The Dandelion Gatherers
On Italian-American Foodways, Anarchism, & Assimilation
by Wren Awry
Zine #38 — February 2025
The Dandelion Gatherers is a historical exploration of Italian American foodways, anarchism, and assimilation through folklore, newspaper stories, and accounts of women who gathered dandelions by the roadside.
On a June day in 1908, two Italian immigrant women were arrested while harvesting dandelions in Paterson, New Jersey. Giuseppina Carrosive and Mary Caminita were foraging for the bitter greens when, according to a pair of newspaper articles, they started chasing some children with the knives they used to dig up the roots. Recorder and judge James F. Carroll(1) came across the altercation on his way home from City Hall and demanded that the women stop. Instead, Carrosive and Caminita fought back. If The New York Times and Paterson Press are to be believed, they “began to brandish their knives menacingly” and “one of the women made a lunge at the Recorder.” Carroll only secured the blades after a spirited tussle. The women were detained and, the day after the incident, fined $25 at a time when the average New Jersey silk worker—Paterson’s primary industry—earned just $444.61 annually. The New York Times article ended with a flourish: “There was a story afloat that the Recorder had been attacked by Anarchists. This he denied.”
The newspaper articles and the episode they report on are full of elisions and unknowns. The women’s names were likely written down incorrectly(2), and since I haven’t yet found any census records or other documents pertaining to them, I don’t know how old they were, if they worked in Paterson’s mills, or where in Italy they immigrated from. It’s probable that they didn’t speak English or even standard Italian, and I like to imagine that they swapped stories and commiserations in Sicilian, Neapolitan, or some other dialect from that language-rich peninsula. While The Paterson Press claimed that they used knives to dig up dandelion roots, they were more likely cutting the stems and leaving the plants intact to leaf out once again, since it was the leaves that these immigrants used culinarily. I also don’t know the details of their altercation with the children: if they were strangers or family members, if the women were provoked, or if the story was exaggerated to give Carroll an excuse to arrest them since, as The New York Times reported, “there had been several complaints about the Italians picking greens” in Paterson.
Reading between the smudged-ink lines of the articles, what emerges is testimony to an everyday act of resistance among immigrant women who—as Jennifer Guglielmo argues in her book Living the Revolution(3), where I first encountered Carrosive and Caminita’s story—were part of a culture in which challenging the sanctity of private property, both materially and ideologically, was commonplace. But their story also illuminates how assimilative pressures and socio-political repression worked to transform Italian-American foodways, and to erode the revolutionary spirit that was once commonplace in the tenement districts and factory towns where Italian immigrants settled.
Harvesting dandelions, and the other bitter greens referred to collectively as cicoria(4), was an activity Carrosive and Caminita shared with Italian women across the northeastern United States, many of whom gleaned prior to immigration. The people of the Italic peninsula had a long tradition of foraging on lands held in common or belonging to the nobility, but the end of feudalism and the 1860s unification of Italy curtailed these practices and this, coupled with a proliferation of taxes on grain, animals, and other foodstuffs, intensified the hunger of poor peasants. Still, in certain places and at certain times, wildcrafting was feasible, and women and children harvested a range of foods, from greens to fungi, herbs, fruits, and nuts. Peasants also picked surreptitiously and, in some cases, scavenged dead carcasses for meat or illegally fished in rivers. It was largely food scarcity that drove four million Italians, primarily from the impoverished south, to immigrate to the United States between 1880 and 1920, bringing their culinary culture with them.
Even women who didn’t wildcraft back in Italy picked it up as a subsistence strategy in the United States where, as Hasia Diner writes, they “canvassed city parks, vacant lots, or empty fields on the outskirts of the cities looking for dandelions, other greens, mushrooms, and berries.”(5) When they harvested cicoria for their own households, they’d fry the bitter, nutrient-rich greens with peppers and tomatoes, use them for soup, or boil the leaves in water to make a tonic called acqua di cicoria, a folk remedy said to ease stomach aches and fatigue.
