by PolackTony » Sat Nov 16, 2024 11:14 am
B. wrote: ↑Fri Jul 13, 2018 9:28 pm
johnny_scootch wrote: ↑Fri Jul 13, 2018 3:38 pm
Utica has a huge feast for Saints Cosmas & Damian every year for over 100 years. It's one of the biggest in the country, bus loads of people come down from Canada and all over surrounding area for this one.
Good info -- thanks man. Utica's operations seem to be overwhelmingly Italian in their heyday, moreso than other "small" cities.
Going through this thread again after a couple of years.
Utica, in its heyday, was proportionally one of the most Italian cities in the US. While big cities like NYC, Philly, Boston, and Chicago had much larger populations in absolute terms, Utica was *far more* Italian per capita.
By all accounts, however, Sicilians comprised a rather small proportion of the Italian population of Utica. The Utica Italian colony was founded in the late 19th century by a group of immigrants from Potenza province, Basilicata. In the subsequent decades, large numbers of immigrants from Bari (in particular the comune of Alberobello), Catanzaro, Frosinone (today in Lazio but then in the old Caserta/Terra di Lavoro province of Campania), and Abruzzo joined them. The much smaller Sicilian population was said to mainly have been composed mainly of people from Palermo province. Thus, the Utica mafia network seems to have been much more Sicilian than the actual Utica Italian community, while the status of the Sciacattani Falcones was almost certainly symptomatic of their place within a broader, national network of Agrigentini rather than simply a consequence of the demographics of Utica, where immigrants from Agrigento would seem to have been a quite small element. I find case studies like this — where the dynamics of the mafia organization/network are clearly not a direct and simple consequence of demographics — very interesting to think about.
Related, but given what we have learned since the OP
about the American Camorra, I would imagine that the Utica area was a major regional hub for Camorra activity in the first decades of the 20th century. As in other localities in the US, there is a specific history to how this element wound up becoming absorbed by the Sicilian mafia network in the area, but, unfortunately, we don’t know the parameters of this for the Utica region. We can see that there was a significant component of Calabresi in the later Utica mafia network, and one can imagine that, given the large community from Catanzaro province, there were surely Camorristi there with close ties to their paesani who were so prominent in the Pittsburgh region as well as Western NY. I don’t have the time to check myself right now, but I’d really wonder how many of these reported “Black Hand” acts of violence in early Utica that you cite actually involved Sicilians. I know well from studying Chicago that the English-language press and LE in this era would often indiscriminately and reflexively refer to all southern Italians as “Sicilians”, particularly when a story involved criminal activities.
As an aside, Scootch brought up the Feast of Saints Cosmas and Damiano. This is really a fascinating topic and an emblem of the perseverance of Italian identity in diaspora. Utica is, of course, in the “Rust Belt”, and by the 1970s the collapse of industry and decline of the local economy in the Mohawk Valley region of NY had resulted in a sharp decline in the Italian-American population of Utica. Coupled with assimilation of younger generations, this demographic decline threatened the viability of the Feast of Saints Cosmas and Damiano, a major event in Utica, held at St Anthony of Padua church and dating back to 1912 (I believe founded by immigrants from Bari province). So the people at St Anthony’s, having heard that Toronto (a major center for “second wave” Italian immigration to North America following WW2) had a large and vibrant Italian community, reached out to people there for assistance in keeping the Utica feast going. This wound up evolving into a close relationship between Toronto and Utica and a big revitalization of the tradition of the Utica Feast, which had previously been under threat of disappearing. As Scootch notes, in recent decades the Feast of Saint Cosmas and Damiano has been one of the largest Italian religious festivals in the US, drawing busloads of attendees from across NY, other US states, and Ontario.
[quote=B. post_id=82920 time=1531542535 user_id=127]
[quote=johnny_scootch post_id=82891 time=1531521482 user_id=105]
Utica has a huge feast for Saints Cosmas & Damian every year for over 100 years. It's one of the biggest in the country, bus loads of people come down from Canada and all over surrounding area for this one.
[/quote]
Good info -- thanks man. Utica's operations seem to be overwhelmingly Italian in their heyday, moreso than other "small" cities.
[/quote]
Going through this thread again after a couple of years.
Utica, in its heyday, was proportionally one of the most Italian cities in the US. While big cities like NYC, Philly, Boston, and Chicago had much larger populations in absolute terms, Utica was *far more* Italian per capita.
By all accounts, however, Sicilians comprised a rather small proportion of the Italian population of Utica. The Utica Italian colony was founded in the late 19th century by a group of immigrants from Potenza province, Basilicata. In the subsequent decades, large numbers of immigrants from Bari (in particular the comune of Alberobello), Catanzaro, Frosinone (today in Lazio but then in the old Caserta/Terra di Lavoro province of Campania), and Abruzzo joined them. The much smaller Sicilian population was said to mainly have been composed mainly of people from Palermo province. Thus, the Utica mafia network seems to have been much more Sicilian than the actual Utica Italian community, while the status of the Sciacattani Falcones was almost certainly symptomatic of their place within a broader, national network of Agrigentini rather than simply a consequence of the demographics of Utica, where immigrants from Agrigento would seem to have been a quite small element. I find case studies like this — where the dynamics of the mafia organization/network are clearly not a direct and simple consequence of demographics — very interesting to think about.
Related, but given what we have learned since the OP
about the American Camorra, I would imagine that the Utica area was a major regional hub for Camorra activity in the first decades of the 20th century. As in other localities in the US, there is a specific history to how this element wound up becoming absorbed by the Sicilian mafia network in the area, but, unfortunately, we don’t know the parameters of this for the Utica region. We can see that there was a significant component of Calabresi in the later Utica mafia network, and one can imagine that, given the large community from Catanzaro province, there were surely Camorristi there with close ties to their paesani who were so prominent in the Pittsburgh region as well as Western NY. I don’t have the time to check myself right now, but I’d really wonder how many of these reported “Black Hand” acts of violence in early Utica that you cite actually involved Sicilians. I know well from studying Chicago that the English-language press and LE in this era would often indiscriminately and reflexively refer to all southern Italians as “Sicilians”, particularly when a story involved criminal activities.
As an aside, Scootch brought up the Feast of Saints Cosmas and Damiano. This is really a fascinating topic and an emblem of the perseverance of Italian identity in diaspora. Utica is, of course, in the “Rust Belt”, and by the 1970s the collapse of industry and decline of the local economy in the Mohawk Valley region of NY had resulted in a sharp decline in the Italian-American population of Utica. Coupled with assimilation of younger generations, this demographic decline threatened the viability of the Feast of Saints Cosmas and Damiano, a major event in Utica, held at St Anthony of Padua church and dating back to 1912 (I believe founded by immigrants from Bari province). So the people at St Anthony’s, having heard that Toronto (a major center for “second wave” Italian immigration to North America following WW2) had a large and vibrant Italian community, reached out to people there for assistance in keeping the Utica feast going. This wound up evolving into a close relationship between Toronto and Utica and a big revitalization of the tradition of the Utica Feast, which had previously been under threat of disappearing. As Scootch notes, in recent decades the Feast of Saint Cosmas and Damiano has been one of the largest Italian religious festivals in the US, drawing busloads of attendees from across NY, other US states, and Ontario.