Private lives, public identities: The Italians of Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940

This dissertation examines the process of immigration, community, and ethnic identity formation of Italians. It documents the meaning people attach to ethnic identity, how it evolves over time, and analyzes the flow between public and private domains by weaving gender throughout the discussion. Whereas the majority of ethnicity studies in the United States have focused on urban areas, this study looks at an ethnic population in a mid-size industrial town situated in a rural agricultural region. Adaptation was place specific. The new immigrants changed the social and political isolation of Reading and the city and region influenced the texture of the Italian community that evolved. Personal narratives and material culture data provide insight into understanding inside systems of knowledge and belief, in other words, how people construct their own history. This emic or folk view as well as symbols (both visual and verbal) encoded in the interrelated spheres of public and private life, provide key indications of intergroup and intragroup relations and cultural boundary creation, maintenance, and change over time. Differences (using the structural categories of gender, class, age, and generation) are revealed in ethnic experience by studying individuals in terms of their life histories and placing those histories in a broader framework of regional, national, and global economic-historical change. This approach reinforces the idea that ethnicity is an ideological strategy that changes over time and involves individual choice. The discussion moves from village life in Italy to settlement and family life in Reading, to the larger spheres of neighborhood and work, to organizational and institutional networks, and finally to the sphere of pageantry and ceremony. By transforming their self-identity as immigrants to Italian Americans, the generations created a unique past in Berks County. Italians created and shaped a collective history distinct from the mainstream cultural consensus through public ritual events--events of pageantry, ceremony and celebration. Over time, a popular ethnic memory emerged achieved through symbolic language, imagery, and enactment with which the diverse Italian population could identify