Migrant Marketplaces

Elizabeth Zanoni's Migrant Marketplaces offers a fascinating and nuanced account of the historical formation of Italian migrant marketplaces in New York City and Buenos Aires. Her cogent comparative analysis of the migrant marketplaces in both cities parses out important diasporic differences affecting consumption practices. Zanoni bases her analysis on a thorough reading of the commercial press in New York City and Buenos Aires along with the publications of their respective chambers of commerce. Migrant Marketplaces is as much a history of food (goods) as it is of migration (people). It recounts how Italian migrants built their identities through buying and consuming. Zanoni demonstrates that Italian elites deliberately instrumentalized migrants as apostles in the global trade of Italian goods. As such, they had a financial stake in maintaining their national and ethnic loyalties. In a work so attentive to geopolitics and commodity paths, it is refreshing to see gender at the center of the analysis. One of Zanoni's key findings relates to the gendering of migrant marketplaces, which shifted from the “manly” markets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to become more feminized after World War I. Zanoni is also careful to assess the racial climates of New York versus those of Buenos Aires to show how they created different conditions for how Italian migrants and their foodstuffs were incorporated into local cultures

Business · Commodity · Consumption (sociology · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Ethnic group · Geopolitics · Migrant workers · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy