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We're proud to share a major milestone for DaShoW: Dr. Matteo Brera has published “A Pedagogy for Crossing the Color Line: Italian-Language Newspapers in Alabama and Louisiana, 1894–1938,” yet another one of the project's major peer-reviewed research outputs.
The article argues that the Italian-language press in the US South functioned as far more than a source of news. In a region where segregated public schooling offered immigrants few paths to integration, newspapers such as Il Gladiatore and the Columbus–Balbo Review in Birmingham, and L'Italo-Americano and La Voce Coloniale in New Orleans, became informal but consequential schools. Through editorials, language columns and coverage of civic and cultural life, they taught readers standard Italian, moral conduct and the behavioral norms associated with respectability, helping Italian immigrants negotiate their racially ambiguous position within the Jim Crow South.
Drawing on more than four decades of newspaper coverage, the article traces this pedagogy in striking, concrete detail: bilingual Q&A columns that prepared readers for citizenship exams, evening “moonlight schools” promoted to working immigrants, a community bookstore that put books “within everyone's reach,” and cultural organizations such as the Dante Alighieri Society and the Virgilian Society, which even helped bring Italian-language instruction to Tulane University. Comparing Alabama and Louisiana, the article also shows how this informal curriculum took different shapes regionally: in industrial Birmingham it centered on behavioral discipline and public conformity, while in New Orleans denser associational networks built a fuller infrastructure around language, culture and institutional standing.
At the same time, the article does not shy away from the more troubling dimensions of this pedagogy: at points, this same press also policed the boundaries of whiteness, instructing readers to keep their distance from Black Southerners in order to protect their own claim to it. Taken together, these findings show how Italian-language newspapers acted as educational spaces where ideas of citizenship, racial identity and belonging were actively shaped and transmitted, not simply reported on.
The article appears in the new special issue of the Rivista di Storia dell'Educazione, Education and Migration in North America (1837–1983), edited by Andrea Mariuzzo, Carmen Petruzzi and Luana Salvarani — a collection exploring the relationship between education and migration across North America from a historical perspective, and an ideal venue for disseminating one of DaShoW's first major research outputs. Congratulations to CIRSE – Centro Italiano per la Ricerca Storico-Educativa on the new issue!
The article is open access and can be read accessed from our Publications page.
Click on the image above to access the full issue on Rivista di Storia dell'Educazione's website.
Readers interested in the primary sources behind the research can also explore digitized issues of the newspapers discussed in the article, available through the DaShoW project archive: https://www.msca-dashow.com/newspapers
