The Social Science Library » The Labor and Leisure of Food Production as a Mode of Ethnic Identity Building among Italians in Chicago, 1890-1940

The Labor and Leisure of Food Production as a Mode of Ethnic Identity Building among Italians in Chicago, 1890-1940

Author(s)	Poe, Tracy N.
Abstract	Between 1890 and 1910, the USA experienced a boom in the number of Italian immigrants reaching its shores. Many of those immigrants found homes in cities such as Chicago, Illinois, where they struggled to accommodate their rural labor and leisure practices to their urban surroundings, and to reconcile the differences between their regionally segregated self-conceptions and their new designation as ‘Italian-Americans’. One of the most important means of achieving a unified ethnic identity was through the amalgamation of diverse regional culinary customs and symbols. This cultural amalgamation was aided in part by the geographical mobility of Chicago’s Italian population and through a willingness to share labor tasks and techniques among fellow immigrants from various regions in the spirit of community co-operation and group identity building. This article examines how Italian-American foodways evolved to reflect a regionally, culturally and dietetically diverse community’s cohesion around labor and leisure traditions selected from the old world and reinvented in the new, and how these traditions were transmitted to succeeding generations.
IssueNo	1
Pages	131-148
Article	Access to Article
Source	Rethinking History
VolumeNo	5
PubDate	March2001
ISBN_ISSN	13642529
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The Labor and Leisure of Food Production as a Mode of Ethnic Identity Building among Italians in Chicago, 1890-1940