The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City
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The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City
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Overview
Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252095016 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 537,517 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Italian American Table
Food, Family, and Community in New York City
By SIMONE CINOTTO
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09501-6
CHAPTER 1
The Contested Table
Food, Gender, and Generations in Italian Harlem, 1920–1930
Food, Domesticity, and Italian American Familism
The proposition that family has been socially and psychologically central to the Italian American experience has become an axiom, as three generations of immigration historians have demonstrated: the realms of domesticity and family intimacy have been the most significant venues in which an Italian American identity has developed.
In her early classic study of the Italians of Buffalo in the peak years of immigration between 1890 and 1930, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin set the tone for discussion to follow: "All provide evidence for the cohesion of both nuclear and extended [Italian immigrant] families.... On the whole, they maintained strict sex role definitions and an adult-centered family structure. Most of these families also resisted outside pressures toward independence and individualization of their members." Forty years later, most scholars still insist on the domestic core of Italian American identity and identify in family life, rather than work or politics, the main source of migrants' feeling of belonging to a diasporic nation of Italians. "Among the descendents of Italians living abroad," conclude Loretta Baldassar and Donna Gabaccia in a recent anthology, "a connection to Italy is often expressed through identification with particular friends and family and particular local home places and deeply felt obligations to stay connected with them, as well as with the pleasures of kinship, domestic life, and cuisine, while the nation and the nation-state remain objects of suspicion when not of outright scorn and contempt." The power of family ideology to define Italian American identity persists. Italian Americans have often interpreted social reality, presented themselves in the public sphere, and claimed their place in U.S. society almost more than anything else as a family-oriented people.
This strong family ethos is deeply connected to and often used to explain the importance of foodways and the rituals of eating and the table in Italian American culture. The private ideal of a rich family life, represented by the consumption of food, has been located at the core of Italian American ethnicity in works of scholarship, public and personal memory, imaginative literature, and popular culture. In Richard Gambino's Blood of My Blood, a widely quoted defense of Italian American culture published in the midst of the white ethnic revival of the 1970s, the pivotal relationship between family life and traditional food is stressed at length. Recollecting his growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, Gambino notes:
In the tradition, each meal is significant. The noontime meal, colazione, was taken whenever possible by the entire family.... Pranzo, dinner, was a gathering of the entire family.... To all Mediterranean people, food is the symbol of life, of all that is good and nourishing. Thus, these people find the attitude of some Americans toward food worse than barbarous. This attitude, characterized in the extreme by the American food stand where one eats bland mass-prepared food on the run, is seen as sacrilegious. To the Italian-American, food is symbolic both of life and of life's chief medium for human beings, the family. I remember the attitude conveyed to me as a child by the adults in my family, immigrants and second generation, that the waste or abuse of food was a sin. I was made to feel that food was the host of life, and not in any remote or abstract sense. It was the product of my father's (or grandfather's, or uncle's, etc.) labor, prepared for us with care by my mother (or grandmother, or aunt, etc.). It was in a very emotional sense a connection with my father and my mother, an outreach by them toward me. In a very poignant way, meals were a "communion" of the family, and food was "sacred" because it was the tangible medium of that communion.
Gambino's revivalist celebration of food and family life has been taken up by more recent scholars, including those in queer and feminist studies. Gay and lesbian Italian Americans have confronted their exclusion from that same family table, while women writers have shed light on the misogyny and unequal relations of power involved in the ethnic family dinner. Yet critical studies do not deny the magic of the family table as the site where expressions of solidarity, bonds of affection, storytelling, humor, material culture, and taste have produced an original Italian American identity.
The bond between food and family in Italian American life appears to be especially strong because it is presented as a cultural trait rooted in an immemorial past and transplanted untouched by immigrants in their new homeland. Scholars (again, across the political and analytical spectrum) have regularly interpreted the intimate connection between food and family culture, and the persistence of distinctive food habits among Italian Americans, as a legacy of the traditional southern Italian peasant culture that has endured in America because it was passed successfully to younger generations. In his classic study of an Italian American working-class community in Boston in the late 1950s, Herbert Gans observes that "generally speaking, the Italian and Sicilian cultures that the immigrants brought with them to America have not been maintained by the second generation. A number of Italian patterns, however, have survived, the most visible ones being food habits. The durability of the ethnic tradition with respect to food is probably due to the close connection of food with family and group life."
The first three chapters of this book offer another perspective. For different generations of Italian Americans, the important role of food in family life and ethnic identity was less the result of cultural entropy than it was a dynamic process that took place in modern America and one that needs to be historicized as a significant dimension of the Italian experience in the United States. The history of the Italian American community of East Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s and 1930s shows that the role of food habits in Italian American culture was strongly influenced by the different ways that immigrant and American-born generations constructed their sense of self in an interaction between the family in both generations and a rapidly changing social and economic world. The Italian American family of the interwar years was not a place where minority ethnic traditions could be easily preserved and protected against the influence of social workers, nutrition experts, and the lures of mass consumption. It was, rather, a place where ethnic traditions were created by family members drawing selectively on and recasting old values and cultural features as a result of new economic and social realities, including relations with neighboring ethnic groups and emerging ideas about race and morality.
The meaning of food culture in the Italian American family cannot be separated from the Americanization of immigrants and their children and their political, social, and cultural integration into the host society. An important factor in this process was the fascination of younger Italian Americans with a popular culture that they viewed as a pathway to autonomization and integration at the same time that this exciting urban culture scorned the un-American customs of unrefined immigrants struggling with English and performing unskilled labor with no hope of social advance. The "Italian" food many immigrant children refused to eat embodied all these negative social implications, laying the origins of a "contested table" in the immigrant family. Eventually, in the midst of two generations' conflicting views about American life and its rewards, food and food rituals acquired a leading role in constructing an ideology of the ethnic private sphere that emphasized devotion, solidarity, responsibility, the work ethic, and the suspicion of the outside world. This food-based ideology became the moral foundation on which many Italian Americans structured a large part of their ethnic experience and identity.
The food culture that shaped the rituals of family gatherings of working-class Italian immigrants in Harlem was at base an investment in family and community ties, aimed as it was at maintaining group solidarity against the appeals of middle-class values and behaviors, even as family members began to earn more at better jobs. In order to do that, paradoxically, Italian immigrants made use of and ultimately internalized a distinct version of such middle-class "American" notions as home, domesticity, respectability, privacy, and secrecy. Italian Americans in East Harlem redefined the boundaries between the public and the private in their lives, concepts and values that often held little meaning in the rural societies from which most immigrants came. In building a family ideology—which in turn created an Italian American ethnicity—they abandoned the solidarity of the paese, which often collapsed individual and family into the community. In its place, they began to embrace the contemporary middle-class ideal of the family as a distinct cell of social life. The Italian American domesticity that many contemporary observers defined as traditional was itself largely an American invention and an important step toward the acquisition of American cultural citizenship.
How did food become a symbol of both domesticity and ethnicity for Italian Americans in East Harlem?
Domestic Conflicts in Italian Harlem
Located in the northeastern section of Manhattan, East Harlem is a rough triangle bound by the Harlem and the East Rivers to the north and east, the neighborhood of Yorkville to the south at East Ninety-Sixth Street, and Fifth Avenue and Central Park to the west. Since the 1960s, the entire area has been known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio because of its predominantly Puerto Rican and Latino population. But throughout the twentieth century, the neighborhood experienced an impressive succession of ethnic groups moving into and out of its boundaries. Unlike Central Harlem, which had originally been an upper middle-class community, East Harlem had always been a working-class neighborhood home to transient immigrants attracted by its low-rent housing stock. Poorer immigrant newcomers typically replaced earlier residents who, having attained some economic mobility, left for more desirable areas. Ethnic hostility dominated East Harlem history, illustrating how in twentieth-century New York racial interactions and conflicts always reproduced class and power relations. Understanding the development of eating patterns and the meanings they held in the Italian American family demands a sense of time and space within the Italian settlement—and its changing social, political, and economic status, and its relation to the many other groups living in the neighborhood.
The first Italian immigrants to East Harlem were workers hired as strikebreakers by J. D. Crimmins, an Irish American contractor laying the tracks of the First Avenue Trolley in the 1870s. They settled in a shantytown along the East River around 106th Street. East Harlem became urban only after the elevated rails of the New York Central Railroad along Second and Third Avenues were completed in 1879 and 1880. The laborers who laid those tracks created the first nucleus of Little Italy around East 113th Street and First Avenue, where the first Italian food shops appeared. In the 1880s, churches, schools, police stations, and firehouses were built to serve an overwhelmingly German and Irish American population of some two hundred thousand. By the end of the century, cheap rents and easy transportation to the garment industry downtown attracted sizable contingents of Jewish and Italian immigrants, some of whom were leaving overcrowded enclaves on the Lower East Side (the Mulberry Bend slum was cleared in 1895). Heavy chain migrations from Europe would follow. In 1917, East Harlem was home to a Jewish population of ninety thousand. Along with eighty thousand Jews living farther west in Central Harlem, Harlem as a whole was the second largest Jewish community in the country after the Lower East Side. In the meantime, as construction of the Lexington Avenue subway line (completed in 1919) provided Italian immigrants with more job opportunities, entire families and villages from Italy's Mezzogiorno landed in East Harlem. By 1910, the area delimited by the East River, Third Avenue, East 116th Street, and East 100th Street had become Italian Harlem.
