Why are there so few Italian-Americans on the West Coast?

January 16, 2009 11:54 AM

Why are there so few Italian-Americans on the West Coast?

For that matter, why are they so heavily concentrated in the urban Northeast? Is this concentration the result of closer family ties? Tighter-knit communities?

I pose this question because most American ethnic groups seem to have spread out pretty widely throughout the country but from what I can see, Italian-Americans seem to be concentrated in the Northeast and Florida.

Why is this so?

Many thanks in advance.

posted by jason's_planet to society & culture (20 comments total)

Well, assuming that Italian families have values that would include kids not moving too far away from family when they grow up, that could have a lot to do with it. Also, if infrastructure that benefits a particular ethnic group exists (groceries that carry foods that they use, media, even perhaps ethnic nepotism in the workplace), why leave?

I think that other ethnic groups leave their original landing spot for economic reasons. Maybe Italians haven't had to? For example, Mexicans moving beyond California and the Southwest for a better selection of jobs.
posted by k8t at 12:11 PM on January 16

Slight sidetrack here, but anyone know what's up with that odd red corner of southeastern Colorado?
posted by CommonSense at 12:12 PM on January 16

My great-grandparents moved to Cleveland because there was a Italian community established there. You did't want to be the only goddamn Whop on the block or there'd be trouble.

Once in Northern Ohio, our family stayed there because... that's where our family was. In the years since my great grandparents passed away, my family has begun to fracture and spin off to other parts of the country, but that's only in the last 20 years or so. I imagine that many Italian-American stories are similar.
posted by cimbrog at 12:15 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Alright, I got curious enough to Google the Colorado (specifically, Trinidad, CO) anomaly. Interesting.
posted by CommonSense at 12:18 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

The east coast is a lot closer to Italy.

It was pretty expensive to move across the country during the time when most of the Italian immigrants came to the us, and why would you? There's people who will hire you in the big east coast cities.
posted by aubilenon at 12:20 PM on January 16

I don't think that it's a big mystery. People tend to like to live where they have some commonality with their neighbors. Since they were coming from Europe, they naturally landed on the east coast and built communities there and didn't want to move to places where they didn't have any community support. You could as easily ask why there are so few third or fourth generation Asians on the east coast.
posted by octothorpe at 12:22 PM on January 16

There actually appears to be a pretty good concentration of Ital-Ams on the West Coast; it's just not as dense as in the east coast.

But I suspect it has to do with immigration patterns for Italian Americans, and their tight-knit communities. Malcolm Gladwell discusses an Ital-Am city in Pennsylvania called Roseto in his new book. Roseto is apparently well known for it being such an insular Italian-American community.
posted by jabberjaw at 12:23 PM on January 16

most American ethnic groups seem to have spread out pretty widely throughout the country

Really? I'm not sure that's true.

Also, California is listed as fourth in the ranking of states with Italian-American population. It doesn't appear to have a very high density because the population of California is over 36 million.
posted by ambrosia at 12:24 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

most American ethnic groups seem to have spread out pretty widely throughout the country

I think this is a false assumption, actually. It's probably pretty true of immigrant groups who came before the mass turn-of-the-century rush, but the groups who arrived around then are still pretty tied to certain areas. No one has Poles like Chicago, Russians like New York, Bosnians like St Louis, and so on. People have spread out, obviously - Kansas City and Chicago have distinct Italian-American communities too. But many ethnic groups are concentrated in certain areas, not just Italian-Americans.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 12:41 PM on January 16

I'd be curious to know how the emigration patterns differed between places like Italy and Poland or Ireland or China at different times. Mostly I'm thinking in regards to men leaving the county alone during hard times to find work as labourers in the Americas. I would expect that their settlement patterns would be more scattered if they travelled, searching for work and then called for their families when they found it as opposed to entire families leaving to join other families from their region, then I'd expect them to stick together in the new world.

As an extreme example, I'm thinking how Chinese men were able to come to Canada to work on the railroads but all kinds of barriers were put up to keep them from bringing their families. When they finally had earned or borrowed enough to pay the extortive head tax, many would have moved on to different industries throughout the country. It seems like every little town in Canada has only a handful of families with a chinese background. There's always that single 50-odd year old Chinese/Canadian restaurant.
posted by bonobothegreat at 12:48 PM on January 16

Joe Dimmagio was from and spent a good chunk of his life as part of a substantial Italian American community that exists in and around San Francisco.
posted by BobbyDigital at 1:19 PM on January 16

Well, assuming that Italian families have values that would include kids not moving too far away from family when they grow up, that could have a lot to do with it.

I think this is part of it. My cousins (we're all Italian-American) lived at home until they were in their 30s. (They're about 40 now.) There's a pretty big Greek population, where I grew up, too, and the sticking-close-to-home thing seemed pretty pervasive in that community, too.
posted by Airhen at 2:05 PM on January 16

Well, my Italian relatives moved to the West Coast from Montana. Maybe most of the East Coasters didn't want to move to a warmer climate?
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:25 PM on January 16

From what I've read, it also has to do with the waves of immigration that came to the US. Later groups of people (especially if they were sizeable) moved farther West (if they were coming from Europe) b/c there was more opportunity / space "at the frontier".

I believe that explains why there're a lot of Scandinavian and Germanic people in the mid-West. The English, Irish, and Italians had been in the North East and established there.

