On the Other Shore
t he Atl A ntic W O rld S O f
i t A li A n S in S O uth Americ A during the g re A t W A r
John Starosta Galante
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln
© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Parts of chapters 1 and 2 were originally published as “Globalising World War I: The Italian War Effort in Greater Buenos Aires” in Proximity and Distance: Space, Time and World War, ed. Romain Fathi and Emily Robertson (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2020), chap. 7. Parts of chapter 2 were originally published as “Buenos Aires and the Making of Italo-Argentinidad, 1915–1919,” Storia e Regione 27, no. 1 (2018): 97–128. Parts of chapters 2 and 4 were originally published as “The ‘Great War’ in Il Plata: Italian Immigrants in Buenos Aires and Montevideo during World War I,” Journal of Migration History 2, no. 1 (2016): 57–92.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Galante, John Starosta, author.
Title: On the other shore : the Atlantic worlds of Italians in South America during the Great War / John Starosta Galante. Description: Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2021015342
iSbn 9781496207913 (hardback)
iSbn 9781496229571 (epub)
iSbn 9781496229588 (pdf)
Subjects: lcSh: Italians—South America—History—20th century. | Italians—South America—Social conditions—20th century. | World War, 1914–1918—South America. | South America—History—20th century. | biSAc: hiStOry / Military / World War I | hiStOry / Latin America / South America Classification: lcc f2239.i8 g35 2022 | ddc 980/.00451— dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015342
Set in Scala by Mikala R. Kolander.
For
Julie, Matteo, Gabriel, and Baby A
1. Mobilizing Diaspora 27
2. The Great War in Il Plata 59
3. Mobilization in São Paulo and Mobility in the Italian Atlantic 87
4. War’s Antagonists in Atlantic South America 123
5. The Making of an Italo-Atlantic 149 Conclusion 189
Illustrations
1. Letter from Amelia Filzi in Rovereto to Fausto Filzi in Buenos Aires 3
2. Advertisements for transatlantic voyages between South America and southern Europe 10
3. Illustration depicting the Italian Atlantic world 15
4. Rivista Coloniale (1918) cover with ships symbolizing Genoa, Venice, and Rome 32
5. Italian- owned factory in São Paulo 37
6. The Italian Hospital in Montevideo 41
7. Poem celebrating emigrant recruits’ return to Italy 50
8. Crowd at port of Buenos Aires to send off recruits departing for Italy 65
9. Postcard of the Italian War Committee of Buenos Aires 71
10. Women’s Auxiliary of the Italian War Committee of Buenos Aires 71
11. Leaders of the Italian War Committee of Buenos Aires 72
12 & 13. Women in Montevideo dressed as personifications of Italian regions 77
14. Instructions for making ration warmers (scaldaranci) for soldiers at the front 79
15. Advertisement for Italian war bonds 82
16. The Lucchesi family 97
17. Angelo Abrami 98
18 & 19. Postcard to Luigi Orlando in São Paulo from his brother at the front in Italy 99
20. Advertisement for Italian war bonds program in São Paulo 103
21. List of contributors to the Italian war bonds program in São Paulo 104
22. Cartoon of anti-German boycotts in São Paulo 108
23. Comparing Italian war bonds purchases in Argentina and Brazil 119
24. Opposition to the war in Buenos Aires 128
25. Opposition to the pro-war mobilization in São Paulo 136
26. São Paulo socialists advertise their “fight against the patriotic travesty” 137
27. Cartoon showing “Italy” trying to wake up “The Colony” to support the war 139
28. Cartoon of local Italian “philanthropists” taking advantage of “The Colony” 140
29. Anarchists in São Paulo seek to unite “workers from all countries” 152
30. Cover page of La Civiltà Latina 153
31. Support for Italian expansion in the Adriatic 158
32. Dinner for returned recruits in Buenos Aires 160
33. Italian victory celebration in Montevideo 161
34. Italian aviators with war veterans in Buenos Aires 164
35. Locatelli’s arrival after crossing the Andes 165
36. Plaque sent to Queen Elena of Italy by the women of Progenie di Italia 169
x | Illustrations
37. Cartoon of Brazilian and Italian postwar relations 179
38. Cover of Italo–South American periodical La Nueva Italia 183
39. Veterans Hall in Buenos Aires 191
40. Former Matarazzo Italian Hospital in São Paulo 192 tA ble S
1. Italians living abroad 29
2. Percentage of Italians living overseas 30
Illustrations | xi
Acknowledgments
Like the book’s geographic scope, the research for this project was transatlantic in its reach. I received assistance from too many institutions, archivists, librarians, scholars, Airbnb hosts, and others around Italy to list them all. Nevertheless, among those with particular influence on this project were Nicola Fontana at the Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra in Rovereto, Fabio Caffarena at the Archivo Ligure della Scrittura Popolare in Genoa, and Marinella Mazzanti and Pietro Luigi Biagioni at the Fondazione Paolo Cresci in Lucca. I also received important guidance from many archive and library attendants in Rome at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Archivio Storico Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Società Dante Alighieri, and Società Geografica Italiana. It was, however, in the library and newspaper archive at the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea where I spent the most time and required the most assistance and to which I am most grateful. At the very start of this project, generous conversations with Mark Choate, Donna Gabaccia, Maddalena Tirabassi, and Fulvia Zega helped me to plot a course through these institutions and their resources.
