Migrant Marketplaces : Food and Italians in North and South America

Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces—urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways. Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Today middle class consumers in the Americas drive the transatlantic trade in Italian foods associated with refined consumption--award-winning regional wines, herb infused olive oils, heirloom San Marzano canned tomatoes, syrupy balsamic vinegars, and pungent slabs of aged parmigiano cheese. At the same time, pizza and pasta are considered typical fare in the U.S. and Argentina. Both developments reflect major changes since the late 19th century when Italy was associated with less luxurious items, mainly mass proletariat migrants, food staple exports, and an unpalatable, garlic-saturated cuisine. During this time of mass labor migration, it was migrant demand for homeland tastes that opened up and sustained transnational trade routes in Italian food items, routes that linked Italians in migrant marketplaces in New York, Buenos Aires, and other cities of the Americas to Italy and to each other. This historical journey from labor migrants to middle-class consumers is a story about international migrants, about the foods and consumption habits that traveled with them, and about how the presence of both mobile people and products ultimately transformed the identities and consumer practices of migrants and non-migrants alike. This book examines how connections between Italian people and products in all three countries influenced migrants' consumer experiences during the age of mass migration"-- Provided by publisher "Today middle class consumers in the Americas drive the transatlantic trade in Italian foods associated with refined consumption ... award-winning regional wines, herb infused olive oils, heirloom San Marzano canned tomatoes, syrupy balsamic vinegars, and pungent slabs of aged parmigiano cheese. At the same time, pizza and pasta are considered typical fare in the U.S. and Argentina. Both developments reflect major changes since the late 19th century when Italy was associated with less luxurious items, mainly mass proletariat migrants, food staple exports, and an unpalatable, garlic-saturated cuisine. During this time of mass labor migration, it was migrant demand for homeland tastes that opened up and sustained transnational trade routes in Italian food items, routes that linked Italians in migrant marketplaces in New York, Buenos Aires, and other cities of the Americas to Italy and to each other. This historical journey from labor migrants to middle-class consumers is a story about international migrants, about the foods and consumption habits that traveled with them, and about how the presence of both mobile people and products ultimately transformed the identities and consumer practices of migrants and non-migrants alike. This book examines how connections between Italian people and products in all three countries influenced migrants' consumer experiences during the age of mass migration" ..