Italian Roots Run Deep, Wide

Author looks at how immigrants influenced American life

Bev Cortiana-McEuen always felt the connection to Tontitown, even though she was growing up in a suburb of Wichita, Kan. It was home to her parents — her mom was an Ardegmani; her dad’s mother a Ceola — and both sets of grandparents were among the settlers who founded the community in 1898.

Her only regret, Cortiana-McEuen said, is that she didn’t ask more questions when her grandparents and parents were still living.

That longing for her own heritage has translated into a passion for sharing the history of Tontitown — and more broadly the history of Italian immigration as a whole. Cortiana-McEuen serves on the Tontitown Historical Museum Board of Directors and will be one of the hosts for a lecture and book signing Tuesday by Vicenza Scarpaci, an immigration scholar from Eugene, Ore. Scarpaci is the author of “The Journey of the Italians in America,” now in its third printing by Pelican Publishing Co.

Go & Do

Lecture & Book Signing

With Vincenza Scarpaci

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday; a reception will precede the lecture at 6:30 p.m.

Where: St. Joseph Catholic Church Parish Hall in Tontitown

Admission: Free

Information: Michael Hartman at 479-595-3299 or email [email protected]

“We thought it would be a good idea to share more of our history through someone else’s,” Cortiana-McEuen said.

Scarpaci is also of Italian heritage, but she was raised in Brooklyn. There, her world included not just Italian culture but also that of Irish, German, Ukrainian, African-American and Jewish neighbors — “and the lonely Chinese laundryman,” she added. As an undergraduate student at Hofstra University, Scarpaci started to look at how her family — and those neighbors — fit into the larger pattern of immigration. The result was years of teaching, both at the college level and in the communities where she has lived.

Scarpaci retired in 1980, “but once you’re an educator, you never retire,” she said. So she took her interest in Italian immigration and invested four years in her book.

Hundreds of photographs take readers to settings as diverse as an Italian family’s kitchen garden in Kellogg, Idaho, to Italians living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Scarpaci already knew about Tontitown, she said by phone from her home, and had visited Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, where the Italians settled before moving on to Northwest Arkansas.

What made Tontitown unusual — but not quite unique — was that the Italian settlers didn’t just move in and dominate a community, they created it.

“They became the welcoming committee when other non-Italian people came to town,” Scarpaci said.

The most similar situation she found was Knobview, Mo., where 30 families from the same group moved in 1898. Although there were farm families scattered around the area, there was no concentrated community until the Italians arrived.

“Within the first 10 years, there were two stores, a saloon, canning plant, post office, school, depot and church, all situated where only trees, brush and some barren land had existed just a decade earlier,” a history of the community reads.

The settlers went on to plant grapes, and the now largely Italian Catholic community was renamed Rosati in 1934 after the first bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Louis, the Italian-born Joseph Rosati.

In addition to history, Scarpaci’s book considers why so little credit has been given to the accomplishments of Italian immigrants — everything from establishing vineyards to designing the first Jacuzzi hot tub — and those of immigrants from elsewhere who took the “dirty, low-paying jobs.”

“The American system looks at who paid for it, who designed it, not who put their sweat and blood into it,” she said. “We’re not supposed to have a class system, but we do. Workers are often not appreciated for what they produce.”

Now, Scarpaci said, being Italian is trendy, which she said is proven by the fact that more people than ever claimed Italian heritage in the two most recent U.S. censuses.

“I can only speculate that new pride in ethnic heritage is due to the fashion and art and cinema and, of course, food from Italy that is so trendy,” she said. “But that’s not all of it. Italians were proud of being Italian even when it wasn’t trendy.”

Scarpaci said her book “wouldn’t count much in the academic community, but it is intended as a gift to the Italian community because I want them to understand and appreciate their heritage.”

Scarpaci’s book and her visit are timed perfectly, according to Cortiana-McEuen, because the Tontitown Historical Museum, which opened in 1986, is in the first year of a five-year plan to “move forward.”

Charlotte Piazza, curator of the museum since it opened, said first on the agenda is creating an online presence and adding a ramp for wheelchair accessibility, both intended to broaden the museum’s reach.

“We’re bursting at the seams with artifacts, and we know there are more out there,” Cortiana-McEuen added. “We’ve got to try to figure out how we’re going to expand.”

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