That generosity extended to South America. In Brazil, Michael Hall provided both an overview of relevant resources and scholars and a critical car ride and introduction to the Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth in Campinas. Luigi Biondi was equally helpful, including in his suggested use of the Centro de Documentação e Memória da uneSp. Fanny Lopes provided important assistance when some sources in Brazil seemed out of my reach. In Buenos Aires, this project benefited in particular from
the attention of Alicia Bernasconi at the Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, Mariana Jordá at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Buenos Aires, and Maria Elisa Paiella at Asociación Italiana Unione y Benevolenza. The holdings at the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno and its newspaper archive were indispensable to my research. Among interactions with scholars in Buenos Aires, those with Federica Bertagna, Fernando Devoto, Roy Hora, and Emiliano Sánchez were particularly productive and encouraging. For more than a decade I have benefited in innumerable ways from the mentorship and friendship of Lila Caimari. Travel, research, and interactions like these would not have been possible without resources and other forms of academic support. Most of those came from the University of Pittsburgh, its Department of History, World History Center, Center for Latin American Studies, and European Studies Center. At Pitt, Pinar Emiralioglu, Lina Insana, and Patrick Manning offered training and guidance, while Tasha Kimball, Kavin Paulraj, Kelly Urban, and many others provided much-needed companionship. I owe a great deal to Diego Holstein for his analytical prowess and camaraderie and to Lara Putnam for her personal, professional, and intellectual wisdom. Most of all, I feel fortunate for having the opportunity to learn how to be a mindful, gracious, affable, and committed historian from Reid Andrews.
At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, this project and other endeavors have moved forward as a result of guidance from Kris Boudreau, Peter Hansen, Jean King, and Kate Moncrief; collegiality and mentorship from Joe Cullon and Jennifer Rudolph; stimulating collaborations with Aarti Madan, Ángel Rivera, William San Martín, and Laureen Elgert; and interactions with many other colleagues with whom it is a pleasure to work. Funding from Wpi’s Humanities & Arts Department supported attendance at a number of scholarly meetings where I presented portions of the content that appears in the book. The assistance of editors affiliated with the Journal of Migration History, Storia e Regione, and Melbourne University Press also helped advance the development of the analysis herein. Bridget Barry and the editorial team at the University of Nebraska Press have been exceptional collaborators in the production of this book.
xiv | Acknowledgments
Only a dense and unwavering network of friends and family can help a one-time itinerant wanderer retain strong roots in community and place. Your support was felt always and everywhere. I owe a great deal of thanks to friends and “family” from New York, whose sidewalks, movie houses, bars, and bookstores were my classrooms for many years. Yet whenever I have returned to Massachusetts, immediate and extended family and all of my “boys” from back home were there, especially and for always J.P. My parents, Robert and Marianne Galante, are extraordinary people who live simply and are the best examples to follow that anyone could ask for. My brother’s intelligence is deeper than I may ever know. Yet the first historian in my life was Lena Teresa DeAngelis Galante, my grandmother, who would regale us at Wednesday dinners with stories from her youth in an Italian immigrant family and enclave. This book is dedicated to Julie for her strength and sensitivity, Matteo for his lessons in perseverance, Gabriel for his joyfulness— and to our daughter and sister.
