Scholars so often focus almost solely on the obvious Italian "food" connection, and seem to forget that food is only a "lubricant/facilitator" to foster the closeness to  "family" and "friends".

Also, IMHO, the importance of "festivals" and "bocce" in the socializing process seems often inaccurately overlooked.

Furthermore, seldom do I hear the mention of "opera" as a social stimulant, since even in the modest circumstances I came from, there was constant conversation about opera, and the pride in feeling that Italians "owned" opera.

What other significant Italian "Identity" Markers can you think of???

Thanks to H-ITAM, Prof. Ben Lawton, Purdue, Editor

Drawing on documents produced and collected throughout the mid-twentieth century by Leonard Covello, Simone Cinotto describes the role food played in the development of Italian American ethnic identity.

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/91.2/cinotto.html?pr=jah912

Excerpted: The Covello Papers is a collection of documents that has abundant source material on the relationship between eating habits and ethnicity in the Italian American community of New York City during the interwar years.

The collection was gathered from 1907 to 1974 by Leonard Covello, an Italian American teacher and scholar who worked in the northeastern area of Manhattan called East Harlem. Today the neighborhood hosts mainly Latinos and is better known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio.

During the 1920s and 1930s, however, the neighborhood was home to as many as ninety thousand first-and second-generation Italian immigrants; it was the largest Italian American enclave in the United States.

Covello's collection consists of interviews he conducted with the Italian immigrants of East Harlem and their children, and written assignments by his students, most of them second-generation Italian Americans, which became the basis of Covello's 1944 New York University doctoral dissertation on the cultural background of Italian American students in New York schools.

It makes it possible to reconstruct representations of Italian American ethnicity enacted by means of the food metaphor. They show how immigrants drew heavily on symbols of food and conviviality as they forged collective self-representations of their being Italian in America.

An analysis of the collection must take into account varying perspectives. These would have to do not only with the immigrants, whose subjective visions of the past and present related to their particular needs, dilemmas, and aspirations at the time, but also with the creator of the collection, who invested the documents with his own individual demands.

In fact, the Italian American identity expressed in the food metaphor is multifaceted, as a reflection of the different, sometimes contrasting, ideological content attached to it by the various voices.

The Italian American identity narrated and internalized by the immigrant parents of East Harlem was different from that of their American-born children.

Also different was the identity conceived by Covello, himself an immigrant from a family of semiliterate manual laborers, but also a reform intellectual with important connections in public life and a distinguished voice in many ethnic and civic associations. . . .

Simone Cinotto | Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the History of Eating
http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/
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http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/
jah/91.2/cinotto.html?pr=jah912