Some women also gathered the greens to sell. In New York City, dandelions were typically harvested in Brooklyn and the Bronx but distributed in Manhattan’s lively pushcart markets, alongside produce, household goods, clothing, and toys. A 1903 New York Tribune article, “Do Fiery Foods Cause Fiery Natures? Italian Love for Red Peppers May Explain the Combativeness of Spirit of Men of That Nation,” ran a picture of an elderly woman, gingerly picking up a portion of greens from the abundance spread across a checkered blanket. The caption read “Selling dandelions for soup—a familiar site in East Side Italian neighborhoods” and, according to the article, these vendors sold massive bundles to eager customers for five cents apiece.
This same article painted the dandelion gatherer as a specter haunting the streets and imaginations of the United States, asking, “Is not the stooping figure of the Italian woman, with her trowel and bag, a familiar one in the suburbs of every town where laborers of that nationality live?” The question—alongside the article’s headline—calls to mind the complaints about Italians harvesting greens that preceded Carrosive and Caminita’s arrests, and the way their behavior was described in newspapers. In the US press more broadly, Italian women were portrayed as both the submissive wives and daughters of patriarchal men, and torrid, criminally-inclined creatures. Although never demonized and discriminated against the way immigrants and communities of color were, Italians of both genders were considered disorderly and dangerous, with passionate Southern European spirits.
Italian immigrant foodways were used to bolster these stereotypes. Photographs that ran alongside “Do Fiery Foods Cause Fiery Natures?” show the outdoor pantry preparation, including drying tomatoes for sauce on sidewalks and stringing up peppers to cure on tenement balconies, that was part and parcel of ethnic Italian neighborhoods. The press and Anglo-American elites considered these practices unhygienic, and an unsavory way of putting private family life on public display. But the article’s critiques are strongest in its discussion of dandelions, emphasizing the ways in which foraging involved an implicit comfort with trespassing. “She is no respecter of persons,” the anonymous author writes of the cicoria gatherer, “The lodges of the wealthy have no more terrors for her than the open barway of the poor man’s field. She passes both with equal impartiality in her search after one of the articles of diet of her race.”
When Judge Carroll interrupted Caminita and Carrosive, they asserted their right to use what would otherwise go to waste among the new, strange landscape of American abundance with what they had on hand: their voices and harvesting knives. By picking edible weeds that grew on well-manicured lawns and in abandoned lots, these women and others like them left their Anglo and affluent neighbors suspicious and unsettled because, as Guglielmo argues in her analysis of the Paterson arrests, they pushed against the mores around private property that the United States’ particular brand of capitalism is built on.(6) While, as Europeans harvesting on stolen Indigenous land, they occupied a fraught settler-colonial position, these women’s transgressions against elite, capitalist norms also functioned as a form of resistance: newly arrived, slotted into low paying factory jobs or piecework, and facing xenophobia, they exercised their autonomy by harvesting nutritious greens from the urban earth to cook with or sell. These deeper threats implied by Caminita and Carrosive’s foraging might have been one reason why The New York Times mentioned that “there was a story afloat that the Recorder had been attacked by Anarchists.”
Italians were particularly well represented within the vibrant, multi-cultural and multi-lingual anarchist movement in the early twentieth-century United States, and this association earned these immigrants reputations as revolutionaries and incendiaries regardless of their individual political affiliations. The first wave of Italians arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth century, after and during their government’s repression of anarchist organizations and popular uprisings across the peninsula. While New York City—which had a population of 400,000 Italians, matching that of Rome, by 1920—was an important center of Italian immigrant anarchism, the much smaller Paterson also emerged as a hotspot.(7)
The first Italians in Paterson arrived at the end of the 1870s to work in the city’s silk mills, primarily from regions in the north where wool and silk production were coupled with a culture of radical labor organizing. Southerners followed after the turn of the century, taking on lower-level, poorer-paid silk industry jobs such as assisting in the dye houses, and by 1910 a full half of Paterson’s Italian population was from the Mezzogiorno. The Italian anarchist community in Paterson started with a small group of weavers from Biella, in the northern region of Piemonte, that included feminist and bookseller Ninfa Baronio and her partner, Firmino Gallo. This was followed, as Kenyon Zimmer writes, by a kind of “radical chain migration” that “guided anarchist refugees and exiles to Paterson.” This migration eventually made the New Jersey city such an important hub that, for seven years starting in 1895, almost every well-known Italian anarchist spent time in Paterson, including writer and revolutionary Errico Malatesta. While anarchist organizers were fewer in number, at the turn of the century significant events like public meetings and lectures could turn out up to fifty percent of the Italians in the city.
By June 1908, when Caminita and Carrosive were arrested, the United States in general and Paterson in particular were in the throes of an anti-anarchist frenzy. In Paterson, this hysteria was born from a decade of anarchist-affiliated labor actions—including a march led by the incendiary Luigi Galleani during the 1902 silk strike during which up to two thousand workers smashed mill windows and doors, and got into a gunfight with the police—alongside the city’s association with previous resident Gaetano Bresci, who assassinated the king of Italy in 1900. In 1907, anarchists were blamed for the mail bomb that murdered Paterson Judge Roberto Cortese, although his reputation for cracking down on organized crime suggests that it was more likely sent by the mafia. In March 1908—on the heels of incidents of alleged anarchist violence in New York, Denver, and Chicago—Paterson’s Mayor McBride asked President Roosevelt to prevent anarchist periodical La Questione Sociale from going through the post and Roosevelt complied, using a technicality to ban it. That May, Paterson authorities indicted editor Ludovico Caminita(8)—who shared a surname with Mary Caminita, one reason she may have been rumored to be an anarchist(9)—on an inciting-to-riot charge based on La Questione Sociale’s content.
Italian women anarchists struggled not just against the state but also against patriarchal attitudes that continued to stricture even that most radical of subcultures. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who helped organize the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, wrote that there were no “prominent women” in Italian anarchist or socialist circles, and that the women were, “always in the background, cooking in the kitchen,” a view that was echoed by the Left generally. Domestic violence was common even within anarchist households while other factors, like the second shift of domestic labor that women were expected to take on after coming home from the mills, further limited their ability to participate. When they did, women were often asked to support cultural and family-centered events instead of editing periodicals, organizing strikes, or taking part in political meetings and revolutionary social circles.
While some women became prominent speakers and agitators, and developed anarcha-feminist study groups like Paterson’s Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna, in which they read and created feminist theory, dozens more complied to expectations, devoting their time to quietly supporting fundraisers, festivals, lectures, theatrical performances, and publishing houses, as well maintaining the social spaces that were necessary for anarchist movements to thrive. Although this work aligned with the patriarchal ideology of anarchist motherhood, reproductive labor was a valuable and integral component of the movement: something to be recognized, within its gendered limitations, rather than dismissed. As Guglielmo cautions, if we fail to “peek into the kitchen and listen to what these women were saying and planning as they nourished these movements” important ideas and contributions are likely to be overlooked. Moreover, immigrant women’s culinary labor can be seen as, in the words of Simone Cinotto, “less … an act of submission to patriarchy than as a work of care, self-assertion, and identification, relevant not only in the construction of an ethnic domestic haven but also in building community, transracial working-class solidarities, and diasporic memory.”
While Judge Carroll denied that Carrosive and Caminita were anarchists, they never had an opportunity, as far as I can tell, to respond to the rumors themselves. Statistically it seems as likely as not that they could have been among the crowds filling the streets and lecture halls on days when Goldman, Malatesta, or Paterson-based anarcha-feminist Maria Roda spoke. They could have also been somewhere in the background, preparing pasta tossed with a rich tomato sauce or planning picnics for male workers organizing strikes and protests. Regardless of whether the two women would have called themselves anarchists, by defending their right to gather dandelions in urban lots they were engaged in an anarchic approach to caring for themselves and their communities.
