Marx 1995:508).

Marx arranges a path for us to walk, however crooked and meandering historical paths may be, to explore how people came to live and work in such horrific conditions as the industrial revolution created. What is critical to complete such a task is an ambush which cornered the peasants and forced them into this oppression. “The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into the modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of private accumulation”

(Marx 1995:509). How did this ambush occur and what tactics were used? In order to move the needle, methodical steps are necessary, or as John F. Kennedy said about the steps in constructing peace, “Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.” The old ways of the feudal economy were slowly eroded and in its place were built new capital structures. Sadly, very different outcomes require similar steps.

The Power of the Witch

Scholar, Silvia Federici adds to the Marxist literature with her book Caliban and the Witch.

Federici questions the exemption of women from his work regarding the conditions in which capitalism took hold. Marx examines the general usurpation of communal lands, but fails to depict woman’s specific role in the struggle against the installation of capitalism, the particular effects that land usurpation had on her, and the power center that she feared would be lost.

Federici maintains that a study of capitalism cannot exist from an abstract view of the economic

model alone. It must be placed against specific moments, specific situations, such as the Witch

Hunts and social movements and struggles. For Federici, capitalism was a response to those specific movements and struggles by the peasant class that were predominantly led by women.

She takes aim at the Witch Hunts and deconstructs it from the viewpoint of the people who suffered under its terror and why.

The Witch Hunt was a process that accomplished many different objectives, not directed to persecute any “particular form of behavior, but focused as a fundamental attack on a whole way of living that was incompatible with the kind of social relation that capitalism needed to establish itself.” Capitalism needed to transform the concept of “social relations and sexuality in a moment of great historical change, when people’s lives needed to be transformed” (Federici

Lecture 2012). In other words, the Witch Hunt was a conduit for the replacement of feudal relations with capital relations through the expropriation of peasant shared lands, and the extermination of the peasant class, mainly, poor old women. Why these people? How could a powerless class stand in the way of social and historical economic change?

Peasant movements and the growth of social movements shook up the power of feudal lords. Social heresy, a movement critical of the power structure, feudal domination, exploitation, the tributes to lords, opposed to the church for fiscal reasons and opposed to commercialization of society led these struggles and were predominantly led by women (Federici Lecture 2012).

The Cathar movement was the most famous of these insurrections. The Cathars are an important group to study, as the spirit to them appears genderless. Women held equal power in Cathar society and especially in the practice of their Christianity. The Cathars stood diametrically opposed to the patriarchal stance that the Catholic Church held on all matters of power and

structure. During this time of history, women were the keepers of the social memory, the glue of society, and these women saw their power and the very control over their person declining.

We rarely discuss the ways in which the feudal class struggle placed the mercantile capitalist in a front row seat to the clash, and further positioned them to step into the void.

Mercantile capitalists seized on an opportunity to force feudal lords to the margins and replace the antiquated relations with the appearance of a way out of poverty. Capitalism, with its focus on hierarchies and divisions, was viewed by Gramsci and Federici as a reaction to the failures of feudal society. If we focus on the struggles and social movements during the Middle Ages, particularly at the end, a whole new conflict arises from the chasm created between the “boss and the workers.” This chasm left a moderate power structure just outside the conflicts ready to step in and take the reins. Now, the divisions (men-women, lower classes-middle classes, and outsiders-insiders) were ripe for exploitation and the gap widened. With the old barriers eroded, society was subdued and terrorized through the Witch Hunts which left its inhabitants separated and poised for a takeover. The poor would succumb to physical and emotional exploitation from this terror.

In the late Middle Ages, after the plague had offered the survivors a chance to remake their social and economic positions, enclosures were installed to cut off the peasantry from their ability to subsist. This great “land grab” that was sponsored by the terror and the laws of the

State continued with greater private accumulations and more bloodshed in the Americas, which stirred a pot of revolt among the peasant classes. Europe was in a great power struggle on the heels of grave loss of life and devastated communities, but as with previous lower-class revolts, this, too, would be unsuccessful.

The new bourgeois class of merchants and tradesmen drove a wedge between lower class revolutionaries with a human “Molotov Cocktail” -- women! Women, who had been left alone from the plague, wars, and unfortunate circumstances, women, who had once held considerable positions in their peasant villages, women, who were feared and revered as healers, love spell brokers, magicians, the keepers of the village wisdom, and the secrets of the spiritual world, were the new scapegoats. These women were powerful, numerous, and needed to be silenced and marginalized. Those executed as witches were the least powerful of the peasant class, but the fear and terror would remain for communities touched by the numerous imprisonments, torture to exact confessions, and gruesome executions exacted upon their friends and family members. The Witch Hunts reigned terror over peasant communities for nearly two centuries with the woman’s place in society decimated, and the male/female relationship changed forever.

Some areas escaped the Witch Hunts, many of them in the remote corners of Europe, and from Federici’s research, untouched by enclosures and capitalism. Italy, which held some of the first Witch Trials in the North, escaped them entirely in the Southern region. Additionally, the

Mezzogiorno region of Italy (Southern Italy), dubbed the land that time forgot, maintained its feudal ties and woman-centered societies for centuries to come.

Vergil and the People that Time has Forgotten

In April of 2010 while traveling through Rome, I was treated to an actor’s troupe,

Gruppo Storico Romano, on the Palatine Hill. The celebration, Natale di Roma (the birth of

Rome), went to great lengths to achieve authenticity. While sitting in the sunshine on the grass tread upon by ancient feet, I watched the reenactment of an era gone by. With a lyre playing in the background and “Caesar” proclaiming Rome’s greatness in the tempo of Vergil, I was transported to an idyllic, romanticized moment in history.

This land, where numerous feet have tread, where generations of blood has been spilled, where much of history has been attributed, home to so many diverse civilizations, where great men created societies, art, literature, and the power of the State, which holds so much of human history, was their backdrop. I was immersed in the pageantry of the performance while the actors played upon a living museum, actual historical artifacts strewn at their feet, half walls of antiquity served as their stage barriers. Still something was missing from their re-created world, something kept me from temporarily suspending my disbelief.

The peasants, the early “Italians”, who worked this land and toiled under the heat of the harsh Mediterranean sun to build such greatness, who cut away stone with their bare hands for her “glory” and lived from her fruits for centuries, escaped central casting. What of them? There is little in history to tell of their place, plight, and mere existence. Vergil mentions them, the

“Italians”, those of the Italic tribe of the peninsula in his great work, The Aeneid. The people that time has forgotten, but the soil has not, whose bones are buried beneath layers upon layers of time, beneath where these actors tread, and beneath where I sit. So, what of them?

Carlo Levi, exiled academic, doctor, artist and thinker during fascist Italy lived among these Italic peasants in 1935. He penned a memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, a lament of the impoverished peoples of the far reaching southern tip of the peninsula. Eboli, a town just south of Naples, was the last stop of the Church, the last stop of “civilization”, and like Hadrian’s

Wall, everything beyond it was a step into another world, a forgotten space that existed on old world agriculture and rituals imposed through fear of black magic, malocchio (the evil eye), and the always looming, near presence of death (Levi 1947).

Levi recalls their history through the use of Vergil’s historical memory and mythos.

“Phoenician invaders from Troy brought with them a set of values diametrically opposed to those

of the ancient peasant civilization; religion and the State and the religion of the State. The ancient Italians, meanwhile, lived on the land, knowing neither sacrifice nor religion” (Levi

1947: 141). The Romans evolved and perfected the idea of governmental and military theocracy from their Greek predecessors, but met with opposition from these peasants, who had “neither government nor an army; its wars are only sporadic outbursts of revolt, doomed to repression.

Still it survives, yielding up the fruits of the earth to the conquerors, but imposing upon them its measurements, its early divinities, and its language” (ibid 140).

Vergil is the first to document these peasants in more detail than just their existence, and

Levi notes Vergil’s historical significance, even if it was written as mythical fiction. In the first century, under the rule of Julius Caesar, Vergil wrote in the style of the time and mimicked the life around him in his art. Similarly, Levi documents these peasants through their unique appearances and lifestyles through his words and paintings, and both of his endeavors survive to date. He, like Vergil, uses the literary art form of his time and the life scattered around him as his canvas. It was as if time had stopped with these rural peasants. “Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types” (ibid 140). They have moved on this earth in the same tribes, in the same manner since the beginning of time, it seems. These countless lives devoted to toil and sacrifice that have been spent in fields for the benefit of others. “There should be a history of this Italy,” Levi laments.

Figure 1: Portrait of First Century Pompeii Couple, Baker Terentius Neo and his Wife. Pompeii, AD 55–79.

Figure 2: Giulia and Child, Carlo Levi’s Painting from 1936 of his housemaid. (Carlo Levi "La-Santarcangelese" 1936 Olio su tela Matera Centro Carlo Levi)

These Italic tribes are insular, they intermarry and conserve their customs and beliefs.

They are tied to the land and the land to them. They have always worked the land, at times for themselves and their subsistence, at times for the good of the community, and other times, for the good of their feudal lords, hands in the dirt, feet on the soil, with the energy of centuries permeating through their beings. Women and men in the southern sharecropper regions had long worked in a communal, familial cooperative fashion to create abundance for the extended family.

Indeed, they were often “idealized by middle-class observers for their cooperative farming”

(Gabaccia 2000:84). The peasants and contadini (farmers) know this earth, they know its spirit, they have lived and died upon it for millennia, and they know the toil and tribulations of hardship, they lament it through their words and express it through their bodies.

Writing teacher Robert McKee implores his students to understand this facet of humanity through the Italian language. “In life two negatives never make a positive. In English double negatives are ungrammatical, but Italian uses double and even triple negatives so that a statement feels like its meaning. In anguish an Italian might say, “Non ho niente mia!” (I don’t have nothing never!). Italians know life. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse” (McKee 2005:320). Certainly, life was quite harsh in the southern region of the Italian peninsula, a land separated from the northern industrial centers by mountains and eons.

The Land of Confusion

The southern end of the peninsula, the Mezzogiorno region, separated tribally and abandoned in poverty that would later be incorporated into the Kingdom of Naples and then the

Kingdom of Two Sicilies, is not exclusively southern. As with most conquered territories and with history itself, rarely do we find a linear division to explain its arbitrary sections. This southern region conquered over and over again, maintains its insular culture, its “la famiglia” circle of trust, which extends to family and close friends, despite the oppressors reasserting themselves and their “culture” century after century.

Byzantine, Lombard, Muslim, Norman, Germanic, Bourbon and French rulers have placed their feet on the soil of the southern peninsula and the island of Sicily and ruled it for a

time. This space was a commercial center for grain production and the conduit, socially, for

Arabic and Greek cultural thought. This land and its people have endured countless oppressors,

Kingdoms and Papacies, yet seemingly survived their propagandist cultures and liberal,

“enlightened” regimes to continue their communal way of life, language, mystical beliefs, and connection to the earth.

Prior to the turn of the first millennium, “Italian history was dominated by the struggle for supremacy between the German Emperors and the Papacy. In the South, Sicily was held by the Arabs (827-1072), then the Normans until 1189, when the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI inherited it by marriage” (Gramsci 1971:196). French installation in the thirteenth century shifted the capital from Palermo, Sicily to Naples signaling a pro-papacy and northern glance.

Harsh rule and heavy taxation signaled a revolt and separation of Sicily from the mainland. The

Spanish house of Aragon’s acquisition of the island set off a power struggle between the

Angevian mainland and the Aragonian island of Sicily which lasted for a century and set economic power in the hands of barons and a new feudal system in both kingdoms.

The mid-fifteenth century would see the two kingdoms become one under Spanish rule, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, when a Bourbon prince conquered Naples and Sicily and pushed for “enlightenment” reforms, but his attempt failed. Liberals emerged during those contentious times and were persecuted. Middle-class intellectuals and noblemen, with an eye toward the

French Revolution, revolted and sided with their French enlightened thinkers to control the mainland countryside and its capital of Naples.

This short-lived capture reverted back to the Bourbon King within months when the capital was abandoned by the French forces. Napoleon, infuriated by this loss, sent his brother to retrieve what belonged to France, but much too late for the many republican revolutionaries that

Ferdinand II had put to death. And, what of the peasants who toiled and starved during these times of political tennis under the rule of the Kingdom of Naples? This land still exudes a humanity of contradictions, vivaciousness and melancholic proclivities. Naples, a space where civilization is built upon civilization, exudes diversity and division, passion and hatred, all of the binaries of a convoluted and conquered space. Revolution was inevitable.

A group of republican liberals, exiled by oppressive authoritarian regimes of the kingdoms and viceroys of distant monarchs easily gained the support of the rural contadini

(farmers) and peasants, who toppled the fractured and economically depressed kingdom of

Naples and Sicily. The Italian Unification in the 1860s held the great promise of freedom for rural peasants who felt they had little to lose siding with invaders from the north. The democratic and republican ideals of unification united the peninsula for a time, but the implementation of new ideals created turbulence, and in a capital system, to have winners, there must also be losers.

The New Political Economy

After Unification in 1861, the new collection of Italian states, which was yet to be called

Italy underwent a diaspora. Italy, home to so many diverse civilizations and strict economic and social stratifications, had not exacted the unification that it had intended. “Few at the time saw the Risorgimento and migration as connected, yet both were rebellions against the status quo of pressing poverty in the countryside, clerical and aristocratic privileges in the cities, and foreign interference everywhere else” (Gabaccia 2000:35).

