Remembering Dr. Joseph Sciorra A Scholar Who Took Italian-American Life Seriously

 

Remembering Dr. Joseph Sciorra

A Scholar Who Took Italian-American Life Seriously

By Chris M. Forte
The Italian Californian

The Italian-American academic and cultural community lost one of its most important voices this week with the death of Dr. Joseph Sciorra, folklorist, cultural historian, author, editor, and longtime Director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, CUNY.

Sciorra died unexpectedly on October 5, 2026, in Ridgewood, New York. He was 71 years old. The Calandra Institute announced his passing on October 7, describing a career that stretched across more than three decades and helped reshape how scholars think about Italian-American culture, religion, folklore, neighborhood life, and everyday artistic expression. Calandra Institute

My own contact with Joseph was limited.

I never knew him personally in the traditional sense.

Our communication was online, only a few times.

But even brief contact can leave an impression, particularly when the person on the other side is someone whose work you have read, followed, or learned from.

And Joseph Sciorra was certainly someone worth learning from.

I should also be candid about something else.

Politically and ideologically, Joseph could be far more liberal than I am. There were issues on which I knew we would probably never see eye to eye.

But I never considered that a reason to dismiss him.

Quite the opposite.

One of the problems with our current culture is the assumption that if someone disagrees with us politically, we must therefore deny their intelligence, their humanity, or the value of everything they have accomplished.

I refuse to do that.

I could disagree with Joseph Sciorra and still recognize what he clearly was:

a serious intellectual, an accomplished scholar, a gifted cultural historian, and one of the most important interpreters of Italian-American life of his generation.

He Studied the Things Other People Walked Past

What made Sciorra's work so important was not simply that he studied Italian Americans.

Plenty of historians and sociologists have done that.

What made his work distinctive was what he chose to notice.

The yard shrine outside someone's house.

The statue of a saint surrounded by artificial flowers.

A neighborhood religious procession.

A homemade grotto.

A presepio.

A memorial painted on a city wall.

A decorated flowerpot.

A feast carried through the streets.

The accordion music playing at an old Italian social club.

The kind of things academics, preservationists and cultural elites sometimes dismiss as kitsch, sentimentality, superstition, or working-class eccentricity.

Sciorra understood that those things were not trivial.

They were evidence.

They told stories about immigration, religion, memory, neighborhood, family, class, labor, identity and belonging.

The Calandra Institute's memorial to him put this beautifully: he treated vernacular expression as a living archive of memory, devotion and identity rather than something beneath scholarly attention. Calandra Institute

That approach matters enormously to Italian-American history.

For decades, historians naturally concentrated on immigration statistics, political leaders, organized institutions, labor movements and major historical events.

Those things matter.

But culture often survives somewhere else.

It survives in kitchens.

On front porches.

Inside parish halls.

At street festivals.

At home altars.

In songs.

In decorations.

In family rituals nobody ever bothered to write down.

Sciorra understood that.

A Brooklyn Son Who Became a Scholar of Everyday Culture

Joseph Sciorra was born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1955.

He earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Brooklyn College in 1980, a master's degree in performance studies from New York University in 1987, and a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. His doctoral research centered on Brooklyn's Giglio feast, a subject that would help define the direction of his career. Calandra Institute

Before joining the Calandra Institute in late 1999, Sciorra worked with numerous cultural and arts organizations, including the Ethnic Folk Arts Center, Queens Council on the Arts, Bronx Council on the Arts and City Lore. Calandra Institute

At Calandra, he eventually became Director of Academic and Cultural Programs, a position he held for more than a quarter-century.

His responsibilities went well beyond conventional academic administration.

He organized conferences and scholarly programs, developed the Institute's Writers Read series, Documented Italians film and video series, and the Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies, while also curating exhibitions devoted to Italian-American history, religion and material culture. Calandra Institute

In other words, he wasn't interested in scholarship remaining trapped inside universities.

He wanted ideas to circulate.

He wanted writers, filmmakers, scholars, artists and ordinary community members in conversation with one another.

That may be one of his most important legacies.

Built With Faith

For me, one of Sciorra's most fascinating areas of research was Italian-American Catholic life.

His 2015 book, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City, was the culmination of roughly thirty-five years of fieldwork.

The book examines the ways Italian-American Catholics transformed ordinary urban spaces through religious expression—yard shrines, sidewalk altars, domestic sacred spaces, elaborate Nativity scenes, neighborhood processions, Christmas displays and grottoes. JSTOR

This was not simply a book about Catholic decorations.

It was about what people do when they migrate.

They bring ideas about the sacred with them.

Then they reinterpret those ideas in a new place.

A shrine that might have existed beside a rural road in southern Italy becomes a statue in a Brooklyn front yard.

A village procession becomes a religious feast moving between apartment buildings and traffic lights.

The immigrant city itself becomes sacred space.

Sciorra's central insight was that these practices should not be mocked or dismissed.

They are part of the story of how immigrants made America their home.

The book won the Italian American Studies Association's 2016 book award and was praised by scholars for taking material culture seriously when others had largely ignored it. IUScholarWorks

That subject alone would have made him important to Italian-American studies.

But his work extended much further.

Graffiti, Music, Feasts and Memory

Long before Built with Faith, Sciorra had already demonstrated his unusual eye for cultural meaning.