If fiery foods caused fiery natures, maybe the passionate, unpredictable Italian spirit could be quelled through a milk and white bread diet. In settlement houses, schools, and factories, reformers worked to “improve” the lots of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, a project that largely involved attempting to “modernize” immigrant communities and introduce them to Protestant ideals. Within Italian neighborhoods, reformers focused on women and children, who they saw as both the keepers of retrograde traditions and the drivers of change within their families and social networks. Many of these efforts were centered on changing traditional foodways, which the social reform movement saw as more than simply unhealthy: as a mechanism by which they were separated from mainstream white American culture, reformers believed that food practices left Italian immigrants vulnerable to the ideas of anarchists, socialists, and union organizers.
While it’s true that malnutrition was common among Italian immigrants, many reformers blamed the habits and beliefs of their food culture itself rather than looking at poverty as a driving force. Although Italians ate more fresh fruits and vegetables than the average early-twentieth-century American, reformers were concerned about “unsavory” practices like drinking coffee and consuming oily, spicy, and fried food. They also deplored the sensorium of ethnic Italian neighborhoods: middle-class visitors to Italian Harlem in the late nineteenth century claimed it stank of trash, latrines, and garlic but residents considered the streets perfumed with the delicious smells of bread, coffee, cheese, olives, and cured meats. Culinary traditions that collapsed the boundaries of public and private were proclaimed foul by reformers in much the same way that they were side-eyed by newspapers.
Although reform efforts included visits from settlement workers, culinary classes, and lectures, turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants were largely incorrigible in their eating habits. To the frustration of social workers, Italian immigrant women rarely attended settlement house courses, although they sometimes took up educational pursuits related to labor activism and other forms of radical politics instead. In response, reformers decided to promote Americanization through public schools. Starting in 1908, the year that Carrosive and Caminita were arrested, charities like the New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor offered free or reduced price lunches for immigrant children that included the American staples of fruit juice, bread, milk, and breakfast cereal. While parents fought to hold onto their foodways—a stance that put them at odds with teachers, social workers, and reformers—some students began to see the food their families ate as a barrier between themselves and, to quote an East Harlem student interviewed by oral historian Leonard Covello, their “‘dreams of becoming a real American.’”
All that said, immigration certainly had impacts. Italians from across the peninsula gathered in the same neighborhoods, which meant home cooks now had access to recipes from disparate regions. Stores offered a greater variety of affordable groceries than had been available prior to immigration, allowing immigrants to put aside the meals of poverty and eat the sugar, coffee, and meat enjoyed by the upper class back home. Foods that most working-class Italians didn’t have access to or reserved only for feast days, including factory-made pasta, became everyday eating in the United States. Until World War I—when the war caused Italy to stop exporting foodstuffs almost entirely and created an opportunity for domestic producers to enter the market—most of these provisions came from the peninsula itself, where the diasporic food export industry made up a significant portion of the economy and was supported by the government. While small-time importers served immigrants from their own towns and provinces, bigger importing operations and middle-class merchants needed consumers who accepted a more standardized set of products tied to an overarching Italian identity, which they promoted through signage and advertising. Cinotto argues that the development of this identity—which also included parades, newspaper propaganda, and erecting statues to Italy’s “great men” of Western civilization like Garibaldi, Dante, and Columbus—allowed these immigrants to more effectively see themselves and be seen by others as white Americans.