Many of the peninsula’s social elites, educated class, and artisans fled the peninsula for academic circles in northern Europe during the Risorgimento and before unification. Artistic and the “best educated, aristocratic and wealthy settled in the cosmopolitan intellectual circles of

Paris, London, Brussels, and Geneva” (Gabaccia 2001:28), while businessmen exiles, from the collective states of the peninsula, made alliances with laborers and became transporters and

“ticketers of the labor migration”. “The migrations of the Risorgimento thus worked a complex effect on relations among Italy’s divided people. It separated the majority of Europe-bound bourgeois exiles from the mass of America-bound labor migrants, perpetuating the cultural and political chasm separating the two groups further by bringing nationalist businessmen and professionals more regularly into contact with the labor migrants” (2001:28). Italy’s already divided people would not come together as one country on the European peninsula on the

Mediterranean, but would coagulate into “Italians” in small colonies outside of Italy and on the shores, predominately, of North and South America.

Village peasants suffered from the chasm created by nationalist business and radical intellectuals. As is true today, radical intellectual ideals do not immediately put “food on the table”, so the business community’s alliance with workers prevailed in dividing the

“Unification”. Peasants were an invisible 1% of nationalists. Peoples from the south waited in anticipation for the end of the tyranny experienced under their Bourbon oppressors. With the formation of the new “Italy” under capitalist ideals, hopes were high for a new way of life, a way to farm and work for themselves, but with heavy taxation on necessary provisions such as milled grain and mules, and cheaper imports from capitalist trade, the rural contadini could never get ahead.

The monarchy’s oppression motivated fighters to dream of a new country, one of inclusion, one of shared prosperity, a classless, equal opportunity space, but with victory came new oppressors, whose main focus was economic oppression. In the southern region, artisans and sharecroppers awaited the reorganization of civilta italiana (the Italian civilization), but all

the while, their northern republican neighbors and the aristocracy colluded to deprive the South of their land. The first Prime Minister of Southern Italy, Francesco Crispi ruled the space for six un-consecutive years following Unification. He moved from radical revolutionary to firm authoritarian in record time. “Crispi’s colonial policy too is connected with his obsession with unity, and in it he proved able to understand the political innocence of the Mezzogiorno. The southern peasant wanted land, and Crispi, who did not want to (or could not) give it to him in

Italy itself, who had no wish to go in for ‘economic Jacobinism’, conjured up the mirage of colonial lands to be exploited” (Gramsci 1971: 228).

Northern revolutionaries debated the merits of including the South, and found the failures of the Risorgimento to hinge on the inferiority of the southern peasant. This “new Italy,” and its inclusion or indifference to the peasantry, especially in the South, “incorporated a polemic of superiority and inferiority between the North and the South. The ordinary man from Northern

Italy thought rather that, if the Mezzogiorno made no progress after having been liberated from the fetters which the Bourbon regime placed in the way of a modern development, this meant that the cause of the poverty was not external, to be sought in the objective economic and political conditions, but internal, innate in the population of the South” (Gramsci 1971:233). The southern peasants would find that this new Italy was never meant to include them.

The South dropped further and further into poverty. The nationalist bourgeoisie left the freedom fighters to starve and suffer. “…the North concretely was an ‘octopus’ which enriched itself at the expense of the South, and that its economic-industrial increment was in direct proportion to the impoverishment of the economy and the agriculture of the South” (Gramsci

1971:233). The North’s lack of concern for the South became much more oppressive than the previous padrone system had ever been. The tyrannical Bourbon monarchy perpetrated horrific

oppression on the southern peasants, however, while padrone systems required strict rule, class stratification and oppression, it also held responsibility for the subjects. Southern peasants found their very existence under fear of elimination.

The previous Kingdom of Two Sicilies exacted the highest tariff on imported wheat from outside the kingdom, a conservative trade ideal, which protected those growing the crop, although very little of that profit trickled down to the workers. In the new regime, low tariffs brought in cheaper wheat and more competition for the small farmers. In the era where a kingdom negotiated on their behalf and kept the profits for wheat high, individual, small farmers were left to compete on their own with larger crop controllers from other regions and countries.

The small farmer could hardly compete. With cheap crop prices, high taxes on the means of subsistence, small rural farmers had little choice but to migrate to industrial cities for wage labor.

In the “new political economy”, the lure of higher wages in L’America, as the southern peasants called her, was now worth consideration.

Lady Liberty and her Lifted Skirt

Wives and youngest children farmed the land while older male children and fathers sought cash wages outside their villages. Often times, this journey for wages took them far from their communities and families. And, as fathers and sons moved farther and farther away from their center for cash wages, women and younger children were left behind to survive village poverty and try to subsist on their shrinking, personal subsistence plots. Women’s power in the community and households was exalted from the absence of their husbands and older male children. She would run the household, create the subsistence and remain the power nucleus in the family’s center.

Heavy tax burdens fell disproportionally on the poor and disenfranchised sharecroppers and southern peasants. With more of the middle-class falling into the landless category, and commercial agriculture and industrialization creating the only space to earn cash for the new currency exchange, bourgeois economy, the poor had little opportunity to survive without outside money to pay these tax burdens. If peasants planted a subsistence garden, republican nationalists would tax their plot, if they had done marginally better, the republicans were there for their added share. Peasants, who had turned against the Roman Catholic Church to follow the secular, nationalist leaders, were lulled back to the arms of their earlier oppressors. The church, who propped up the padrone system and left peasants bound and tied to a system that would never give them social mobility or economic opportunities, became the refuge for the human tennis balls that the capital system lobbed across the economic growth of the new “Italy”.

Only this time, the church had little wealth and limited power to help the rural peasants.

The new nation of Italy was unstable and offered little protection for the peasants. This instability gave rise to protests and ultimately, protests with their feet. So, taking the step to cross the Atlantic into the unknown for better wages seemed like a chance worth taking and the rural contadini and peasants from the south migrated in larger numbers than any other European country. Migrant workers took their chances on a new country, thousands of miles away, that offered them an opportunity to make higher wages. That country, L’America, was a place where

Lady Liberty welcomed them, at times, as the women left behind scolded, “with a lifted skirt”.

L’America was a gamble, but one with better odds than staying at home to starve.

Nineteenth century “coyotes” called padrones disrupted family life in the villages and brought workers to America for the second industrial revolution. U.S. America needed male bodies to fill the workforce decimated by the Civil War. The building that followed would move

America into the technological age and a place of prominence, and Italian immigrants would be the predominant conduit for the progress. Italian workers never saw themselves as “Italian,” and this would prove to be difficult on the other side of the Atlantic.

Culturally “Italian”

Italian peoples are not a monolith. The villages and regions of the peninsula were under the rule of differing countries such as Spain, France, Austria and Germany, and those influences coupled with years of conquests and cultural shifts made for separate spaces and separate cultural definitions. Calabria, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Abruzzo, and the island of Sicilia are the southern regions of Italy, and all have different flavors, foods, superstitions that inform their practice of religion, dialects, and social structures, however, all were cast as Italian “South” for U.S. racial profiling and categorization purposes, so this informed how they reorganized once on the other side. “The local identities of the other side defied bureaucratic efforts to categorize it on Ellis Island; it defies contemporary affirmative action guidelines” (Gabaccia 1994:13).

The new American “Italians” would form their own alliances and paesani (country-folk).

Peasants saw themselves as Calabrese or Abruzzese in opposition to their different regional neighbors, but never as a group of racialized homogeneous peoples. Also, peasants of the collective regions of the peninsula had little attachment to their newly forming country, “Italy”.

While connection to their villages remained strong, their family, their extended family, and even their entire community could be moved to a new space. Surely, they could replicate village life in a new space, and in some cases, that is exactly what they did.

The village of Roseto Valfortore in the Apulia region of Italy on the southeastern coast of the Adriatic Sea relocated near the slate quarries in the Lehigh Valley of northern Pennsylvania.

For three generations, this community would remain exclusively, not only Italian, but Apulian.

This small town of socially cohesive villagers were the center of a heart study out of the

University of Oklahoma in the 1960s. Researchers found that social cohesion creates a feeling of safety and thus, longevity, today known as the Roseto Affect. These peasants, and others like them would work together to assure prosperity and a new life in the United States of America.

This small utopia was not the norm. Many rural peasants suffered and died under the oppression of the industrial system in their new home of L’America far away from their paesani and la famiglia.

The Returners: “Americani”

Southern Italian migrants called Birds of Passage, much like the Mexican migrant laborers of the last century in border states of the U.S., experienced deep economic hardships back in their villages which forced them to migrate. These Southern “Italian” peasants lived in fear of constant starvation and subsistence usurpation. Their fears and distrust of power structures was real and has persisted in their familial beliefs today.

Once on the other side, immigrant peasant men lived in deplorable, cramped conditions to save money to create the new lives they dreamed of back home. Canadian Historian Robert

Harney called these Italian sojourners the “men without women”. Italian Luigi Villari used military metaphors to construct the life of these womanless men as “soldiers without generals”, a telling metaphor for the position that women held in southern village communities. Women, and especially the women left behind, white widows, held a prominent space at the center of the family and greater community in the southern peninsula of the newly unified “Italy”. These peasants and sojourners would try to keep their cultural center in tact as they traversed the

Atlantic, but ultimately, lady liberty and her “lifted skirt” would change the way peasants viewed their humanity and place in society.

The migration of young, single men after a generation of men sent to fight in the military, left Italian families and their communities fractured and changing. Levi reminds us that those left behind from mass migration, the Italian Diaspora, were left in deplorable conditions.

Communities without “able-bodied men” to continue the physical labor in the fields left a generational gap in the population. The internecine struggle in the gentry, those left to lead the small towns and villages, was one of desperation, and the peasants, without the able-bodied young men of the community to work for subsistence, were left in even more desperate conditions.

Young men had a freedom they never before experienced, a freedom to choose another path in life that their fathers had not enjoyed. This freedom was a “threat to a father’s power as cash became an increasingly important addition to peasant family economies. The Italian state had forced peasants into the cash nexus with its demand for taxes, as did the spread of commercial agriculture” (Gabaccia 2000:84).

The post-unification Italian state became a liberal republican economic progression that left many southern regions not only “behind”, but without recourse for economic survival.

While many southern peasants migrated for a temporary fix to their economic uncertainty, others saw an opportunity to make their way in the new L’America and create a life without borders and restrictions that the repressive Italian state imposed upon them. Family life was central to their culture, central to their circles of trust, important in the reproduction of their culture, so how would they recreate this culture of “la famiglia” in their new space? Could they recreate it or would they have to create something new?

During Levi’s time in the rural mountainous village, many Italians were returning from their time abroad and re-integrating to their new country with new ideas of what it meant to be a

human being. A government official from Abruzzo noted that migrated men acquired “a consciousness of their dignity as men, and a sense of independence and liberty when face to face with the class of gentlemen.” He was “…more confident in his strengths, no longer convinced he was born only to serve.” While many migrants, who left for the Americas, would not return, the returners, the “Americani”, were empowered in their own humanity and there would be no turning back. “Returners refused to doff hats, kiss hands, or otherwise offer traditional symbols of servility,” as Gabaccia notes (L’Inchiesta Jacini, [Jacini Investigation] 1907:271).

The migrant’s self-awareness was at odds with village life upon their return, but would create a new existence that forever changed Southern Italy post World War II. At the end of the great migration, young men held considerable autonomy when they arrived back in Italy from their travels to U.S. America. At the start of Unification, the country that had created the diaspora through an economically disadvantaged peasant class had changed significantly, and

“Italy’s two races neither looked nor lived as differently as they had in the past” (Gabaccia

2000:94). Sadly, some of the returners fell back into the same impoverished lifestyle that they had struggled to leave, and racialized perceptions of Southern Italians was too ingrained to be overcome by American dollars only.

Approximately fifty percent of the migrant workers returned to continue life in Italy.

Migrant peasants were redubbed “Americans” or “Germans” by the locals. The contadini migrant’s experience in a broader world view had changed them. They expected more respect, equality, comfort and commercial fineries, and thus changed the lifestyle of peasants in rural

Italy. Migrants sought to create a different financial situation for themselves and their families, but returned to the country and way of life that they loved. They wanted Italian village life, la famiglia, but wanted it with all the comforts from which they had come accustomed to living in

the United States. Capitalism was brought back to their villages, but this time, it was brought back by their fellow paesani.

The desire for the homeland extended to those who stayed in U.S. America. Immigrants involved themselves in the transatlantic trade and used their purchase power, the politics of consumption, on products from Italy. Olive oil, tomatoes, and salt for cheeses were some of the products imported to U.S. America from Italy to relay a feeling of “home”. “Advertisements for

Italian products suggested that consumers abroad could experience Italy by buying Italian goods”

(Zanoni 2014:71). These consumptions supported a failure “to Americanize Italian Americans and their progeny into the late 1930s. It was only during World War II that Italian Americans’ practices of consumption disclosed a sense of affiliation that began to go beyond their national ancestry.” Through such actions as “planting victory gardens” and “coping with wartime shortages,” Italian Americans “revealed their own patriotism and attachment to their adoptive country” (Luconi 2014:145-146).

Capitalism was infiltrating the stalwarts of pre-capital resistance. “Initially, many rural peoples chose defensive strategies to protect their kin-based households from the atomizing influence capitalism and its system of individual wage-earning and consumption” (Gabaccia

1994: 11-12). However, from World War II forward, the Italian American community walked more steadily into the arms of the capitalists. Gone were the resisters who adhered to Marxist proclivities and organized strikes for better wages in the factories. The rural villagers who resisted the effect of capitalism over centuries could resist no longer, and communal change had come to their doorstep.

