The unity of the Italian family has an economic as well as an emotional basis. Father, mother, and children often form a single industrial unit. “I works for me fader,” says the urchin whom you meet on the stairs carrying a pail of coal to a customer. Visit the Sabbio family and you find Mrs. Sabbio presiding at the bar in a small saloon. In response to your question whether her husband owns the saloon, she answers, “Both of us, we work together.”
In the dark, damp little coal and ice cellars, the cluttered tailor and cobbler shops, the grocery and candy stores, at the fruit stands, and in the saloons, all members of the family take a hand and help to bring in the common income. Stroll along Ninth Avenue and you may see sometimes one member of the family “on the job,” sometimes another; at busy times, all are there. The mother is almost always on duty, delegating the housekeeping and tending of babies to the daughter at home. But very often the baby is also in evidence, and is unceremoniously dumped from his mother’s or sister’s arms into a perambulator when attention must be given to a customer.
Similarly, the Italian of this West Side community makes common financial cause with his relatives and friends in business enterprises. He is likely to be in partnership with his father-in-law or one of his numerous brothers or cousins in the ownership of dray-horses, of a candy or notion store, or a stand. Whenever an Italian begins to thrive in any kind of joint business one may at once be assured that his relatives are “in on it.” And one may be equally sure that in times of hard luck or slack work the temporary deficit of the family will be met by relatives and friends. This is taken as a matter of course. “In Italy everybody helps everybody else” is the answer you receive if you express surprise. If the head of the household falls ill, the neighbors drop in daily to see how he is, and rarely does one leave without first slipping into the sick man’s hand a nickel, a dime, or perhaps a quarter. Not the slightest thought of charity is entailed by the act, either in the giver’s mind or the receiver’s. It is understood, however, that the act of kindness will be reciprocated when occasion arises.
When the social worker visits such a home and notes that the signs of real want are lacking, in spite of the fact that the sole income is the $4.00 or $5.00 a week which the daughter earns, the suspicion arises that these people must have profited in business before the father’s illness and put by more than they will admit. Then the next-door neighbor enters, a coin is dropped quite openly on the bedcover, and the social worker departs with a deeper insight into the ways and character of the Italian. Small wonder that charitable societies of this district have comparatively few Italian families in their charge.[84] So common is the feeling of loyalty and responsibility among them that it is like the old tribal sense of oneness, an entire merging of the personal in the group interest, and the group’s bearing as its own the burden of the individual.
The protection and watchfulness of the family are constantly about the girl. And the family circle from which surveillance proceeds is usually intact unless death has entered it. Only in rare cases is a “broken home” the result of desertion. The Italian does not abandon his wife and family, nor is his relation to his children that of breadwinner only. He shares with the mother the intimate care and close watchfulness over them. It is always “I ask my father” with these young Italian girls, and in spite of the over-strictness which so many of them resent and from which they take refuge in deception, there is between the Italian father and his daughter a close degree of companionship seldom found in Americans of their position. Perhaps this is due to the fact that he is more in touch with American life than the shut-in Italian mother, whose life is almost wholly occupied with child-bearing and child-burying.
The eagerness of most Italian parents for the arrival of a daughter’s fourteenth birthday strikes one with no little pathos when one bears in mind how pitifully small is the equipment of the child at that age grown up in so restricted an environment. The girl herself is as eager to go to work as her parents are to have her. She takes it for granted that she should help in the family income. Carlotta gets a job not because she feels the need of self-support as an expression of individuality, of self-dependence, but because she feels so strongly the sense of family obligation. Lucy Colletti turned her weekly wages into the more generous family income as readily and unquestioningly as Rose Morelli gave hers to meet the needs of bare subsistence.
The West Side Carlotta is not a recent immigrant. Her family came through Ellis Island probably as much as ten years ago,[85] settling first in one of the lower and more congested districts of New York. Later they moved up to this district, attracted by reports of cheaper rents or simply following, as is the Italian way, relatives already there. Her father is probably a naturalized citizen.
Notwithstanding the exotic community in which the Italian lives and his loyalty to Latin traditions, ten years of New York are bound to leave their mark. This is particularly true of the West Side Italians, so many of whom carry on a petty but independent business. Owning a fruit stand, a coal cellar, or a trucking business is in itself evidence of long residence and some Americanization.[86] “The Italian with the stand—eh, he is well off—long time here,” is a common remark among his compatriots.
Other signs of long residence on the West Side are the changes in names. Not only does “Lucrezia” become “Lucy”; “Dominica,” “Minnie”; “Giovannina,” “Jennie”; “Fortunata,” “Nettie”; “Francesca,” “Fannie” and so on, but even the family names sometimes suffer a change. The “Aquinas” become the “Quinns,” the “D’Adamos” become the “Adamses.” The old names to which still cling some of the grandeur that was Rome are often gladly exchanged for a genuine West Side cognomen.
Perhaps the chief evidence of Americanization, however, appears when the daughter of the family begins wage-earning. For this she goes directly to the factory. She does not join the ranks of the Italian women who form so large a proportion of the out-workers or home workers of New York City. Only those who are familiar with the submissive way in which the Old World Italian women endure industrial exploitation can understand what a stride toward independence the Italian girl has made by simply working in a factory instead of at home.