Stefano Morello (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Consistent throughout contemporary history, the socio-political phenomenon of racializing disease, or pathologizing race, has not spared Italians. Disease works as an especially powerful metaphor that suggests immigrants, like germs and other vectors of disease, are external agents attacking the body from within. Before the acceptance of germ theory in the mid-nineteenth century, it was believed that sensory evidence such as visible filth or noxious smells were reliable indicators and even vectors of disease. These beliefs, combined with the late Victorian pseudoscience of eugenics and scientific racism, endured long after its discovery, as both white progressive reformers and nativists itched for visible signs of sanitary threats in each of the newcomer immigrant populations. The stereotypes of the “dirty” Italian, the “drunken” Irish, or the “rat-eating” Chinese emerged in that context and called for the exclusion of vulnerable, especially non-white, members of society from entry to the country or full citizenship.

At the turn of the 20th century, medical inspections conducted by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) were the first barrier that immigrant populations had to overcome upon their arrival into the country. Led at the ports of entry on both coasts and at the borders with Mexico and Canada, they consisted of both physical and attitudinal tests used to examine immigrants. While the examinations aimed at preventing disease from entering the nation, PHS often de facto prevented the entrance of “undesirable” people: carriers of chronic disease and disability, and those who, according to the inspector, “would not make good citizens.” While non-European immigrants were more targeted by the inspector’s scrutiny, the medical inspection at Ellis Island plays, to this day, a central role in the collective remembrance of Italian migration in the United States (in part because of its representation in The Godfather Part II, and Nuovomondo).

The fear of infected masses carrying known and unknown diseases into the nation was further fueled by the belief that non-anglo saxon immigrants, especially those coming from areas of the world perceived as pre-modern, were unfit for urban life. As Italians built individual and collective lives in the United States, they were met with skeptical scrutiny by the genteel public opinion. “The Italian,” a signifier often used to describe Southern Italian working-class immigrants, was treated as a monolith whose very being was a threat to public health and the dominant social order. Three egregious examples of the tendency to blame Italians for the proliferation of disease in urban areas, with little to no scientific evidence, include the spread of tuberculosis in New York City’s Lower East Side in 1903 (and again in 1933), the typhoid resurgence in Philadelphia in 1915, and the polio outbreak in Brooklyn in 1916. In defiance of US social, cultural and economic norms, “the Italian,” according to both nativists and progressive writers alike (such as Lillian Betts, Jacob Riis, and Ernest Poole) was “content to live in a pig-sty,” used tenement hallways like the public streets; communally cared for children, and happily shared housing with extended families. Italian housekeeping practices, including the production and consumption of food, were often criticized and greatly misunderstood by external observers. Like a spreading disease, the Italian and its way of life were thus to be contained in the immigrant working-class quarters, if not pushed out of the city altogether, and its community atomized to favor assimilation. Articles with titles like “The Italian Invasion of the Ghetto,” exemplify the fear of Italian geographic expansion, while what really concerned the reformers was that an Italian way of life would metastasize beyond the boundaries of their enclaves and “contaminate” the rest of the city.

As the emergent US public health authorities developed effective sanitary surveillance techniques to monitor infectious diseases in the overcrowded, tenement house districts where many newly arrived immigrants lived, their work became intertwined with the Progressive social reform agenda to cure the perceived moral, social, and physical ills of the immigrant. The nation’s struggles to manage foreign bodies thus inevitably came to include not only bacteriological or viral pathogens but also the non-white and the immigrant.

Italian physicians such as Antonio Stella sought to deconstruct the correlation-turned-into-causation between high rates of disease in certain tenement districts and the Italian nationality of their dwellers. While the rates of disease in urban Italian enclaves were unarguably high at specific historical conjunctures, they were rarely higher than in the working-class quarters occupied by different ethnic groups. Further, the discrepancy between the low rates of disease in Italy and the number of cases of infectious diseases in US urban areas was to be attributed to the conditions the Italian working classes were forced to deal with in their new environment, both at home and at work. Italians, at the time, were engaged in “dangerous and hazardous occupations, in mines, steel mills, blasting, excavations, besides all sorts of dusty and unhealthy trades” more than any other foreign group and were often living in cramped and dark tenement buildings. When Italian migrants fell ill, their conditions were sometimes further exacerbated by mistrust in both public health authorities (partly due to long and bitter experience with public officials in Southern Italy) and Western science in favor of a blend of folk remedies (relying on plants or animals) and religious rituals, such as the devotion to, turned into reliance on, saints (e.g., Saint Rocco, Saint Lucy, Saint Anna, the Madonna).

Paradoxically, in the 1960s a study that gained nationwide popular attention turned inside out the discourse that accompanied the effect of Italian culture and mores, perceived as atypical or threatening at the beginning of the 20th century. The survey found that the majority-Italian residents of Roseto, Pennsylvania had a lower-than-average incidence of heart disease. According to the researchers, the explanation lay in the Italian communalism, social interconnectedness, and economic interdependence found in Roseto—some of the same modes of life that social reformers misunderstood as threatening to health and the social order in the early 1900s. While romanticized in its findings, the study vocalizes a nostalgic longing for ethnic neighborhoods and communities that extend beyond the nuclear family.

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