CHAPTER 3

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Marx and the History of Capital

When Karl Marx departed from the labor theory of Adam Smith and critiqued those of

John Stuart-Mill and David Ricardo, it was revolutionary thought in the study of labor. Marx blew open the theory by placing the exploited laborer in the center of the argument, instead of the market and commodity-centered study that had previously dominated the field. Karl Marx, through his study of economics, became capital’s biggest critic.

Marx’s major contribution to social theory is that of exploitation. He found that labor power was a commodity and this led to the exploitation. The concept of exploitation derives from the labor theory of value which assumes that all value is created by the laborer. Marx additionally radicalized Smith’s theory of constant capital to include the labor from previous surplus creation. “The essence of exploitation is what the capitalist will advance is actually labor which was appropriated from the workers in an early cycle of the production. The capitalist then will pocket the surplus, will not give any to the worker, and the worker will be satisfied with the wages” (Szelényi 2009). The worker’s labor power must be exploited to ensure a surplus of the commodity and maximized profit for the capitalist and additional constant capital for reinvestment; thus, all value comes from the labor.

So, we could ask how the capitalist was capable of convincing workers to leave their feudal fiefdoms, land, and the shared life of the commons for a life of oppressive labor in the factories with little-shared prosperity? What were the conditions in society under which this exploitation arose, existed and thrived to date? These questions lead back to Marx’s early work on private accumulation and the usurpation of land. 26

Land, in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe, before capitalism took hold, was the measurement of wealth and held exclusively by the monarchy, and distributed to the Catholic

Church and feudal lords. Through laws of enclosures, wars, and increased technology for food production, the social structure of feudal Europe was changing, and peasant revolts added to the upheaval and change. Marx notes that at these junctures, where society passed from feudal power to capital power and turned communal land into private property, peasants were expelled from their homes, their livelihoods and their ability to subsist. The peasant had little choice but to work in the burgeoning surplus production facilities and later, the industrial factories. Private accumulation had accomplished step one of the transformation into a new social and economic system.

Private accumulation was at the center of early Marxist critique. Marx notes in Das

Kapital that the legal system “legitimized” the theft of communal lands. “The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people” (Marx 1995:506). He further argues that “…the events (enclosures) that transformed the small peasants into wage labourers, and their means of subsistence and labour into material elements of capital, created, at the same time, a home- market for the latter” (1995:524). This usurpation of land served two purposes, the need of the laborer to work for the capital property owner for subsistence and the space for the production of commodities that would, in turn, be consumed by the laborer.

The writings of Marx and Engels empowered workers with the gravitas of academia. For the first time, they had words and concepts to define their condition, and a manifesto to guide them. Before the Second World War, exploited workers fought back emboldened by Marxism’s

power of the masses, and won significant gains. The 1912 woolen workers strike in Lawrence,

Massachusetts, not only forced mill owners in Lawrence to give workers a 15% increase in pay, but mill owners all over America for fear of more strikes from the public relations nightmare coming out of congressional hearings, gave raises to all workers. Nearly 250,000 workers received a pay raise from the striking of approximately 15,000 workers (Laurino 2015:101-102).

Marxist concepts were revolutionizing social life in Europe and the United States. Once the war ended and Europe was rebuilding, the “red scare” became the predominant focus in the United

States, and U.S. workers were placed under the watchful eye of pro-capitalist lawmakers. Left out of this equation were the women who had worked side-by-side with their male counterparts in feudal society to create subsistence for the fiefdom or the communal, cooperative farms. How was she explicitly exploited in this new construction of society? What role did women play in pre-capital society and how did she lose ground so quickly?

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels notes that a

“communistic household implies the supremacy of women in the house” (2004 (1884):60), an intriguing thought. He goes on to point out that women held power and that a man who fell out of favor with her could be expelled from her household, forcing him to seek refuge in the home of his clan or seek a new matrimonial alliance. Thus, women held considerable power over the family, the household and its construction. She worked with men in the field, created a surplus of foodstuffs, and exacted agency within familial relations and the construction of familial interactions. She was a particular cog in the wheel of capitalism that Marx left empty. Woman’s power needed to be quelled and expropriated for the new capital structure, and more importantly, her control over procreation. Her body must become docile, regulated and legalized under the

realm of social relations. Discipline and punishment were exercised over her reproduction and her autonomy.

Marxist Critique: Social Reproduction Theory

Since Frederick Engels raised the question and position of women in capitalism on the pages of his work, the “woman question” has been debated. How does capitalism specifically oppress women? In what context are women at risk for oppression, and how does capitalism separate women to institute this oppression? For most of the Marxist literature and theoretical history, the division by “class” alone failed to allow for a focus on woman’s particular exploitation by capitalism. Feminist Marxist set out to add to the Marxist literature with more clarity of woman’s oppression.

Second Wave Feminism in the 1970s and the dual approach lumped all men together in the oppression of women. It gave the oppressed lower-class men the same power over the oppression of women as their dominant class male counterparts. In hindsight, this stance created a division which furthered the gap between men and women of the oppressed class. As stated before, the path to understanding is never linear, nor easy, and so is it with the confrontation of social theory. As we seek consensus for and critique of social theory, we expose its failings through the push-back and emerge with a clearer understanding of the theoretical context than ever before. Indeed, the successes and clearer understandings of theoretical frameworks and oppression led to a group of feminists confronting this chasm and seeking to bridge the gap.

Lise Vogel’s 1983 work, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary

Theory, pushed back against predominant narratives in Marxist literature and Marxist scholarship regarding the expropriation of women and their bodily control during the debate over the

“woman question.” It placed women, specifically, within the capitalist mode of production

(CMP), which helped to locate her oppression more directly through a Marxist understanding of capitalism. The outcome, Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), used a unitary approach versus the dual approach from the 1970s and placed childbearing and the oppression of women at the heart of every class mode of production. She put woman’s oppression in a theoretical context through

Marxist categories and literature. Vogel frames SRT with four processes to guide its user through theoretical employment. First and foremost, SRT focuses on the reproduction of labor power in class societies accomplished through a unitary framework that assumes the extension of

Marxist theory to include gender and race.

Secondly, SRT finds that the reproduction of capital is focused specifically in class societies. Marx stated in his work that “The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is and must ever be a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfillment to the labourers instincts of self-preservation and propagation”

(1995:398). SRT maintains that Marx failed to analyze in any detail the “reproduction of labor power” and the oppressive sway that capital held over the “instincts of self-preservation and propagation.” From the point of view of SRT, the reproduction of the labor force is a process that must be further examined.

In defense of Vogel’s position, Sue Ferguson remarked, “Capitalist accumulation requires human labor power, but does not produce it. There is no mechanism in the direct labor-capital relation, to ensure labor power’s daily and generational renewal. Thus, capitalism finds ways to organize historically specific embodied subjects, differently gendered and racialized subjects in and through hierarchically and oppressively structured institutions and practices, such as private households, welfare states, slavery, and global labor markets” (Ferguson 2014:165). Thus, as capital had no contingency plan to fill its factory floors in the industrial days, it did organize

structures, mainly legal and social messaging, to create bodies that fulfill this reproduction through coercive and propagandized means.

SRT additionally distinguishes a variety of daily activities that maintain and allow direct producers to return to work, which additionally maintains non-laboring members of the subordinate class such as those too young, too old, too sick or those involved in maintenance activities to support the workforce. Those involved in maintenance activities will additionally support generational replacement of the labor force. This specific activity, the bearing of new members to the subordinate class, requires the division of labor along gender lines. However, the raising of new members for the labor force can be genderless. The final process draws new labor into the market through immigration and the addition of women to the workforce in the

1940s and 1950s. When these processes are disentangled, the concept of reproduction of labor can be freed from normative assumptions of biological procreation in heterosexual family contexts (Vogel Lecture 2015). SRT does not, however, include kin-based systems.

And finally, SRT makes the structure of the reproduction of labor power visible and sensitizes one to possible contradictions of long-term tendencies, such as childbearing in the subordinate classes can diminish surplus labor of the woman in the working class. Women extracted from the labor force during childbearing is costly to the dominate class, but her contributions of new workers to the system conversely benefits them. In wartime, famine, or natural disaster, generational reproduction and woman’s contribution to the workforce and surplus might be at odds. This creates quite a paradox for the capital system, as well as the researcher.

Additionally, when surplus labor is needed, exploited classes are mobilized, and the familial structure can be disrupted causing long term issues for reproduction. Sites of struggle

can identify spaces where migrants fight against isolation from families abroad, native workers fight against immigrant workforces, and woman’s refusal to marry, bear children, or stay out of the workforce are met with opposition from her male counterparts in the workplace or the patriarchal power structures (Vogel Lecture 2015). These situations are critical to highlight terrains of battle and struggle.

All the while, SRT theorists employ rigor to the definitions of theoretical categories, such as the “family.” Families have a class character and should be defined as such which allows discussions for borderless households created by capitalism. The critical component of Vogel’s

SRT to this research is the negation of the capital reproduction in Italian American immigrant households during the turn of the century. These peasants were isolated from capitalism to a large extent, as were their households in rural villages in Southern Italy. The history of capital’s movement throughout Europe confronted a whole new familial and social structure in which

Italian women struggled to oppose.

Today, feminist scholar Silvia Federici argues that through her research into the Witch

Hunts, societies transforming to capitalism were steeped in pre-capital relationships to the earth, and women were additionally in the foreground of that struggle. Women are attached to the land as the last line of defense for their way of life through subsistence agriculture. Women stand on the front lines of these struggles today and suffer for their resistance through new Witch Hunts and the replay of history.

Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation

Silvia Federici flips the narrative that capitalism evolved from a failure in feudal economic and social organization, and the exclusive expulsion of the peasantry from the land.

While these two historical moments are certainly a precursor to the change to a new socio-

economic structure, there is more to the story. Additionally, the predominant wisdom is that woman’s unpaid labor in the realm of domesticity and support for the production of the labor force in capitalism was a part of that same pre-capital society and a “natural” part of her existence. Federici engages with old texts and legislation during this economic structural transformation to argue that woman’s expulsion from the land alone fails to tell the complete story of the Witch Hunts. The addition of social movements, the insertion of new riches from conquest, and the failure of the feudal power structure to enforce regulated work and tributes supported the introduction of capitalism and preceded the appropriation of land.

Federici worked backward from Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and asked the simple question, “What was the history of housework and how was this work created?’ This dominant trope in modern society that projects a “nature of women” and a “natural” history of domestic work simply through the innate physical structure of the female body was a legacy of a pre- capital society. That is, domestic labor and the bearing and rearing of children is something that has existed since the beginning of time and is a part of the woman’s “nature.”

Federici found in the verdicts of the Witch Trials an added piece to the puzzle in the rise of capitalism. She placed this new evidence at our feet which refuted such a “natural” or

“evolutionary” claim. The failure of feudalism and the rise of capitalism was the desired outcome long before feudalism failed. Feudalism’s inability to control the masses led to a new need for control and bodily definition. Federici looks to philosopher Michel Foucault and his study of the docility of bodies in Discipline and Punish to explain the ways in which new bodies were transformed.

Federici found through the creation of “witches” and other scapegoats to quell the dissent of the peasants, bodies were rebranded as “machines” and women’s bodies, specifically, were

inscribed with new definitions of sexuality and deception. Bodies needed to be docile and mechanized to ensure capital’s ascension to prominence. But, why was it necessary to sexualize women, or more specifically, poor women? And, additionally, how would this be accomplished?

First, according to Federici, the Witch Hunts played a major role in transforming sexuality and controlling the bodies of individuals, specifically the poor, for capitalism to take hold in a society organized upon a very different economic and social model. In the early days of capitalism, the requirement for success in capitalism or mercantilism was “the more poor bodies, the better,” and who can produce more poor bodies for the workforce than poor, powerless women.

Women, indeed, were oppressed in different ways to their male counterparts, and Silvia

Federici critiques Foucault’s omission of woman’s specific discipline. “Foucault’s analysis of the power techniques and disciplines to which the body has been subjected has ignored the process of reproduction, has collapsed female and male histories into an undifferentiated whole, and has been so disinterested in the ‘disciplining’ of women that it never mentions one of the most monstrous attacks on the body perpetrated in the modern era: the witch-hunt” (Federici 2014:8).

Federici’s use of Foucault’s framework, however gendered it may be, in examining the Witch

Hunts is particularly useful in positioning the domination of women from the Witch Hunts and trials forward. She examines how the redefining of bodies, and woman’s body, in particular, was accomplished.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault addresses the process by which the body is controlled, not only by the outside forces of oppression, but from the inside, or what he calls “the soul” of the individual, the space where training and coercion are recorded for perpetuity. Bodies, inscribed from a pre-capital social construction, needed to be reissued as a soldier for the new

capital army, and like good soldiers, they would carry the torch of liberty, freedom, individuality and opportunity for exaltation from their previous station.

Foucault uses the example of the control over a soldier, his physical body and what is the ideal body, “someone who could be recognized from afar” to posit his theory of bodily domination and adherence to a new order. The soldier was revered as he was perceived to be

“agile and strong” (Foucault 2010:179). The body was moving into a new realm, one of control over the individual instead of the masses, or as Foucault calls it a “scale of the control” which treated the body not “en masse, ‘wholesale’…but of working it ‘retail,’ individually” (2010:181).

