Italian-American Heritage Month

Italian-American Heritage Month was first celebrated in October in 1989. Its purpose is to educate and celebrate the contributions and culture of Italians in the United States.

Italy became a unified nation decades after the formation of the United States, but people from what is now Italy had been immigrating to the US since its early days. Most Italian-Americans arrived in the later 1800s and early 1900s, with more than 4 million Italians immigrated to the US between the 1880s and the 1920s. Today, around 16.3 million Americans (4.8%) have Italian ancestry.

In the early part of the 1900s, “southern Italian immigrants were among the lowest-paid workers in the United States.” Many Italians worked under a padrone (patron) system of labor, similar to slavery, in which labor brokers recruited workers for large companies and then acted as overseers who also controlled workers’ wages, contracts, and food supplies.

Italian immigrants to the US dealt with prejudice, anti-immigrant sentiment, and hostility. During World War II, many Italian Americans were forcibly deported, imprisoned, or interred even though most had rejected Benito Mussolini’s regime and many were fighting or working on behalf of the Allies. After World War II, Italian Americans became more widely accepted and represented in media.