A recent article in the New York Times was titled, “How Italians Became ‘White,’” (Oct. 12, 2019), a seemingly radical idea until you start to dig into the social history of immigration. Many historians, for instance Jennifer Guglielmo in Living the Revolution, have shown how the media and most public institutions of the early 20th century categorized Italians as people of color.

For instance, the police provided mugshots of Southern Italian women to the major newspapers of the time, including the New York Times and Life magazine, which framed the women as genetically prone to anger and violence, both creating and fulfilling a host of stereotypes from the association of Sicilians with the mafia to women gone bad to some lurid generalizations about the European and Global South.