On the Other Sh O re
Introduction
On November 20, 1916, Fausto Filzi wrote a letter in Milan to his friend “Momi” in Buenos Aires.1 Fausto began the letter, written on stationary from Caffé della Borsa in Verona, excusing the delay in his writing, for which he blamed problems during his trip from Argentina, issues upon arrival in Italy, and “military life.” Regarding his transatlantic passage, Fausto noted difficult conditions in third class that obliged him to pay for a private cabin, which also enabled him to participate in a “very lively party” as the ship passed the equator and lifesaving lessons in case of German submarine attack. On board, he had met a “slender little doll, blond, very blond . . . divine, she spoke Italian with a pronounced Argentine accent and Argentine with a pronounced Italian accent.” She said she was a lady-in-waiting, but Fausto guessed she was probably a nanny. He was not ready to settle down in any case, he wrote.2
Fausto Filzi was born in June 1891 in Capodistria (today the Slovenian port of Koper) and raised in Rovereto, a town on the Adige River near Trent and, until the end of World War I, part of the AustroHungarian Empire’s County of Tyrol. His troubles in Genoa, where he arrived on September 26, 1916, related to his enlistment in the Italian army, although he was born and raised in dominions of its principal opponent during the war. Still, by October 24 he was enrolled in the Ninth Royal Artillery and enduring basic training in Verona “to make ourselves into brave defenders of our and your lands . . . to offer our blood for the defense of la patria (or homeland),” he told Momi.3 Hints of sarcasm in these comments, reference to friends in Buenos Aires who “stayed in the woods” instead of fighting, and his choice of a nom
de guerre, Momi Spolaore, an homage to his friend, reveal the cheery playfulness of a twenty-five-year- old. Despite his origins, Fausto received the rank of lieutenant, likely because of his middle- class background and because his brother, Fabio Filzi, was a fallen hero of the Italian cause. Yet Fausto mentioned his denied request to join the Alpini unit of his “poor brother.” The letter ended with a long list of questions about life in Buenos Aires: Did “Berto” get his act together? Had “chubby” Eugenio gotten fatter? Fausto asked Momi to read the letter to friends and for them to remember their “distant friend.”
Fausto and Fabio were two of four sons of Professor Giovanni Battista and Amelia Filzi. According to their parents’ letters just before and during the war, the Filzi brothers were scattered throughout the borderlands of Austria-Hungary and Italy. Many of these were so- called terre irredente, or unredeemed lands, that Italian nationalists in the 1910s believed to be the unfinished work of the Italy’s Risorgimento unification effort, which saw its greatest advances in the 1860s. The Filzis’ presence in these areas corresponded with their position as Italian-speaking subjects of the Hapsburg crown. Yet in December 1913, twenty-two-year- old Fausto departed for Buenos Aires. Despite the distance, transatlantic postal networks kept him aware of goings- on at home. On March 21, 1914, Amelia wrote a letter from Rovereto to Fausto’s address at the corner of Avenida Córdoba and Calle Paso in central Buenos Aires. In it, she recounted the postmarked notices she received during Fausto’s transatlantic journey from Trieste, Naples, Barcelona, Almería, Las Palmas, and Rio de Janeiro. She advised him to seek out a contact at a Buenos Aires insurance company, expressed relief that he was surrounded by “compatriots,” and shared news of his brothers and Rovereto gossip. She also feared that war was imminent.
A set of letters from Amelia and Giovanni Battista to Fausto in 1915 demonstrate how the war affected the Filzi family and one way immigrant residents of Buenos Aires maintained close connections with Europe. After the May 1915 start of the conflict, the Filzi parents were evacuated to Innsbruck.4 Fausto’s brother Mario, whom Amelia referred to as “indifferent” to the conflict, worked at a hospital in Graz after his family was removed from Pola on the Adriatic coast. Brother Ezio served in the Austro-Hungarian army and fought in the Dolomites. Other
| Introduction
enlisted trentini Fausto knew were killed in battle, imprisoned in Russia, or lost an eye, a leg, or a relative to the war, Amelia wrote, adding, “The trentini are scattered throughout the world.” She said nothing of Fabio, which was wise because a number of letters Fausto received had stamps from censor officials. And at the time, the strident irredentist Fabio was in northern Italy, conspiring for the Italian side. Amelia worried in 1914 about Fausto’s “suffering” in Buenos Aires from difficulties he related in his letters. By late 1915, however, she was pleased he had found a job but feared he would never return to Europe. Around the same time, Fausto received a postcard dated August 8, 1915, from his father, who wrote that the Austro-Hungarian military had drafted the 1891 recruitment class and that Fausto needed to report to the consulate in Buenos Aires. Only one event brought Fausto back, however: the capture of Fabio alongside leading irredentist Cesare Battisti in July 1916 and Fabio’s death by public hanging in Trent. Italianlanguage periodicals in Buenos Aires covered the events.5 Fausto did not report to the Austro-Hungarian consul; instead he boarded a clipper for Genoa and enrollment in the Italian army.
