The Adjustment of Italian Immigrants in Buenos Aires and New York, 1870-1914

Abstract

AMEDEO CANUTI AND GIUSEPPE TRIMORA left Italy for the Americas at the turn of the past century. Amedeo was born in the tiny Adriatic fishing village of Sirolo in 1865. When the town's fishing industry came upon hard times during the latter part of the nineteenth century, he and his three brothers went to Buenos Aires. In 1894 Amedeo was recorded in the membership lists of a leading mutual aid society as a literate, twenty-nine-year old sailor who lived with six fellow villagers at 175 Calle La Madrid in the Boca, the center of Argentina's maritime industry. He later married and moved with his family to the nearby town of Quilmes, where he became the owner of a grocery store. Giuseppe's background was somewhat different. As an unmarried Sicilian of thirty-two, he migrated to New York in 1896. The census of 1900 records him as living with eighty other individuals, all but five of whom were Italian, in a tenement house at 228 Elizabeth Street in the heart of one of the city's many Sicilian colonies. Guiseppe could not read, write, or speak English. He listed his occupation as laborer, but at the time of the census he had been unemployed for several months. 1 Amedeo and Guiseppe were joined by millions of their countrymen who migrated to Argentina and the United States before World War I. Some remained permanently in their adopted country. Others returned home. Still others went back and forth many times. By 1914, however, nearly a million Italians lived in Argentina and a million and a half in the United States. In each country, the Italian immigrants settled primarily in the urban areas, especially in the rapidly growing commercial and industrial port cities of Buenos Aires and New York. When World War I broke out, three hundred and twelve thousand Italians-one-third of the total in Argentina-lived in Buenos Aires, and three hundred and seventy