"Italian America in the Making"

Abstract

The presence of immigrants has undoubtedly contributed to the construction of the American nation. In such a process, the Italians have played an important role but interaction between the American environment and the Italian background has led to a identity among the recent generations of Italians in the United States. It can be called Italian-Americanness. Though Richard Alba maintained that European immigrants had been fusing into a European-American group especially since the 1980s, an assimilative process that induced a twilight of ethnicity among them, Rudolph Vecoli and Richard Gambino rather thought that Italian-American ethnicity was in a new dawn. This paper maintains that, in early 21st-century multicultural American society, the Italian Americans’ ethnicity may be said to have reached a zenith with regard to their economic and social positions and the place that their cultural heritage stands for in the larger society that might be on its way to become postethnic.