His 1994 book R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art, created with photographer Martha Cooper, documented spray-painted memorial murals throughout New York City.

At a time when many people saw graffiti only as vandalism, Sciorra recognized that memorial walls could function as communal acts of grief and remembrance. Calandra Institute

He edited Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives and co-edited major collections on Italian migration, needlework, Neapolitan music and Italian-American cinema. Calandra Institute

His writing ranged across an extraordinary number of subjects:

religious feasts,

Italian-American popular music,

doo-wop,

rap,

Puerto Rican vernacular architecture,

Black Madonna traditions,

the Sacco and Vanzetti legacy,

the Watts Towers,

ethnic neighborhoods,

memorial art,

religious processions,

labor history,

race relations,

and the complicated relationship between ethnicity and American identity. Calandra Institute

That range tells us something important about him.

Sciorra did not believe culture existed in neat little boxes.

Italian-American culture interacted with Puerto Rican culture.

Catholic tradition interacted with urban architecture.

Immigrant history interacted with labor history.

Music interacted with memory.

Religion interacted with public space.

Neighborhoods interacted with politics.

He studied those intersections.

An Intellectual I Did Not Always Agree With

This is where my own perspective becomes important.

Joseph Sciorra and I did not necessarily see the world the same way.

From what I observed, his politics and cultural outlook were considerably more progressive than mine.

At times, probably too liberal for my taste.

But I don't say that as an insult.

I say it because intellectual honesty matters.

A memorial should not require pretending that everyone agreed about everything.

What I respected was that Sciorra thought seriously.

He researched.

He documented.

He argued.

He asked uncomfortable questions.

He brought evidence.

He was not merely repeating slogans.

That is the kind of person worth engaging even when you disagree.

Perhaps especially when you disagree.

There is something profoundly healthy about being able to say:

"I disagree with this man about some important things, but I still respect his mind, his work and his humanity."

We need more of that.

Italian-American life has always contained political disagreements.

Republicans.

Democrats.

Socialists.

Conservatives.

Progressives.

Devout Catholics.

Secular intellectuals.

Traditionalists.

Radicals.

Immigrants who wanted to preserve the old world and immigrants who wanted nothing more than to escape it.

That diversity is itself part of our history.

Joseph Sciorra represented one important voice within that larger conversation.

Saving What Others Might Have Lost

Sciorra was not merely interested in describing culture.

Sometimes he helped preserve it.

He successfully nominated the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto on Staten Island and the Lisanti Family Chapel in the Bronx to state and national historic registers.

He helped lead the campaign that resulted in the 1927 recordings of “Protesta per Sacco e Vanzetti” entering the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.

He helped place folk art and traditional musical instruments into museum collections.

And he helped organize an effort to place a headstone on the previously unmarked grave of murdered dockworker and labor activist Pietro “Pete” Panto. Calandra Institute

These are not flashy accomplishments.

But they are exactly the kinds of things cultural historians should do.

Because once something disappears, it often disappears forever.

A chapel gets demolished.

A feast ends.

A recording deteriorates.

A family throws away old photographs.

A neighborhood changes.

An immigrant dies without being interviewed.

A language disappears from a household.

Then twenty years later someone asks:

"Does anybody remember?"

Joseph Sciorra spent much of his life making sure the answer would sometimes be yes.

He Helped Give Italian-American Studies Intellectual Weight

Italian-American history was not always treated seriously in American academia.

For generations, Italian Americans often appeared in popular culture primarily as stereotypes.

Gangsters.

Mobsters.

Loud families.

Food.

Accents.

Comedy.

Those subjects themselves can be legitimate parts of culture.

But they are not the whole story.

Scholars like Joseph Sciorra insisted that Italian-American experience deserved the same rigorous attention given to any other ethnic, religious or immigrant culture.

At the Calandra Institute, he helped create the infrastructure for that study.

He served as editor of the Italian American Review from 2009 to 2016 and later as its editorial director, helping develop the journal into an important interdisciplinary forum for research on Italian-American life. Calandra Institute

He was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 2016 and received numerous honors for his scholarship. Calandra Institute

Yet perhaps his greatest achievement cannot be measured with awards.

He taught people to look differently.

To see culture where other people saw clutter.

To see history where other people saw an old neighborhood.

To see theology where somebody else saw a plastic saint.

To see art where someone else saw graffiti.

To see memory where someone else saw junk.

That is what a great cultural historian does.

The Scholar as Bridge

One of the most striking descriptions of Sciorra in the Calandra Institute memorial is that he was a cultural broker and public intellectual.

That description fits.

He could present research at an academic conference.

Then discuss the same cultural traditions in a church basement.

Or a social club.

Or even a neighborhood bar.

A 2015 account of a presentation for Built with Faith noted that Sciorra joked about having presented his research in universities, church basements and social clubs—but never before in a bar. iItaly

I love that.

Because culture doesn't belong only inside universities.

Italian-American history certainly doesn't.

It belongs wherever Italian Americans actually lived.

In churches.

Kitchens.

Backyards.

Union halls.

Social clubs.

Bars.

Feast committees.

Neighborhood streets.

And family homes.

Sciorra understood that scholarship should travel back into those places.

