Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914

By Samuel L. Baily

Most studies of immigration to the New World have focused on the United States. Samuel L. Baily's eagerly awaited book broadens that perspective through a comparative analysis of Italian immigrants to Buenos Aires and New York City before World War I. It is one of the few works to trace Italians from their villages of origin to different destinations abroad.

Baily examines the adjustment of Italians in the two cities, comparing such factors as employment opportunities, skill levels, pace of migration, degree of prejudice, and development of the Italian community. Of the two destinations, Buenos Aires offered Italians more extensive opportunities, and those who elected to move there tended to have the appropriate education or training to succeed. These immigrants, who adjusted more rapidly than their North American counterparts, adopted a long-term strategy of investing savings in their New World home. In New York, in contrast, the immigrants found fewer skilled and white-collar jobs, more competition from previous immigrant groups, greater discrimination, and a less supportive Italian enclave. As a result, rather than put down roots, many sought to earn money as rapidly as possible and send their earnings back to family in Italy.

Baily views the migration process as a global phenomenon. Building on his richly documented case studies, the author briefly examines Italian communities in San Francisco, Toronto, and Sao Paulo. He establishes a continuum of immigrant adjustment in urban settings, creating a landmark study in both immigration and comparative history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501705014

Book preview

Immigrants in the

Lands of Promise

Italians in Buenos Aires and

New York City, 1870–1914

Samuel L. Baily

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON

To Jennifer, Sarah, and Benjamin

who have so greatly enriched my life

Contents

Illustrations

Tables

Preface

Prologue: Migration from a Participant Family’s Perspective

Introduction: The Comparative Study of Transnational Italian Migration

PART I: THE ITALIAN DIASPORA AND THE OLD AND NEW WORLD CONTEXTS OF MIGRATION

1. Italy and the Causes of Emigration

2. The Italian Migrations to Buenos Aires and New York City

3. What the Immigrants Found

PART II: THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE ITALIANS IN BUENOS AIRES AND NEW YORK CITY

4. Fare l’America

5. Residence Patterns and Residential Mobility

6. Family, Household, and Neighborhood

7. Formal Institutions before the Mass Migration Era

8. Formal Institutions during the Mass Migration Era

9. Constructing a Continuum

Appendix: Sources and Samples

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Plates

Wedding photograph of Ida Sola and Eugenio Cerruti, 1905

Formal, professionally taken photograph of Oreste Sola and his wife, Corinna, 1910

Maps

1Regions and areas of heaviest emigration, 1876–1915

2Buenos Aires census districts and areas

3Manhattan wards

4Italian clusters in the Boca

5Italian clusters in San Nicolas

6Village clusters in the Mulberry District

7Italian clusters in East Harlem

8Mulberry District neighborhood in New York City

9Italian East Harlem neighborhood in New York City

10 Barrio del Carmen in Buenos Aires

11 The Boca neighborhood in Buenos Aires

12 A city block in the Boca, Buenos Aires

Figures

1The Sola family tree—with travel destinations

2Passports issued by Commune of Agnone, 1885—1914 (total)

3Passports issued by Commune of Agnone, 1885–1914 (by destination)

4Italian immigration to Argentina and the United States, 1861–1920

Tables

1Examples of variables used to evaluate and explain patterns of immigrant adjustment in Buenos Aires and New York City

2The general contours of the Italian diaspora, 1876–1976

3Italian emigration, 1876–1915 (annual averages)

4Italian emigration, 1876–1915 (age and sex)

5Italian emigration, 1880–1914 (occupations by sex)

6Agnone population data

7Italian immigration to Argentina and the United States, 1861–1920 (by decade)

8Italians as part of New York City population, 1860–1920

9Italians as part of Buenos Aires population, 1855–1936

10 Italian return migration from Argentina and the United States, 1861–1910

11 Italian emigration to Argentina and the United States, 1876–1915: Leading regions of origin by decade (regions with 5 percent or more of total emigration)

12 Age of Italian-born residents of Buenos Aires, the United States, and New York City

13 Sex ratio of Italian-born residents of Buenos Aires, New York City, Argentina, and the United States (number of males/100 females)

