07-07-2025
Love charms, frog bread, letters and wakes: How the Irish and Italians handled emigration to the US
The idea for Rituals of Migration emerged when we began to compare the customs surrounding emigration from Ireland and Italy.
In Ireland, local communities bade farewell to emigrants they would never see again by holding an 'American wake,' an all-night ceremony with drinking, music, and keening. In Italy, although the chances of returning were much higher, departures also featured lamentations and silent processions.
In both countries, family, friends, and neighbours gathered to read the 'American letter,' learning the news from abroad and checking to see if the envelope contained money or prepaid passage tickets.
In thinking about these aspects of migration, we also drew inspiration from literature – short stories by Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Maria Messina; Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn: A Novel and the sequel, Long Island – and from films such as Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (1960), Nuovomondo (2006), and The Field (1990). But a historian is like a novelist under oath, always constrained by the available evidence. And film is film. To what extent, then, can historians uncover the more intimate, emotional dimensions of the migrant experience?
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Approaching migration from the perspective of rituals provides a compelling answer to this question. Certain kinds of social and cultural activity convey meaning through their structure, form and repetition. Rituals are communicative actions that must be performed to be effective.
We focus on particular moments, actions, sentiments, and material objects – at the point of departure, in transit, and in the process of return – to uncover their meaning and significance. Approaching migration through the lens of ritual sheds light on what people thought, felt, did, and carried with them as they embarked on the journeys that changed their lives.
At a time of intense anti-immigrant rhetoric, we also hoped that a new approach to two of the largest diasporas in history would help humanise people on the move today.
We find the idea of rituals performed during rites of passage especially helpful. At various points during their lives – including birth, puberty, coming of age, marriage and death – individuals experience moments of separation, transition and reincorporation, and they mark these occasions with particular words, actions, sentiments, and objects.
Emigration involves a particular kind of rite of passage: separation from the homeland, a journey to a new society, integration into that society and the possibility of return. And grappling with the decision of whether to leave or stay was an expected part of the Irish and Italian life cycle.
The 'American wake' had well-defined ritual components. In the week leading up to departure, the emigrant called on friends and neighbours and invited them to the farewell ceremony. Women prepared food; guests brought more food; men brought beer and poitín.
The 'wake' started on the evening before departure and usually continued through the night, with dancing, drinking, and keening. In the morning, family, neighbours and friends followed the emigrant along the road until, at an agreed-upon crossroads or turning point, the older members of the community said goodbye and stood watching until their loved one disappeared from sight.
The American wake slowed down and formalised the process of departure, binding the emigrants emotionally to their community and providing consolation to those who stayed behind.
In Italy, rituals surrounding la partenza – family dinners, visits, packing, letters – featured excitement, anticipation and joy as well as sorrow, just as the Irish wake had elements of merriment alongside grief.
Because so many Italian men left as 'birds of passage' with the intention of returning, migration could be seen as a temporary phase rather than a permanent loss. More than 50 per cent of the Italians who migrated to the Americas returned, compared to well under 10 per cent of the Irish.
Most Irish emigrants were very poor to begin with. They earned significant amounts of money abroad, but they were much more likely to send remittances to bring siblings over to the United States than to use that money to return home. Most of them felt, with good reason, that there was nothing much to return to.
Irish migration, as we explain in the book, was also highly distinctive in that, from the famine onward, about half of the emigrants were young women. Finding opportunity abroad, they were more likely than men to send remittances home and, in doing so, they financed an extensive system of chain migration.
Italian migration, by contrast, was heavily male. Before immigration restriction in the 1920s, perhaps three-quarters of Italians who emigrated to the United States were men. They came intending to work in the United States for three to five years before returning home to Italy. Some made repeat journeys.
In southern Italy, where widows traditionally dressed in black, these men married before leaving in effort to protect gender and patriarchy norms. The brides, left at home and known as 'white widows', often subverted those norms in their husbands' absence by starting businesses or taking lovers, even as the husbands took new partners abroad.
The book also shows how material objects provide important insights into migration and its rituals. Most people in the past did not leave written records; nor did they use written language as their primary mode of expression. Analysing the objects they carried with them is a powerful way to learn about their experience.
In all human societies, key transitional moments in the life cycle – births and birthdays, comings of age, weddings, and funerals – involve the transmission of objects.
Migration history features a rich variety of material sources, including trunks, suitcases, remittances, parcels, posters, clothing, and handwoven textiles, physical spaces and places (ruined cottages, pubs, ships, poor-law offices, US consular offices, immigrant landing centres, hotels and boarding houses), and non-textual cultural forms such as music, photographs and film. These sources provide rich insights into sensations, emotions and experiences that leave no trace in written records.
Material objects sometimes assumed a spiritual or magical significance. Some Irish emigrants, for example, carried 'frog bread', made by roasting and crushing a frog and mixing the powder with oaten meal, to ward off illness during the voyage.
Italian migrants often carried images of their town's patron saint in their steamship trunks to protect them during the trip and abroad. They also packed charms against bad luck and swaddling clothes with amulets and embroidery to protect infants from the evil eye.
Emigrants carried love charms, too, including pubic hair stitched into clothing or a drop of menstrual blood soaked in linen and sewn into a man's clothes to symbolise faithfulness.
Rituals of Migration reveals how everyone involved in the migrant experience – migrants, the families they left behind, and those in charge of regulating mobility – tried to make sense of a process filled with peril and uncertainty, but also with hope and excitement.
Rituals reveal aspects of the migrant experience that might otherwise go unnoticed, providing powerful reminders of the hopes, sorrows, and joys that people on the move experience.
We focus on the Irish and the Italians, two of the largest migrant groups in modern history, but we hope this book will inspire similar studies of other groups, both past and present.
Rituals of Migration: Italians and Irish on the Move, edited by Kevin Kenny and Maddalena Marinari, was published by New York University Press last month.