The separation of controlled masses, which existed in the pre-capital lives of the peasantry, with the controlled individual, which was on the rise from “enlightenment” thought and post-capital construction of docility and discipline, divided the oppressed group for control.

There was “the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization…the modality

(of the body) …(its) constant coercion, supervising the process of the activity rather than its result” (2010:181). The body was now a machine, fit to produce and reproduce for the new economic apparatus.

“In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the disciplines became general formulas of domination. They were different from slavery as they were not solely based on the appropriation of bodies; indeed, the elegance of the discipline lay in the fact that it could dispense with this costly and violent relation by obtaining effects of utility at least as great”

(2010:181). The idea of servitude required mass “relation of domination,” and vassalage required “products of labor” and “marks of allegiance.” Still ascetic and monastic control was revered as one of “renunciation” and the decrease of utility, thus the “increase of the mastery of each individual over ‘his’ own body.”

The definition of this new discipline was the “human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’... (with the)

‘mechanics of power’” …and new discipline that “produces subjected and practiced bodies,

‘docile’ bodies.” (2010:182). And, in this docility of the body was the minutiae, as Jean-Baptiste de La Salle lamented in this focus on the “little things.” He posited that “Little things lead to greater…little things, yet it is they that in the end have made great saints.” A discipline that would move farther inward to the trivialities of existence and assure a greater outward control in the “ordering of human multiplicities.”

As society moved further toward an exclusively capitalistic economy, discipline needed to take a more effective and efficient role. Through an “increase in the floating population,” capitalism needed greater control over wandering masses. The “growth in the apparatus of production…was becoming more complex…and more costly, so its profitability had to be increased” (2010:207). The ideas of punishment and discipline needed to be “normalized” and employed vigorously to amass maximum benefit and profit for the capitalist.

Additional steps were taken to quell the heretical movements that grew from protests against power and for the pre-capital empowerment of the people, particularly the poor and poor women. First, the “safe havens” for the powerless must be extinguished, a maneuver which is echoed today in demand for closures of “sanctuary cities” for “undocumented” immigrants.

Secondly, during times of great turmoil and change, heretical movements, and individuals with uniquely loud voices who led these revolts must be exterminated, that is, the Witch Trials. And lastly, new laws must be enacted to reorganize and oppress women’s bodies for the reproduction of the proletariat.

Individual resistance, often seen as a “choice,” can be reclassified as protest among the peasant women in feudal society. The decision NOT to procreate was a desire to stop the installation of more poor bodies into slavery, and this moment is of specific importance in the escalation of the Witch Trials. These new laws imposed during the Witch Hunts, regarding abortion and contraception, directly address the peasant woman’s desire to stop the succession of bodily oppression that her offspring would certainly encounter. This act would leave the capitalist class without the “poor bodies” they desired for their new economic revolution. Thus, personal control over one’s body could not stand.

Federici takes Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), adds evidence and a deeper theoretical connection of women’s oppression for capitalism’s rise and places this theory squarely in the

Witch Hunts. She gives a deeper historical context to SRT with the juxtaposition of the feudal female body and the desired female body for capital. The change, whether through laws or fear, which needed to occur for a new system to supplant the old, was that of social reproduction control, a struggle that exists today.

Witchcraft is a reproductive crime, used as control over women to reproduce the workforce, so once she ceased to produce new members to the proletariat, she became obsolete and useless. The accusations were “so crazy; people flying in the night hundreds of miles from their home to meetings that had orgies, copulating with the devil, killing children and cooking them to ingest special powers which gave them the ability to fly” (Federici Lecture 2013). Theft, begging, curses and the killing of children and animals were a few crimes, in particular, which had a correspondence to the transformation to capitalism and ideologies that were promoted by the capitalist class. The concept of pauperization surfaces during the witch trials and the creation of the beggar class begins. Before this time, feudal lords and the family oversaw the lives of the

poor and attended to their needs. Capitalism sought to change this dynamic, and thus the poor, begging woman emerged.

Begging women were among the largest group of those accused of witchcraft. Their support system needed to migrate to the cities for work, which left them to beg for survival. The most enduring definition of the witch was that of rendering men impotent, and more importantly, the begging and cursing old woman becomes someone to fear, demonize and exterminate. Think of all the children’s stories, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm; Hansel and Gretel, Little Red

Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, all of which contain an old, hideous woman cursing and perpetrating evil against young, often beautiful children. Hansel and Gretel is thought to have originated during the “Great Famine” of the early fourteenth century, or around the time of the first witch executions and heretical exterminations of the Cathars and the Knights Templar.

Marxist theory, Foucault’s philosophy of bodily domination and the adherence to a new capital order, Social Reproduction Theory steeped in the particular control of women for the procreation of the proletariat class, and the terror of the Witch Trials intersect to define the restructuring and redefining of the social individual. These theories touch all aspects of society and our interpretation of those societies. From art to literature, to legislation, to protests, to economic formation, the theoretical lens supports our search for meaning and a clearer definition of our condition, or in this case, woman’s condition.

Italian woman immigrants in the researcher’s site of Portland, Maine, organized in village ways, in kin-based circles, and though they continued to reproduce the labor for industrial capitalism and their husbands often worked for the capitalist structures, they maintained their social organization from rural village life within their homes through a “village” of kin-based communal sharing. Southern “Italians” existed in a pre-capital, agrarian society including the

village of Lettomanoppello in the Province of Pescara in the region of Abruzzo from where the women of this study migrated, and ironically, the inhabitants escaped not only the Witch Hunts at the end of the Middle Ages, but additionally circumvented the installation of capitalism for nearly 300 years while most of western Europe succumbed to the economic restructure. The women in this study may have lost the battle in maintaining the agrarian, communal, economic arrangement, but she fought to keep the woman-centered, familial, social structure of her community intact as her husband and sons crossed the Atlantic. She pinned her hopes on migratory wages brought home from L’America as a temporary fix to the family’s wage losses and continued to maintain village existence through matrilineal organization, but braced herself for upheaval and relocation.

CHAPTER 4

DATA

Villages of the South: Hit Last and Hit Hard

Southern villagers from Lettomanoppello, feudal holdovers from an agrarian economic structure, had to adjust to the new capital economy infiltrating their village and reorganizing their community, or they had one last choice, to migrate. Lettomanoppello, the center of stone- carving had reached its peak of production between 1800-1900 with over half of the town employed in the craft directly or in an adjacent capacity. With the decline of stone-carving after

1900 and the abolition of the feudal system followed by land privatization, local paesani lost their ability to survive. Meanwhile, the young, unmarried women of the post-unification generation felt a power shift happen in their village life. With young men away in L’America for wage-labor, they must await their return for brokered marriages or find men outside their generation.

Mother’s in the village worried as marriage options for their daughters diminished.

Without a husband to solidify her daughter’s position in the community and alleviate her dependency on the family, Lettomanoppello mother’s awaited the return of potential husbands for their daughters, but found this exercise futile. The young men failed to return to the village permanently. Many older women and their husbands would traverse the Atlantic to broker village marriages for their daughters and find financial stability in their older age for themselves in the seaside city that previous paesani had established. Young Lettomanoppello migrants emigrated to Portland, Maine in the United States and with them, they carried their talent for sculpting and stonework and a desire to finally own land for future prosperity.

Immigrant Rudy DiPietro, shortened from DiPietrantonio, from Lettomanoppello, recalled that his grandparents and many of their paesani were skilled laborers who had numerous trades aside from their subsistence farming. His grandparents, Carmine and Giovanna

DiPietrantonio came to Portland, Maine in the 1890s. Carmine did stone work, everything in

Lettomanoppello was made from marble and stone, according to Rudy. Scholar John Bodnar supports DiPietro’s assertion that most immigrants to the United States were middle and lower middle-class skilled laborers who immigrated from the confrontation with industrial capitalism in their villages. “In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, craftsmen in small towns and even urban dwellers who manufactured crafts by hand for supplemental income faced increasing competition from cheaper goods produced in factories” (Bodnar 1987 [1985]:30). If the rural southerner wanted to exist, it became increasingly imperative to migrate for better wages and lower taxation.

Capitalists from the North, who had coaxed the rural Southerners into supporting

Unification, abandoned their promise of a new Italy with opportunities for all and pushed the failing economy of the new state disproportionately onto the backs of the already impoverished

South. The Italian immigrants in the research site of Portland, Maine found this taxation to be overwhelming and unsustainable. The peasant's resistance to authority and the documentation of their private information for surveillance and taxation purposes prevails in their Italian community today. This researcher met several male descendants of the Lettomanoppello migrants, who gather every Thursday morning at the Cantina in the Italian Heritage Center (IHC) of Portland, Maine over coffee and muffins to "solve the world's problems," reminisce, and lament the political and taxation system that makes earning a living more challenging.

Additionally, the intrusive documents used to support the government and taxation system were

met with disdain in the rural villages and continue to live in the minds of their descendants at the

IHC.

The new overlords after Unification were relentless in their interventions and wealth extraction. Northerners viewed the South as an untapped resource of wealth, placed bureaucracies in their village to record any and all activities to be taxed, and pursued them with abandon. For the villagers of communities like Lettomanoppello, their resistance to the new economy and the capitalist mindset helped to keep their feudal organization in place for over three centuries. Feudal overlords were cruel and despotic, but their cruelty was fleeting and distant.

Southern Italian communities grew skeptical of intrusive questions from outsiders, as

Laurie Fabiano recalled in her family memoir, Elizabeth Street. After unification, the bourgeois class exacted taxes from poor peasants in all areas of their lives, from the mules that transported their goods, to the grain they needed for survival. "Everyone in authority was the enemy, and if they knew more about you, they could tax you more. If they knew you had a garden plot, a home garden plot, they could tax you more." Italians invested inside the family. Only the family and those closest to you could be trusted. "The more knowledge others had, the more they could hurt you with it, and that came with them" (Fabiano interview 2015).

Cutting out the Middle Man

The relentless pursuit of tax monies from peasants and contadini (farmers) proved fruitless. Some peasants became astute at hiding the means by which they were taxed, however, many just grew deeper and deeper in debt to the signori (upper-class). Life became unbearable and dire for the contadini, but additionally for the middle-class and upper middle-class workers, who had lost their place in society.

Exile Carlo Levi noted in his memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, that the able-bodied working-class and upper-class males left Gagliano for the Americas and northern Europe. "The upper-classes have not the means to live with decorum and self-respect," (Levi 1947:36) as they did in the cities north of Naples. So, those young men of promise migrated, predominately to northern cities within Europe. The struggling skilled laborers and some impoverished peasants fled economic oppression that the elites in their villages had failed to curb.

In the feudal structure that predominated Southern Italy throughout the Middle-Ages, the wealthy, educated class managed the cities for the crown, distributed foodstuffs for subsistence to the peasants who worked the land, and everyone had enough. This is not to romanticize the exploitative conditions under which peasants toiled in the feudal structure, however, lords, like parents, were responsible for the vassal's welfare. After Unification, the middle-man had disappeared. There was no need for a distributor of wealth, only for owners of the means of production and the producers of that wealth, the laborers.

The middle-man, padrone, would need to create his space as the purveyor of laws through governmental positions, migrate to northern Europe, to the Americas as skilled workforce, or fall into the lower classes and find work like every other peasant. In this "new economy," one's ability to remain idle and financially stable through birthright became increasingly out of reach in the rural villages. Those who could not escape the new economic changes and the cycle of deep poverty that would supplant the earlier subsistence lifestyle, predominately the very poor and the elderly, stayed behind and relied upon meager wages until a letter arrived with dollars from their family abroad. The middle-men that went abroad returned as labor brokers for the new industrial capital system in L’America.

Better Wages in L'America

Rural peasants from the southern provinces marched en masse, predominately to the docks of Naples and into northeastern U.S. American communities to earn a higher wage, then return home to enjoy a higher standard of living in their village. For many of the 5.5 million

Italian migratory workers, also called "Birds of Passage," returning home would be an unattainable plan. For those who returned to the village, they would find that life in the village was no longer appealing, as U.S. America had changed them. The "Americani," as local villagers now defined these travelers, had removed themselves from the village and in the process, removed the village from themselves. "Visits home by workers from abroad were viewed apprehensively by many elders, who saw the migrants not as returning sons but as young men on the prowl, soldiers of the economy who were here today and gone forever as men with a personal role in the village's future" (Talese 2006 [1992]:228).

The wages in L'America were high enough to warrant the treacherous, two-week trip across the Atlantic and to return again after the working season had ended. In Lettomanoppello, small groups of middle-aged villagers traversed back and forth to their families in the village to create the life that Unification had failed to deliver. These migrants were "men without a country" in the sense that they felt free and borderless from this new oppression. A real sense of freedom to travel, work, and return permeated the low-wage workforce in the United States in the early days of Italian migration; it was a return to their freedoms of the past, or so they thought. The southern peasant's existence in the "land that time forgot" had been a “freedom” for them before Unification, but when subsistence agriculture disappeared, their last line of defense against the North's economic oppression was to simply leave and move west to set up new resistance communities in the Americas.

Birds of Passage

The fabric of rural villages was rapidly changing from a substantial absence of young men in the community lost to migration. The men, unlike the women of the post-unification generation had a unique chance to leave their village and explore a wider world of financial opportunity and romantic freedom, but they often suffered particular hardships and debilitating illnesses and injuries from that "freedom." Gaetano Talese’s grandson, author Gay Talese recalled in his novel Unto the Sons, that when Gaetano was a young man in Sicily, he climbed to the high rocks and watched the ships leave the harbor. He dreamed of life on the sea. The open, blue, welcoming sea was freedom, adventure, and when he was old enough, he knew this would be his life.

