| Chapter 1: | The Family |
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to the legislation excluding Chinese. Articles such as this one deploring the South Italian migration to America were the rule rather than the exception from the 1880’s through the 1920’s. In a letter dated June 2, 1860 from Palermo, Henry Adams remarked that the Sicilians were the “most brutal and savage crowd known in modern Europe.”2
Having established himself in his shop and his tenement apartment on One Hundred and Seventh Street, in 1907 Alfio sent for Rosalia and Marianna as well as his other sister Betty and Betty’s children Charles and Angelina. Within a short period of time, Charles got married and went to live in Pelham Bay. Angelina got married, too, and Betty joined her and her husband in the Bronx. Soon, Alfio’s brothers, Giuseppe and Luigi, came to America looking for economic opportunities. Giuseppe was lazy and Luigi had a drinking problem. They worked for about five years in construction but they were often unemployed and decided to return to San Fratello. Luigi had left his wife in San Fratello and had not seen her during his stay in New York. Giuseppe’s daughters, Mary and Fanny, lived for six years with Alfio, Rosalia and Marianna, but they were unhappy in East Harlem and returned to Sicily. Charles Whibley, an English literary critic and journalist, visited New York City in the same year my grandmother came to East Harlem. He considered New York City a “magic cauldron,” and the immigrants “who are cast into it are born again.”3
By marrying Rosalia and bringing her to America, Alfio had saved her from the grinding poverty that destroyed the lives of so many Sicilians following the unification of Italy. Italy had no