Introduction | 3
Fig. 1. Letter from Amelia Filzi in Rovereto to Fausto Filzi in Buenos Aires, January 25, 1915. Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra, Rovereto.
Fausto did not leave Buenos Aires entirely behind, as few returning migrants did. He brought with him experiences and the language he learned and kept in touch with acquaintances across the Atlantic. He made animated references to his time in Argentina in letters to fellow trentini residing in northern Italy, including Fabio’s widow, Emma, and a Zanzotti family member to whom he provided news about a brother in Buenos Aires.6 In March 1917, while at a military academy in Turin, Fausto received a letter from a friend in Italy who had delighted in hearing of Fausto’s adventures and asked him, “Always write me in beautiful Castilian [Spanish],” as he had in his previous letter.7 In 1917 Fausto also received letters (written in Italian) from friends in Argentina. In March, Antonio Zuffo wrote of a chaotic carnival season and unrest between Turkish and Greek immigrants in Buenos Aires.8 Businesses struggled because few goods arrived from Europe. Zuffo hoped Fausto would return: “[I send] from everyone here best regards and wishes for the triumph of your patriotic cause.” In May, Umberto Faleris lauded Fausto’s exploits, admitting that he sometimes wished he had left Buenos Aires with Fausto and providing news about their seemingly close group of friends.9 In conclusion, Faleris wished for an Italian victory and the “liberation” of their hometowns, where they could “live a hundred times happier and more beautiful life than in this American region.” In the meantime, Faleris asked Fausto to write him at el gordo Eugenio’s on Calle Gascon.
Fausto’s most prolific correspondence was with his grandfather, who resided in Verzuolo, a town southwest of Turin. In early 1917 Fausto wrote letters in imperfect Spanish to organize meetings with his querido abuelo, Spanish for “dear grandfather,” whom he thanked for getting him drunk and introducing him to “the most beautiful” women during a furlough.10 As Fausto moved from Turin to Milan, Verona, and Susegana north of Venice (each one closer to the front) his mood changed. In February in Susegana, he spoke of his monotony but “exalted morale.”11 By the end of March he was tired of the cold and desperate, and said, “For my part I would be very happy if they send me right away to the front.”12 Finally, in May, writing in Italian from the mountains near Asiago, he spoke of victory, death, and la patria, having left Susegana “with all the enthusiasm of a fervid Italian” ready to sacrifice himself for a “sacred
| Introduction
cause.”13 The army had extricated his youthful spirit and solidified his identification with Italy. He apologized for an inability to respond to a humorous reference in a previous letter written by his nonno (grandfather in Italian). “It will be for the next time,” Fausto wrote. But he was killed in action on June 8, 1917.
Fausto’s physical and emotional journeys from Buenos Aires to his death near Monte Zebio, where an engraved stone marks the spot, highlight many of the principal circumstances, locations, interactions, and actors that shaped the period of World War I in Italy and South America and the networks connecting them across the Atlantic. This conflict and these people, places, relations, and conditions are the focus of this book, which examines the response of Italians in South America to Italy’s war and the effects the war had on Italians and the transatlantic places they inhabited. Through its analysis, this book engages with histories of “global” World War I, late modern Atlantic worlds, transnational networks and mobilities that resulted from Italian mass migration, and influences of Italian nationalism on each of these. Doing so reveals some of the ways residents of Italian origins in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and São Paulo managed relationships and identifications with their places of residence, country of origin, and one another.