Gaetano would indeed venture on the seas to North America and cross the rocky Atlantic on nearly seven occasions. He came to realize that those adventures were less than romantic. He died at the age of 43 of lung cancer from mining asbestos in U.S. America. These young men

"cut themselves off from all that was familiar and threw themselves to the wind" (Talese interview 2015). Many migrants returned with additional finances for their families, some never returned, and yet others, like Gaetano, came home to die and left their families destitute.

The majority of the immigrants in this research traveled in waves from Lettomanoppello, a hilltop Province of Pescara to the northeastern seaboard of the United States of America.

Paesani secured work through padroni and left the village in small groups of adult males. Once they arrived and established steady work and shelter, more villagers joined them. James

DiBiase's father, Giacomo was a teenager in Lettomanoppello when he left for U.S. America.

He was an apprentice stone cutter, scalpolini, and came to the United States at the age of 15 or

16 in 1901, in James’ recollection. Giacomo came through Boston and was employed at the

quarries up in Stonington, Maine. James believed that his father came alone, but he could not be sure. (James DiBiase personal communication with author April 21, 2016).

Figure 3: View from Green Head, Stonington, Maine, ca. 1915

Figure 4: Hallowell Italian Granite Works, carvers (scalpolini), ca. 1895

The documents tell a slightly different story of Giacomo DiBiase’s first trip to U.S.

America. According to the ship’s manifest, Giacomo (16) arrived in New York on April 14,

1902, with fellow villagers, Genaro D'Alfonso (24), most likely an uncle or possibly a cousin on his mother's side and Carlos DiPietrantonio (28). The three men arrived into New York to stay at the house of DeHefanis (illegible handwriting on immigrant ship manifest), the brother-in-law of D'Alfanso and DiPietrantonio and the uncle of Giacomo according to the information provided by the travelers on the ship manifest.

Figure 5: Ship Manifest S.S. Trojan Prince, passenger Giacomo DiBiase, April 14, 1902.

We can surmise from the confusion in documents that the immigrants seeking work may have lied about their age or skill level merely to obtain work, which occurred in Laurie Fabiano’s

family when her great-grandmother’s first husband Nunzio Pontillo came to New York to do labor work. Fabiano stated in her book, Elizabeth Street that Nunzio was college educated, but his padrone directed him to simply put “laborer” on his paperwork. Labor jobs were plentiful, but middle management and educated positions were unavailable to Southern Italian immigrants.

Young bodies were wanted for unfathomably horrific physical labor, but despite the hardships, desperate laborers may have lied about the number of entry dates or their age to obtain employment. Additionally, the questions and answers may have simply been misunderstood due to language barriers and some immigrants may have been unaware of their actual age. The answers to these issues may never be known.

Some of the Italian Heritage Center participants came to the conversation with photographs, documents from such personal research, and their memories. Documents can tell us about the immigrant in general, their age, birthplace, gender, career, and destination, but fails to communicate the immigrant's motivations, desires, and dreams. Through past interviews of the immigrants provided by the IHC, and their children’s memories of life for their parents and the community, this researcher was capable of assembling a more complete story of the immigrants’ lives.

For the immigrants before the turn of the twentieth century, migration was welcomed and relatively easy. But, through the passage of a series of Immigration Acts, migrating would become more challenging. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed on the heels of the

Anti-Coolie Act discouraging Chinese immigration to California, ironically, just after the Gold

Rush. This Act restricted migration of Chinese nationals for ten years.

These acts opened the door for more "Europeans" which at the time, included Italian immigrants. Laborers were needed to build the infrastructure of a growing industrial United

States following the massive loss of young male lives during the Civil War. However, in 1890, the temperature quickly changed after eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans for the alleged murder of Chief David Hennessey. The tinge of Mafioso hung "like an albatross around the necks of all Italian immigrants" who stepped on U.S. American shores after 1890. Italian families as "dark and criminal took hold in the American imagination" (Maggio 2015), and

Italian immigrants would reassess their desire to plant permanent roots in the United States.

For the gentlemen of Lettomanoppello documented on ship manifests, who left their wives, children, and parents behind, the intention was to work and return. James DiBiase recalled that his father went back to America in 1915 and left his wife and daughter behind

(James DiBiase personal communication with author April 21, 2016). Laborers traveled to the

United States to stay with family, friends, or in boarding houses arranged by a padrone. Just as they were "warehoused" for profit on the large steamships, they would leave that misery to board in large warehouses for the industrial workforce.

Boarding Houses

When the laboring masses arrived at Ellis Island in the New York harbor, and later in

Boston, they boarded transport to the far reaches of the industrial northern cities of North

America. These men from the youngest ages of 14 up to the older age of 50 worked side-by-side in physical labor jobs from railroad construction to factory labor, from coal mining to asphalt mining, and when the day was done, they rested their heads in a boarding house.

Raffaele Del Ponte left Lettomanoppello for the first time in 1902, he arrived in New

York with another able-bodied man from his village to join Donato Corvellio at 108 Park Street in New York City.

Figure 6: Ship Manifest, S.S. California, passenger Raffaele Del Ponte, April 9, 1902.

The immigration document states he arrived April 9, 1902 with nearby villager,

Domenico DiBiase of Manoppello, however, his declaration of intent documentation refutes this arrival as his first entry to the United States with a date of May 15, 1901 on the S.S. California into New York. This researcher has yet to find the Ship's Manifest for the S.S. California on

May 15, 1901, but Del Ponte’s declaration of intent document could have typographical error, confusing the “1” and the “7” in the year of the document. He did arrive, subsequently, on May

13, 1907 for, what appears to be his final journey to the United States before settling permanently.

Figure 7: Raffaele Del Ponte photograph from family collection of Ambrose DiBiase Jr., ca. 1930s

Raffaele left his wife, Chiara and two daughters, Antonia and Anna behind in the village.

His son, Joseph (16), a shoemaker, came to the United States on March 26, 1914 aboard the S.S.

Verona with family member, Michele Del Ponte (23) to live with his father in Pittsfield,

Massachusetts, and lived near him in 1920 when he sent for his remaining family. Many women were left behind in the village to maintain the home, family life, and to farm for subsistence, and their husbands and fathers sent money home to pay the added expenses.

When Raffaele arrived, he and his fellow paesani navigated a myriad of conflicting and unclear laws for entry. The succession of immigration laws and acts from 1870-1920 sought to define the individual allowed to be accepted to the United States based on ethnicity, country of origin, mental capacity, physical health, intellect, and political affiliation. The Naturalization 51

Act of 1870 extended naturalization to those of African nativity, from which they were prohibited earlier, however, it failed to include those of other "non-white races." The pliable definition of "white" and “non-white” would prove to be challenging and often detrimental to those immigrants entering from southern and eastern Europe, Asia and India over the next 50 years.

The addition of the 1875 Act to discriminate against "undesirables" which offered another open to interpretation concept and sought to clamp down on those of Asian nativity.

This opened the door to more European immigrants once again, but their numbers would be controlled through age, mental capacity, labor affiliation (1885 Act), and political beliefs (1903

Act), whose additions included the poor beggars, prostitutes, and people with specific ailments such as epilepsy. The 1906 Immigration Act included English as a requirement for citizenship and established a bureau for immigration and naturalization. As more immigrants became permanent residents in the United States and sent for their families, new immigration acts, like

The Immigration Act of 1907, required those with disabilities and disease to be detained and deported. Immigrants now had a way to naturalize and become citizens, although to navigate the ever-changing laws and acts, as well as the pliable definition of “whiteness” to gain entry to the

United States entrapped the newcomers. A 1911 study found that Italians were the most unlikely to become American citizens, and this study, the Dillingham Report, would limit southern and eastern European migration.

On May 13, 1907, Del Ponte arrived into Boston, Massachusetts to follow his brother-in- law, Raffaele Ferrante, to Portland, Maine with 8 other men from his village. On this trip, the broad age range includes adult males and younger sons and other family members. These men arrived in Portland, Maine for work arranged by their paesani on the docks. Raffaele made his

way to 101 Fore Street, near the boarding home of fellow villagers, Rinaldo and Petranella

DiPietroantonio. The Fore Street homes were demolished and rebuilt into attached homes that continue to house immigrants today.

Figure 8: 101 Fore Street, Portland, Maine, photograph from Mainememory.net collection, ca. 1924

Petranella DiPietrantonio, or as the locals remember her, Za-peta-nell, housed many of the immigrants from Lettomanoppello and surrounding villages. Her home on Fore Street in

Portland, Maine was a place to get "on your feet" and start a new life. With the sudden death of her husband, Rinaldo, in January of 1920, and 8 children to raise, Zia Petranella would board immigrants for her family's survival in addition to the grocery store started by her husband and run by the family. Petranella's story was common to many immigrants at the turn of the century.

Widows left with many mouths to feed and limited skills in the capitalist economy were pulled deeper inside the community and further from the outside world.

Labor agents or padroni from the other side, the old middle-men who had found a new purpose, may have supported, coerced or even tricked desperate laborers to traverse the Atlantic

and create a new debt to their padroni "middle-men", but fellow villagers like Zia Petranella and her sister-in-law, Santa Ferrante, helped laborers gain their footing in the new country once they arrived. This system of support on either side of the Atlantic would prove helpful in the early years, and necessary after the 1950s.

Petranella’s support for the new immigrants was two-fold, indeed, she helped these newcomers with an address to record upon entry and a place to gain their footing in a new country, but additionally, it gave her family an added income, which after her husband's death became increasingly more necessary for their survival. Indeed, many Italian women, who were widowed at an early age in the early years of Italian migration from the horrific work required of their husbands, became the "Mamooch" (grandmother) of the new village to a whole new generation of laborers for the capital system.

Other immigrants, who settled earlier in Portland, took in fellow villagers as boarders and found them jobs. Betty DiBiase Girard remembers how people came to live in the area. "My mother had boarders. Those people that came without their wives, (and) their wives came later, well, they helped each other. The women did their washin’, done their cookin’, and after that their (families) came and they got into rentals. Sam Aceto, he was a contractor, he helped those guys. Sammy used to send for some of those men, he'd sign for them and he put them to work.

You know, he'd give ‘em a job" Betty DiBiase Girard claims (personal communication with interviewer Tom Profenno, July 12, 2002). The earlier migrants, who set up the community and called for fellow villagers to follow provided a space to get on their feet and jobs to earn a living.

Petranella migrated with her husband in 1900 and operated a grocery store in Little Italy.

They created a foothold in Portland, Maine before many migrants came to stay and work on the docks. Rudy DiPietro was the great nephew of Zia Petranella. He remembered her open house

in our discussion. "Mamooch, she took in a lot of Italians. Rudy Ferrante's mother (Santa), God rest her soul, she took in a lot of people, too. She'd help ‘em out until they got on their own.

That's how they worked for each other." Rudy DiPietro claims (personal communication with author April 21, 2016). Especially in the early days, records show that many immigrants from

Lettomanoppello stayed at Petranella's home on 67 Fore Street.

Figure 9: 67 Fore Street, Portland, Maine, photograph from Mainememory.net collection, ca. 1924.

Women like Petranella DiPietrantonio and Santa Ferrante, her sister-in-law, were sentinels for the transplanted community. Not only did they ensure the newcomers a place to sleep and nourishment, they found them jobs, wives, and communicated stories of survival in the new space. These women would guard their way of life nearly 100 years ago in the new world and their legacy endures today. Meanwhile, women and children left in the “old country” awaited letters with news of safe arrival in Portland, and awaited their husband’s return. The family suffered from the separation, but received an elevated financial stature in their village.

While their husbands were away in L’America to earn a living for the family, the wives left behind, white widows, kept the family's daily life whole. In Italian American scholarship,

white widows enjoyed exalted status in the village, as her husband was away earning a higher wage, to achieve the dream of a better financial standing in their community. While the men were away, women and their children farmed subsistence plots, worked on other farms as laborers for cash wages, and worked as domestics in wealthier homes. Young boys elevated to the father's status as field worker, young girls became small mothers and wives to replace their mothers who now joined their young sons in the field. Many of these women had to endure long days of physical labor in the fields while continuing to do their jobs in the home and the community, which included finding suitable husbands for their daughters.

James DiBiase recalls a story told to him by his mother about her life in Manoppello,

Italy before migration. After her father had died, the women of the family worked together as seamstresses. His mother, Rosina D’Emilio introduced a sewing machine to the family and that was how they survived at the time. Rosina, left her mother and sisters, eventually, to live with an uncle, who was a priest in Chieti. She was able to pursue more education for a young woman in

Italy at the time because she wasn't married. She learned from the priest. James DiBiase claims

(personal communication with author December 3, 2016).

The male and female rules of engagement were inconsistent in the rural village. Carlo

Levi adds that while village life was matrilineal and women enjoyed an elevated status in the village while their husbands were away, they were not allowed in the company of men, and especially single men, without another person or at least a child to accompany them. He noted this custom when women came to his home for medical care. They often brought a child to stand as their evidence of honorable intent. Priests were exempt from such customs, though.