A Loss Beyond Academia

Dr. Joseph Sciorra's passing is obviously a profound loss for the Calandra Institute, his colleagues, his students and his family.

He is survived by his wife and life partner, Zulma Ortiz Fuentes, and their children, Akela and Lucca. Calandra Institute

But his death is also a loss for the wider Italian-American community.

Because every ethnic community needs people who study it seriously.

Not merely people who celebrate it.

Not merely people who criticize it.

People who document it.

People willing to ask:

Why do we do this?

Where did this tradition come from?

How did it change?

What did our grandparents believe?

Why did our neighborhoods look the way they did?

What disappeared?

What survived?

And what does all of it tell us about who we became in America?

Joseph Sciorra spent a lifetime asking those questions.

Respect Across Differences

I communicated with Joseph only a few times, and only online.

I can't offer stories about long conversations over dinner.

I can't claim friendship.

I can't pretend that we agreed politically.

We didn't.

But respect does not require agreement.

I respected Joseph Sciorra because he had dedicated his life to understanding culture instead of merely consuming it.

He valued the voices of ordinary people.

He took working-class culture seriously.

He believed neighborhoods, religious rituals, immigrant art and family traditions were worthy of scholarship.

And he helped establish Italian-American studies as something much deeper than nostalgia.

That deserves gratitude.

In fact, perhaps one of the best tributes we can pay him is to continue doing what his scholarship encouraged people to do:

Look carefully.

Notice the old shrine before it disappears.

Photograph the feast.

Record the elderly relative.

Save the family letter.

Ask what the tradition means.

Learn the history of the neighborhood.

Take seriously the things previous generations created.

Because what looks ordinary today may become priceless history tomorrow.

Joseph Sciorra understood that better than most.

I may not have shared all of his politics.

But I valued the man.

I valued the intellect.

I valued the scholarship.

And I am grateful that Italian America had a scholar willing to spend his life documenting what so many others overlooked.

Rest in peace, Dr. Joseph Sciorra.

And thank you for helping us understand that the everyday lives of Italian Americans were worth studying, preserving and remembering.

Two Voices of Italian-American Laughter Gone Too Soon Remembering Mike Marino and Joey Sorice

 

Two Voices of Italian-American Laughter Gone Too Soon

Remembering Mike Marino and Joey Sorice

By Chris M. Forte
The Italian Californian

Within a matter of weeks, the Italian-American community lost two men who spent much of their lives doing something that may seem simple, but is increasingly important: making people laugh, celebrating where they came from, and bringing people together.

Comedian Mike Marino, known to generations of fans as “New Jersey’s Bad Boy of Comedy,” died on September 15, 2026, at the age of 63. Marino had publicly revealed that he was battling Stage 4 brain cancer following surgery earlier in the year.

Then, on October 3, comedian, producer and Los Angeles Italian Festival founder Joey Sorice died suddenly at home from what festival organizers described as an apparent heart attack.

The timing made Sorice’s death especially shocking. The eighth Los Angeles Italian Festival was scheduled to take place the very next day at Hollywood & Highland. Instead, organizers were forced to cancel the celebration its founder had spent years building.

For me, these losses feel personal in a particular way.

I was not a close friend of either man, and I would never pretend otherwise.

I met Joey several times through the Los Angeles Italian Festival. Mike I knew mostly from a greater distance. We attended some of the same Italian-American events over the years, I saw him in passing, and I followed his comedy, appearances and social-media presence.

But anyone who spends enough time in an ethnic or cultural community understands this phenomenon.

You don't necessarily have to know someone intimately for that person to become part of the landscape of your life.

You begin recognizing the same faces at festivals, dinners, parish events, cultural organizations and community gatherings. You see their names on flyers. You follow what they are doing online. Eventually they become familiar members of that larger extended Italian-American family.

That is how I remember Mike Marino and Joey Sorice.

Mike Marino: Unapologetically Italian American

Mike Marino built much of his comedy around something Italian Americans immediately recognized:

family.

A Jersey City native who grew up in New Jersey, Marino originally pursued acting. He trained at institutions including the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Herbert Berghof Studio before developing the stand-up career that eventually made him nationally known.

His television and entertainment work stretched well beyond comedy clubs, but it was his material about New Jersey, Italian families and everyday life that became his signature.

Marino understood the comic potential of the Italian-American household.

The relatives.

The food.

The family arguments.

The accents.

The exaggerated personalities.

The mixture of affection, aggravation and loyalty that anyone raised around a big Italian family immediately recognizes.

He exaggerated it, of course.

That is what comedians do.

But underneath the exaggeration was something authentic.

Italian-American audiences could laugh at Marino because they recognized pieces of themselves in the characters and situations he described.

His enormously popular “If the President Were Italian” routine eventually received more than 12 million views on YouTube, according to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

That idea evolved into Marino’s memorable “Make America Italian Again” comedy persona and web series.

It worked because Marino wasn't apologizing for being Italian American.

He was celebrating it.

He took something that earlier generations were sometimes pressured to hide—the accents, the food, the oversized personalities, the neighborhood culture—and turned it into something audiences could proudly laugh about.

His career eventually took him around the country and internationally. He performed repeatedly at Montreal's Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and became a familiar performer in theaters, casinos and comedy clubs.

In 2008, Marino was inducted into the New Jersey Comedy Hall of Fame.

