An Imagined Community of Their Own: Voices of Italian Immigrants in <i>Il Lavoratore Italiano</i>

This contribution proposes to reflect on the experience and sense of identity of Italians through the analysis of Il Lavoratore Italiano, an Italian-language radical weekly newspaper published in Kansas from 1905 to 1927. A mouthpiece for Italian rank-and-file radicals in the U.S., the periodical opened its pages to readers established in mining communities throughout the Midwest, the Mountain States, and the Southwest. Based on the analysis of all issues of the newspaper dated 15 December 1905 to 24 August 1906, this essay examines the interactions at work within and around Il Lavoratore Italiano between the newspaper’s editors and its readers, with editors of different publications and radicals of different persuasions, and between readers. The author stresses the overall importance of exchanges among readers themselves, as well as the role these exchanges at the bottom end of the editorial process actually played in shaping early communities of Italian immigrants who still largely defined themselves in local terms, in spite of their radical sympathies and the editors’ agenda. With their personal networks of relatives and friends dispersed in a significant number of mining towns across the U.S., Italian labour migrants would commonly use the newspaper’s pages to keep in touch with faraway communities and share the information they needed to circulate among them. To these “Italian workers of the world”, Il Lavoratore Italiano proved to be a very efficient means to reinforce their networks and reduce, in the process, the distances between mining communities.