Women and men alone in a private space implied sexual intercourse, and women would never tempt the customary rules for fear of labeling. Levi had a hard time finding a woman domestic

during his exile in 1935, as he lived in the village without a mother or at least a sister. Any woman working for Levi was sure to be branded his mistress. Although many in the village found the custom archaic, they acknowledged and respected it.

The issue of a single woman, especially those in their 20s, posed a challenge. Women should be married to solidify her power in the community and single daughters were a financial burden for a family. In this "double-bind", young women had to navigate a small village with contradictory rules of gendered engagement without young males their age to properly adhere to the customs. Young women who failed to marry were often sent to live with the priest or nearby businessmen to work as domestic laborers. At times, these young female domestics had children with the man of the house, even the priests. Carlo Levi noted from his time in Gagliano, "All the priests have children, and no one sees in this fact any dishonor reflected upon their calling" (Levi

1947:103). Women were left behind and children "happened", as this researcher learned from open discussions at the Italian Heritage Center in Portland, Maine. Children belonged to their mother in these matrilineal villages, they clung to her and depended upon her for every need.

Life and death were daily occurrences in the rural village, so life goes on in the struggle for existence, and paternity was a small matter.

The men of the post-unification generation had unique opportunities to leave their village and explore a wider world of financial fortune and romantic freedom, but they often suffered specific hardships for that "freedom". While work in L'America was back-breaking and harsh, the pay increase, even with travel and living expenses factored, seemed worth the risk. Although villagers returned in tailored "Americani" suits and new gentile mannerisms, the newly "exalted" lives they sought would often not come to fruition. Indeed, Levi noted that many permanent returners to Gagliano looked upon their return date as the “unluckiest of their lives.” Levi’s

barber confided in him that in L’America, “I had a shop of my own and four assistants…Now,

I’ve only this miserable hole in the wall and I’m up against it” (Levi 1947:124)

Raffaele Del Ponte made an undetermined amount of trips to U.S. America. His grandson, Ambrose DiBiase, and second-cousin to this researcher, recalled that his mother,

Anna, her mother, Chiara, and her sister, Antonia were separated from his Dadone (grandfather) for almost 10 years. Raffaele traveled to New York, Massachusetts and eventually Portland,

Maine to work in factories for the needed wages to keep his family afloat in their small village in

Italy. On his first trip to U.S. America, Raffaele traveled with fellow paesani from

Lettomanoppello, but ended up in a boarding house in Oneonta, New York with many other

Italians to work in a local factory. Like many of his fellow countrymen, he would work in the season, spring through late fall, and return home for the winter.

The young wives of the migratory laborers enjoyed the power of mother and father of the family and took on a dual-gendered position that would sparingly revert after the separation.

Once power is acquired, relinquishing the position becomes difficult. Levi notes the village society left behind was in flux and battling to adjust, yet still held strong to customary traditions.

"The matriarchal structure of society, the primitive and direct approach to love, and the want of balance between the sexes following upon emigration had none-the-less to combat a residue of family feeling, the strong consciousness of blood relationship, and age-old customs tending to separate men and women" (Levi 1947:103).

Conversely, immigrants transplanted the gender balance that would continue to grow in the soil of the new country, L'America. These undaunted guards of the secrets, memories and the resistance from the old country carried their village ways to their new space. Not only did many of these women refuse to speak English in the community, although they often understood it

well, they would use their language, a distinct dialect from their mountainous region in Abruzzo, as a shield to protect their village.

Cultural Resistance

The Americani returned to marry local women in their villages and bring them to

L'America. James DiBiase remembers his father, Giacomo's trip back to Lettomanoppello to court his mother, the cousin of his recently deceased wife. Giacomo went back to

Lettomanoppello and Manoppello, the neighboring village in Italy to court Rosina. At first, she didn't seem too enthused about the idea of marrying Giacomo, but when her girlfriends expressed interest in him, Rosina became interested. Rosina explained that when Giacomo came over looking like a “dude” with a little money from America. He brought a phonograph player with records, so he could dance with the young women. He was displaying himself as the older generation labeled “like a dapper" (ladies’ man). James DiBiase claims (communication with author December 3, 2016).

However, through her advanced age and added education, Rosina held more power to accept or decline the proposal of Giacomo DiBiase than her mother's generation. So she took a chance on the future and accepted his offer to marry and live in L'America. During an interview before her death, Rosina told her grandson that when the truck came to take her to Naples to come to the United States, they had to tear her away to put her in the truck. James DiBiase claims (personal communication with author December 3, 2016). For women in the

Mezzogiorno region of Italy, leaving her circle of family and support was devastating.

Young women of this transitional generation, like Rosina, arrived on the shores of

L'America to start new families, and again would encounter different cultural norms and expectations without the circle of extended la famiglia to support her in her duties. New woman

immigrants raised children alone or with her new family of villagers. The definition and redefinition of women in the rural villages of the newly forming "Italy" established an empowered woman unwilling to relinquish her new status. Their cultural ways would clash with the men and women of L'America, and village woman immigrants would respond with silence and retreat inside the family and their new village, like those of Little Italy in Portland, Maine.

Their resistance was one of silence, retreat and rejection.

Other women in the village were given less options and fewer opportunities to choose who they married and where they lived. "I arrived on the boat, and he was there to pick me up.

He was 34 and I was 16…he was my husband, and I loved him…that was it" Clorinda DiBiase claims (personal communication with author July 1986). Clorinda Ferrante DiBiase, born in

1909 in Lettomanoppello, appears in the ship manifest on August 3, 1928, age 18, travelling with her United States Citizen husband, Graziantonio DiBiase. Details can be lost or confused in memory recall. Documents help us to fill in the blanks and stitch together a more coherent story of the past. However, Clorinda's recollection of her experience is hers. No one can replace how it "felt" to be her, or how she experienced coming to a new place without her extended family to support her in raising her children at such a young age with a man so much older than her.

Figure 10: Ship Manifest, S.S. Duilio, passenger Clorinda Ferrante DiBiase, July 25, 1928, p. 1

Figure 11: Ship Manifest, S.S. Duilio, passenger Clorinda Ferrante DiBiase, July 25, 1928, p. 2

The relationships that ruled the old country seem antiquated, and by the laws and cultural norms of today, immoral, however, they were in no way pervasive. A woman's options grew slimmer based upon her family's financial situation, education level and beliefs in the autonomy of women. For centuries, women brokered the marriages of their sons and daughters. They negotiated with their sisters, cousins, and friends. Often, these children were first and second cousins, another norm that is illegal and socially unacceptable in our society, today.

Clorinda imparted this wisdom or warning, however one chooses to define the moment, over Sunday dinner in this researcher's young teenage years. Clorinda took her position as the matriarch to pass wisdom to a family member experiencing an impending divorce. Women of

her generation were actively Catholic, and often stated that they "did not believe in divorce."

Her story was a "way to live," a "way to deal with the realities of life" as she saw them through lens of the old world. It was a "reality" that she had to navigate, but a lost truth for her young,

American descendants. The ladies at the table recoiled from such a story, but as a steadfast sentinel of the past, Clorinda dug her heels in deeper and came out stronger in her message. She was resistant to the new views of marriage and the Americanized social construction of family.

Clorinda was protective of her family, a resister to the end.

Surveillance of a Community

“The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued

Proclamation 2527, which rendered the country’s six hundred thousand unnaturalized Italians enemy aliens, subjecting them to restrictions, apprehension and detention, and requiring them to carry pink identification cards” (Laurino 2105:185). While Japanese Americans were predominately interned, German and Italian Americans entered camps or were documented as aliens and surveilled.

On February 20, 1942, one day following the Executive Order, Anna Del Ponte DiBiase and her mother, Chiara DiPietrantonio Del Ponte (Feb 16, 42) received documents defining their status in the United States. The United States took non-citizen, long-time residents of certain ethnic origins under suspicion and the watchful eye of the FBI simply because of their place of birth or ethnic correlation. "If they (non-citizen Italians) failed to report, they were sent to the internment camps" Ambrose DiBiase Jr. claims (personal communication with author December

3, 2016).

Figure 12: U.S. Alien Registration Card, front cover, Anna DiBiase, Feb. 21, 1942

Figure 13: U.S. Alien Registration Card with finger prints, photograph and signature, Anna DiBiase, Feb. 20, 1942

Figure 14: U.S. Alien Registration Card, front cover and page 1, Chiara Del Ponte, Feb. 16, 1942

Figure 15: U.S. Alien Registration Card with finger prints, photograph and signature, Chiara Del Ponte, Feb. 16, 1942

While Chiara Del Ponte, nearly 69 years-old at the time, and her daughter, Anna Del

Ponte DiBiase, 41, had been in America for 21 years, they had been unable to attain citizenship.

At the time, clear knowledge of English, the spoken and written word, and the ability to read were all requirements for citizenship, Chiara was either not qualified, or had declined to apply for Naturalization. The former is most likely, as Chiara was incapable of speaking English.

Anna, nevertheless, had filed a Naturalization Petition on September 29, 1941, narrowly two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Both women were left after the attack at an ethnic and gendered disadvantage, and would be observed throughout the war, even though Anna's son,

Nick, was in the Pacific fighting for the United States of America.

Figure 16: U.S. Naturalization Petition Paperwork, Anna Del Ponte DiBiase, Sep. 29, 1941

Upon Raffaele's death in 1940, Chiara lived between her older daughter Antonia's and her younger daughter Anna's houses, alternating on a six-month basis. Ambrose Jr., a child at the time, remembered the FBI agents coming to the house to check his mother and grandmother's paperwork. "My father sat at the table smoking a cigarette when the agents came in, ‘there are your enemy aliens over there making sauce'. He made a joke of the situation" Ambrose DiBiase

Jr. claims (personal communication with author December 4, 2016).

The women ignored these agents and the outside forces that tried to define them through documents of suspicion. "I was never scared or worried, my dad only laughed it off. My brother's said that the agents wanted my dad's homemade alcohol. I don't know about that."

Ambrose offered their line of defense, "But, my mother never spoke English around them, although she spoke English quite well. My grandmother, however, didn't understand English."

The community used their language as a form of resistance to the cultural changes, and in this instance, silence served them well. In the DiBiase house, the agent's presence failed to create a reaction as "we had nothing to hide.”

Ambrose Jr. was ambivalent to the FBI agents entering their home for routine checks.

"My mother knew they targeted her because she sent packages and money back to Italy, but she didn't care. It was fascist Italy and her family was in dire poverty back in Lettomanoppello"

Ambrose DiBiase, Jr. claims (personal communication with author December 4, 2016).

Ambrose shared that he would interpret newspaper articles for his grandmother, as she had a great interest in many subjects, especially the news of the war back home. From Chiara’s document, her X on the signature spot is an indication that she was unable to read or write. She merely identified articles of interest from pictures and Ambrose would read them. Ambrose

DiBiase Jr. claims (email with author February17, 2017). Chiara, like many of the Italian

women, showed great interest in the world around them, especially information that included the news back home. They kept their circles of trust and their energy focused on their family, friends and the practice of everyday life. The resistance the women of Portland, Maine’s Little

Italy exhibited permeated the entire community from intrusive outsiders to the resistance practices of subsistence farming they brought from their village.

Taking Back Subsistence

Vegetable Gardens

The immigrants brought survival tactics with them including the food they ate. Dina remembers the stories that her parents told her about the old country and the dire poverty they endured. “I don't know how they survived, but they survived well. And now, many, many years later, we know why. Because they had closeness with the family, they had good parents, and they had the Mediterranean diet which was beans and lentils, that we used to hate. But this is it, they had the best and they didn't know it. The best food. And, pure olive oil. It worked, it worked for them. And, we thought, oh those poor people" Dina Montebello Irace claims

(communication with interviewer Tom Profenno July 28, 2006).

Portland's geography was unfamiliar to the Southern Italian peasant farmers. Its humid continental climate and extreme temperatures are antithetical to the regions they left in Italy.

Additionally, Portland's planting zone with its extreme minimum temperatures of minus ten to minus fifteen Fahrenheit, juxtaposed with Italy's extreme temperatures of ninety to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit created a learning curve for their survival. The peasants must learn to plant and grow sustenance in new soil, a different climate and possibly an adaptation in diet. But, regardless of the difficult climate acclamation, they refused to change their diet.

New immigrants arrived to live with sponsors, and "they came wherever the sponsor lived" Dina Montebello Irace claims (communication with interviewer Tom Profenno July 28,

2006). After boarding with relatives or in houses of fellow villagers like Petranella

DiPietrantonio and Santa Ferrante, new immigrants found a space of their own and set down roots, mainly, in the East End area of Portland, Maine's Munjoy Hill. This space, now branded

"Little Italy" was the creation of an old village on new land. Villagers utilized the open spaces, inexpensive land, rich soil, and a culture of farming to re-invigorate their subsistence plots and private gardens. For those immigrants living inside the cityscape of the enclave, planting space was limited and some chose to move outside “Little Italy” for land.

Betty DiBiase Girard, born in 1914 in Portland, Maine was interviewed by the Italian

Heritage Center in 2004 about the old neighborhood. Betty's family settled outside Little Italy on Warren Avenue, just west of downtown. Her father purchased a home at the end of Warren

Avenue with an opportunity for land. She reminisced about her childhood on Warren Avenue with exclusively Italian inhabitants. "This whole street was full of Italian people. It was like a little village, and they were all happy. When you took a walk down the street, you were goin' somewhere, all of these people were outside just like (in) Italy." Betty DiBiase Girard claims

(communication with interviewer Tom Profenno, July 14, 2004). Betty recalled the stories from her parents and her own trips to Italy where the men sat outside, played cards and talked about life.

