Italian immigration to California…
…and how it worked out for California as a wine region, pre-Prohibition. I’ve got plans to expand this into a more thorough explanation of Californian wine history, but it’s 1:56am right now and my fingers can only type so fast
Meeting between Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, two leaders of the Risorgimento
The great Italian diaspora (1880-1914) in the aftermath of the Italian Unification (1848-1871) drove about 13 million Italians out of Italy, one of the largest voluntary emigrations in recorded history. Pushed out of Italy by deepening poverty and widespread illness, most of these were agrarian workers from the peasant class.
It’s one of the questions I’d like to ask someone in charge: why every great movement in history (or at least the history I’ve learned so far) that was “for” the workers and the producers of the world, always leaves out the workers and producers of the world in the end. Why over and over, the people who need the most protection in the world, the people who need champions the most badly in the world are always used as fig leaves for the avarice and ambition of others.
Unsurprisingly, the people who worked the land with their bodies were once again disappointed by the Italian Unification. The Risorgimento, as the unification was known in Italy, broke down the feudal land system that exploited the farm workers, but in the redistribution of farmland failed to include the workers.
Ellis Island arrivals, 1904
Of the 13 million total leaving the Italian peninsula, 4 million arrived in the United States, 3 million of them between 1900 and 1914.
The vast majority of them were pulled to the States by an abundance of comparatively well-paid hard labor jobs (which most of the working-class Italian immigrants were used to), novel business possibilities of the new world, and artistic and cultural opportunity. Most of them came from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Regno delle Due Sicilie), and it just so happens that modern-day Puglia, the home of the Zinfandel grape, was a key part of the Kingdom.
The Gold Rush in California then began pulling Italians from both Italy directly as well as Italian-Americans who had initially landed in East Coast major cities. Those arriving found that the California economy was already more diversified even compared to the Eastern seaboard—fishing, mining, logging, food processing and manufacturing. But also, California was yet to be completely planted to White agriculture, and California was and is so beautifully suited to viticulture and winemaking. (Let’s stick a pin in this to chat about the ethics of viticulture in brave new terroirs).
Some of today’s biggest wine producers such as the Italian Swiss Colony and Sutter Home were originally founded at the end of the nineteenth centuries by agrarian Italians who were driven from what they knew and the roots they’d grown, to the blinding newness—at least to them—of America and California.
Like countless others before and since, these immigrants put down roots in a strange place, driven out far away from everything they had ever known. In a land that didn’t welcome them, among new people who they knew either resented or exploited them, they rebuilt a small piece of home for their own comfort. Much because of the way they honored their longing, we have this beautiful history of winemaking on our very own west coast, California.
Crucially, though, California itself was not new, and growing crops in California wasn’t new either. It’s important to remember that California itself was stolen before working-class Italian immigrants ended up there; come with me to try to get an idea of what California looked like before it was California.