Ethinic Groups and Discrimination
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Italians is my group of choice. The reason for my choice is two-fold. First it is my heritage and I would like to learn more. Second I wanted to see if what I have been told from my elders can actually be found in history books according to them the history books do not give you all the dark secrets of back then. So sit back with a glass of good wine and enjoy the little history lesson you will be embarking on.
The Genoese navigator Cristoforo Colombo, known to us now as Columbus, was only the first of many Italian explorers who would come to shape the Western Hemisphere as we know it today. In 1497, the Venetian Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot, sailed to Newfoundland and became the first European to see the shores of New England. By 1502, the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci had deduced that these new discoveries were part of one great continent. Within a few years, that continent had been given his name–America.
Most of this generation of Italian immigrants took their first steps on U.S. soil in a place that has now become a legend—Ellis Island. In the 1880s, they numbered 300,000; in the 1890s, 600,000; in the decade after that, more than two million. By 1920, when immigration began to taper off, more than 4 million Italians had come to the United States, and represented more than 10 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population.
What brought about this dramatic surge in immigration? The causes are complex, and each hopeful individual or family no doubt had a unique story. By the late 19th century, the peninsula of Italy had finally been brought under one flag, but the land and the people were by no means unified. Decades of internal strife had left a legacy of violence, social chaos, and widespread poverty. The peasants in the primarily poor, mostly rural south of
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Italy and on the island of Sicily had little hope of improving their lot. Diseases and natural disasters swept through the new nation, but its inexperienced government was in no condition to bring aid to the people. As transatlantic transportation became more affordable, and as word of American prosperity came via returning immigrants and U.S. recruiters, Italians found it increasingly difficult to resist the call of “L’America”.
The Italian immigrants who passed the test of Ellis Island went about transforming the city that they found before them. They scattered all over the New York region, settling in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and nearby towns in New Jersey. Perhaps the greatest concentration of all, though, was in Manhattan. The streets of Lower Manhattan, particularly parts of Mulberry Street, quickly became heavily Italian in character, with street vendors, store owners, residents and vagrants alike all speaking the same language–or at least a dialect of it.
To soften the blows of urban life, Italian immigrants formed societies for mutual aid. In keeping with the spirit of campanilismo. In 1905, the Order of the Sons of Italy was founded to provide financial aid, education, and shelter to new Italian immigrants, as well as to serve as an umbrella organization that would advance the cause of the Italian community in the U.S. By 1922, the Order had over 1300 lodges nationwide, and it remains a prominent organization today.
Many Italian immigrants, however, found themselves toiling for low pay in unhealthy working conditions. At the turn of the 20th century, southern Italian immigrants were among the lowest-paid workers in the United States. Child labor was
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common, and even small children often went to work in factories, mines, and farms, or sold newspapers on city streets.
Many thousands of Italian immigrants found themselves prisoners of the padrone, or patron, system of labor. The padroni were labor brokers, sometimes immigrants themselves, who recruited Italian immigrants for large employers and then acted as overseers on the work site
Labor struggles were not the only conflicts Italian immigrants faced. During the years of the great Italian immigration, they also had to confront a wave of virulent prejudice and natives’ hostility.
As immigration from Europe and Asia neared its crest in the late 19th century, anti-immigrant sentiment soared along with it. The U.S. was in the grips of an economic depression, and immigrants were blamed for taking American jobs. At the same time, racialist theories circulated in the press, advancing pseudo scientific theories that alleged that “Mediterranean”