As newer waves of migrants arrived in the New York metropolitan area from outside of Europe and reformers shifted their focus to the diets of Puerto Ricans and Black Americans from the US South, freshly-assimilated Italians took to denigrating their new neighbors, a process that impacted their own culinary practices. Whiteness and the economic power it purchased allowed Italian-Americans to draw sharp lines between what should be public and what should be private, and cast aspersions on ethnic groups that were unable or unwilling to do so. Although rag-picking was a common occupation among turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants, Italian-Americans in East Harlem and elsewhere disparaged their new Black and Puerto Rican neighbors when they turned to the same survival strategy during the Great Depression. Despite articles like “Do Fiery Foods Cause Fiery Natures?” that articulated the ways in which Italian immigrants wildcrafted, bought from pushcarts, and dried peppers and tomatoes in public, by the late 1930s they distinguished themselves from the produce stands and street food culture of their Puerto Rican neighbors by eating behind closed doors in family groups.
Political assimilation happened concurrently. The tradition of Italian immigrant leftism, and leftism in the United States generally, started to wane during and after the first Red Scare. This included the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920—which led to the arrest of thousands of suspected radicals and the deportation of over eight-hundred, primarily those of Russian, Jewish, and Italian ethnicities—and was followed by the controversial 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. While some immigrants decided to repatriate to Italy in the wake of this repression, many of those who remained in the United States embraced nationalism as a path toward assimilation. Italian immigrant communities experienced a surge in American patriotism during World War I, during which both the United States and Italy were on the side of the Allies. This was followed by the growing influence of Fascism within Little Italies—strategically promoted by Mussolini himself, as well as by mainstream US newspapers(10), the non-radical Italian language press, and food importers(11)—which lasted up until World War II. Political repression, coupled with the rise of fascism, pushed most of the Italian-American Left toward a focus on (often quite militant) anti-fascism, as well as reformist labor union and community organizing that depended on appeals to capitalism and the state. “By the 1940s,” Guglielmo writes, “Italian Americans had learned to demand change not through revolutionary, internationalist, working-class solidarity but with the terms of interest-group liberalism.”
This shift is born out in anecdotes about how, after the first Red Scare and other acts of repression, anarchist and radical pasts were covered up or only whispered about. From rediscovered family photos related to Sacco and Vanzetti to the daughter of Carmela Teoli—a teenage mill hand whose testimony to Congress played a vital part in the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike—only finding out about her mother’s role in that struggle after Teoli’s death, these stories make clear just how much was intentionally hidden as part of the process of assimilation. Now, the mainstream Italian-American experience is characterized and caricatured by adoration for the genocidal conqueror Columbus(12), television shows like The Sopranos, and a handful of cheesy red sauce dishes like chicken parmesan and lasagna.(13) Collective memories of struggle and resistance have, for the most part, been cleared from the table alongside balcony-dried peppers and wild greens gathered from city lots.
In “The Three Chicory Gatherers,” a Calabrian folk tale collected by Italo Calvino, the eldest daughter of a greens harvester stumbles across a giant cicoria plant and, uprooting it, uncovers a dragon’s lair. To save herself from being eaten, she agrees to housekeep the dragon’s home and dine on a human hand. When she can’t follow through with the macabre meal, the dragon kills her. Her middle and youngest sister come looking for her in turn and they too end up trapped below ground, prisoners in a house of treasure. It’s the clever youngest sister that ends up not only killing the dragon and bringing her two older sisters back to life, but also reviving his other victims: princes, kings, and noblemen. Three of these men end up marrying the sisters and, ensconced in their new royal home, they “had a grand wedding celebration, and everyone was happy, especially the three girls’ mother, who didn’t have to go out any more to pick chicory.” While I would never begrudge the overworked mother for celebrating a chance to put her feet up or the sisters for enjoying some rest after escaping a kidnapping, I can’t help but notice that they won this reprieve by becoming part of the power structure. And what did they lose when, upon entering the dragon’s den, their life sustaining practices led to punishment and terror?