The community on Warren Avenue in Portland was the center of their little village and everyone participated. "People used to call our house the farm because we had vegetables and animals. Our land was beautiful before the city ruined it." Betty's family owned a house at the end of Warren Avenue and the land came with it. "Land was cheap," Betty remembered, "so we

had space for gardens. Everyone enjoyed it. People would just walk down and take what they needed." The city, however, enforced eminent domain for a new drain system, and according to

Betty, the beautiful land would not produce crops for the neighbors ever again. Betty DiBiase

Girard claims (communication with interviewer Tom Profenno, July 14, 2004)

Family to Betty included more than just her parents, siblings, husband, children, and grandchildren. It included her sisters, brothers, their families, and the families of their spouses.

Good friends on Warren Avenue were also "family" to Betty and the children of the immigrants.

Family was a broad concept. "We had all fish dishes on Christmas Eve and all the family was invited. These days, my daughter makes the food and it's just us, my little family, but we keep the food tradition" Betty DiBiase Girard claims (communication with interviewer Tom Profenno,

July 14, 2004).

Catching the Blackbird

Food ways varied in the enclave from household to household. The men from the

"Cantina" reminisced about the neighborhood and the survival dishes brought from the “old country”. All of the men in the room grew up in the enclave in the East End of Portland's

Munjoy Hill. They spoke fondly of the neighborhood and the abundance of food. “I could walk up to fifteen different houses down on Carey Lane and just smell what was coming out of the kitchen, and they’d would bring you in and feed you. When I got home, my grandmother would say, ‘Did you eat?' and I'd say yes, I ate at Mrs. Cardamone's house or Mrs. so-and-so's house.

Everybody had food for you" Mark Moran claims (personal communication with author April

21, 2016).

Figure 17: Carey Lane, Portland, Maine's Little Italy, ca. 1924

"My mother made her own bread and macaroni. She would call us in from the street where we were playing ‘tin-can alley' and feed us some fresh bread with olive oil and salt and pepper, and send us back outside. "We had hard Italian bread broken up in a coffee bowl for breakfast” Rudy DiPietro claims (personal communication with author April 21, 2016). "La

Zuppa," the Cantina full of men from the neighborhood shouted. Every man in the room had la zuppa (bread in coffee) for breakfast.

"Honey, do you know what La Polenta is?”, Rudy questioned. At that moment the room irrupted into a chorus of family recipes and memories, and while one man claimed that “it was a delicacy”, another winced in disgust. Rudy explained how the meal was served in his house that was run by men after his mother died. "The table is all cleaned off. They spread it all over, put the sauce over it…you can either have rabbits in there, blackbirds in there, deer meat or sausage, and when you sat down, nobody touched nothin' ‘til the father said, Go! We loved it, it was just cornmeal, but it was good" Rudy DiPietro claims (personal communication with author April 21,

2016).

A few of the men turned up their noses at the mention of blackbirds, but one recalled that catching the blackbird was his after-school responsibility. When he arrived home from school, he would wait in front of the window with a string attached to a box. Once the blackbirds ventured under the box to eat the bait, then the predator would pull the string and catch the blackbird. His father instructed him not to touch the box until he arrived home from work. The bird sat under the box the rest of the day until dinner time. He lamented that the blackbirds were

“tough as a son of a gun." (personal communication with author April 21, 2016).

Other men chimed in with memories of blackbird for dinner. It crossed economic lines in the room. Some men, even though their father's made a good living, still caught blackbirds to eat for dinner. It was a practice that they brought from the village in the "old country," and they wanted to continue this in the new space. James DiBiase’s father, who owned the family grocery store and other properties, still trapped pigeons and blackbirds for dinner. All the fathers in the enclave participated in this sport, James recalled. James DiBiase claims (email with author

March 16, 2017). Food and struggle went hand-in-hand in the villages of Southern Italy. The celebration of food was the triumph over poverty and struggle. Even the most impoverished

homes had food. It was part of their culture to shower your guests with an abundance of food no matter your economic circumstances. Italians in the old and new country would spare no expense to live this part of their culture.

Subsistence Farms and Wine Making

Many traditions and skills were brought from the Southern Italian Villages to Portland,

Maine's Little Italy. “My grandmother's nickname was Giovanna-la-gord, that meant she had a large farm (where they) raised olives and grapes for wine. They all had nicknames because there are so many DiPietrantonios, you had to give them a nickname to know which ones they are”

Rudy DiPietro claims (personal communication with author April 21, 2016). The meal, for

Italians, has a number of meanings woven through the fabric of the community.

Hunger in the rural south has always existed, but after unification and before the end of

World War II, deprivation and desperation was at its most horrific. These man-made conditions created not only hunger, but powerlessness against the hunger, and even throughout those times of abject poverty and deprivation, feasting was a part of the community, a celebration of life, and homemade wine was a part of every evening meal.

Philomena Fiato remembers her family's space in East Deering, another community that

Italians moved "out" to from the enclave for added space. East Deering, in the early years, was the overflow from the East End enclave of Little Italy. From the enclave, East Deering was an easy drive down Marginal Way and a quick jump on Route 1 over a small bridge.

Figure18: 1930 U.S. Federal Census Portland, Maine, Feato Family

The church, St. Peters, was the cultural center, the meeting place in the middle of Little

Italy for those in the enclave and the outside communities of East Deering, Warren Avenue and later, South Portland. For Philomena, living outside the enclave was great. They had space for a garden and animals. "Oh yeah! When I was young we had chickens and a cow. When I was born…my mother had complications after my birth…she couldn't nurse me, so my father bought a cow. We had a lot of milk, we used to sell it in the neighborhood” Philomena Fiato-Lane claims (communication with interviewer Tom Profenno, March 17, 2001).

Her father also made his own wine, a skill brought to U.S. America with many Italian immigrants from the southern regions. "My father used to make 2 barrels of wine every year.

He bought the grapes. We all had a hand in it. The kids washed the boots and stomped on the grapes. Big tubs, huge tubs, whatever tub you could find. We didn't have a grinder, so we did it with our feet. After they were mashed up, then you put them in the barrel …they used to let it

ferment for so many days and then they would draw it off and put it in another barrel, a whiskey barrel preferably. I can see them now, pouring it in with a big funnel, and then they would let it age, of course" Philomena Fiato-Lane claims (communication with interviewer Tom Profenno,

March 17, 2001).

Wine was made for everyday meals. Italian families had "table red" for dinner. It was simply a part of the meal. "We always had wine on the table. Sure, I could drink it if I wanted, even when I was a kid, but I never wanted it. It was terrible” Joe Chessi claims (personal communication with author). Special bottles were made for special occasions like weddings, communions, confirmations, and the return of family. "When my brothers went to war, my father made a white wine and he put it in a tin gallon barrel and he says, ‘I'm not going to open this until the boys come home.' And, when the boys got home, he opened it and it was like champagne, it was wonderful, and of course, they all got smashed. Thank God they all came home. It aged for a few years. It was potent stuff. I only got drunk off my father's wine once, and I couldn't drink it again" Philomena Fiato-Lane claims (communication with interviewer

Tom Profenno, March 17, 2001).

Chickens in the Yard

Although many of those living inside the enclave of Portland's Little Italy had limited outside space, they still incorporated subsistence plots and the small animals that the space allowed. Most of the houses were "triple deckers" built in the New England saltbox style, while other buildings in Little Italy were Federal style, made of brick. The "triple deckers" were built on narrow lots that left little space in between for gardens.

The Chessi family lived at 6 Fox Street, a narrow saltbox style home adjacent to the back of a grocery store and apartment on Washington Avenue, a main thoroughfare. "We had

chickens in the side yard. My mother would walk down the steps, grab hold of the neck of one of those hens, and swing it, snapping its neck. She was good. She did it swiftly. It's important to kill them quickly so you don't spoil the taste of the meat. Even the Rabbi would say that was kosher" Joe Chessi claims (personal communication with author).

Figure 19: Joe DiDominicus (Chessi) on the stairs at 6 Fox Street in Portland, Maine’s Little Italy, from the author’s personal collection, ca. 1940s.

The immigrants from Lettomanoppello had recreated their village in the small enclave of

Portland, Maine's Little Italy on Munjoy Hill, Warren Avenue to the west, and East Deering.

These areas, filled with Italian immigrants from across the Mezzogiorno region of Italy shared with each other, cared for each other, and put family and extended family at the center of their lives.

The older generation are gone, the neighborhoods have changed, subsistence plots disappeared with the victory gardens during World War II, but their familial focus remains. "My mother sat next to her brother in the picture," Betty explains the photograph of her family to her interviewers. "He was her family. I told my kids blood is thicker than water. You stick with your own. I want my kids to grow together and get along, even after they're married because they are going to have children and they'll need each other” Betty DiBiase Girard claims

(communication with interviewer Tom Profenno, July 14, 2004). Betty passed on a tradition that she hoped would continue long after the language disappeared and her children moved out. “For

Italians during the first wave of immigration to U.S. America, family would be their source of strength and survival, but the values that sustained them…would also put them at odds with the rest of the country. (Their) self-imposed isolation made it harder for them to assimilate into the mainstream of American life” (Laurino 2015:17). The education system would take Italian children to the next step toward assimilation, but a great war would make them “Americans”.

Community in Transition

Sending children to school exposed them to a message that they should forgo their

"Italianness" to become "American". Leonardo Coviello, a child immigrant from Avigliano,

Italy entered the New York City public school system at the turn of the century. Coviello tells the story in his 1958 book, The Heart is the Teacher, of his childhood experience in the public school system through his adult years as an education reformer in the same neighborhood.

When Coviello was a child, a teacher changed his name to Covello, as it was "easier to say". Coviello's father noting the change on his report card was angered. A teacher changed his family name. To be an Italian in racialized America was, for the children, as Covello

remembered, learning to be American occurred through the hatred of their families. From this point on, he would be known as Leonard Covello.

Social reformers, who included the teachers in public school, worked tirelessly to change the "backward ways" of the Italian immigrants. Children in classrooms were learning to "be

American," which was taught in those days. Children were expected to salute the flag, say the

"Lord's Prayer" and learn the lessons of "Americanism," from how and what to eat, to how to dress, speak, profess, and pray. School was used as an indoctrination conduit for

"Americanization”, a concept that Covello fought when he became a teacher, principal, and education reformer. He proposed an alternative of cultural pluralism to preserve the integrity of the individual’s culture.

If the leaders of the community could separate the children from their parents for 6 hours a day and teach them how to be "American," then the children had a chance to grow up with less nefarious traits inherited from their backward parents. Covello remembers that his "long

European trousers had been replaced by the short knickers of the time…To all outward appearances, I was an American, except that I did not speak a word of English" (Covello

1958:16).

Italians were challenging the notion of the American melting pot, although they were the least likely to become citizens, according to The Dillingham Report in 1911. “The Dillingham

Commission, which began its work in 1907, had concluded by 1911 that immigration from southern and eastern Europe posed a serious threat to American society and culture and should therefore be greatly reduced” (Harvard Library Open Collection Program 2017). Race relations in the United States continued to encompass immigration and the Italian community, and the

United States found more reasons to keep certain “undesirables” from migrating.

Upon arrival, Italians were racialized into "Italians" and "Italians South", after 1902.

South Italian, an inferior race, followed most of the immigrants from the Italian American community throughout sixty years of migration. In the years that followed the shooting of police chief, David Hennessy in New Orleans, his dying words, “The dagos shot me,” were echoed throughout the United States. Racialized terms like “guinea,” “dago,” and “wop” defined

Southern Italians until Japanese kamikaze pilots attacked the largest American Naval Base in

Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Multitudes of U.S. American men signed up to fight, but for Italian Americans, it was a moment that could give their people back their dignity and change the future, if they could survive the war.

For the children of immigrants, there was a gap between the success of the family and loyalty to the family, and the American promise of freedom, independence, and self-realization.

Within this gap, the children of immigrants tried to merely survive the daily insults hurled in their direction. "In the war, the guys would make jokes like, ‘What did the bag of shit say when it hit the fence…WOP!' We were all in it together, though. Every guy was teased from Goldie, a Jew, to Freddy and Irish/Italian, to me. We were "micks", "kikes", and "wops". That is just how it was" Joe Chessi claims (personal communication with author). The grown children of these immigrants would find their way in America and try to assimilate. World War II would give them a new chance with opportunities that were withheld before.

There was no question for Italians living in U.S. America where their loyalties lay when the United States joined the war. Italian Americans did what they could for the war effort. Rosie

Bonavita, was dubbed Rosie the Riveter, and the icon of the women's movement during the war.

Nearly 1.5 million Italian Americans left their exclusively Italian enclaves and fought alongside other U.S. Americans from a number of ethnic backgrounds. One of the gentlemen at the Italian

Heritage Center remembered that the food was so different, and that he couldn't wait to get home and have some meatballs (personal communication with author April 21, 2016). The “melting pot” that America espoused had come to fruition inside the platoons, barracks, and ships during

World War II. Italian Americans had seen a wider world, but more importantly, the outside world had experienced them.

Italian Soldiers in the Casco Bay

After the armistice with the allies in September of 1943, approximately eight U-Boats were sent to U.S. America with the Italian crew intact. Two of those boats ended up in Casco

Bay in the Portland Harbor. "They ask us to train the U.S. American destroyers, first in Bermuda and then in Casco Bay, where I met my wife" John Irace claims (Irace interview with Tom

Profenno, July 28, 2006). The Allied Forces had no access to the secret workings of enemy submarine weaponry and tactics, and this training would give them an advantage.

