I don’t know about the rest of you, but if there’s one thing about this course that I find myself running up against again and again, it would have to be the mind-boggling scale of the task at hand: where even a single day in the life of a single person is all but impossible to trace in even a fraction of its complexity, somehow we are attempting to understand the evolution of an entire city of people across a span of well over one hundred years. And while Italian Harlem is only relatively tiny slice of the picture we’re trying to draw, its history demonstrates the same daunting fractal-like intricacy as the whole of NYC.
More than just complicated, at times Italian Harlem seems downright paradoxical; it was, as Orsi describes, “a theater of extremes” (p. 48). First among its series of characteristic contradictions was the conflict between the laying down of roots in East Harlem and the maintenance of nationalistic ties with southern Italy. By the late 19th century Italian men began to immigrate to New York sans-familia in search of the opportunities that the then-stagnant mother country couldn’t offer them. This separation from blood and country is what Orsi sites as one of the primary shapers of early Italian Harlem, but he also notes the wide variability of its effects. For some of these men, this separation bred a powerful nostalgia for the homeland. For many others, only “the keen desire to have their families with them in the new world” mattered (p. 20). Such men would take even the most exploitative work (as strike-breakers and padroni patsies) and save aggressively, for what was often years, in order to pay their families’ passage. As Italy-anchored family members had been the main tether between the early Italian Harlemites and their birth country, Orsi notes that their ties to the patrie gradually dissolved. This, however, seems contradicted again and again by the intense devotion to Italian culture and values that the people of Italian Harlem demonstrated for years after most of the direct kinship links between NY and Europe had disappeared.
In fact, Orsi writes extensively about the way that the traditional Italian idea of the domus (family based life) was woven inseparably into the fabric of the neighborhood. In Italian Harlem, responsibility to both nuclear and extended family was of the highest priority, and the worst insult one could hurl was the word cafoni: the accusation of showing disrespect to the domus. Interestingly enough, this intense focus on the importance of family loyalty made Italian Harlem a breeding ground for gangs of juvenile delinquents and mafia crime syndicates, while at the same time setting the stage for social justice advocacy and a number of progressive politicians.
Yet another of the neighborhood’s complexities is exhibited by the strange love that its residents often held for it in spite of its many flaws. As was the case with Five Points, the dirty, deadly, and densely populated Italian Harlem seemed to inspire a fair bit of nostalgia for the neighborhood that they often left as soon as they could afford to. Orsi quotes several former residents reminiscing about Italian Harlem’s incredible communal cohesiveness, the credibility of which is somewhat undermined by Orsi’s reports of a number of fierce rivalries between various Italian groups that were only truly relaxed for the annual parade of the Madonna of Mount Carmel.
The worship of the Mount Carmel madonna was one Italian Harlem’s most distinctive features. While it certainly entailed a good deal of religious fervor, the festival was in a way more an expression of devotion to Italian Harlem itself, and to the ancestral histories of its residents, than a simple religious holiday. The yearly festa of family, food, and penance was the neighborhood’s most vibrant celebration of Italian culture, and its chief unifier across the ever widening gap of generations.
So where does all of that leave us in our understanding of NYC? For all of its overwhelming intricacy, Italian East Harlem does present several of the themes we’ve come across before. Immigrants came seeking financial opportunity, set up a small and essentially homogenous ethnic enclave amidst the city’s diversity, expanded via chain migration, and eventually ran up against the dispersive Americanization that came with the passage of generations. Here’s hoping this business of characterizing the “peopling” of New York gets easier as we go along.
