Abstract
At the turn of the twenty first century relations between Italian Americans and other ethnic groups in New York City had been defined in the minds of the general public largely by the mass media coverage of the most notorious of violent interracial incidents. The facile media accounts of these tragic crimes must be corrected in order to provide an objective context for understanding Italian Americans’ relations with other groups that is partially explained by their territorially centered culture. As Italian neighborhoods slowly changed during the 1970s and 1980s, despite local resistance, individual Italian Americans, and citywide Italian American organizations, worked positively, but mostly unnoticed, with other ethnic groups. All this took place during a turbulent era in New York City punctuated with other instances of intergroup violence, urban riots as well as hotly contested municipal elections that exploited racial, ethnic and religious divisions. As a consequence, today most historically Italian neighborhoods are dominated by new groups, but retain some of the earlier, often elderly, Italian population.
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Krase, J. (2017). Italian Americans and Others in New York City: Interethnic Relations from the Field. In: Krase, J., Uherek, Z. (eds) Diversity and Local Contexts. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53952-2_11
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