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Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the History of Eating Habits among Italian Immigrants in New York
Simone Cinotto
| The Covello Papers is a collection of documents that has abundant source material on the relationship between eating habits and ethnicity in the Italian American community of New York City during the interwar years. The collection was gathered from 1907 to 1974 by Leonard Covello, an Italian American teacher and scholar who worked in the northeastern area of Manhattan called East Harlem. Today the neighborhood hosts mainly Latinos and is better known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, the neighborhood was home to as many as ninety thousand first- and second-generation Italian immigrants; it was the largest Italian American enclave in the United States.1 |
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The documents in the collection are heterogeneous. Most relevant for our purposes are Covello's transcriptions of interviews he conducted with the Italian immigrants of East Harlem and their children and written assignments by his students, most of them second-generation Italian Americans. An important part of this body of oral and written sources was to become the basis of Covello's 1944 New York University doctoral dissertation on the cultural background of Italian American students in New York schools; the students were the main focus of his public, professional, and intellectual work.2 These sources turn out to be crucial for understanding the connection between eating habits and ethnic identity, for they make it possible to reconstruct representations of Italian American ethnicity enacted by means of the food metaphor. They show how immigrants drew heavily on symbols of food and conviviality as they forged collective self-representations of their being Italian in America. |
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The utilization of a dense, systematic, and coherent archive such as the Covello Papers requires focusing on Covello as a producer of documents and an active subject in the framing of the data available to researchers. As we were reminded several years ago in the pages of Quaderni storici,
A collection of documents ... is something different from the sum of the individual papers it contains, for it does not limit itself to gathering testimonies but selects, assembles, and monumentalizes them by means of a cultural action that frames an image of the past and a pedagogy for the present.3
An analysis of the collection must thus take into account different levels of meaning and varying perspectives. These would have to do not only with the immigrants, whose subjective visions of the past and present related to their particular needs, dilemmas, and aspirations at the time, but also with the creator of the collection, who invested the documents with his own individual demands. In fact, the Italian American identity expressed in the food metaphor is multifaceted, as a reflection of the different, sometimes contrasting, ideological content attached to it by the various voices that reach us through the Covello Papers. The Italian American identity narrated and internalized by the immigrant men and women of East Harlem was different from that of their American-born children. Also different was the identity conceived by Covello, himself an immigrant from a family of semiliterate manual laborers but also a reform intellectual with important connections in public life and a distinguished voice in many ethnic and civic associations. |
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