Editor's Introduction: Ethnic Place and Space

Abstract

In Pietro di Donato’s 1937 short story “Christ in Concrete” (expanded to a novel in 1939), the Italian immigrant characters are introduced to readers in relation to the two main urban spaces that they occupy: the tenements they call home and the construction site at which they work. The refuge and safety of “home” and the joy that the foreman, Geremio, feels at the thought of his newly purchased house (even if it is only “a wooden shack” [2602]) contrasts dramatically with the danger of the construction site as the floor gives way beneath the men. In the course of the building collapse, Geremio is deposited “neatly and deliberately between the empty wooden forms of a foundation wall and pilaster in upright position, his blue swollen face pressed against the form and his arms outstretched, caught securely through the meat by the thin round bars of reinforcing steel” (2606). Above him, “gray concrete gush[ed] from the hopper mouth, … sealing [him] up” (2607) as the concrete “contracted and squeezed his skull out of shape” (2610). As part of the immigrant labor force constructing New York City’s modern urban spaces, Geremio is literally absorbed by the infrastructure that he is helping to create. Although the novel provides more information about the subsequent successes and failures of Geremio’s family in the aftermath of the accident, the short story ends with Geremio’s horrific death by concrete, emphasizing the negative aspects of urban US space for the immigrant laborer and ethnic subject.