Like the family in the folk tale, descendents of turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants have largely stopped harvesting and eating dandelions. I rarely see recipes for the green in Italian-American cookbooks, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on a red sauce restaurant menu. Only one friend of several I talked to had family memories of harvesting and eating dandelions, although he had never done so personally. This friend mentioned that his mother never ate the dandelion salad his grandmother would make on Sundays because she found it unpalatable, and that his grandfather ultimately stopped gathering the greens because of concerns around pesticide use. On the one hand, tastes morphed and adapted, and on the other urban and suburban landscapes have become—to an even greater degree than they were in 1908, when Carrosive and Caminita were arrested—tightly controlled, whether through chemical sprays, chain link fences, video surveillance, or the twin senses of propriety and shame.
I only regularly started cooking and eating dandelion greens after learning about the practice among Italian immigrant women. Since I live in the desert, I buy my dandelions from the grocery store, but they still feel precious to me. I wash and boil the greens, then save the water to cook pasta or polenta, an ad hoc ode to acqua di cicoria. I wring out the excess water from the greens, then saute them simply with olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper. The cooked dandelions are earthy and nutrient-rich: they taste like strength and struggle but, as the bitterness cuts through, I’m also reminded of the acrid dangers of assimilation and forgetting.
On the rare occasion that I leave the greens in my fridge too long and they turn slimy and brown, I bring them to the compost bed at my local anarchist social center and sprinkle them across the top like offerings.
Carroll went on to play a prominent role in jailing organizers and supporters during the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike.
I’ve wavered on what to call the two women, although I’ve ultimately decided to go with their surnames as listed in the 1908 The New York Times article. I love that “Carrosive” reads as a slightly misspelled, gender-neutral take on the Italian word “corrosiva/o,” which means “corrosive”—it sounds like a punk name!
Guglielmo’s writing and research in Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945—especially regarding Italian immigrant contestations of private property, the racialization of Italian immigrant women, and the importance of paying attention to so-called “women’s work” so that those histories don’t get lost—threads its way through this entire piece. This essay wouldn’t exist without her scholarship, alongside that of Hasia Diner, Kenyon Zimmer, Marcella Bencivenni, and Simone Cinotto. I am grateful for and beyond indebted to them all.
Cicoria refers to a range of edible greens that includes, but is not limited to, dandelion. You can really “get into the weeds” trying to sort out the specific species and varieties that are harvested within an Italian and Italian-American context: suffice it to say they’re all pretty similar and are used in similar ways culinarily.
I like to imagine that, for some of these women, harvesting cicoria leaves served as a way to remember the villages, surrounded by mountains and macchia, that they had left behind in Italy. But for many gathering the dandelions was probably drudgery or at least a chore, nearly as tedious as doing piecework in damp tenements or tending day and night to their families.
Writing about gleaning under Mussolini, Diana Garvin invokes James C. Scott’s idea of the “weapons of the weak,” everyday forms of resistance that “provided ordinary weapons to relatively powerless groups.” While Garvin is focused on the era from 1922–1943, decades after Carrosive and Caminita emigrated, she illuminates some of the ways that foraging challenged laws that protected private property. “Fascist policies consistently favoured rural landowners over migrant workers, and the land itself over those who laboured on it,” she writes. This led to the resistance that female rice workers, or mondine, enacted when they foraged bird’s eggs and frogs from the paddies, small acts of rebellion that would later contribute to an eruption of labor strikes between 1932 and 1939. By insisting that they had a right to food that grew wild on well-manicured lawns and in abandoned lots, Italian immigrant women who gathered greens in the urban and suburban United States also wielded foraging as a weapon of the weak.
Although Italian immigrant anarchists primarily followed the anarcho-communist ideologies of Malatesta and Russian Peter Kropotkin, splits did emerge. The starkest one was between the federated organizzatori, of which labor organizer (and wife-abuser) Carlo Tresca was the most famous member, and the anti-organizzatori, who were catalyzed by Luigi Galleani’s incendiary politics and the concept of propaganda by the deed.
In 1920, during the First Red Scare, Ludovico Caminita turned snitch, and he later edited pro-Fascist newspapers (eesh!).
This is the reason Guglielmo suggests in Living the Revolution.