Also, don't forget that New York and Boston were big immigration ports.

Red
posted by reddot at 3:33 PM on January 16

I think there's a bit of a false assumption here. San Francisco historically had a significant Italian community. The Bank of America was founded as the "Bank of Italy," and of course, you can visit Ghirardelli Square, etc. San Diego has it's own "Little Italy" which historically was the home of the tuna fleet.

The thing is, California has grown so much since those days. Even then, California had so many, many immigrants from many places. The massive population growth of the state has come in large part after the big wave of late 19th Century and early 20th Century Italian immigration to the US.

FWIW, my Italian ancestors took the boat the New Orleans.
posted by Robert Angelo at 3:48 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Seconding Robert Angelo about San Francisco.

Seattle also had a significant Italian population in the early 1900s. Many settled in the Rainier Valley south of downtown which generated the nickname "Garlic Gulch" (see this page about halfway down--I think the old fruit trees in my yard are a relic of those "large productive farms").

White people from other ethnic groups had settled the city, though, and at the time that the Italian folks migrated here there were other ethnic groups becoming established as well (primarily Asian).
posted by Sublimity at 5:20 PM on January 16

Part of my family is Italian, and both my grandmother's and grandfather's families came to Los Angeles in the late 1800s/early 1900s. My great-grandfather, originally from an area near Genoa, was the first Italian consul-general in L.A., and later owned an Italian grocery store and winery (Piuma wines, which alas, went bankrupt in 1952, when much of the Southern California wine business had dried up or else left for more northern parts of the state).

My grandmother's family left the Italian Alps north of Lake Como and first settled in North Hollywood in 1902, where my other great-grandfather owned a dairy. This was back in the days when it was a bit of a trek to get from NoHo to downtown L.A.!

About ten years ago or so one of my relatives told me that there was a group of people who wanted to start an Italian American Heritage Museum on Olvera St. in downtown L.A. [More info in the post from philippa on this page.] Most people now know Olvera St. as being a focal point of L.A.'s Mexican heritage, but apparently in the early 1900s, it was also where the city's Italian population hung out. (Who knew?) I do know that there's a Roman Catholic church near there that was historically Italian—St. Peter's, perhaps? My grandparents were desultory Catholics, at best, so they didn't have strong connections with the church—I'm operating from hazy childhood memory, here. :-)

It's good to know that the Italian community in L.A. still manages to support an Italian-language newspaper, L'Italo-Americano (though they also cover other areas of the West Coast, too). My grandmother used to read that paper every week when I was young (reading it with her gave me at least a working knowledge of the language, too). Their website—which I'd never visited before—has an article about a very distant relative who just turned 105. Hmm, there must be some good genes in the family tree! :-)
posted by kentk at 5:33 PM on January 16

There are a lot of Italian-Americans on the West Coast, as other commenters have noted.

But the other thing to look at when seeking to understand why immigrant populations settled where they did is that the great waves of immigration into the US from roughly 1850-1930 were not consistent numbers of people from the same places for seventy-eighty years. Instead, the populations were drawn from different regions for different reasons - political oppression, pogroms, famine, changes in law, etc. The places sending the greatest numbers of immigrants changed significantly with each passing decade. Irish, Scandinavians, and Germans arrived earlier in greater numbers. Eastern Europeans and Italians arrived later in greater numbers.

With each group, settlement patterns were somewhat different because when they arrived in the US, they encountered different economic conditions with each passing few years. Different public works projects were taking place. Different skills sets were required. And different economic centers were developing in different regions. People went where opportunities were - especially when the opportunities matched their skill sets. The requirement on the East Coast for stonemasons and plasterers - a skill set that many Italians had - was almost unquenchable during the Gilded Age. Why leave? Garment manufacturing and shoe manufacturing centers were booming on the East Coast. Agriculture was booming on the frontier - but that attracted people with some agricultural understanding - much more a background of Scandinavians and Germans than for most migrating Italians, who came from urban centres.

It's hard to make generalizations, but patterns do emerge. The cultural penetration of the Italian-American presence on the Eastern seaboard is perhaps more pervasive than on the West Coast, but that could be because the presence was larger and began earlier. it's certainly not because there's no Italian presence on the West Coast because there is. But even when talking about "Italians," it's important to remember that the nation-state Italy was fairly new in the late 1800s. People from Italy did not see themselves as all sharing the same culture - in fact they really didn't share the same culture - north to south, and sea to sea. The cuisine, dialect, and culture of different kinds of Italians is different today and was more pronouncedly so in the late 1800s.
posted by Miko at 7:27 PM on January 16

We covered this exact phenomenon and other similar phenomena in a ethnic relations sociology class I just took. Mostly everything came from this text: http://www.amazon.com/Race-Ethnic-Relations-American-Perspectives/dp/049550436X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232175622&sr=8-2

If memory serves, Italian-Americans started out living the NE because that's where the jobs were. As additional Italians arrived in the US, it was only natural for them to migrate to areas where other Italians were. Oftentimes, they already knew these Italians. It is not uncommon to have (parts of) entire villages migrate to a single area in the USA. People move to where their existing networks are, where people they already know are. On a personal basis, I have seen this same phenomenon with Chinese people in Canada.
posted by demagogue at 11:02 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond!

Thanks!
posted by jason's_planet at 11:45 AM on January 27