Book Alert / Italian Voices -- Making Minnesota Our Home

Italian Voices -- Making Minnesota Our Home, Foreward by Rudolph J. Vecoli by Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich, Minnesota Historical Society Press '07, $29.95, 315 pages, ISBN #0-87351-581-1. Index, source notes, appendix, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The author, an oral historian, describes Minnesota's Italian colonia "in Duluth, Dilworth, the Twin Cities, and towns of the Iron Range between 1900 and 1960." Rather than offering our feeble attempt to deconstruct the lives of Italian emigres in their new world, it seems much more to the point to let members of that community speak for themselves:

"Christmas, we used to make stuffoli, a lot of dough with honey, and we made those rings like doughnuts. My mother had a machine and we used to make seppole, an Italian sweet, and then in the middle we put a chunk of crema and a cherry on top." -- Josephine Nigro, Virginia.

"If you went to a union-organizing meeting you got fired. We had to hide when we met. Somebody gave us a place to meet in a tavern basement, but one guy stooled on us. The next day at work the boss said, 'Hey, Patsy, when there gonna be a strike?'" -- Patsy Serrano, Buhl.

"The boarders paid me $3.00 a month. I washed their clothes full of iron ore. Tough to get clean. They brought the eats and I cooked for them. I always made a good lunch pail: break, some meat, fruit, sometimes a piece of cake. We made wine. There were lotta barrels in our cellar!"