In 2015, he received the USO Bob Hope Comedy Award in recognition of his performances for American military personnel.

Those accomplishments tell us something else about Mike Marino.

Behind the “bad boy” image was a performer who clearly understood that comedy could be a service.

Sometimes people simply need to laugh.

And Marino spent decades giving them that opportunity.

Earlier this year, that story took a painful turn.

Marino publicly disclosed that he was battling Stage 4 brain cancer following surgery in January. Yet he continued communicating with his fans and working toward returning to the stage.

On September 15, he died at 63.

The man who spent so much of his life making other people laugh was gone.

Joey Sorice: Creating a Piazza in Hollywood

Joey Sorice's contribution to Italian-American life was somewhat different.

If Mike Marino brought Italian America onto the comedy stage, Joey helped create a place where Italian Americans could actually gather.

That place was the Los Angeles Italian Festival.

And that is where I encountered him.

I met Joey several times at the festival over the years.

Those brief encounters were not enough for me to claim that I knew Joey personally in the way his close friends and family did.

But I did see what he created.

And I saw what that creation meant.

Los Angeles presents a particular challenge for ethnic communities.

Unlike New York, Boston or Philadelphia, Southern California's Italian-American population is spread across an enormous metropolitan region.

Los Angeles once had recognizable Italian neighborhoods and enclaves, but much of that population dispersed generations ago.

That means community often has to be deliberately recreated.

Joey Sorice helped recreate it.

For one day, the Los Angeles Italian Festival transformed part of Hollywood into something resembling an Italian-American piazza.

There was food.

There was music.

There was comedy.

There were vendors.

There were Italian organizations and personalities.

There were people celebrating their ancestry and others simply coming to enjoy the culture.

The festival described itself as continuing the tradition of the Italian street festival—the sights, sounds, smells and flavors of an old-fashioned Italian celebration.

Joey was its founder and producer.

But the festival was only one chapter of a much longer entertainment career.

Sorice came from Short Hills, New Jersey, and described growing up in a large Italian family.

His first experiences onstage were musical rather than comedic. He played saxophone in his family's band, which he jokingly described as something resembling an Italian version of The Partridge Family.

His family also had some remarkable connections to the New Jersey entertainment world.

Sorice recalled that actor Joe Pesci, an old friend of his father's from Newark, wrote some songs for the family group. He also remembered spending time in Las Vegas where the act received training from Tommy DeVito, one of the original Four Seasons.

Eventually the music career ended and comedy took over.

Joey and his younger brother developed the comedy team Jimmy & Joey, performing regularly in Southern California and becoming associated with Los Angeles' famous Comedy Store.

Later came The Meatballs of Comedy, an Italian-themed comedy showcase that brought together performers working from the Italian-American experience.

And eventually came the Los Angeles Italian Festival.

When you look at Joey's career as a whole, a theme becomes obvious.

He kept creating places for Italian-American performers and culture to be seen.

A family band.

A comedy duo.

An Italian comedy showcase.

An Italian festival in Hollywood.

Those weren't isolated projects.

They were variations on the same idea:

bring people together and put Italian-American culture on the stage.

More Than Nostalgia

Ethnic festivals and heritage comedy are sometimes dismissed as nostalgia.

Certainly there is nostalgia involved.

Italian-American culture itself carries enormous amounts of inherited memory.

We remember grandparents and great-grandparents.

Sunday dinners.

Parish festivals.

Neighborhood bakeries.

Social clubs.

Old Little Italies.

The immigrant generation.

The old neighborhood characters who seemed to come straight from central casting but were actually real.

Much of that world has disappeared.

But men like Mike Marino and Joey Sorice demonstrate that preserving culture does not necessarily mean freezing it in the past.

Culture survives by adapting.

Marino took stories about Italian-American family life and carried them into comedy clubs, television, YouTube, podcasts and social media.

Sorice took the traditional Italian street festival and recreated it beneath the lights of Hollywood.

That isn't a dead culture.

That is cultural transmission.

Every generation receives something from the generation before it and decides what to carry forward.

Mike and Joey carried something forward.

They simply did it with microphones, punchlines, music, food and festivals.

The Strange Sadness of Familiar Faces Disappearing

Their deaths have also made me think about something that becomes increasingly noticeable as we get older.

Familiar faces begin disappearing.

Some belong to family.

Some belong to close friends.

But others belong to that larger circle we call community.

They are people whose names keep appearing on flyers.

The person you expect to see standing near a festival stage.

The entertainer whose latest video appears in your social-media feed.

The organizer rushing around making sure everything works.

The guy you recognize from across the room even though you may never have sat down and had a long conversation with him.

You don't realize how familiar their presence has become until suddenly it isn't there anymore.

Mike Marino was one of those people for me.

Joey Sorice was another.

Joey's death carries an especially haunting symbolism because the celebration he created was literally hours away.

On Sunday, October 4, people were supposed to gather at Hollywood & Highland for another Los Angeles Italian Festival.

There should have been music.

There should have been food.

There should have been laughter.

Instead, the festival was canceled because the man responsible for creating it had suddenly died.

There is something painfully symbolic about that silence.

I Hope Joey's Festival Returns

I hope the Los Angeles Italian Festival comes back.

Not because Joey Sorice can simply be replaced.

He can't.

Founders bring personalities, relationships and institutional knowledge that cannot simply be transferred to somebody else.

But if there is a way for the festival to continue, I think continuing what Joey built could eventually become one of the greatest memorials to him.

Perhaps someday people will once again gather in Los Angeles beneath Italian flags, eat Italian food, listen to Italian music and hear comedians making jokes about their crazy Italian families.

And perhaps somewhere in that celebration there will be a photograph of Joey Sorice and a simple explanation:

This is the man who started it.

That is how culture survives.

One generation builds something.

The next decides not to let it disappear.

The Show—and the Culture—Must Go On

The Italian-American community is changing.

The old immigrant neighborhoods have largely dispersed.

Most members of the original immigrant generation are now gone.

Their children are aging.

Many cultural organizations struggle to attract younger members.

Festivals struggle for volunteers and funding.

Old institutions disappear quietly every year.

That makes the people who continue creating things even more important.

A festival.

A parish celebration.

A cultural society.

A newspaper.

A website.

A comedy show.

A heritage organization.

Each becomes a small bridge connecting one generation with another.

Joey Sorice built one of those bridges.

Mike Marino built another.

They used different tools, but underneath their work was essentially the same message:

Remember where you came from.

Laugh about it.

Celebrate it.

Share it.

And invite everybody else to the table.

I met Joey Sorice only a handful of times.

I knew Mike Marino mostly from passing encounters, shared events and following his work from a distance.

So this isn't the remembrance of a best friend.

It is something different.

It is the remembrance of two familiar figures from the larger Italian-American community whose presence helped make that community feel alive.

And sometimes you don't realize how important those familiar faces were until they are suddenly missing.

Mike and Joey helped make Italian America a little louder.

A little funnier.

A little more visible.

And a little more joyful.

For that, I will remember them.

Rest in peace, Mike Marino.

Rest in peace, Joey Sorice.

Viva Italia. Viva gli Italiani d'America.

And may the laughter continue.

Italian Americans & Labor Day

 

Labor Day and the Italian-American Story: The Workers Who Helped Build America

By Chris M. Forte
The Italian Californian

For many Americans, Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer—a three-day weekend marked by barbecues, beach trips, family gatherings, and one last celebration before fall begins.

But Labor Day was never intended to be merely a farewell to summer.

It is a national tribute to the American worker: to the men and women whose labor built cities, railroads, factories, farms, mines, ports, businesses, neighborhoods, and ultimately much of the country itself. The first Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on September 5, 1882. By 1894, Congress had established the first Monday in September as a national holiday honoring workers and their contributions to American life.

For Italian Americans, that history should have particular meaning.

The story of Italian immigration to the United States is, in large part, a story of work.

Millions of Italians came to America hoping for lavoro—work, opportunity, and the possibility of giving their families a better future. They became miners, fishermen, stonemasons, factory workers, garment workers, railroad laborers, farmers, longshoremen, builders, tradesmen, shopkeepers, and entrepreneurs.

And when they encountered low wages, dangerous workplaces, discrimination, and exploitation, many Italians did something else:

They organized.

Italian immigrants and Italian Americans played an important—and sometimes overlooked—role in the American labor movement.

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Italian Immigrants and the Working-Class American Dream

The enormous wave of Italian immigration that began in the late nineteenth century brought millions of people from Italy to the United States.

Many immigrants came from southern Italy and Sicily, where poverty, unemployment, land inequality, and limited opportunities encouraged families to look overseas for a better future.

America offered opportunity, but rarely easy work.

Italian immigrants found jobs across the country. In San Francisco, they worked as fishermen and stevedores. In Appalachia and the Mountain West, they entered coal and mineral mines. Skilled Italian stonemasons worked in quarries throughout New England and elsewhere. Others labored on farms from the Northeast to California.

They helped build roads, railroads, tunnels, buildings, factories, and entire neighborhoods.

Yet these workers frequently occupied the lowest levels of the economy.

They worked long hours.

They performed dangerous jobs.

They were sometimes paid less than other workers.

And they faced intense ethnic prejudice.

Even some established American labor unions initially excluded foreign-born workers. As a result, Italian immigrants sometimes formed their own organizations or joined unions willing to organize workers regardless of nationality.

Labor organizing therefore became part of the Italian-American experience.

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Pane e Lavoro: Bread, Work and Dignity

An Italian expression captures much of the immigrant experience:

Pane e lavoro — bread and work.

For immigrant families, work meant survival.

But workers gradually demanded something more than survival.

They wanted wages that could support their families.

They wanted reasonable working hours.

They wanted safer mines and factories.

They wanted protection from abusive employers.

And they wanted their children to have opportunities greater than their own.

The labor struggles involving Italian immigrants were therefore about more than politics or ideology.

For many families, they were about dignity.

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Arturo Giovannitti, Joseph Ettor and the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike

Two of the most important Italian figures in early American labor history were Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph James Ettor.

Both became organizers associated with the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW.

Their names became particularly connected with the great Lawrence textile strike of 1912 in Massachusetts.

Lawrence's textile mills employed an extraordinarily diverse immigrant workforce. Rather than organizing workers according to nationality, organizers sought to unite Italians and other immigrant groups around their shared working conditions.

Giovannitti and Ettor became prominent organizers during the struggle.