14 Occupations of Italian emigrants to the United States and Argentina (active population)

15 Indicators of Argentine and U.S. economic growth, 1870–1910

16 Occupational structure of Buenos Aires and New York City

17 Occupational distribution of Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City

18 Real wages in Buenos Aires and the United States, 1882–1914

19 Unemployment in New York City and Buenos Aires

20 Italian family income-expense data, New York City, 1908 (57 Italian families earning $600–$1,100/year)

21 Family income-expense data, Buenos Aires, 1897–1925

22 Italian home owners in Buenos Aires and New York City

23 Remittances sent from Argentina and the United States to Italy, 1884–1914

24 Relative location of total population and Italian population in Buenos Aires

25 Relative location of total population and Italian population of New York City

26 Concentration of Italians in Manhattan (first and second generations)

27 Distribution of Italian mutual aid society members in eight Buenos Aires districts, by region and province, 1904

28 Distribution of naturalized Italians in Manhattan, by selected regions and provinces, 1906–1921

29 Mobility of naturalized Italians in Manhattan, 1915–1916 to 1921

30 Mobility of Unione e Benevolenza members in Buenos Aires, 1895–1901

31 Distribution of Italians by occupation

32 Marital status of adult Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City

33 Indicators of marriage patterns of Italians in Buenos Aires

34 Births to Italian women in Buenos Aires and New York City (percentage of all births)

35 Composition of Italian-headed households, New York City, 1900–1915

36 New York City Italian households with boarders as percentage of all Italian households according to length of residence of heads in the United States

37 Composition of Italian-headed households and families, Buenos Aires, 1895

38 Italian women working in Buenos Aires and New York City according to marital status (age 16 or older)

39 Place of birth and occupations of new members of the Unione e Benevolenza, 1858–1862 and 1888

40 New York City–area Italian mutual aid societies, 1858–1886

41 Italian mutual aid societies in Buenos Aires, 1908 (14 largest societies)

42 Italian population of San Francisco, São Paulo, and Toronto, 1850–1920

43 Italian societies in San Francisco and São Paulo, 1898 and 1908

44 Key variables associated with respective patterns of adjustment

45 Occupation and age of Italian household members: District 15 compared with other districts (Italians aged 16 and older)

Preface

The inherent humanity and comparative nature of the migration process have compelled me to write this book. Quite by accident I stumbled onto the topic when asked to present a paper on it for an American Historical Association meeting in New York some time ago. Although I come from English ancestry, I soon became totally absorbed in the experience of Italian immigrants. Several things have influenced the way I have approached my subject. Living for two years in a small Mexican village many years ago first made me aware of a village-outward perspective on what happens in this world. Participating in the publication of the Sola family letters (Baily and Ramella, One Family, Two Worlds) reinforced my long-standing commitment to incorporating something of the perspective of the participants in my work.

Comparative history is not easy to do. For me it involved learning a new language, developing my computer skills, working in archives in five countries, and reading extensively in several distinct bodies of scholarly literature. The effort, however, has been worth it. My belief in the importance of comparative history has grown over the years. It is my hope that this book will encourage and help others to undertake such projects on their own.

Over the years of researching and writing, I have become indebted to many individuals and institutions. I found scholars, librarians, archivists, and Italian immigrants and their descendants in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy interested in what I was doing and anxious to help me do it. There are too many to acknowledge individually, but I want them all to know that I am grateful and recognize that I would not have been able to complete this project without the selfless giving of time and information by so many.

I want to note especially the help of Michael Adas, Donna Gabaccia, Mark Wasserman, and Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, who read the entire manuscript and gave me the benefit of their insightful comments. Others who have read parts of the manuscript, discussed their ideas on immigration with me, or assisted me in some other way include Rudolph Bell, Frank Dauster, William Douglass, Glen Kuecker, John Lenaghan, José Moya, Jane Orttung, Ingrid Scobie, Franc Sturino, Camilla Townsend, and Rudolph Vecoli. Sarah Buck did an exceptional job of assisting me long distance when I was in Italy and Spain in 1996 and 1997. The former and current directors of the Center for Migration Studies on Staten Island, Sylvano and Lydio Tomasi, have always encouraged and supported my research. The Cerruti family, the children and grandchildren of Ida Sola Cerruti, have been indispensable to me. I wish to thank them all, and especially Pat Sisti and Alice Petkus Mason for their help setting up interviews with Ida’s children and arranging access to the various materials in the Cerruti archives. In addition, I wish to acknowledge the important contributions to my work of four very special people who are now deceased—Robert Harney, George Pozzetta, James Scobie, and Carl Solberg. Peter Agree, my editor at Cornell University Press, has been enthusiastic and encouraging in seeing this manuscript through to publication.

