Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the History of Eating Habits among Italian Immigrants in New York

Drawing on documents produced and collected throughout the twentieth century by Leonard Covello, an Italian American teacher and community activist, Cinotto describes the role food played in the development of Italian American ethnic identity. Cinotto uncovers three sources of conflicting narratives of ethnicity in the Covello collection-the subjectivity of its creator, the sources he collected and selected, and the words of the immigrant women and men conveyed by those sources. Many historians have seen food as an uncontested source of ethnic unity but Cinotto argues that rituals of food production and consumption were a site of generational conflict between Italian-born parents and American-born children over the meaning of Italianness and Americanization.