Popular memory of the great Italian migration to the United States almost always settles on the crowded tenements of Manhattan, Boston, or Philadelphia. Yet a different stream of Italians flowed along the muddy bends of the Mississippi River, far from the northern tenement districts.
That world had a distinct character. Historian Jessica Barbata Jackson captures it in a single sentence in the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities encyclopedia, 64 Parishes. “While Sicilians represented twenty-five percent of Italian arrivals nationally, they accounted for ninety percent of Italian immigrants in New Orleans.” The same entry calls the city a principal port of entry for Italians between 1880 and 1914, though a significant Italian community had already taken root there in the 1840s.
That said, the roots run deeper. Henri de Tonti, born near Gaeta, traveled down the Mississippi with La Salle in 1682 and earned the nickname “Iron Hand” for the metal hook that replaced a hand he lost to a grenade explosion in the Sicilian wars. He died in 1704, 14 years before New Orleans was founded.
Loyola University New Orleans historian Justin Nystrom dates the arrival of Sicilian citrus traders to the 1830s, when the first lemon cargoes reached the city. In an essay for What It Means to Be American, Nystrom writes, “As late as 1884, lemons represented New Orleans’ third most valuable imported commodity, behind only coffee and sugar.” He also writes that before 1850, the number of Sicilians in New Orleans kept pace with the number in New York.
The citrus fleet soon carried people as well as fruit. After emancipation, Louisiana sugar planters searched for workers to replace their formerly enslaved labor force, and the state established a Bureau of Immigration in 1866. According to Jackson, citrus traders in Palermo and New Orleans organized the recruitment of poor Sicilians and facilitated their movement to and from Louisiana, “sometimes through coercive methods.” Many arrived in the fall with the citrus fleets and sailed home after the cane harvest in the spring.
What drove them across the Atlantic was an Italian unification that left Sicily on the margins. As Jackson puts it, “As disenfranchised Sicilian and other southern Italian peasants faced increased taxes, land scarcity, and environmental challenges, they sought opportunities abroad.” Many came from western Sicily, from towns and islands such as Cefalù, Ustica, Salaparuta, and Contessa Entellina. That last village sent Arbëreshë emigrants, descendants of Albanians who had settled in Sicily centuries earlier and kept their own Byzantine Catholic traditions.
In the city, the newcomers settled mainly in the lower French Quarter around the French Market, a district known as “Little Palermo.” Unlike their counterparts in northern cities, they built no large tenement districts and spread out in a cosmopolitan city of French Creoles, free people of color, formerly enslaved Black Americans, and other immigrants. Jackson observes that Louisiana commentators favored their presence in the post-Civil War years while the northern press painted Italians as criminal and unassimilable.
That tolerance had limits, and in 1891 it shattered. After the 1890 murder of police chief David Hennessy, prosecutors tried 9 of 19 Italian suspects. On March 14, 1891, a mob stormed the Orleans Parish Prison, and Jackson noted that “Within hours eleven Sicilians and other Italians were lynched in one of the largest mass lynchings in US history.” Some of the victims had been acquitted the day before. The killings sparked a diplomatic crisis with Italy. In 1892, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini arrived to help poor Italian immigrants. She opened an orphanage on St. Philip Street and later built a second orphanage on Esplanade Avenue that became Cabrini High School.
The community endured and continued its ascent up the socioeconomic ladder. Smithsonian Magazine writer Miriam Davis reports that Italians “owned only 7 percent of grocery stores in New Orleans in 1880. By 1900, 19 percent were Italian-owned, and by 1920 they ran fully half of all groceries in the city.” Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian cobbler who arrived around 1880, bought a hotel on Royal Street in 1886, and his family’s Hotel Monteleone still anchors the street. Giuseppe Uddo immigrated in 1907 and within a few years began importing tomato paste and olives, a business that grew into Progresso. The Vaccaro brothers of Contessa Entellina and their brother-in-law Salvador D’Antoni began importing Honduran bananas in 1899, building the firm that became Standard Fruit and eventually part of Dole.
Italian migration left a significant footprint in New Orleans’s culinary scene. Salvatore Lupo’s Central Grocery on Decatur Street, dated to 1906 in most accounts, is traditionally credited with the muffuletta, though the origin remains murky. In a 1971 States-Item interview reported by NOLA.com, Charlie Tusa, son of one of Central Grocery’s founders, said, “Nobody has ever been able to figure out for sure how the muffuletta started.” Angelo Brocato, born in Cefalù, apprenticed at age 12 in a Palermo ice cream parlor and opened his French Quarter parlor in 1905. Pascal’s Manale gave the city barbecue shrimp in the 1950s, and Mosca’s in Waggaman, founded in 1946, became a Creole Italian landmark.
Faith served as a powerful source of social cohesion for New Orleans’s budding Italian community. Every March 19, families build tiered, meatless St. Joseph’s altars laden with breads, fig cookies, and lucky fava beans, honoring the saint credited in legend with ending a medieval Sicilian famine. Nystrom told Atlas Obscura, “St. Joseph’s Day also has this syncretic quality about it.” Mutual aid societies such as the Società Italiana di Beneficenza Contessa Entellina, which Louisiana folklorist Laura Westbrook dates to 1886, supported members from particular villages, and after Carnival organizations excluded them, Italians formed the Krewe of Virgilians in the 1930s.
Music may be the most surprising aspect of Italian migration to New Orleans. Nick LaRocca, a New Orleans cornetist of Sicilian descent, led the Original Dixieland Jass Band, which in early 1917 made what the National Park Service calls the first commercially issued jazz recordings.
The countryside told its own story. Sicilian pickers reached Independence in Tangipahoa Parish in the 1890s and within a few years saved enough to buy their own farms, and by 1905 the town had become Louisiana’s primary strawberry shipping center. In politics, Robert Maestri, the son of an Italian father, served as mayor from 1936 to 1946, and Victor Schiro, of Arbëreshë descent, from 1961 to 1970.
Historians have spent decades telling the Italian American story through Ellis Island and Mulberry Street, but the Sicilians of Little Palermo show that the account remains incomplete until New Orleans gets its due.
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