My Argentine colleague Fernando Devoto and I have, since 1985, debated the fine points of Italian migration in our homes and at various meetings in Argentina, Italy, the United States, and Spain. He kindly read the entire manuscript and gave me the benefit of his extensive knowledge read the of the subject. He, Luigi Favero, Alicia Bernasconi, Carina Silberstein, and the whole group associated with the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos in Buenos Aires have continually been most gracious and helpful to me. I also wish to thank Alberto Agnelli, Antonio Busich, Lorenzo Ferro, Ruben Granara, Eduardo Miguez, Mario Nascimbene, Patricio Randle, and Hilda Sabato for their assistance in Argentina. My thanks also to the staffs of the Unione e Benevolenza, the Archivo General de la Nación, and the Biblioteca Nacional for their patience and willingness to help me use their collections. I want to acknowledge a special intellectual debt to the distinguished scholars Gino Germani and José Luis Romero, who early on taught me so much about Argentine history and immigration.

In Italy and several other European countries as well, many individuals aided my work. Gianfausto Rosoli of the Centro Studi Emigrazione in Rome greatly facilitated my research trips to Italy, generously opened the resources of the Centro to me, and was always willing to share his vast knowledge of migration. Franco and Luciana Ramella, coeditors with me of the Sola family letters, shared their extraordinary understanding of all things related to Italian migration and especially their intense interest in real people in local settings. Aldo Sola, the custodian of the Sola family letters, generously gave the Ramellas and me access to these letters and to many other things in his library and archive. Antonio Arduino, director of the Biblioteca Comunale of Agnone, extended himself every time I visited Agnone and provided me with many essential documents. My thanks also to the employees of the town archives of Agnone, Piedimonte d’ Alife, Sirolo-Numana, and Valdengo, whose diligence and cooperation helped me uncover some difficult-to-locate source material. And finally, I wish to thank Maria Baganha, Romolo Gandolfo, Dirk Hoerder, John MacDonald, and Nuria Tabanera, European colleagues who invariably stimulated my thinking and clarified some of my ideas on immigration.

I wish to acknowledge the generous financial support of the American Philosophical Society, the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Rutgers University Research Council, which made possible a number of research trips to Argentina and Italy and the writing of the manuscript. York University permitted me to spend a semester in Toronto working on the manuscript by making me the Mariano C. Elia Research Chair in Italian Studies for the spring of 1992.

I am also grateful to the following for permission to make use of materials and information in this book: the editors of Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos for use of the material in my article Patrones de residencia de los italianos en Buenos Aires y Nueva York: 1880–1914, Rutgers University Press for the picture of Oreste and Corinna Sola, Stephanie Bowers for her District 15 data, Timothy Delpapa for his interviews and letters, and the Cerruti family for their interviews and letters and the picture of Ida Sola and her husband.

My friends Michael and Jane Adas, Frank and Helen Dauster, Stuart and Rita Faden, Lloyd and Nancy Gardner, Richard and Terry Hixson, John and Lydia Lenaghan, Ruth Ross, and Mark and Marlie Wasserman provided support and encouragement as well as intellectual stimulation and insight that was essential to completing the project.

It is hard to acknowledge adequately the many contributions of my wife, Joan, and to thank her properly for all she has done. She has willingly read and reread drafts of this manuscript, discussed and debated the contents with me, and consistently given me helpful insight into the problems at hand. Her patience, love, and continued support have made the completion of this work possible. I want to thank her as best I can for being the person she is.

Finally, I want to thank my three children—Jennifer, Sarah, and Benjamin—to whom I am dedicating this book, and Jennifer’s husband, Mike Zona, and their wonderful children, Josie and Luke, for their love and encouragement.

Piscataway, N.J. SAMUEL L. BAILY

Wedding photograph of Ida Sola and Eugenio Cerruti, 1905

Formal, professionally taken photograph of Oreste Sola and his wife, Corinna, 1910

Prologue

MIGRATION FROM A PARTICIPANT FAMILY'S PERSPECTIVE

At the turn of the nineteenth century, two cousins, Oreste and Ida Sola, left the small north Italian hill town of Valdengo, he for Buenos Aires and she for New York.¹ These two would live the rest of their lives many thousands of miles apart from each other and from their homes in Valdengo. Both Oreste and Ida had other relatives who migrated to Buenos Aires or New York. Some of the Solas moved permanently; others returned to Valdengo after stays of various lengths. But wherever the members of the family were, they remained in contact with one another through letters, visits, and the exchanges of information carried back and forth by friends and paesani².

Valdengo had a long tradition of migration. It was one of nearly eighty small towns in the densely populated district of Biella located in the foothills of the Alps. Most residents were peasant farmers who cultivated grain, grapes, and other crops on rented land to supplement what they could produce on their own small farmsteads. Some, such as Ida’s father, Giacomo, were artisans; he was a shoemaker in addition to being a part-time farmer. Young women like Ida often became servants in the households of the wealthy. Others, both men and women, worked in the textile mills of Biella.

Biella was an area of both emigration and immigration at the turn of the century. The rapidly growing textile mills increasingly attracted internal migrants. At the same time, many people participated in a seasonal migration to other places in Italy, to Switzerland, and to southern France. With the improvement in overseas transportation in the 1870S, a few began to travel to Argentina and shortly thereafter to the United States. Emigration from Valdengo was most frequently seen as a way to augment family income and, if possible, to purchase a little more land.

Like many other families in the area, the Solas had a long tradition of migration. Oreste and Ida’s great-uncle Andrea had traveled to France and to various countries in Latin America and Africa during the three decades after 1850, spending six of these years in Buenos Aires (Figure 1). Luigi, Oreste’s father, had wanted to join his uncle Andrea abroad, but when Andrea discouraged him from doing so, he decided to remain at home. Ida’s father lived at various times in Europe, Africa, and the United States as well as in Valdengo. Other cousins spent time in France and Cuba.

Oreste’s father, Luigi, had inherited a small farmstead, but it was insufficient to support the family. Although Luigi moved to Biella to become a factory worker in the textile mills, he still kept his small property in Valdengo. Many years later, he retired there. Through involvement in local labor organizations, Luigi was introduced to radical politics and became increasingly active in the Socialist Party. Oreste’s mother, Margherita, also worked in the textile mills of Biella and there met her husband. The couple had three children—Oreste, a younger daughter, named Narcisa, and a younger son, Abele.

Luigi and Margherita wanted their two sons to have a better life than theirs, and they mobilized the resources of the entire family to achieve this end. Margherita, unlike most married women of her age, continued to work in the factory so her sons could pursue their education beyond grammar school. Narcisa left school at an early age to work in the textile factory for the same reason.

Oreste decided to migrate to Buenos Aires at age seventeen, shortly after he graduated from the Biella technical/professional school. His choice of destination was most likely determined by the fact that his godfather worked there as a contractor and at the time the city was known as a place of considerable opportunity in the construction business. Oreste departed from Genoa with several friends and arrived in Buenos Aires on August 5, 1901. As he explained in the first letter he wrote to his parents from Argentina, he went immediately to his godfather’s house at Calle Rivadavia 1892: I have been here since the 5th of this month; I am in the best of health as are my two companions. As soon as we got here, we went to the address of Godfather Zocco, who then introduced us to several people from Valdengo who have been in America for some years and all are doing well more or less.³

Ida’s reasons for migrating were different from her cousin’s. She apparently wanted to escape a difficult family situation and was not primarily motivated by aspirations to economic and social achievement. Ida’s father, Giacomo, was a peasant farmer and a shoemaker who traveled abroad extensively during his lifetime. Giacomo and his first wife had three children: Ida and then two sons, Abele and Andrea. Ida’s mother died shortly after having the children. Her father remarried, but Ida did not get along well with her stepmother. Ida worked as a servant for several years and by the age of twenty-one had saved enough money to buy her own ticket to New York. She left Cherbourg on the Germanie in the company of two cousins, Isolina and Rinaldo Bonardi, and three other individuals from a nearby town. She arrived in New York on May 31, 1904, with thirteen dollars in her pocket.

