The Imagined Immigrant ─ Images of Italian Emigration to the United States Between 1890 and 1924

Using original sources - such as newspaper articles, silent movies, letters, autobiographies, and interviews - Ilaria Serra depicts a large tapestry of images that accompanied mass Italian migration to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century. She chooses to translate the Italian concept of immaginario with the Latin imago that felicitously blends the double English translation of the word as 'imagery' and 'imaginary'. Imago is a complex knot of collective representations of the immigrant subject, a mental production that finds concrete expression; impalpable, yet real. The 'imagined immigrant' walks alongside the real one in flesh and rags.

Ilaria Serra is assistant professor of Italian at Florida Atlantic University.