Book Review

Comparative/World

This is a collaborative work by eleven scholars, the result of an international project extending over several years and culminating in 1996 with a conference held in Tampa, Florida. The essays reflect scholarship on Italian worker solidarity in Europe, Latin America, and the United States and simultaneously address issues of migration, nation building, class structure, and, to a limited degree, gender. (The last will have its own collection in a future volume, edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta.) While most of the essays in the present work are grounded in a specific country, a global perspective runs throughout as the authors show the impact of movements and events that transcend borders. These linkages, plus the careful selection and sequencing of essays by editors Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, result in a volume noteworthy for its overall cohesiveness, a quality not always found in edited works. An introduction by the editors provides a concise overview of the volume introducing the three parts that separate the essays along chronological and thematic lines.	1
The first section relates Italian nationalism and migration and begins with an essay in which Gabaccia examines the migration of political refugees and migrant laborers to Argentina and Brazil before and during the Risorgimento. It was there that they gained an identity with Italy, rather than in the homeland. Giuseppe Garibaldi recruited among them for soldiers in the nation-forming phase of the countries of the La Plata region. Thus began the alliance between republican exiles and laborers. An essay by Fernando J. Devoto follows showing the split among Italians in Argentina, which mirrored the republican-monarchist split in Italy. Only in the 1870s did an Italian community form in Buenos Aires, due in part to the increasing number of Italian migrants, their origin, and a growing Italian business community that necessitated increased contact between the classes.	2
With this groundwork established, the second section looks at the simultaneous factors of nation building and internationalization of workers as the numbers of migrant laborers increased rapidly in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. Mirta Zaida Lobato uses La Patria degli Italiani, an Italian newspaper in Buenos Aires, to explain and interpret the rapid changes Argentina went through between 1870 and 1920. Nearly three million Italians entered Argentina in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Most settled in the urban areas of Buenos Aires and cities along the Rio de la Plata, providing a receptive environment for socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists. La Patria detailed the numerous strikes that followed. It would have been helpful had the author noted how the newspaper covered the victory of Hipólito Yrigoyen, the Radical Party's presidential candidate in 1916, his dialogue with Italian workers, and their role in the "Tragic Week" of 1919. While La Patria served as a voice for workers, it also tried to shape their behavior into that of "model citizens."	3
Carina Frid de Silberstein examines the neglected Argentine countryside and the development of rural unrest, carefully noting its heterogeneous nature, which made political organization difficult. She links her discussion to the previous study with frequent references to La Patria's coverage of rural protests. Labor groups in rural Argentina were heavily influenced by foreign-born activists and constantly split among anarchists, socialists, and moderates. However, after 1930 agricultural issues became irrelevant as Italians flocked to urban areas, soon to be embraced by Juan Perón.	. . .