Sicilian sojourners did not plan to assimilate into American culture

Evidence

Sicilians who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century were not interested in becoming Americans. They simply wanted to earn money, send it to family members back home, and save enough to live comfortably when they returned to Italy permanently. Unlike the northern Italians who wished to remain in the United States, Sicilians felt no need to learn about Southern culture, as they were not planning on staying there very long. Some worked on the docks, others became business owners, and many worked on plantations. But while they were here, they worked, ate, and lived among black Americans on the plantations and other workplaces that employed both groups: “In certain regions of Louisiana and Mississippi their children were forced to attend segregated schools with blacks.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 119

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s prior knowledge of how immigrant sojourner communities (cf. the liquidity of whiteness and the ‘whiteness of wealth’ analysis) functioned in the Jim Crow South.