Giving voice to an immigrant story
The story of the greater Boston Italian community is recorded in a new book by a Weymouth author whose own family's experience was typical of what early immigrants faced.
Immigrant pioneers are the heroes of Stephen Puleo's "The Boston Italians," recently named a recommended book by the Boston Author Club Awards Committee.
Starting Saturday and extending over the next several weeks, Puleo will speak in Hanover, Sharon, and Norwell about his book and that rich history.
"The Italian American experience is the epitome of the American Dream," says Puleo. "You arrive poor, you're illiterate in your own language. A largely rural, agrarian population, you move to cities, live in tenements, and overcome a racial component - all in a very short time, the whole migration span lasting about 100 years."
Although Italian immigrants first settled in Boston, after World War II they took part in the suburban exodus, moving to communities such as Quincy, Braintree, and Weymouth. Today, about 800,000 Italian Americans live in Eastern Massachusetts.
"The Boston Italians" - the first book-length treatment of the history of Italian immigration in the Boston area - received good reviews and a warm welcome from readers who felt their own family story hadn't been told before. That pent-up hunger for the "real" story has been mocked by a steady diet of treatments that depict Italian Americans as the evil geniuses of organized crime and sell the latest Mafia tale as "the real story."
"The real story is people arriving here almost with nothing, who built lives, built families, built a large part of the urban part of the country - street-paving, sidewalks, subways - and decided to embrace the country as their own," Puleo said.
He offers the example of his own grandfather (detailed in the book) who worked pick-and-shovel labor jobs, sold fruits and vegetables from a pushcart, and raised a family. "That's very much the typical story," he said.
Puleo, a lifelong South Shore resident, comes to the subject as an established author. Among his offerings are "Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919" and "Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56."
He was a full-time journalist before a master's program in history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston in the 1990s turned his career to history research and writing.
Puleo finds the roots of his latest book in a period of unprecedented natural and economic disasters in southern Italy - volcanoes, crop failures, epidemics, high taxes - shortly after the 1870 unification of the country. But leaving home and "la via vecchia" ("the old way") for an urban America with no safety nets was no easy matter.
Early decades of Italian immigrants traveled by steamship to work in America, sent money home, and returned to Italy when work was slow. Puleo quotes a well-known account of an Italian laborer who made $1.25 a day - and lived on 26 cents a day. Immigrants sought the intimacy of village life by replicating it in such places as, for example, Boston's North End - "the enclave within the enclave," Puleo said.
Italians faced early prejudice on two fronts: from those who doubted their commitment to America, and from detractors who said the "dark" southern Italian "race" was volatile, crime-prone, and untrustworthy. In World War II, Italian Americans who had not become citizens had to register as "enemy aliens."
But the universality of war, and Italians' military service, helped bring Italian Americans into the mainstream. Taking advantage of GI benefits, Italian Americans went to college, bought homes, moved to the suburbs, and took their place in postwar America.
Puleo will speak about the stories in his book - and likely hear some new ones - at the John Curtis Free Library in Hanover on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. For information about appearances in May in Sharon and Norwell, visit his website, stephenpuleo.com.
Robert Knox can be contacted at rc.knox@gmail.com. 