From 1914 to 1921 World War I and related crises gripped the late modern world. The conflict, this book helps show, had critical implications as far away from European front lines as the neighborhoods of South American metropolises some eleven thousand miles away. The effects traversed widespread and dense commercial, financial, transportation, communication, geopolitical, cultural, ideological, migratory, and other networks in which Fausto and his contemporaries were embedded. Those networks were not solely associated with European imperialism, on which most “global” histories of the war focus, but the “globalized” world of the 1910s.
Fausto’s lived experience was not global in scope. It was confined to ports and cities in northern Italy, the western Mediterranean, and a region this book refers to as Atlantic South America that encompassed much of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. At this time, millions of Italians and their children populated the Western Hemisphere and had significant influence in places like the metropolitan areas of BueIntroduction | 5
nos Aires, Montevideo, and São Paulo that are the focus of this book. Decades of mass migration—built on centuries of logistical, commercial, migratory, and cultural connections between the Italian peninsula and South America—had produced a multitude of transatlantic interactions, as Fausto’s experiences show, and transformed these regions and the space between them. With this in mind, this book extends the reach of Atlantic history into the early twentieth century and explores the Atlantic “worlds” in which Italians were situated. Middle- class trentini and combatants like Fausto were only a small part of these Atlantic worlds, which were inhabited and shaped by many other groups of Italians as well as shipping companies, international businesses, social welfare agencies, religious orders, media outlets, army battalions, and other institutions with activities that stretched across borders and the ocean. Fausto’s experience was both particular and relatable to a larger transatlantic space agitated by postunification Italian nationalism and expansionism.
That Fausto was neither a resident nor a citizen of Italy prior to enlistment, but nevertheless thought of himself as “Italian” in some way, speaks to the term’s contested meaning for his contemporaries and historians. This book interrogates the significance and complexity of italianità, or “Italianness,” primarily by examining how different individuals, groups, and institutions in South America that were considered Italian in some form responded to World War I and its aftermath. Doing so addresses historiographical questions related to the reach of Italian nationalism and Italy’s nationalist ambitions across the Atlantic and in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and São Paulo especially. The book also contributes to scholarly discussions of solidarity and discord among Italians in these places amid ideological and class divisions, generational shifts, and residence in different countries. And through a review of the immediate postwar period, it explores areas of historical inquiry concerning the hybridization and hyphenation of notions of belonging in these metropolitan areas. (For example, the patois of commingled Italian and Spanish used by Fausto and the young lady he met during their middle passage across the Atlantic, reached well beyond these two.)14 Ultimately, despite its relevance for the study of large-scale phenomena like World War I and Atlantic history and more moderately scaled
topics like Italian nationalism, this book is principally a social history of Italian communities in South America. It examines the emotional and more tangible connections individuals, groups, and their institutions in South America maintained with places, people, institutions, and ideas based in Italy— and often with one another across borders in South America.
Global and Atlantic Purviews
The repercussions of World War I stretched literally around the world. Alongside centennial remembrances, many more war-related histories have come to light that report on places (and people from places) beyond the principal areas of conflict and belligerent countries and territories of Europe and the Middle East. Many deal with European colonialism and colonial subjects in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.15 Recent work by Heather Streets-Salter, for example, illustrates how British, French, and Dutch colonial administrators, Vietnamese and Indian nationalists, and German saboteurs operated in Southeast Asia during the war.16 Others describe the wartime contributions in Europe of “non-white” soldiers and laborers from European colonies.17 Richard Smith and Marc Michel, respectively, have examined the roles of Jamaican and Senegalese regiments in the British and French militaries and how those experiences reconfigured relationships between colonies and metropoles.18 Formal colonization was not required for a place or its people to be embroiled in the conflict, as Guogi Xu’s exemplary scholarship on China and East Asia shows.19 The depth and breadth of systems of labor, economic production, trade, and political influence left few localities impervious to the conflict.20
Latin America—neither formally colonized nor colonizing during this period—was deeply impacted by the war. Considerable scholarship has focused on political transformations and economic crises in the region due to the conflict, including recent work by Stefan Rinke and Olivier Compagnon.21 Several historians have also investigated how the war affected the lives of European immigrants around the Americas and the children of immigrants residing in ethnic enclaves.22 Hernán Otero, for one, has shown how Germany’s invasion of France reconnected FrancoArgentines to their “ethnic nucleus” despite his view of their advanced
Introduction | 7
