Italian Americans, Education, and Italian Language: 1880–1921

Abstract

Italian migrants in the United States have been often associated to the tendency to neglect the importance of culture as an instrument of upward social mobility. Traditionally perceiving culture as a hegemonic tool of the elites, Italian migrants in the United States, who had a predominantly peasant background, were supposedly uninterested in educating their children, rather preferring that they drop out school to add with their work a supplemental income necessary to face the daily necessities of migrant families. Based on a long-standing prejudice, this supposed Italian-American disinterest towards culture and education has been revisited by some scholars, who have revaluated the migrant attitude towards the cultural realm. In the first part, this essay will offer an overview of the different scholarly views on the relationship between Italian-Americans, culture and education. In the second part, it will discuss how Italian-Americans approached the usage of the Italian language, the native idiom that was disappearing in the Little Italies with the progression of newer generations, which inevitably favoured the recourse to English. Finally, the essay will take into account how Italian governments in the Liberal Age (1861–1921) connected to the communities of the Italians in the United States through programs addressed to fostering the Italian language overseas as a way to preserve the Italianità, namely the Italian character of migrants.