Overview

Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913. Supplemented with the interviewees' private documents and working from U.S. and Italian archives, Christa Wirth documents a century of transatlantic migration, assimilation, and later-generation self-identification. Her research reveals how memories of migration, everyday life, and ethnicity are passed down through the generations, altered, and contested while constituting family identities. The fact that not all descendants of Italian migrants moved into the U.S. middle class, combined with their continued use of hyphenated identities, points to a history of lived ethnicity and societal exclusion. Moreover, this book demonstrates the extent of forgetting that is required in order to construct an ethnic identity.

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9789004284562

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it is a nearly irreplaceable book for classes in research methodology, oral history, and immigration history . Susanna Garroni, in H-Net Reviews, June 2021.

Author Information

Christa Wirth has taught at Harvard University and is currently teaching in the History Department at the University of Zurich. She has published articles on migration, including Memory and Migration, Research in The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Volume IV, Immanuel Ness (ed.) (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 2158-2164).

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