Figure 1. The Sola family tree—with travel destinations

Ida chose New York rather than Buenos Aires or some other destination apparently because of her family ties there. Thirty- four-year-old Rinaldo was returning to his wife in New York. Isolina, sixteen and unmarried, went to stay with her uncle, Ferdinando Bonardi, who lived at 161 W. 32nd Street in Manhattan. Ida accompanied her. The three other people traveling with them went directly to the well-known Biellese destination of nearby Paterson, New Jersey.⁴

After arriving in Argentina, Oreste initially considered joining his cousin Edvino in Cuba but decided instead to remain in Argentina. He spent a year and a half exploring opportunities in the Argentine interior and then returned to Buenos Aires. In March 1903 he obtained a job as a draftsman with a firm constructing the new Argentine congressional buildings. Four years later he acquired a second job taking care of the heating and ventilation of these buildings. He explained to his parents in a letter of May 3, 1907:

As you see, after such great and tremendous efforts I have succeeded in becoming an employee of the government, in the service of the National Senate. I hold the position of the technical chief in the Congress. I constantly have to deal with deputies and senators. I am getting indigestion from politics, something that doesn’t agree with me at all. I am, however, still holding the job I had before, so I am two employees, but they aren’t ruining my life. In the government position I have the responsibility of taking care of the heating and ventilation of the Congress, as well as all the other piping installations, like gas, hot water, sewers, and cold water. In the job which I already held I do the computations for the work on the part of the firm which is constructing this very building.⁵

Oreste’s financial success enabled him to start sending money home, to buy a piece of property in Buenos Aires, and to marry Corinna Chiocchetti, a young woman originally from. a village near Valdengo. The newly married couple moved into a house just two blocks away from Oreste’s godfather. In 1910 Oreste was awarded a contract to build a short stretch of railroad in the Argentine interior; he became an independent contractor.

The world Oreste entered in Buenos Aires was a remarkably familiar one that included relatives, friends, and others from the Biella area with whom he would associate. Oreste lived with his godfather for nearly five years until he married, and as he told his parents, The life that he [the godfather] leads is also mine.⁶ His social activities centered around fellow Biellesi, and he met his wife within this community. Cousin Abele, Ida’s brother, arrived with his family in Buenos Aires in 1909 and stayed there for the next twelve years.⁷ When Oreste became an independent contractor, he hired a friend as his chief assistant for the railroad project and employed nine Biellese masons. This world was so familiar that Oreste could walk down a street in the Puente Alsina section of Buenos Aires and be recognized as his father’s son. In this town, Oreste explained, I have met several friends of yours, Dad, who remember you with affection and pleasure. Why, one recognized me right off as your son because I look so much like you. We had never seen each other before, but he stopped to ask me if I was Mr. Sola.⁸

Oreste’s brother, Abele, traveled with friends to Buenos Aires in 1912. Oreste paid for the ticket, took Abele into his home, introduced him to members of the Biellese community, and helped him find a good job as an engineer with a large metallurgic firm. Benefiting from his brother’s connections, Abele achieved rapid financial success and started sending money home within five months of his arrival in Buenos Aires. It had taken Oreste five years to be able to do this.

The two brothers shared the same social world of Biellese friends and relatives. In fact, since Abele was more gregarious than his brother, their community-based social life became more active. The letters home speak frequently of good friends such as the Sassos and the Pellas from Biella, and of the profound sorrow the Sola brothers felt when the Sassos returned home. They also describe numerous visits with cousin Abele (Ida’s brother, who came to Buenos Aires in 1909 at age twenty-four), the arrival of cousin Andrea (Ida’s other brother, who reached Buenos Aires in 1920 at age twenty-nine), and then of the return of cousin Abele and his family to Valdengo in 1921.

Though physically separated, the members of the family remained close and continued to support one another. The parents had mobilized all of the family resources to educate the two boys at the technical/professional school and to continue to facilitate their subsequent careers abroad. During Oreste’s early years in Buenos Aires, Luigi and Margherita sent him clothes, food, cameras, and books. When the daughter Narcisa died of cancer in 1904, all the members of the family shared the grief and consoled one another. Later on, when Oreste needed money to buy equipment for the railroad project, Luigi helped him obtain a loan from a friend in Biella and personally guaranteed the loan with his farmstead. The boys also assumed the responsibility of supporting their parents after their retirement. Oreste (beginning in 1906) and Abele (beginning in 1912) regularly sent enough money home for their parents to live comfortably. They were especially solicitous during Margherita’s long bout with bone cancer and when she died in 1919.

