Worlds Apart: Italian and Latino Immigrants in the 20th Century Bay Area

Italian-American immigration to the Bay Area cannot be studied in a vacuum. Any immigrant group will necessarily encounter not only the host culture but also a myriad of other minority and immigrant peoples. This is no different for Italian-Americans, who over the course of their century-long arrival to the Bay Area encountered many other demographic groups, which had varying effects on their status as a people. While the first Italian inhabitants of the “Model Colony,” may have found themselves surrounded by immigrants from China, Japan, and Northern Europe, giving them a unique situation to evolve from, later Italian immigrants who principally arrived between 1950 and 1970 stumbled upon a very different landscape. With the end of the Second World War, the death throes of the American government’s Mexican migrant worker programs, and later the establishment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the landscape looked very different. Italian immigrants would have found themselves in a sea of other Southern Europeans seeking economic prosperity, Latin-American migrants working their way northward, and the beginning of widespread immigration from Asia, something previously unheard of. It is these Latin American immigrants and their interaction with Italians that is the principal focus of this project.  

By finding commonalities between both communities the immigration experience as a whole can be explored from a new perspective which emphasizes continuity and similarity, building greater unions between disparate groups. This project’s goal is to track the ways in which both communities interacted with one another, especially at work and in religious institutions like Catholic schools and churches. It will also evaluate the contrasting process of integration between the two groups, and cultural values each group emphasized keeping despite immigration. Finally, the reaction of those already here to new arrivals is also of unique importance. This will include the Anglo-American majority, Italians and Latinos who arrived earlier, and other ethnic minority communities. As such, the questions this project aims to answer are threefold, in what ways did Italian and Latino-Americans interact, how were these interactions guided by cultural similarity and difference, and how have these interactions affected their descendants.

Credit: Tyler Pineda