Migrant Marketplaces

Abstract

Migrant Marketplaces explores how connections between Italian people and foods in Italy, the United States, and Argentina influenced migrants’ consumer experiences and identities in New York and Buenos Aires during the age of mass migration. The book analyzes discussion about and representations of foodstuffs in the migrant press to characterize New York and Buenos Aires as “migrant marketplaces,” urban spaces defined by transnational linkages between mobile people and goods. As migrant marketplaces, New York and Buenos Aires were global and gendered sites where Italians interacted with foods from their home and host countries in ways that shaped migrants’ consumer identities and practices, the consumer cultures in which they were enmeshed, and wider transatlantic commodity networks. Over the course of the twentieth century, migrant marketplaces feminized, as World War I, tariffs, immigration restriction, and U.S. business interests in Latin America shifted ties between food consumption and notions of Italianness from single male laborers to female consumers and families. Using a comparative perspective, the book also examines race making and the evolution of tipo italiano, or Italian-style, foods in New York and Buenos Aires to identify nation-specific networks of meanings and experiences associated with Italian trade goods. Migrant Marketplaces of the Americas argues that Italians constructed changing and competing links between gender, nationalism, race, and ethnicity through the global foods they sold and consumed.