From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia. (Reviews).

From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia. By Stefano Luconi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. x plus 264 pp.).

In this ambitious study, Stefano Luconi argues that Italian immigrants' evolving ethnicity was a product of dialectical processes that reflected transnational and local experiences. The author's insight into the connection between international relations, identity, and electoral politics as well as the study's chronological breadth, make this book an important contribution to immigration history. Despite its wide scope, the study's analytical framework is limiting because it relies so heavily on the voices of leaders to explain the transformation of an entire community's ethnic consciousness.

Luconi carefully weaves themes of localism and internationalism to uncover how Italian immigrants in Philadelphia created a single national identity out of multiple regional loyalties and, in turn, how these ties became white racial bonds. Unlike the first generation of Italian immigrants, the fuorusciti, who arrived before the Civil War and who had a strong sense of belonging to the recently formed Italian nation-state, migrants who came after the 1880s identified with regional villages. These subnational affiliations created the social, political, and economic contours, as well as the divides, of the city's Italian population through World War I. Luconi argues that the prominenti, ethnic leaders, of this generation had the greatest impact on forging, what he terms, "Italianness" and, later Italian-American consciousness. During the Progressive era, the prominenti balanced divergent interests and highlighted the common plight of their compatriots in order to gain political power. For example, in 1906, these leaders successfully rallied support for a campaign to stop President Teddy Roosevelt from signing literacy test legislation which would have had a negative impact on future Italian immigration. They also reminded Italians of their common history through organizing celebrations honoring Christopher Columbus and Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Italy's involvement in the Allied cause during World War I gave its emigrants in Philadelphia a new legitimacy in municipal politics. Rejecting the notion that Italians remained apolitical in the 1920s, Luconi demonstrates their sophistication in dealing with both the Republicans and the Democrats. Italians' decision not to align with one particular party reflected savvy power brokering rather than an apolitical outlook. Their partisan equivocation continued throughout the 1930s.

Simultaneously, the rise of Fascism in their homeland caused the population's subnational allegiances to abate and nationalist fervor to grow. Italian identity, therefore, was made locally out of the Depression era crisis and fueled internationally by Benito Mussolini's rise to power. Luconi uses these transnational events, and their meaning to Italians in Philadelphia, to argue against the idea that the period was Americanizing moment in which second and third generation ethnics came together in the New Deal Coalition. Rather, Italians became more aware of themselves as part of a group, distinct from native-born citizens and other immigrants alike.

Underlying this new sense of connectedness, he asserts, was Fascism. While highlighting some ideological rifts in the community, he still concludes: "The great bulk of Philadelphia's Italian Americans revealed a prevailing pro-Fascist bent" (p. 85). He never defines precisely what "great bulk" means, and his evidence suggests a more complicated reality. Regardless, he finds that the increase in nationalism had two implications for the community: Racism and applications for citizenship among Italians were both on the rise. Luconi has interesting interpretations of each. First, applying for citizenship was a result of the encouragement of Mussolini who believed that pro-fascist Italian-Americans could have a positive impact on foreign policy. Second, the author argues, "The racist views of Philadelphia's Italian Americans resulted less from the elaboration of any white identity than from the appeal of Fascism" (p. 74) In other words, Italian immigrant's anti-semitism and anti-black feelings were tied to Italy's 1935-1936 invasion and occupation of Ethiopia and the regime's 1938 antisemitic decrees. There is evidence for these conclusions. Luconi's assertion, however, that anti-Irish feeling was also connected to fealty to il Duce is shaky. Once the United States entered World War II, pro-fascist sentiments became less vocal. Still, Luconi points out that the war did not, as John P. Diggins puts it "fuel ... the melting pot" but rather helped Italians construct a national consciousness.

While U.S. officials might have been concerned with immigrant ties to homeland during the war, afterwards the government used the pro-Italian sentiment to ensure that Christian Democrats won Italy's 1948 parliamentary elections. The Cold War, then, reinforced the community's sense of ancestral identity and ethnicity. It would take another decade for Italians to racialize their whiteness as Americans.

By moving through the period of new immigration and the post World War II era, Luconi's analysis supplements recent historiography on the problem of assimilation and race. Scholars such as Dave Roediger, Jim Barrett, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Linda Gordon, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, posit that Americanization meant racialization. Though not explicitly stated, Luconi suggests two forms of racism--one based in transnational experience and the other on becoming American. Were Italians, as Tom Guglielmo has dubbed it, "WOA" (White on Arrival) or something "inbetween" as Roediger and Barrett claim? From Paesani to White Ethnics certainly does not solve this debate though it does show that, during the 1930s and 1940s, racial prejudice reflected an emerging Italian consciousness (albeit one formed in the U.S.). Only in the 1950s, after Italianness had been well-established, did perceptions change. The precursor to whiteness was a sense of victimization. Luconi again uses electoral politics to trace this change in p erception and the resultant "ethnic defensiveness." This defensiveness was reflected in the 1952 fight against the McCarran-Walter Act which brought Italians into contact with other European American minorities. These groups joined forces on local issues as well. The most defining campaign was the fight to preserve segregated housing and to keep African-Americans from moving into ethnic neighborhoods. By the time this "trans-ethnic" coalition formed the Federation of Community Councils and Neighborhood Associations in 1965, Philadelphia's Italians had become white Americans. This new racial identity was not a product of ethnic revivalism. "Since," Luconi states, "the sense of Italianness among the Philadelphians of Italian extraction did not decline during the Depression decade or in the wake of both World War II and its aftermath, it could hardly resurge in the 1970s" (p.150) The process through which Italians had gone from regional subnational affiliation to Italianness to a white Italian-American identity had taken over 70 years.

Though Luconi provides some perceptive interpretations on ethnicity and race, he is more adept at posing provocative questions than he is at answering them. He make some confusing claims which are compounded by organizational weaknesses. For example, in Chapter 3, which focuses on the Progressive era and the 1920s, the author states that the growing sense of Italianness was a result of other groups' perceptions of them. Jewish members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) were prejudiced against Italians for allegedly undercutting wages. No specific date is given to help periodize this behavior. In the next chapter on the 1930s, Luconi abruptly returns to pre-World War 1 era union building. Highlighting the Italian syndicalist presence in the city, he presents evidence of interethnic organizing among Jews, Germans, and Italians in the garment trades. Clearly, union drives were always complicated and multifaceted. But, in the first instance, the ACWA's behavior suggests that the growing sense o f Italianness among subnationals was a response to anti-Italian prejudice which lumped regional groups together. What did simultaneous interethnic organizing mean for, and about, the community's ethnicity and the role of the working class in molding that identity?

From Paesani to White Ethnics provides a revised framework for understanding the development of ethnic consciousness, its periodization, and its local and international dimensions. In this book, Stefano Luconi challenges the notion that immigrants developed a racial consciousness as they became American. Rather, he posits that increased international ties shaped Italian immigrants' racial identity before they Americanized. His attention to political history as a reflection of these developments is interesting. But such analysis is done at the expense of explaining how, why, and to what extent Italian workers (the majority of Italian residents in Philadelphia) followed the lead of their well-to-do contemporaries or shaped their own ethnicity and racial consciousness.