During an evening event at the Italian Heritage Center, community members discussed the "prisoners of war on House Island." One member recalled that the old women would bring food to the young Italian "prisoners". Giovanni (John) Irace's recorded history clarifies their memory. John was an Italian Naval officer sent to Casco Bay to train the U.S. Americans. He spoke no English and had a hard time in U.S. America. One evening while walking through the

Italian neighborhood, Dina Montebello's father picked him up and took him to their house. "My father saw him walking along Congress Street all by himself, and knew he was Italian from the uniform, so he said, ‘Hey you, come here." In my mother's kitchen, I met him and that was the beginning" Dina Montebello Irace claims (interview with Tom Profenno, July 28, 2006).

Dina recalled that Sebastian Pennise, who also married a "girl from the neighborhood," was one of the Italian Naval officers from the boat. "He was a beautician and helped start the

Sons of Italy in the community." Some of the men from the Italian Navy stayed in Portland and married the Italian American women from the enclave.

The legend of Italian prisoners of war was mostly correct. They were captured soldiers, who's country capitulated and allied with the United States at the end of World War II, and were sent to assist the Americans in the war effort. However, the idea that they were prisoners of war is highly unlikely, as John was free to walk in the harbor, off the island where he worked and trained American soldiers. However, the chronicle of Italian immigrant women as the

"Mamooch" of the community caring for the Italian Naval officers far away from home persisted. The women of Portland’s Little Italy took the young soldiers into their homes, fed them, and brokered marriages between their daughters to the young men, just as they had done in

Italy.

Post World War II – Progress in America

When the "boys" arrived home to Munjoy Hill, the celebration went on for days along with the mourning of those who were lost. Francesca DiBiase remembers the celebrations in the streets. She was a little girl when the “boys” came home from war and it was a “great time”.

People in the enclave took to the streets for days. They set off fireworks in celebration. But,

Francesca’s aunt lost her only child in the war. “I was there when she received the telegram.

She ripped it in two and pounded her chest. It was just awful. She never recovered from that.

Nunzio was killed on a ship in the Mediterranean. They bombed the ship and everyone on it died” Francesca DiBiase claims (personal communication with author, December 3, 2016). The younger, first-generation Italian American males observed the change in perception of Italians once the soldiers came home. Rudy DiPietro remembers when the young men from the neighborhood returned and the feeling in the community. The “boys” were heroes to the

community. “We were nothin' back then, ya know, the Italians, but those boys made us somethin’" Rudy DiPietro claims (personal communication with author, April 21, 2016).

Once the "boys" were home from the war and the celebrations were over, life went back to a somewhat normal assemblage, only now, these brave young soldiers had moved from immigrant status to full American. Nick DiBiase recalls that the soldiers wore their uniforms everywhere. “When we went dancing, the soldiers were royalty, and the ladies loved it. We weren't ‘Dago’ anymore" Nick DiBiase claims (personal communication with author June 10,

2016). These newly minted "Americans" were poised to enter the American "mainstream" and participate in the socially created concept of the Post-World War II "American Dream."

Soldiers came home to their wives, girlfriends, and the neighborhood girls that they would eventually marry. Marriages in the United States hit an all-time low of 7.9 percent in the

Depression Era of 1932, only to rise to an all-time high of 16.4 percent in 1946 (U.S. DHEW

Study 1973:7). The pressure of war and the hard look at one's mortality gave way to a society yearning for peace, happiness and family life. Additionally, the G.I. Bill offered young soldiers and their families a chance at a new idea, the “American Dream”. "It seemed like everyone was getting married. I feel like I attended a wedding every weekend after the war, including my own" Nick DiBiase claims (personal communication with author, June 10, 2016).

The "American Dream" – Capitalism and Home Ownership

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was signed into law in June of that year.

The Veterans Administration (VA) carried out the law's key provisions of education and training, loan guaranty for homes, farms or businesses, and unemployment pay (VA benefits website

2013). Regardless of previous economic or educational background, veterans were granted the ability to improve their lives. African American veterans, sadly, were left out of the infusion of

financial support. Italian Americans, who were considered questionable under the definition of

"whiteness" were now fully "white" U.S. Americans and received the benefits from the GI Bill which helped to bring their community out of poverty and into the mainstream of U.S. American society.

Before the war, college and homeownership were unreachable dreams for the average

U.S. American. Millions of returning veterans were in need of jobs and time to re-enter U.S.

American society. "In the peak year of 1947, Veterans accounted for 49 percent of college admissions. By the time the original GI Bill ended on July 25, 1956, 7.8 of 16 million World

War II Veterans had participated in an education or training program" (VA benefits website

2013).

Tax dollars were allocated to massive building projects after the war ended. Suburban homes were built to reach demands from recently married veterans. Many of the young newlyweds lived in apartments and rented spaces inside the cities. Urban sprawl occurred outside major cities in the United States and the Interstate Highway project of 1956 joined these areas to support the movement of families to the suburbs. "Millions also took advantage of the

GI Bill's home loan guaranty. From 1944 to 1952, VA backed nearly 2.4 million home loans for

World War II Veterans" (VA benefits website 2013). Additionally, major infrastructure projects and education expansion funding placed inside the highway bill created growth and prosperity for the "Greatest Generation".

Italian families moved outside the city, away from the enclaves their grandparents and parents had created as cultural spaces, protection, and areas of resistance. The younger generation now accepted as "Americans" were set free from the cultural spaces they viewed as stagnant and archaic. In Portland's Little Italy, the areas outside the city were less than a ten-

minute drive to their parents and grandparents for what remained of the cultural resistance,

Catholic Mass and Sunday dinner.

On any given Sunday, Federal Street was buzzing with generations of Italians. The church, St. Peter’s, built as a resistance to ethnic and racial prejudice, encompassed the families of the enclave, and attendance was perceived as mandatory. Sunday Mass became the space to commune after many families had moved from the "Little Italy" section of the East End. What was once the center of Italian culture and daily social interaction, became a place to visit on the weekends. The younger generation failed to stray too far from their families, however. They remained in the area to gather on Sundays for Mass and the coveted "Sunday Dinner”. “On

Sundays, we closed the store from twelve o'clock to three o'clock and had our Sunday Dinner"

James DiBiase claims (personal communication with author December 3, 2016).

Sunday Dinner took place in the oldest family member's home. The family would gather after Mass for Sunday Dinner between noon and six in the evenings for culture and family time.

Every Sunday morning, Ambrose DiBiase’s father, Ambrose Sr., came over to the house with a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast before Mass. The family went to Mass together, and then to his house in Little Italy for the Sunday dinner. “Those were good days,” Ambrose Jr.’s wife,

Cynthia recalls. For years, she remembers, her girls thought Dunkin’ Donuts was “Dunkin-a

Donuts,” as Dadone (grandfather) pronounced it that way with his accent in the Lettomanoppello dialect. “I can’t pass by a Dunkin’ Donuts without thinking about Dadone.” Cynthia DiBiase claims (personal communication with author December 4, 2016).

Even though the younger generation kept this tradition, it slowly faded once the older generation passed on. Clorinda’s grandson voiced his frustration with the disappearance of the traditions, especially “Sunday Dinner”. He remembered complaining about going to his Nana’s

house every Sunday as a child, but now realizes how important it was. His kids missed out on

Sunday Dinner, as his parents moved to Florida. His kids never experienced the "family thing" on Sundays like he had at Nana's.

Story Corp, a non-profit that collects individual stories posted a story called, "Sunday at

Rocco's," told by Rocco's grandson, Nicholas Petron. Nicholas remembered the final Sunday dinner at Rocco's house before his building was condemned and scrapped for "progress."

Originally, the entire family lived in Rocco's building, and they had shared many days together, including the coveted Sunday meal. Rocco encourages the young boys, Nicholas and his brother, Michael, to throw coal through the windows and break them. The boys thought it was fun to break windows with grandpa, but soon realize that Rocco is sad. "At first my reaction was, they took his building away, that’s what I thought it was about, but I realized much later that it was about the destruction of the family, which I think he knew. A month later he had to leave…and never again were we together on a Sunday in that way” (Petron 2009).

Progress is a paradox. The "American Dream”, a concept that sells success, requires one to give up the differing ways that made their communities successful in the first place to blend into the new culture. For Italian Americans, Sunday dinner and the "family" sequestered in one neighborhood was lost. Italians had now become fully American, but at what cost?

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

Community Memory

In this thesis, I have addressed my main question of how woman immigrants from the region Abruzzo in Southern Italy resisted the insertion of capitalism in their rural village for nearly three centuries and subsequently transplanted those values in the U.S. American enclave of Portland, Maine. I juxtaposed the history of and Southern Italy and placed those incompatible social constructions under a Marxist and Marxist Feminist lens. From this view, the community came to life through their resistance and insular values, but the final dimension, the humanity in the question lacked a richness that the history and theory failed to provide.

In the late 1990s, members of the Italian Heritage Center started recording the memories of the immigrants and their children, which continued through approximately 2006. This research engaged with those interviews transcribed them and extracted their stories of the past.

The participants who engaged with this researcher together with the voices from the past, paint a picture of a cohesive community that clung tightly to their Italian roots and continued to revere the woman at the center.

The family is the cornerstone of all Southern Italian life, and the mother is the center pillar. Supported by previous scholarship, the matrilineal organization within agrarian subsistence farming communities led to a more egalitarian social organization within the community. Men and women in these social groups enjoyed an equal cohesive community, and family was the only way these peasants knew to survive. In the old country, they farmed together and shared the fruits of that labor, they raised children together and trusted in that offspring the duplication of future generations, and above all, they cared for one another in 87

illness, old-age, and loss. Their very survival depended upon this unit and leaving their family and paesani behind in the village shattered the familial structure that the women would painstakingly recreate from the ground up.

In the new country of L’America, together with fellow villagers, they planted subsistence gardens, raised cows, pigs and chickens, and reinvigorated their communal structure. They shared food, shelter, and knowledge together and worked through some of the new community’s darkest moments. Communal sociability was an integral part of Southern Italian interactions, and this resistance mechanism persisted on the other side. What they needed was “time” and

L’America scarcely offered them much.

Time was needed to exercise their social interactions at the end of a long, hard day’s work. Time to reconnect, time to eat and time for friends and family, it was a precious commodity to the immigrants, and they would fight vigorously to retain it. For time was all they had in the world that mattered. It was the commodity they worked all day to achieve and was necessary to pass wisdom and recreate culture.

Italians believed that simply breathing the air in U.S. America weakened the family. U.S.

Americans failed to live “family life” in the way Italians perceived its importance. The women of the community heard the rumors of L’America and her seductive ways. The taunted that

“Lady Liberty lifted her skirt” to the young men of their villages, and those men came home seduced with her extravagant lifestyle. She was the protector of these young men against the seduction, but she would eventually lose this battle with her children and grandchildren.

Consumption is alluring, and fineries are seductive. Capital continued to attack her control in all aspects of life.

Italian women exercised her place as the marriage broker once she arrived in L’America.

She insisted that her sons marry Italian girls from the enclave for one reason, to keep the culture alive. She knew, intrinsically, that when her son married "out" that the Italian culture and the matrilineal center of the family would collapse. The Italian language would gradually fall from her ancestor's tongues, and with language extinction, culture follows close behind. Italian women, at the center of the family, struggled to maintain their power and exercise that power within her community.

Eventually, however, her children and grandchildren married out of the village and into the U.S. American mainstream society. They bought houses and cars, televisions and college degrees and from popular sentiment, those were all the things immigrants dreamed of for their progeny, but in this instance they would be mistaken. Italian peasants removed to U.S. America to maintain their ability to subsist and survive. They suffered the separation from family and friends back home to replicate village life, and they fought diligently to retain this in the face of the capital machine that they had previously escaped. A resister to the end, the Italian mother fought for the pre-capital life that had kept her family close, cohesive and in control of their livelihood.

Additional Research

Today, the children of these villagers, as they age, become more adamant about recalling and replicating village culture. They worry that the next generation will fail to see the importance of their ancestor’s resistance to outside forces that threatened their way of life. If history repeats itself, we can hope that the younger generation will fight to retain these traditions.

The loss of time from capitalism’s insatiable appetite for more continues to challenge the Italian

American community that tries to retain their communal culture. The question of time and what 89

it means to differing cultures is a space that needs further research.

Additionally, the immigrants, who risked hundreds, even thousands of years of history in one space to traverse the Atlantic and transplant their culture on new land emerged as resisters for a pre-capital, subsistence, communal, woman-centered existence. They thwarted the installation of capitalism for nearly three centuries in their isolated enclave in the Majella

Mountains in the Apennines of Southern Italy. The immigrants from “the land that time has forgotten” focused inward on “family” in their village and the communal, cooperative farming and wage earning. Similar to clan or tribal organizations in the history of humanity, and the far northern reaches of Scotland, Southern Italy survived the industrialization of their existence.

Further research is needed into the “lands that time has forgotten” as resisters to capitalism from the far north of Scotland to the far south of the Mezzogiorno region of Italy.

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Sundays at Rocco’s 2009 Nicholas Petron. 3:17 min. StoryCorp https://storycorps.org/listen/nicholas- petron/Originally aired December 18, 2009, on NPR’s Morning Edition