Hopelessly Alien
The Italian Immigration Experience in Chicago Heights
Louis Corsino
- 208 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Hopelessly Alien
The Italian Immigration Experience in Chicago Heights
Louis Corsino
About This Book
Hopelessly Alien is an in-depth study of Italian immigration to Chicago Heights, Illinois, between 1910 and 1950. Drawing upon oral histories, interviews, historical documents, and census materials, Louis Corsino examines the critical concept of hope, which most immigration studies have cast in privatized, psychological terms as the motivation to emigrate in search of a better life. This investigation offers a more contentious, sociological perspective, depicting hope as both an ideological lure to recruit and manage the "foreign element" and as a resource immigrants employed to purchase acceptance and avoid a disparaging label as a "hopelessly alien" stranger. These dialectical processes are illustrated through the Italian immigrants' pursuit of occupational mobility and homeownership, and the appropriation of their children's hopes. Each became forms of cultural capital that demonstrated a public commitment to the American ethos of "joyful striving." Each provided measures of success, but these individual pursuits came at the expense of upsetting the necessary tension between individual and communal hopes.