Transnational Italians and the Culture of Everyday Life (McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History)

Departing from conventional community-based histories, this innovative work examines how immigrant identities are transformed into transnational ones.Focusing on families from the Campania region of Italy who settled in Toronto, Ontario, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, after 1945, Transnational Italians and the Culture of Everyday Life demonstrates why ethnic identity is best understood as a transnational construct - shaped by migrants’ mobility and the global dispersal of extended families and kin networks. Drawing from more than two dozen oral histories, Abril Liberatori places migrants’ narratives at the centre of her book.They are complemented by a range of archival materials - including song lyrics, recipes, and advertisements - to show how transnationalism is articulated through everyday cultural practices around food, music, gender, and language.Foodways shaped identity through importing goods from Campania and mixing those with local foods and traditional methods; Neapolitan song