During the strike, Italian immigrant worker Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed during a confrontation. Although Giovannitti and Ettor were not accused of firing the fatal shot, authorities prosecuted them, along with striker Joseph Caruso, in connection with the killing.

The Library of Congress notes that the three men were imprisoned for nearly a year before the case against them failed.

Their imprisonment turned the men into symbols of the broader labor struggle.

But the Lawrence strike demonstrated something even more important.

Employers could benefit when immigrant groups remained divided—Italian against Polish, one language against another, one ethnic neighborhood against another.

Workers became much more powerful when they crossed those divisions.

That lesson remains one of the most important legacies of early immigrant labor organizing.

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Joseph Ettor: Organizing Across Ethnic and Language Barriers

Joseph Ettor was born in New York to Italian immigrant parents.

He became particularly effective at organizing immigrant workers in industrial communities where numerous languages and nationalities existed side by side.

That was no small accomplishment.

A textile workforce might include Italians, Poles, Syrians, Portuguese, Jews, French Canadians, Lithuanians, and many others.

Their cultures differed.

Their languages differed.

Their religions sometimes differed.

But their paychecks and working conditions gave them common interests.

Ettor's career illustrates one of the most significant contributions immigrant labor organizers made to American unionism: teaching workers that ethnic identity and worker solidarity did not necessarily have to compete with one another.

An Italian could remain proudly Italian while standing alongside workers from entirely different backgrounds.

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Carlo Tresca: Italian Immigrant, Labor Organizer and Anti-Fascist

Another major Italian labor activist was Carlo Tresca, an immigrant from Abruzzo who arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century.

Tresca became a newspaper editor, labor activist, anarchist, civil-liberties advocate, and later a vigorous opponent of Fascism.

He participated in labor struggles involving miners, textile workers, hotel employees, and other workers.

One of his best-known activities occurred during the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike in New Jersey.

Thousands of silk workers walked out during a long and bitter industrial dispute.

And an Italian immigrant family's home became one of the most important gathering places of the strike.

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Pietro and Maria Botto: When an Italian-American Home Became a Labor Headquarters

Pietro and Maria Botto were immigrants from northern Italy who settled in Haledon, New Jersey.

Pietro worked as a silk weaver.

Maria performed textile work at home while also caring for their household and preparing meals for boarders.

The Botto home represented the kind of immigrant achievement familiar to countless Italian-American families: work, saving, homeownership, family, hospitality, and community.

But in 1913, their house became something more.

During the Paterson Silk Strike, Pietro Botto offered the family's property as a meeting place for striking workers.

Labor organizers including Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and "Big Bill" Haywood addressed crowds from the home's second-story balcony.

The National Park Service records the important role the house played in keeping striking workers organized and maintaining morale during the months-long dispute.

The property later became the American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark.

There is something wonderfully Italian-American about that history.

A family home—with meals being prepared, relatives gathering, boarders staying upstairs, and bocce being played outside—became part of America's labor history.

The family table and the workers' movement existed in the same world.

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Italian-American Women in the Labor Movement

Italian-American labor history was never exclusively male.

Women were essential participants.

Italian immigrant women worked in factories, textile shops, garment shops, family businesses, and inside their homes performing paid piecework.

Many carried the enormous burden of earning money while simultaneously raising children and maintaining households.

The garment industry in particular became an important arena for female labor organization.

Young immigrant women often worked long hours in crowded factories for low wages. These workplaces brought Italians together with Jewish, Polish, Russian, and other immigrant women.

Some became strikers.

Others became union organizers.

And a few became nationally important labor leaders.

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Angela Bambace: From Garment Worker to Union Leader

One of the most important Italian-American women in organized labor was Angela Bambace.

Bambace became active in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, one of the most influential unions representing workers in the clothing industry.

She worked extensively as a labor organizer and eventually became a vice president of the union.

Cornell University's labor archives preserve Bambace's papers and identify her as a prominent labor organizer and ILGWU vice president.

Her career challenges a stereotype sometimes attached to early Italian-American women—the idea that they existed exclusively within the domestic sphere.

Many did devote enormous energy to their homes and families.

But they were also wage earners.

They walked picket lines.

They organized other workers.

They attended meetings.

And sometimes they rose into leadership positions within major American institutions.

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Luigi Antonini and the Italian-American Labor Council

As Italian Americans became more established in American society, they also began moving into leadership positions within organized labor.

One important figure was Luigi Antonini.

Antonini joined the ILGWU in 1913 and rose rapidly through its leadership. Cornell's labor archives record that he became an ILGWU vice president in 1925 and later served as first vice president for more than three decades. He was also a founding member of the Anti-Fascist Alliance and president of the Italian-American Labor Council.

In 1941, the Italian-American Labor Council was established.

Its mission connected labor activism with another important question facing Italian Americans during World War II: how to maintain pride in Italian heritage while firmly opposing Mussolini's Fascist regime.

The ILGWU had a substantial Italian membership and even maintained Italian-language locals. The Italian-American Labor Council supported the American war effort while advocating for Italians in the United States.

That history deserves greater attention.

Italian-American opposition to Fascism did not exist only among politicians, intellectuals, or newspaper editors.

Labor activists participated as well.

