Italian Communities Abroad

This volume provides an overview of research on Italian communities abroad, and, thus, represents an important contribution to the recent wave of paradigm renewal in the field of migration (socio)linguistics of Italian. The contributors here are some of the most active and rigorous exponents of this renewal tendency, and here they discuss new approaches and paradigms for the sociolinguistic study of migrations.

Italy is known for its history of emigration - with millions leaving its borders to find new beginnings elsewhere. They took with them their languages (including Italian) and established themselves mostly in urban settings, i.e. cities. At the same time, the Italian language is widely studied outside of Italy as a result of prestige or historical links. It appears in everyday contexts around the world in the domain of food, fashion and design. This volume brings together researchers working on Italian in its many linguistic and social facets and/or on language maintenance and use in Italian immigrant communities in specific urban settings around the globe. In the last decade, many Italians have started to emigrate again, joining older Italian communities (e.g. in Melbourne and New York) or forming new communities (e.g. in Barcelona). While all of these locations are explored in this volume, it also includes lesser known expressions of Italian language and community, which may or may no longer exist (e.g. Italian(s) in Asmara and Mogadishu). This volume provides a valuable overview, within a primarily sociolinguistic perspective, of Italian in and beyond Italian migrant communities in a range of urban settings around the world.

Between 1880 and 1915, thirteen million Italians left their homeland, launching the largest emigration from any country in recorded world history. As the young Italian state struggled to adapt to the exodus, it pioneered the establishment of a “global nation”—an Italy abroad cemented by ties of culture, religion, ethnicity, and economics. In this wide-ranging work, Mark Choate examines the relationship between the Italian emigrants, their new communities, and their home country. The state maintained that emigrants were linked to Italy and to one another through a shared culture. Officials established a variety of programs to coordinate Italian communities worldwide. They fostered identity through schools, athletic groups, the Dante Alighieri Society, the Italian Geographic Society, the Catholic Church, Chambers of Commerce, and special banks to handle emigrant remittances. But the projects aimed at binding Italians together also raised intense debates over priorities and the emigrants’ best interests. Did encouraging loyalty to Italy make the emigrants less successful at integrating? Were funds better spent on supporting the home nation rather than sustaining overseas connections? In its probing discussion of immigrant culture, transnational identities, and international politics, this fascinating book not only narrates the grand story of Italian emigration but also provides important background to immigration debates that continue to this day.

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.

This book investigates Italian foreign cultural policy from the 1947 Constitution to the present. How has Italy conveyed its language and culture to the outside world? Where does the Italian experience fit into a wider international context? Finally, what can be learned from the answers to such questions in relation to the Italian experience in Australia?

Offering a kaleidoscopic perspective on the experiences of Italian workers on foreign soil, Italian Workers of the World explores the complex links between international class formation and nation building. Distinguished by an international panel of contributors, this wide-ranging volume examines how the reception of immigrants in their new countries shaped their sense of national identity and helped determine the nature of the multiethnic states in which they settled. In Argentina and Brazil, Italian migrants were welcomed as a civilizing influence and were instrumental in establishing and leading syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist labor movements committed to labor internationalism. In the United States, by contrast, where Italian workers were greeted by the American Federation of Labor's hostility to socialism, internationalism, and unskilled laborers, they organized in ethnically mixed unions, including the radical Industrial Workers of the World. The xenophobia they encountered in the land of opportunity ultimately encouraged sympathy among Italian Americans for Mussolini's modernizing, imperialist ambitions for the Italian state.Covering the work of republican Garibaldi boundaries of historical nationalism.

In Italy, the rate of foreign immigration is among one of the major cultural shifts after World War II. Increased immigration rates account not only for people fleeing from countries during the war or times of unstable political situations (170,000 in 2014), but also for people relocating for work or family-related reasons. The immigrants were fewer than 150,000 in 1970, but currently count for 5 million (8% of the total population, not including those who have become Italian citizens), and are more numerous than Italian citizens residing abroad (4.5 million). This book proposes to introduce foreign readers to this phenomenon, which is in some respects problematic. Translation of texts written for Italian readers was avoided and the authors made choices to include original themes that could be interesting to readers outside Italy. The book's conclusions were entrusted to three immigrants: an Albanian sociologist, an Eritrean researcher and an Algerian novelist. According to the forecasts of demographers, the future Italy will be a country of large-scale immigrations, accounting for more than 10 million people by mid-century. Will Italy only be a country with many immigrants or a country with an adequate migration policy? Although society is still divided on the subject of newcomers, this book hopes to solve this issue in a positive manner and stimulate greater interest abroad.