The Italian American Family. The Southern Italian Family's Process of Adjustment to an Urban America

The Transplanted Family in Contemporary Research on American Society

Since World War II, in all parts of the world most social systems have been moving quickly or slowly, toward some form of the conjugal family system and also toward industrialization. Many social scientists argue that the conjugal family system, with its standards of ascription, particularism and diffuseness, ideally is not permitted to interfere with the demands of industrialization, whose standards are achievement-based and universalistic. The concomitant emergence of the conjugal family and industrialization could suggest that all change and all causal relations flow from one single, global factor, such as industrialism, and that such modern phenomena as migration, urbanization and acculturation must necessarily weaken or destroy the system of closely knit kinship bonds outside the nuclear family which characterizes most of the "folk" societies. "Modified extended family" theories, however, show that there is both a need and a capacity for extended families to exist in modern society, and that geographical mobility does not necessarily result in a lessening of ideological or emotional commitment to kin.

In looking for how and why massive socioeconomic changes hinder or help to outweigh the resistance of family systems, the southern Italian migratory experience seems almost an ideal case. In fact, most of the many millions of immigrants who came to the United States from Italy were southern Italian peasants. However, they did not generally enter farming occupations in America. Rather, they clustered primarily in the industrial centers of the North: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit. The study of the Italian family undergoing the acculturation process in the United States is an ideal area in which to examine the interrelationships among cultural, social and psychological events. Previous researchers have focused on only two of these dimensions at a time, studying individuals against a family background in which the dynamic principles are never clearly specified. One has to observe the full range of cultural, social, psychological and biological variables – the individual within the family as the small primary group within the larger social system with its system of values in a particular geographical setting – which are involved in the events of family life and the adaptation of the individual family member.

The main purpose of this paper is to delimit the contemporary controversy on the nature of the southern Italian family system, which has a special significance of the renewed interest in the persistence of ethnic identity in the face of strong forces for change. Teachers, social workers or guidance counselors must understand the conflict which ensues from the fact that the American school encourages the southern European student to pursue personal goals rather than those his family has laid down for him.