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Italian Workers and the Ludlow Massacre

Not every labor struggle ended at the negotiating table.

Some ended in tragedy.

One of the darkest episodes occurred during the Colorado Coalfield War.

Striking miners and their families had been forced into a tent colony near Ludlow, Colorado.

On April 20, 1914, violence erupted between the Colorado National Guard and the striking miners.

The tent colony burned.

Women and children died.

The incident became known as the Ludlow Massacre.

For Italian-American history, there is a particularly painful detail.

According to the Library of Congress, the two women and eleven children who died in the fire were Italian immigrants.

Their deaths are a reminder that the history behind Labor Day was not simply one of parades and union banners.

Workers and their families sometimes paid an enormous price during America's industrial conflicts.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Immigrant Worker

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 is another tragedy inseparable from America's immigrant labor history.

The New York garment factory employed large numbers of immigrant women, particularly Jewish and Italian workers.

When fire swept through the factory, 146 people were killed.

The disaster became one of America's most infamous workplace tragedies.

It strengthened public demands for improved factory regulation, fire safety, inspections, and protections for workers.

For immigrant families, workplace reform was therefore not an abstract political idea.

It could literally mean whether a daughter or son came home from work.

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Italians Were Never Politically All the Same

There is an important qualification to this history.

Italian workers did not all share one political philosophy.

Some were socialists.

Some were anarchists.

Some joined mainstream trade unions.

Some were deeply Catholic and suspicious of radical politics.

Some became Democrats.

Some became Republicans.

Some disliked unions altogether.

Others crossed picket lines.

Many immigrants cared little about political ideology and simply wanted a steady paycheck with which to support their families.

As Italian Americans moved upward economically, many also became business owners, managers, contractors, employers, and professionals.

That diversity is important.

Remembering Italian participation in the labor movement does not require modern Italian Americans to adopt the politics of every historical labor organizer.

Carlo Tresca's anarchism, for example, does not have to become one's own political philosophy in order to recognize his historical importance.

The story is larger than ideology.

It is about working people attempting to improve their lives and participate in American society.

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Labor and the Rise of the Italian-American Middle Class

Eventually, the relationship between immigrant workers and organized labor changed dramatically.

Italian workers who had sometimes been excluded from established unions became members of those unions.

Their children and grandchildren became skilled tradesmen, union officials, civil servants, teachers, firefighters, police officers, construction workers, longshoremen, transit workers, manufacturing employees, and public-sector workers.

For many families, union wages and benefits helped make possible something their immigrant grandparents could barely imagine:

a stable American middle-class life.

A home.

A car.

Education for their children.

Health benefits.

Retirement.

Paid vacations.

And enough disposable income to enjoy the country their ancestors had helped build.

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Labor Day in America and Festa dei Lavoratori in Italy

Italian Americans also occupy an interesting position between two labor traditions.

In the United States, Labor Day is celebrated on the first Monday of September.

In Italy, workers are honored on May 1, known as Festa del Lavoro or Festa dei Lavoratori.

The dates differ, but the basic idea is similar:

work deserves recognition because workers contribute enormously to the life, prosperity, and stability of society.

For Italian Americans, that gives us two opportunities each year to remember the dignity of labor.

May 1 connects us with Italy.

Labor Day connects us with the American experience.

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Italian-American Heritage Is Also Working-Class Heritage

Italian-American culture is frequently—and rightly—celebrated through:

food,

wine,

music,

religious feasts,

family traditions,

Little Italys,

regional customs,

art,

festivals,

and entrepreneurship.

But our heritage is also the heritage of the worker.

The miner.

The fisherman.

The railroad laborer.

The stonemason.

The seamstress.

The bricklayer.

The dockworker.

The barber.

The baker.

The factory worker.

The construction worker.

The farmer.

The shopkeeper who worked twelve hours and opened the doors again the next morning.

Those people built Italian America.

And many literally helped build America itself.

The Library of Congress documents Italians working in mines, quarries, ports, farms, factories, and other industries throughout the United States while also participating in many of the major labor struggles of the early twentieth century.

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This Labor Day, Remember the Italian-American Worker

So when we celebrate Labor Day, perhaps we should remember something beyond the last barbecue of summer.

Remember Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor, standing beside immigrant textile workers in Lawrence.

Remember Carlo Tresca, organizing workers and later speaking against Fascism.

Remember Pietro and Maria Botto, whose Italian immigrant home became an important gathering place in the Paterson Silk Strike.

Remember Angela Bambace, who rose from garment labor activism into union leadership.

Remember Luigi Antonini and the Italian-American labor leaders who combined pride in their heritage with participation in American civic life.

Remember the Italian women working in garment factories.

Remember the miners.

The quarrymen.

The fishermen.

The railroad crews.

The farmworkers.

The builders.

Remember the Italian mothers and children who died at Ludlow.

And remember the countless Italian immigrants whose names will never appear in history books.

Their labor helped build railroads, factories, homes, churches, businesses, docks, farms, streets, and communities throughout the United States.

For Italian Americans, Labor Day is part of our heritage too.

Our ancestors did not usually arrive in America wealthy or powerful.

For many, the American Dream began with a lunch pail, a sewing machine, a shovel, a hammer, a fishing net, a factory whistle, or a small storefront—and the determination to make sure their children had opportunities they themselves had never known.

