DISTANT LOYALTIES: WORLD WAR I AND THE ITALIAN SOUTH ATLANTIC

This dissertation focuses on the impacts of World War I on Italian immigrant communities in the metropolitan areas of Buenos Aires, Montevideo and São Paulo. It uses the period of the war, and the diverse responses to the conflict by immigrants and their institutions of civil society, to highlight patterns of social cohesion and division within Italian overseas communities. It centers its analysis on a pro-war immigrant mobilization influenced by Italian nationalism and an anti-war movement shaped by working-class ideologies that emphasized Internationalism. It therefore considers the tangible connections and sentimental relationships that existed between Italian immigrants in South America and political and intellectual leaders in Italy, a nation-state that existed only from the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, through its study of three immigrant communities, this dissertation reviews interactions and comparisons among those communities as they related to the pro- and anti-war efforts. It uses the transformative period of World War I to trace and track patterns of interaction and “distant loyalties” in an area it refers to as the Italian South Atlantic