10. Immigrants

Although it can accurately be said that Italians were the first Europeans to emigrate to America-think of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci-the first major wave of emigration from Italy to America occurred in the late 1870s, coinciding with the time Italy declared itself a unified nation. That unity, however, came at a great price. Living conditions in the area south of Rome known as the Mezzogiorno (where eighty percent of the immigrants came from) were deplorable; poverty, unemployment and famine were widespread. The earliest immigrants came to America not so much to get rich but merely to survive.

However, it did not take long for "La Merica," as the early immigrants called it, to become known as a Promised Land in which money was easy to be had, where one was free to start over and make a new, prosperous life. The new arrivals, lonely for family and friends back home, wrote exaggerated accounts of the "good life" that lured more and more Italians to the ports of Genoa or Napoli, where they booked passage for the arduous sea journey to the New World.

The truth, of course, was quite different. Reality became apparent to immigrants as soon as they arrived on Ellis Island, where they were detained in densely overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. They were typically held there for many days while their papers were processed and their physical and mental health were being assessed. Many people's names were changed. It's no wonder the place became known to them as L'Isola delle Lacrime-the Island of Tears.

Once past the ordeal of initial processing, immigrants confronted the chaos and cultural shock of New York City, a world as far apart from the rural towns and villages of southern Italy as one could imagine. It was a world in which they were extremely vulnerable, rarely knowing the language or having the street savvy to survive. And yet they came in greater and greater numbers throughout the first decades of the new century. By 1935 there were more than 5 million Italians in America, a number of immigrants surpassed only by the Germans, who had been arriving throughout the nineteeth century. They began to settle in "Little Italys" throughout the country, although by far the greatest concentration remained in New York City.

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