That deserves to be remembered.

Buona Festa del Lavoro—and Happy Labor Day from The Italian Californian.

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Labor Day Q&A

Q: What is Labor Day?
A: Labor Day is an American holiday honoring the social and economic contributions of workers. The first widely recognized Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on September 5, 1882, and Congress made the first Monday in September a national holiday in 1894.

Q: Were Italian immigrants involved in the American labor movement?
A: Yes. Italian immigrants participated in major labor struggles involving textile mills, mines, quarries, garment factories, cigar factories, and other industries. Some became nationally known organizers and union leaders.

Q: Who were some important Italian-American labor figures?
A: Arturo Giovannitti, Joseph Ettor, Carlo Tresca, Angela Bambace, Luigi Antonini, and immigrant workers Pietro and Maria Botto are among the notable Italians and Italian Americans connected with American labor history.

Q: Were all Italian Americans supporters of unions or radical politics?
A: No. Italian-American workers held many different political, religious, and economic views. Some were union activists or radicals, while others were politically conservative, opposed strikes, became employers themselves, or had little interest in organized labor.

Q: Does Italy celebrate Labor Day?
A: Yes. Italy observes Festa del Lavoro or Festa dei Lavoratori on May 1, while the United States celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September.

Q: Why should Italian Americans remember Labor Day?
A: Because the Italian-American story is deeply connected to work. Generations of Italian immigrants and their descendants helped build the country's industries, infrastructure, businesses, and communities—and some also helped shape the American labor movement.

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Sources & Further Reading

For readers who want to explore this history in greater depth, these are particularly useful starting points:

History of Labor Day — U.S. Department of Labor

Working Across the Country: Italian Immigration — Library of Congress

Paterson, New Jersey: America's Silk City — National Park Service

ILGWU Historical Timeline — Cornell University

ILGWU International Affairs and Luigi Antonini — Cornell University

Italian American - Native American Friendship Gathering: A Proposal

October is Italian American Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the history, culture, traditions, achievements, and contributions of Italian Americans. Just one month later, November is Native American Heritage Month, honoring the histories, cultures, traditions, resilience, and contributions of Native peoples across the United States.

That back-to-back placement on the calendar feels especially meaningful for this proposal. Rather than allowing October and November to become separate cultural observances—or allowing the Columbus controversy to dominate how Italian Americans and Native Americans relate to one another—we believe these two heritage months can also become an opportunity to build a bridge.
Proposal: An Italian American–Native American Gathering in San Diego

The Italian Californian would like to propose a new community gathering in San Diego—one designed to bring local Italian Americans and Native Americans together around the same table.

Rather than allowing disagreements over Christopher Columbus or other historical controversies to define the relationship between our communities, we would like to create an opportunity to meet one another as neighbors, learn from one another, and discover the values and traditions we may share.

Our initial idea is for an Italian American–Native American luncheon or dinner centered on food, culture, conversation, and friendship.

The gathering could begin as a smaller, invitation-only event bringing together leaders, elders, educators, cultural representatives, clergy, businesspeople, artists, and other members of both communities. Participants could share traditional foods, explain customs and family traditions, discuss the challenges facing their communities, and explore areas where cooperation may be possible.

Another possibility would be a larger event open to the public, featuring food, cultural presentations, storytelling, music, artisans, historical displays, and moderated conversations.

Either way, we believe the most important principle is that this should not simply be an Italian-American event to which Native Americans are invited. It should be planned collaboratively and belong equally to both communities.

There are many possible subjects we could explore together: preserving cultural traditions and languages, passing heritage to younger generations, food and family customs, historic preservation, stereotypes and misunderstandings, community advocacy, cultural education, the importance of elders and ancestors, and the relationship between identity, community, and place.

The Columbus controversy does not need to be ignored. Italian Americans and Native Americans may have very different historical perspectives on Columbus and what he represents. But perhaps we can acknowledge those differences without allowing one historical debate to prevent us from learning about one another.

Before debating our differences, perhaps we should first sit down together.

We would like your feedback.

Would you attend an event like this?

Should the first gathering be a small invitation-only dinner or luncheon, or should it begin as a larger public cultural event?

What subjects, foods, traditions, speakers, or activities would you like to see included?

Most importantly, The Italian Californian would like to hear from Italian-American organizations, Native American tribes, cultural organizations, museums, educators, community leaders, artists, chefs, businesses, and individuals in the San Diego region who may be interested in helping us develop this idea.

We are only proposing the concept at this stage. We want any future gathering to be created through genuine conversation and collaboration with members of both communities.

If your organization would be interested in participating, advising, hosting, sponsoring, providing food or cultural programming, or simply joining the discussion, please contact The Italian Californian or leave us a comment.

Email: theitaliancalifornian23@gmail.com

🔗 The Italian Californian: https://theitaliancalifornian3.blogspot.com/

Let us know what you think.

Could October's Italian American Heritage Month and November's Native American Heritage Month become not only two celebrations of heritage, but also an annual season of dialogue, cultural exchange, and friendship between our communities?

#ItalianCalifornian #ItalianAmericanHeritageMonth #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth #ItalianAmerican #NativeAmerican #SanDiego #IndigenousCulture #CulturalExchange #CommunityBuilding #SanDiegoCommunity