When Ida arrived in New York with her cousins in May 1904, she initially lived with her uncle and worked at a restaurant owned by a woman from the Biella area. She quickly became acquainted with the Biellese network in New York and New Jersey and soon met her future husband, Eugenio Cerruti, at the house of a friend in Hackensack, New Jersey. Eugenio was a weaver from a town near Valdengo who had served in the Italian army in Ethiopia and had worked for a time in France before coming to the United States in 1903. The two were married on April 22, 1905, a little less than a year after Ida’s arrival.

Ida and Eugenio lived the rest of their lives in nearby Paterson, New Jersey, and a neighboring town. Ida had five children between 1906 and 1913 and devoted most of her time to raising them. As the children got older, she took in washing from her neighbors, but she never worked outside her home. Eugenio was employed in the Paterson textile mills until 1913 when, as a result of his participation in the strike of that year, he was dismissed. He then worked at a number of jobs for various periods of time—at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in some capacity, as a field hand on a farm in nearby Clifton, as a manager of a small hotel, and finally he returned to the Paterson mills. He also raised chickens and vegetables, but only for family consumption. However he earned his money, Eugenio was financially successful enough to buy a small house in Paterson in 1912, the lot next door sometime later, and a Model T Ford in 1927. A year later he sold the original house and bought another in nearby Haledon. All the children had some schooling, but worked from an early age to contribute to the support of the family.

Ida’s story shows that in New York and Paterson, the Biellese network operated as it did in Buenos Aires. She migrated with relatives and paesani. She lived with an uncle in New York and worked at a restaurant owned by a Biellese family. She met her husband at the home of Biellese friends. Her father, Giacomo, made several trips to New York, and on one of them brought wooden clogs he had made for Ida’s children. The family frequently visited friends of Eugenio in Hoboken. And in 1928, they moved to Haledon, where many Biellesi lived.

Unlike Oreste, Ida, as a woman, was not expected to support her father, Giacomo, in retirement and did not do so. Nor did her brother Andrea. Andrea was upset when their father left Valdengo for New York in 1913 without saying goodby to his family.⁹ Andrea served in the Italian army during World War I and then in 1920 migrated to Buenos Aires. He never wrote to his father after that. Ida’s other brother, Abele, who lived in Buenos Aires from 1909 to 1921 and then returned to Valdengo, was the one to assist their father when needed, but in fact Giacomo managed for the most part very well on his own.

Ida, nevertheless, served as the principal contact for the family. Everyone wrote to her even when they refused to communicate with one another. Brother Andrea did not write either to his father, Giacomo, or to his brother, Abele. The two brothers broke off relations in 1921 over the disposition of the dairy business Abele had started in Buenos Aires a number of years before. But all three men—Giacomo, Abele, and Andrea—continued to write to Ida and at times asked her to intervene on their behalf with one of the others.

Neither Oreste nor Ida returned to Valdengo except for brief visits and then only after their parents had died. Yet their letters and actions suggested a good deal of ambivalence about their intentions. Oreste indicated much uncertainty on the subject of his return to Valdengo, either to visit or to stay. When he left for Buenos Aires in 1901, he clearly expected to return and wrote home a number of times about the possibility. A half dozen years later, however, when he bought property in Buenos Aires, he talked about building a house on it and settling there. Yet, probably to reassure his parents, he explained that buying property in Buenos Aires was a good investment and therefore not necessarily an indication of his intention to remain permanently abroad. Even after his parents’ deaths, he never sold the family house in Valdengo. And he never became an Argentine citizen.

