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Review
| Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California, 1915–1999, by Carol Lynn McKibben. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 164 pages. $40.00, cloth; $18.00, paper.
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| This entry in the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Series focuses on the Sicilian community of Monterey, California. The book offers some unusual and fresh perspectives in immigration history. Although a part of Italy and included in the general heading of Italian immigrants, Sicilians came to California directly from Sicily and established themselves as a distinct community. Unlike their Italian compatriots who came from agricultural and industrial backgrounds, Monterey Sicilians earned their living from the sea. Sicilian men and women appear to have had traditional relationships (men work as fishermen, women run the household), but Carol Lynn McKibben demonstrates that they depart in many ways from the stereotype. Sicilian men and women worked as partners with loyalties to the family and the family's well being. While men were gone at sea for long periods, women made major financial decisions for the family. They also worked outside the home. |
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Monterey's attraction for Sicilians lay in the sardine fishing and canning industry. From the 1920s to the late 1940s Sicilian men caught sardines, and their wives and daughters worked in the canneries. Ambitious and upwardly successful, Sicilians owned canneries and invested heavily in real estate. McKibben identifies three crisis periods for the Sicilian immigrant community in Monterey. The first was U.S. entry into World War II, an event that placed Sicilians in the role of enemy aliens. In their focus on earning a living and concern with family and community, many Sicilians had never applied for U.S. citizenship. Sicilian noncitizens were moved to Salinas, their boats confiscated, their homes investigated by the FBI. However, Sicilians recognized the advantages of U.S. citizenship and became involved politically after the war. The second crisis occurred in 1948 and thereafter as the sardine industry drastically declined. Sicilians, identifying themselves as a fisherpeople, had to look to a more diversified economic future in which fishing became a recreation rather than an occupation. |
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The third crisis involved the views of Monterey Sicilians towards the greater community in which they lived. Insular, frowning on marriages to non-Sicilians, and maintaining cultural and social ties to the homeland, Sicilians were also proud Americans, and found it necessary to work out a view of acculturation acceptable to them. All in all, their story is one of success, and McKibben tells it well. She interviewed 150 people (100 women, 50 men) varying in age from people in their 80s to young people, and their anecdotes and recollections enliven the book. In an era where air travel makes returning to Sicily a vacation trip rather than a trek, many Monterey Sicilians maintain ties with Isola Della Femina, San Vito Lo Capo, and Marettimo, the principal points of origin. Americans of Sicilian descent have successfully run for public office, including mayor and city council, and are leaders in Monterey's business community. The distinctiveness of the Sicilian immigrant community experience, and especially the focus on the strong roles Sicilian women have played in their community, should make the book appeal to high school and college students. McKibben is of Sicilian heritage, and her personal comments provide an air of commitment to the work that makes it more than an academic study. Her description of the work at the canneries, gutting and packing sardines, may persuade students that a good education could lead to a better line of work than what immigrants had to do. |
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| Los Angeles Valley College |
Abraham Hoffman |
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