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# 70 • OCTOBER 19 , 2015
se. As a result, many Italians emigrated to North
and South America to find
work.
In Argentina Italians were
early immigrants and welcomed. Pope Francis’s
parents were Italian immigrants. In Brazil, Italians
replaced blacks on coffee
plantations. Treated little
better than slaves, Italians
moved to other pursuits.
Today the richest State in
Brazil, Sao Paulo, has more
people of Italian heritage
than the founding Portuguese.
The Italians who arrived in
New York found the Irish
and Tammany Hall running
the city. If an Italian wasn’t
a mason, a tailor, a barber,
or a shoemaker, and didn’t open a shop with his
family, he was consigned
to manual labor. The padroni system for finding
employment
exploited
new comers. Italians were
often recruited in Italy and
controlled by a padrone in
New York who took a cut
of their wages. Italians occupied the bottom rung
on the socio-economic
scale. They were the “human steam shovels” who
built the skyscrapers and
72 | WE THE ITALIANS
www.wetheitalians.com
subways of New York.
Birds of Passage was the
name given to Italians of
the late nineteenth and
early twentieth-centuries
because they were the
first immigrants to the United States who returned
to their home country. Italians left seeking work and
returned after earning
money. Many made multiple trips. After World War
I, when U.S. immigration
laws tightened, Italians
could no longer guarantee their return, so many
decided to stay in the U.S.
and bring their families.
As with the character, Guido Basso in Birds of Passage, both my grandfathers
were ragmen. Their labor
was dirty and backbreaking, but they were their
own padrone. My father
was the last immigrant
in my family. He acquired just a seventh-grade
education before he set
out to work. Unemployed
for a long period during
the Great Depression, he
found a job in a warehouse. Working rapidly to
impress the boss, he reached up for a box atop
which a vase had been
left. The glass knickknack
slipped and shattered