| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Judith Rainhorn. Paris, New York: Des migrants italiens, annèes 1880-annèes 1930. (CNRS Histoire.) Paris: CNRS Editions. 2005. Pp. 233.

Judith Rainhorn has written an innovative, ambitious book. Rainhorn responds to Nancy Green's 1990 call for a comparative history of immigration in Annales ESC and contrasts the development of the Italian immigrant community in the peripheral neighborhoods of La Villette in Paris and East Harlem in New York, respectively. The comparative nature of Rainhorn's enterprise required the inspection of archives in Italy, France, and New York, a task rendered more daunting by the longitudinal scope of the study, which moves from the establishment of the two communities around 1880 to their dissolution in the 1930s, and by the author's attention to the history of individual immigrants as well as the community as a whole. The investigation of different national locales over an extended period of time, combined with the fusion of macro and micro-analysis, enables Rainhorn to revise several accepted notions in immigration history, first of all the theory of distinct national models of ethnic integration. Instead of the assimilation of the Italian community in an allegedly universalistic France and its segregation in the United States, Rainhorn finds that the deconstruction of ethnicity took place in both national settings, although in different ways and with different rhythms. Additionally, her painstaking attention to individual histories allows her to reject another established notion—that of the homogeneity of the Italian immigrant community—and to underscore, on the contrary, its internal fragmentation in terms of regional origin, occupation, political orientation, marital status, and geographical mobility.

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