Migratory Resistance Communities: Italian Immigrants in Portland, Maine, 1880-1920

This thesis seeks to illuminate the resistance communities that existed in the rural southern villages of the Mezzogiorno region of Italy, specifically Lettomanoppello, before and after Italian Unification and removed to Portland, Maine in the United States to re-established their culture. Through multiple lines of evidence, including previous scholarship, documents, past interviews with immigrants and current personal communication with descendants of immigrants, the research contextualizes the presence of resistance in the immigrant’s interaction with capitalism and their continued resistance to the residual fallout in the form of individualism that attacked their familial ways and sacredly held joy of family “time”. From their first interaction with the new capital economy in their villages to the erosion of their old country ways, immigrants from Lettomanoppello clung to their pre-capital lives through language, subsistence farming, and la famiglia, and sought to transplant these ways in their new enclave of Portland, Maine in the United States.