Tuesday,
January 15, 2008
"Soft Earth - Black Grape":
Experience of Italian Winemakers in
The
ANNOTICO Report
"Soft
Earth Black Grape" provides evidence that previously
deterministic assumption found in much of the available scholarly literature
that Piedmontese immigrants successfully
transplanted a shared, traditional wine culture to
striking geographic, climatic, and environmental
similarities between the place they had left behind and the
To
the Contrary,
None of the successful entrepreneurs had any enological training prior to
immigration, let alone the skills that a modern wine industry would have
required. Lacking the initial capital, the would-be winemakers typically
purchased marginal and poor tracts of land, which scarcely resembled the hilly
landscapes of their native surroundings. Intensive immigrant labor, first and
foremost, transformed what would have been hopeless efforts into profitable
investments.
The
book also touches on the Racial Discrimination against Italians and how
Prohibition effected the Italian grape growers.
Soft Earth
Black Grape:
Labor,
Social Capital, and Race in the Experience of Italian Winemakers in
By
Simone Cinotto
At
the beginning of the twentieth century, the Italian-Swiss Colony of
Its
director, a former pharmacist named Pietro Carlo Rossi, was widely
considered one of the brightest minds in the
At
the same time, Secondo Guasti,
the founder of the Italian
Vineyard Company in Cucamonga (some fifty miles east of Los
Angeles), could claim to possess the largest vineyards in the entire world. And
in 1933, Ernest and Julio Gallo established the Gallo Winery
in
first- and second-generation Italian immigrants who had come to
Why
did such a negligible number of immigrants from a single Italian region have
such a dramatic impact on a major trade in
striking geographic, climatic, and
environmental similarities between the place they had left behind and the
None
of the successful entrepreneurs discussed in the book had any enological
training prior to immigration, let alone the skills that a modern wine industry
would have required.
Lacking
the initial capital, the would-be winemakers typically purchased marginal
and poor tracts of land, which scarcely resembled the hilly landscapes
of their native surroundings. Intensive immigrant labor, first and
foremost, transformed what would have been hopeless efforts into profitable
investments.
In
fact, it was social capital - their ability to access limited resources like
credit and cheap labor through personal, ethnic, and family social networks -
that gave Piedmontese
winemakers the initial edge over competitors who were richer in financial
capital. As for labor
relations, they could not only take advantage of a constant
source of skilled manpower - supplied by professional chain migrations from
Race
was a major factor. As opposed to what happened to their more numerous
counterparts in industrial cities like New York and Chicago - where a major
in-migration of Blacks from the South did not take place until the
interwar years- from the very beginning (in the 1870s), Italian immigrants
entered a complicated racial mosaic in California that included a significant
population of people of color
(Chinese, Latinos, and later Japanese, African Americans, and
Filipinos).
Scientific
racism and a racial division of labor caused them to be placed in what labor
historians David Roediger and James Barrett have
called in-between jobs: unskilled, low-paid occupations in agriculture,
destined for immigrants from Southern and
whose racial identity - and sometimes even whiteness - was
disputed. In 1911, the survey on "The Wine-Making
Industry of
On
the other hand, due to the presence of "non-white" groups that were
permanently marginalized and discriminated against (which in viticulture
meant being assigned the most demanding, dangerous, and tiresome
temporary jobs for minimal salaries), Italian immigrants enjoyed the wages
of whiteness - the privileges inherent in the fact of never being at the very
bottom of a racially-determined social ladder.
Piedmontese winemakers resorted vigorously to paternalism,
non-monetary benefits, and open discrimination against their
"non-white" workers in order to secure the loyal cooperation of their
coethnic employees. [ This was
similar to the Jewish "We help each other mentality.]
Race
was also an important factor in determining the success of Piedmontese
winemakers over other competing Italian groups. Racial discrimination among
compatriots had been a feature of Italian life
since the political unification of the country. In
again from what was happening in the rest of the
Their early
take-over of the wine niche provided the Piedmontese
with a dramatic advantage over later comers, which they transformed into
cultural capital- the narrative of the "Piedmontese
as skilled winemaker." Ironically, the
historiography of Italian immigration to
Matters
of race further overlapped with the accumulation of social and cultural capital in determining the consolidation of
the Piedmontese presence in the
foreignness to the production, commerce, and consumption of
it from the 1820s on. In the cultural and political climate
of World War I and its aftermath, it was exactly the association
of wine, along with other alcoholic beverages, to any "alien
force" present in American society that led to National Prohibition
(not incidentally concurrent with the racist Immigration Acts of 1921-1924,
mainly directed against Italians and other Southern and Eastern
European national groups).
Spurring
the retreat of German Americans (who were especially targeted
by the 100 percent Americanism of WWI and the Red Scare of 1919-1921)
and other competitors from the wine trade, Prohibition was paradoxically the
main factor in creating a distinctive
Italian niche in viticulture. Because of the
dispensation in the Volstead Act that allowed the domestic production of
wine for selfconsumption,
Piedmontese winemakers turned into grape growers and
shippers, and they relied on a commercial network of ethnic growers,
distributors, and auctioneers to flood the markets of immigrant
consumers in enclaves of the eastern industrial cities. Much of the wine produced out of the grapes they shipped
eventually entered the illegal market. In fact, the
illegality of transforming those grapes into wine for commercial purposes
supported the price of the product sent off by the Piedmontese
viticulturists to their fellow-countrymen in the east, and in turn allowed
them not only to survive Prohibition, but also to gain even further shares of
the market and to emerge at the time of the Repeal as major actors in the
wine business. Prohibition frustrated the dream
of earlier Piedmontese entrepreneurs to create a
national market for wine, forcing them to rely on a relatively vast, but
still limited and risky, ethnic market. Even the Ga llos, who
eventually realized the dream of their first-generation
predecessors, had to depend on an ethnic market for several years: their
early
products "cheap and fortified wines" were
designed for and mostly consumed by poor consumers in the Black ghettoes
of the decaying inner cities. It was only in the late 1960s that their efforts
to turn wine into a mainstream American beverage could be considered
successful.
Rich
in anecdotes and oral histories, and complete with more than one hundred
photographs, "Soft Earth Black Grape" is an interesting case study of
the social history of wine, the history of ethnic entrepreneurship, and
the history of Italian immigration in the United
States.
The
Author is a member of the
History at the
David
Thelen Prize awarded by the Organization of American
Historians for the best article on American
history published in a
language other than English, and was published in The
Journal of American History. He has been Fellow of the Italian Academy
for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (2004), Visiting Fellow
of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies
at Cornell University (2000), Visiting Scholar of the History Department at
Columbia University (1998, 2000, 2007) and Resident Fellow of The Balch
Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia (1998, 2000).
SOURCE:
H-ITAM@H-NET.MSU.EDU
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