Luigi and Margherita assumed that Oreste would return and frequently urged him to do so. After Oreste married, his parents urged Oreste to bring his bride home so that they could meet her. They also wrote about how they had fixed up the house in Valdengo and used some of the money the boys had sent home to add to the family farmstead in anticipation of the return. Early in 1919 Margherita got worse from her bone cancer and Luigi desperately pleaded with his sons to come home. The parents had not seen Oreste for eighteen years and Abele for more than six. They had never met Corinna. In a brief letter dated February 23, 1919, Luigi told his sons:

I don’t know if your dear mother will still be alive when you get this letter. For several weeks she has gotten painfully worse. She hasn’t gotten out of bed for the past fifteen days. She suffers terribly; only morphine in large doses relieves the pain a bit. Consider that this doesn’t cure her; it kills her sooner. And yet what’s to be done? Either let her die in despair from the pain or make her die with pain killers. It is tragic.

Luigi closed the letter by imploring his sons to return just to be able to embrace you at least one more time before dying since, if fate takes your dear mother, I won’t be around much longer.¹⁰

Nevertheless, there was always some reason why Oreste could not return. At first he was concerned with his career. Then the war increased his fear of being drafted and made travel impossible. Yet even after the war, when the Italian government declared an amnesty for all young men who had been subject to the draft, Oreste did not return. Perhaps the cost of the trip discouraged him, or possibly his constant concern with work. When Oreste finally did make the trip home, it was after both his parents had died. He subsequently made only one or two brief trips to Italy.

Oreste died in Buenos Aires in 1949. His body was cremated, the ashes carried to Valdengo by a returning immigrant, and he was buried in the family plot alongside his father, mother, and younger sister. Oreste’s brother, Abele, died in 196), and Oreste’s wife a year later. Their ashes were also transferred to the cemetery in Valdengo. There is a bit of irony in the fact that in death the entire family of Oreste Sola was finally reunited.

It is unclear if Ida left Valdengo with the intent of returning. Her husband, Eugenio, did not write to his relatives; he also made it clear to his children that he never wanted to see Italy again. Eugenio became a U.S. citizen on April 20, 1920, and Ida did likewise during the early 1940s, in part because one of her sons was missing in action in World War II. Ida maintained continual contact with her family in Buenos Aires and Valdengo, however, and thought about the possibility of returning after the death of her husband in 1948. Her brother Abele encouraged her to do so. At the end of 1951, Ida’s brother Abele wrote to his sister and explained that their cousin Abele (Oreste’s brother) had been in Valdengo for several months, was about to return to Buenos Aires, and would try to persuade Andrea to visit Italy.¹¹

Ida did return to Valdengo in the summer of 1954 for a reunion with her two brothers. It was her only visit home and it tempted her to stay. As Ida wrote from Haledon a dozen years later, If I had been free I would not have come back here, I was going to settle there for the rest of my life. Now, however, I can’t make the change, I’m tied down here, I must stay here.¹²

When Ida died in 1975 she was buried in the Paterson cemetery next to her husband. Her five children and many grandchildren have lived their lives in the United States. Only one of them has ever visited the ancestral home, and the correspondence across the Atlantic, once so frequent, has diminished to practically nothing.

Introduction

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TRANSNATIONAL ITALIAN MIGRATION

The Sola family history provides a road map to guide my inquiry into the experiences of the Italians who migrated to Buenos Aires and New York City at the turn of the past century. Although this story—or the story of any one family—cannot encompass the entire range of experiences of all migrants, it illustrates many of the most important features of the Italian migration process and it does so from the subjective perspective of those who actually participated in it. Through the personal histories of Oreste, Ida, and the other family members, we see that migrants went to multiple destinations in different countries, and that family and village­based networks were essential to the successful negotiation of each phase of the process. More specifically, the experiences of the Solas help us understand who migrated and why, how they chose their destinations, and with whom they made the trip abroad. In addition, these histories give us some insight into how, once they arrived at their destinations, the family members found jobs and places to live, created a social life, and sought to improve their situations. And finally, the Sola history documents the importance of the continuing, though evolving, ties between family and community members in Italy and abroad.

Oreste and Ida were among millions of Italians who migrated to the United States and Argentina between 1870 and 1914. More than half ultimately settled in destinations abroad. Others returned home. Still others went back and forth a number of times. A few moved from one overseas destination to another. By the beginning of World War I, however, approximately a million Italians resided in Argentina and a million and a half in the United States. In both countries, the Italians concentrated overwhelmingly in the urban areas, and especially in the rapidly growing port cities of Buenos Aires and New York. In 1914, 312,000 Italians lived in Buenos Aires, and 370,000 in New York. These numbers represented one-third of all