Italian American immigration was largely a rural to urban migration. Rural southern Italian peasants immigrated to the large urban centers of the United States. Many of these immigrants selected New York City as their dominant area of destination. While almost never entirely homogeneous, Italian immigrants developed urban ethnic communities predominantly settled by their fellow countrymen. These “urban ghettoes” acted as “shock absorbers” as the immigrants became adjusted to their new areas of settlement. Today, many Italian Americans are in the third or fourth native born generation. Many of the older ethnic neighborhoods are no longer single ethnic communities. More recently, social mosaics have emerged whereby a variety of ethnic-immigrant groups now reside in these areas. This paper explores the process of change involved in the transition from ethnic neighborhood to social mosaic.
|Keywords:||Ethnic Neighborhoods, Italian Neighborhoods, Social Mosaics, Urban Change|
Professor, Department of Sociology, Iona College, Westbury, NY, USA
Rockland County Department of Planning