Up until World War II, major US newspapers viewed fascism as a corrective to Italian anarchism and communism, and expressed admiration for Mussolini.
According to Cinotto, Mussolini’s Italy only granted food import licenses to Italian-American businesses that espoused support for fascism.
As D’Angelo and Pinto write, Columbus Day was instituted as a national holiday in the 1930s after lobbying by Fascists and their friends. Not all Italian-Americans, myself included, are invested in the myth of Columbus. Leftist organizations in East Coast cities, such as Contro Colombo in New York and the Philly Radical Italian Network, are working alongside Indigenous organizers to fight for the removal of Columbus statues and the genocidal history they celebrate.
To be clear, I have watched all six seasons of The Sopranos and will eat chicken parm and lasagna any day of the week.
References
Bencivenni, Marcella. “Fired by the Ideal: Italian Anarchists in New York City, 1880s–1920s.” In Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, 49–66. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017.
Bencivenni, Marcella. Italian immigrant radical culture: The idealism of the sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011.
Calvino, Italo. “The Two Chicory Gatherers.” In Italian Folktales: Selected and Retold, 500–503. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
Cannistraro, Philip, and Gerald Meyer. “Introduction: Italian American Radicalism: An Interpretive History. .” Essay. In The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture , 1–48. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003.
Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, family, and community in New York City. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
D’Angelo, Jeanne, and Samantha Pinto. “Opinion: Contro Colombo: It’s Time to Honor Our Italian Ancestors by Removing Racist Monuments.” WHYY, August 11, 2020. https://whyy.org/articles/contro-colombo-its-time-to-honor-our-italian-ancestors-by-removing-racist-monuments/.
Diner, Hasia R. Hungering for america: Italian, Irish, and Jewish foodways in the age of migration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
“‘Do Fiery Foods Cause Fiery Natures?’ .” New York Tribune. December 6, 1903. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1903-12-06/ed-1/seq-35/.
Garvin, D. (2021). Chapter Two: Agricultural Labor and the Fight for Taste. In Feeding fascism: The politics of women's food work (pp. 47–85). essay, University of Toronto Press.
Guglielmo, Jennifer. “Donne Ribelli: Recovering the History of Italian Women's Radicalism in the United States.” In The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, 113–141. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003.
Guglielmo, Jennifer. Living the revolution: Italian women’s resistance and radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945. Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2010.
“‘Italian Amazons.” The Paterson Press, June 2, 1908.
“Judge Fights Armed Women: Paterson Recorder Secures Their Knives After a Lively Struggle.” The New York Times, June 3, 1908.
Klindienst, Patricia. The earth knows my name: Food, culture, and sustainability in the gardens of ethnic Americans. Boston: Beacon Press, 2008.
“United States Congressional Serial Set. 5921. ,” n.d https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3991872&view=1up&seq=79
Ziegelman, Jane. “The Baldizzi Family.” Essay. In 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement , 183–227. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2011.
Zimmer, Kenyon. “‘I Senza Patria: Italian Anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey.’” Essay. In Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America, 49–87. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Zimmer, Kenyon. “Red Scare Deportees.” Kenyon Zimmer, December 24, 2019. https://kenyonzimmer.com/red-scare-deportees/.
About the Author
Wren Awry is a writer, food/history/folklore nerd, and the editor of Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid (PM Press, 2023)
I’d like to offer gratitude to archivist Reina Borst at the International Institute of Social History and to the New Jersey State archives for scanning newspaper articles for me. To Nick for sharing his family’s history with dandelions, and to the denizens of Hollow Horse Farm in Maine, where I stayed for a weekend in summer 2024 and delighted in harvesting the dandelions that grew all over their fields. To Saidiya Hartman, whose Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments wasn’t directly quoted or incorporated into this piece, but was one of my main inspirations in “activating the archives” and trying to bring Carrosive and Caninita’s story to life on the page. And, as always, to the incredible Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness team. Any mistakes are my own.