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Reviews
| Italian Voices: Making Minnesota Our Home. By Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich. Edited by FlorenceMae Waldron. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007. xix + 315 pp. Photos, notes, appendix, and index. $29.95 (cloth).
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The history of this book is almost as interesting as its contents. Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich grew up in Minnesota, then spent most of her professional life as a teacher and administrator in Chicago's public schools. An indefatigable activist in the Italian American community, Mancina-Batinich joined the American Italian Historical Association and eventually headed the Oral History component of the Italians in Chicago Project (of which the current reviewer was director). In that role, she shepherded over one hundred interviews from taping to transcription and dissemination. |
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In the 1980s and early 1990s, Mancina-Batinich personally interviewed about one hundred Italian Americans in Minnesota and began working on a manuscript that was left in draft form when she died in 1996. In all, her materials—now in the archives of the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota—run 73 linear feet. Under the leadership of Rudolph Vecoli, IHRC eventually arranged for FlorenceMae Waldron to prepare this draft for publication. |
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The book is presented in nine thematic chapters—"Promised Land," "Bread and Work," "Women's Work," "The Boarders," "Religion," "Life Cycles," "Leisure," "Italy at Table," and "The Performers." After an essay that sets the geographic, chronological, and scholarly context, the book presents extended relevant quotations from the oral history narrators. Biographical and additional information is also included in italics to distinguish it from the narration. These are not raw transcripts. Many interviews have been translated and most have been edited for clarity. The results are fascinating, filled with the details of everyday life and momentous life-altering decisions. |
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Italian Voices comes well equipped with a masterful Foreword by Rudolph Vecoli, Mancina-Batinich's own Preface, the reflections of editor Waldron in a postscript, an ample index, ten pages of detailed footnotes, an appendix with a list of the interviewees, and numerous photographs. The combination of all these tools makes it easy for readers searching for specific nuggets of information. |
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Obviously, the best target audience for Italian Voices: Making Minnesota Our Home is the Minnesota Italian American community. The references to their hometowns and the small communities where they settled will strike a responsive chord. Especially poignant are the accounts of life in the mining towns, the working conditions, and the struggles to organize unions. |
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Ethnic scholars will be interested in the appealing method in which oral history interviews are presented and in the author's efforts to use the paradigms of Frances M. Malpezzi and William M. Clements's Italian-American Folklore (Little Rock, AR, 1992) in interpreting and classifying the oral history testimony. The book does not pretend to present new interpretations. Aside from an endorsement of social history, it makes no special claims for the superior importance or accuracy of oral history as a valid method of historical inquiry. It consists simply of 300 pages of rich and authentic detail of the lives of Italian emigrants to Minnesota. |
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Italian Voices heavily emphasizes the experience of women. The chapters on women's work, life cycles, and food are dominated by interviews with women. Walking interviewees through the calendar and life cycle proved to be an effective way to get them to organize their stories and gives the reader a clear and logical framework. Readers interested in foodways will be delighted with the interviews that tell of the formaggio, vino, vinaccio (bad wine), funghi, grespigni, prosciutto, frittata, polenta, gnocchi, ciambelli, cachi, and melanza from the Italian American past. |
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As the old timers die and the new generation loses interest in the immigrant past, Italian American history and culture is at risk of being lost. Mancina-Batinich had good connections with Italians from all walks of life in Minnesota, and she was uniquely qualified to document for us this fleeting episode in Italian, American, and Minnesota history. Italian Voices deserves a large readership.
Dominic Candeloro
American Italian Historical Association
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