Migration and Peasant Militance: Western Sicily, 1880-1910

Abstract

Although writers like Stephenson (1979) have questioned the assumption, many historians of immigration continue to argue that geographic mobility and levels of working-class consciousness (as expressed in trade unions, strikes, or workers’ political parties) are negatively related. In so arguing, recent studies follow the work of MacDonald and MacDonald, who claim that where migration from Italy was high, labor militance was low (MacDonald, 1963, 1958; MacDonald and MacDonald, 1964). For example, Barton (1975) and Yans-McLaughlin (1977) argue that familist southern and eastern European peasants living in fluid, complex societies were most likely to emigrate to the United States, in hopes of improving their positions in their home villages. Their familism—strong solidarity within the nuclear family and concomitant competitiveness in relations with those outside the nuclear group—discouraged voluntary associations, including participation in workers’ organization both in Italy and in the United States.

Advances in Italian and Iberian Family History

“…Gabaccia (1984), for example, found greater emigration from the latifondo areas of southern Italy than from those areas characterized by smaller and more diverse peasant and sharecropping household economies. The growth of international emigration within southern Europe during the nineteenth century is frequently explained by the increasing penetration of the countryside by capitalism and by the significant population pressures during the nineteenth century.…”