Two-thirds of the Italian immigrants to East Harlem were unskilled laborers from southern Italy and Sicily. Half of the men and more of the women were illiterate. They occupied the least desirable housing on the eastern fringe of the neighborhood and the most exhausting and poorly paid jobs in construction and in the clothing, candy, and artificial flower industries; peddling fruit, vegetables, fish, ice, and coal; and picking rags. Most girls worked in the garment industry, either in the shops or at home "finishing" pieces: many of the workers who died in the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911, came from Italian Harlem. The arrival of southern Italians and eastern European Jews in the neighborhood at the start of the century spurred the exodus of the Germans and the Irish. Less than half of the sixty thousand Irish and German Americans who had called East Harlem home in 1910 were there in 1920. Despite the mass influx of Jews and Italians, between 1910 and 1920 the neighborhood experienced a net loss of 7,224 residents as the city grew outward.
Until the mid-1920s, Italians were East Harlem's poorest and most disparaged ethnic group. The Irish in particular harbored deep prejudices against Italians, variously deeming them ignorant, superstitious, dirty, and lazy. The local Tammany Hall political clubs, as well the many Irish police officers and teachers, discriminated against the southern European newcomers. In the early years of the Italian community, the Irish clergy condemned immigrants' popular Catholicism as a form of residual paganism, sometimes refused to offer them pastoral care, and forced them to celebrate mass in the basement of churches. Many reasons for conflict arose in the labor market. The Irish, who had just won a fragile socioeconomic security, feared the newcomers as a threatening supply of cheap labor. Blacks resented the fact that Italians had stolen jobs that they had previously monopolized, such as barber, porter, waiter, and shoe shiner. That Italian immigrant sometimes served as strikebreakers earned them the hostility of the more unionized Jewish immigrants.
Between 1920 and 1930, the ethnic composition of the neighborhood shifted again. Italian Americans became East Harlem's predominant group just as its Jewish community almost completely vanished, from 128,000 in 1919, to 28,000 in 1930, and to 4,000 in 1937. Jews moved out in search of better housing, schools, and streets, but their flight was also accelerated by a significant influx of Puerto Ricans who began to occupy the once heavily Jewish sections between Third and Fifth Avenues and around East 104th Street at the borders of Italian Harlem. East Harlem began to change its skin color in this decade, as African American and new West Indian immigrants also settled in the northwestern part of the neighborhood on the edge of Central Harlem.
The 1930 U.S. Census marked the era's greatest expansion of the Italian community. In 1930, some 80,000 first- and second-generation Italian Americans lived in East Harlem, out of a total population of 233,400, of which 69,519 were of foreign stock. The other largest groups included African Americans (29,000), Jews (28,000), Irish (19,000), Puerto Ricans (14,000), and Germans (11,000). In Health Areas 21, 22, and 26—delimited by Third Avenue, the East River, East 119th Street, and East 104th Street—Italian Americans represented respectively 79.6 percent, 78.6 percent, and 84.3 percent of the population. Ironically, though, East Harlem became the largest Italian enclave in the United States and in the Western Hemisphere just as the neighborhood lost population and the passage of a racist immigration law (the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924) blocked new arrivals from Italy. Racial tensions, a decaying housing stock, and burgeoning rates of crime and disease pushed not only most Jewish, Irish, and German Americans, but also many Italian American skilled workers and second-generation families out of the neighborhood and into newly developed areas in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. By the end of the 1920s, a researcher investigating the high rates of juvenile crime in the neighborhood drew a dismally graphic picture of Italian Harlem:
Old brick buildings, row on row, dingy, dreary, drab; wash flying like stings of pennants from the fire-escapes, garments of none-too-selective choice; streets littered with rubbish from pushcarts, busy curb markets of the district; "mash" in dark heaps in the gutter, silent evidence of a flourishing illegal industry [winemaking]; garbage in piles, thrown from kitchens where heavy, oily fare is prepared for gluttonous gourmands; penciled or chalk lines on walls and sidewalks, indecent expressions of lewd minds; ground-floor shops, unattractive warehouses of dusty stocks, cellar pool rooms, "drink parlors," many curtained or shuttered, suggestive of their real business; human traffic busy about nothing in this squalid congestion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Italian American Table by SIMONE CINOTTO. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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