Between Peasant and Urban Villager : Italian-Americans of New Jersey and New York, 1880-1980 : The Structures of Counter-Discourse

Between Peasant and Urban Villager is a cultural history of the Italian-American working class in New Jersey and New York. It is a demonstration of how the cultural realm functions as an arena of class conflict on the plane of everyday life. It is also a study of cultural discourses - Roman Catholicism, funerals, adolescence - and the rhetoric of daily life which, through the 1980s, always assumed a boundary of equally compelling, yet contrary cultural expressions which many have called the dominant culture. The discourse of the area's Anglo-American middle class, like that of Italian-American workers, has historically functioned to define an interior sense of togetherness along with an outward perception of otherness.