Food in Italian Migration to Argentina and the United States: Gender, Racial, and Labor Differences

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 5. Comparative Immigrant Integration

Abstract

Italian immigration in the new world focused particularly in New York and Argentina. Food and immigrant foodways are an interesting window into these intersectional lives, especially those of Italian immigrant women, and their usually working-class husbands. This paper compares relative assimilation and assimilation style of Italian immigrants in New York and Argentina. Though the period of migration is much longer, the focus will be only on the 1930’s. This was the decade where Italian emigration to America began to slow down, and also the decade where we can tell the effects of fascism on immigrant communities most clearly. This essay argues that the difference in relative assimilation and assimilation style found though the window of food in New York and Argentina are due to a different uptake of fascist ideology. Meat eating, particularly, will take center stage as a consumption practice. It was and is rather usual in Italy, but it has been adopted by both Italians in America and in Argentina as a signifier of integration. Through the differential uptake of meat consumption, this paper will explore how Italians adapted differently to the different societies they encountered on the other side of the Atlantic in the United States and Argentina in regards to racialization and how they interacted differently within racial categories and labor struggles in the two communities.

Author

• Katharine Marina Waldmann