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ow many Trentini left for the United States of America between 1870, when there began the Great

Migration, and 1970, when for the first time the number of those returning home (a small number) was greater than the number of those leaving? From the statistics compiled in 1888 by Lorenzo Guetti, the priest and founder of the Trentino Cooperative movements, we can deduce that between 1870 and 1888 about 4,000 workers went to the USA, of a total 25,000 emigrants who left for the Americas. It is yet more difficult to determine how many followed them until the outbreak of the First World War, a period when the great and invincible North American country proved a magnet for European immigrants. While there are no official statistics, we can rely on three annual surveys proposed by the European Mediation of Labor Chamber of Commerce of Rovereto. We can conclude that in the fifteen years that preceded the war the force of attraction of the United States on the masses migrants had become overwhelming, so much so that in some years, 70-90% of the workers who came to America had chosen the United States and only the remainder headed to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. In absolute terms, the Office's investigations can make us think of an annual flow of 2,000-3,000 Trentini to the States. From 1890 to 1914, he could then calculate 50,000-60,000 workers started from the Dolomites to New York, to which are added the 4,000 earlier. According to our studies, another 6000-8000 Trentini would follow them in the period between 1919 and 1939 . After the end of the Second World War in Trentino the emigration to the U.S. becomes reduced to several hundred. In short, the United States of America opened its doors to approximately 60,000-70,000 workers parties from the Italian Tyrol and, after 1918, from Trentino.

The Great Emigration

there are two considerations. Firstly, this movement toward these areas was an internal immigration until 1918 since the Trentino was part of that empire. Nonetheless, they moved to a region with a different language, costumes and economy. This was also for those who went to live in Vorarlberg or in Bosnia. This circumstance was a movement representing a temporary or seasonal migration just for one or few seasons with an eventual return home. Even among the Trentini that entered the United States, many then returned home. It is difficult and frustrating to define how many did this turn around. We merely have indirect information that suggest that 50% went and returned.

There were years, possibly decades, especially between 1890 and 1914, where many males of the Italian mountains would leave. It had become almost a custom, a difficult and painful habit, however, to go to the United States whenever the household could not sustain itself and whenever it was difficult to find work. They were the famous birds of passage. They were the immigrants that the American ruling classes did not like too much since they worked a while and then took away a small amount of capital from the country instead of spending it on the spot, settling there and forming the manpower available to the local capitalism needed to maintain a low level of wages. They instead lingered a handful of months or a few years, sacrificing and saving and eventually brought home the hoard of dollars that, given the high exchange rate, was used to replace the house, to buy a pasture, a field, a set of woods. It was also, and especially with these dollars, these rimesseremittances that the Trentino economy managed to recover the great crisis that had prostrated it in 1870-1890.

Here is indeed a major finding: the United States of America was the country that welcomed and accepted the greatest number immigrants from the Trentino. More than double the number of immigrants, for example, found hospitality in the USA than in Brazil or Argentina, as well as the many more than who entered in the same period of time in France, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, the most common destinations for emigrants from Trentino in Europe. In contrast, more workers from the Dolomites gravitated and found work in the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Accordingly

Enrico Gentilini, a Trentino pharmacist who lived in Trinidad, Colorado and for a time worked for the newspaper L'Unione of Pueblo traveled around the States and he estimated in 1914 that there were about 40,000 Trentini, including children born there. Silvio Bernardi had sent a report to the Secretary of Trentino emigration that there were 40,000 Trentini in the USA that included 567 colonies in the USA in 35 states. In 1900, the Trentino had 360,000 inhabitants while tens of thousands of people had emigrated to Brazil, Argentina and other European countries.

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An enormous question: in those decades of enormous economic and social crisis, how did these migrants find the money to cross the ocean to get to the USA? Hardly a silly question: it was very difficult to put together the few dollars to buy passage on some ship to the USA. In addition, the U.S. government also enacted laws that sought to prevent the entry into the country of poor and needy people that would weigh on state coffers or private charity. This became the way: who had already emigrated sent to friends and relatives the money for the trip. They returned the funds a little at a time as they found work. Indeed, those relatives and those friends were often the ones who found employment for the arriving new emigrants. There developed a system of bordo or boarding houses wherein the new comer who stay in a house, would be served meals, have their laundry done in exchange for an agreed weekly or monthly compensation. Even in this way, here and there in the United States, there developed valley islands since the Nonesi would recall Nonesi and those of the Bleggio those of their area and villages.

From which Valleys did the emigrants come from and where did they settle? According to the statistics compiled by Don Guetti, from the very beginning, the greatest amount migrants came from the Val di Non followed by those from the Val Rendena. Among those of the Val Rendena were the moleti the knife grinders who were able to make their way with their craft in the large cities like New York and Chicago. With their experience of the Cooperative Movement of Don Guetti, they formed efficient labor guilds, they achieved a good standard of living and often a life of ease, creating prosperous business enterprises. So, too, migrants came from the Giudicarie Valleys, the Val di Chiese, Bleggio, Banale e Lomaso, Val di Cembra e the Val di Pine`. Other valleys had migrations from time to time: the Valsugana, Basso Sarca and the Val di Ledro.

previous decades. At the same time, to prevent the arrival of an illiterate labor force with no financial resources, Americans approved of some laws creating quotas which drastically limited into the country the entry of Latin, Slav, Greek, Arab emigrants as well as other nationalities and ethnic groups. Note that even among Italians, especially those in the south, illiteracy was very high and that both the north and the south of the country , workers departed who did not have even a small amount of money. As a result, the Anglo-Saxons, the Germans, Scandinavians were favored and preferred.

They would continue to head to the United States in great numbers. The emigrants from Trentino continued to leave their land with small numbers even in the period between the two World Wars up to 1960-1970. But the U.S. government virtually prevented the flow to continue. In the 1920`s a number of laws were passed to restrict the entry of immigrants in the United States, whose capitalist system was now focusing on the development of the internal market, and consequently on a policy of high wages, thus requiring less and less of a massive immigration as had been the case for the

The Trentino region, we know, had entered World War I as Austrian but had exited Italian. So even for her children that Percentage Bill of 1921 had an impact since it imposed a limit and a quota of only 42,000 to the Italian immigrants who had entered in the previous decades in the hundreds of thousands per year in the country. The Secretariat of Emigration for the Tridentine Veneto wrote sadly regarding the Trentino emigrants: there exists a certain mistrust of Italy in them (the Trentino immigrants) since as the once Austrian subjects in America, they were most respected and well regarded of the Italians. Rightly or wrongly, however, almost always the result of prejudice, this was another reality with which the Trentino emigrants had to deal with from 1918 and certainly not just those bound for the United States of America. Even so, now that they could no longer boast an Austrian passport, they could no longer differentiate themselves from emigrants who came from the rest of Italy. Hence, they named and baptized their social groups Tyrolean Clubs after 1918 since in the decades before, they had identified themselves as Tirolesi and dedicated to the figures of the Emperor Francis Joseph and Andreas Hofer. These Clubs or Circles were used to gather the people around the traditional values they had brought from their valleys, in a country that was rushing towards modernity, quickly erasing their roots. The newspaper L'Emigrante of March 1921 hinted that there were sixty Trentino associations established in the various centers of the Confederation North Americana.
Renzo Grosselli is a noted journalist of LAdige the main newspaper of the Trentino. He has researched the history of emigration from the Trentino and has published the book LEmigrazione dal Trentino dall Medioevo all Prima Guerra Mondiale (Trentino Emigration from the Middle Ages to the First World War).

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