Between 1880 and 1915 over 4 million Italians arrived in the United States. One of the primary points of entry for these immigrants was the port of New Orleans. A significant Italian population had already established itself in New Orleans in the 1840s, well before the Civil War, with Italian residents in Louisiana surpassing those in New York as early as 1870. By 1910 forty-three thousand Italians—both foreign and native born—resided in Louisiana. By 1930 nearly half of all foreign-born families in Louisiana were Italian. Italian immigrant experiences in Louisiana reveal the complex intersections of race, identity, violence, and regional politics.

Arrival of Italians in Louisiana

Following the Civil War, plantation owners in Louisiana sought labor to replace their freed Black workforce. Meanwhile, due to the existing citrus trade between Palermo and New Orleans, Italian citrus traders in both cities took on the role of labor agents by organizing the recruitment of impoverished Sicilian workers. These agents also facilitated the movement of workers to and from Louisiana, sometimes through coercive methods. In response to labor demands and recruitment efforts, arriving Italian laborers to the region were largely Sicilian.

Sicilians and Italians who immigrated to Louisiana in the late nineteenth century possessed a fragmented sense of national identity. Italy had only unified under a constitutional monarchy in 1861. This unification was less a popular movement and more a product of elite alliances, which left southern Italy, particularly Sicily, outside the newly formed republic. As disenfranchised Sicilian and other southern Italian peasants faced increased taxes, land scarcity, and environmental challenges, they sought opportunities abroad.

In the United States, the identities of arriving Italians were complicated by late-nineteenth-century nativist stereotypes, which often placed them in a lower social and racial status. Italians’ “whiteness” was qualified since Italians were Mediterranean, which fell below the dominant northern European racial classifications of the era. Although Italians were legally “white” and granted significant legal privileges as a result, they were simultaneously understood as a less-advanced and less-evolved “race.”

While Sicilians represented twenty-five percent of Italian arrivals nationally, they accounted for ninety percent of Italian immigrants in New Orleans. This distinctly Sicilian immigrant population brought a complicated sense of place, identity, and belonging as they negotiated their sense of nation, ethnicity, and citizenry in post-Reconstruction Louisiana.

Relationship with the Local Community

By 1890 approximately eleven thousand Italians—both foreign and native born—resided in Louisiana. The relationship between Sicilians and native-born white Louisianans was markedly different from the hostile attitudes that Italians encountered in northern cities. New York newspapers, for example, described Italians as “ragged, filthy, and verminous,” “links in a descending chain of evolution,” and “wretched, lazy, ignorant, and criminal dregs of the meanest sections of Italy.” In opposition to such negative tropes, Louisiana’s regional press welcomed these immigrants and emphasized the contributions and advantages of their arrival. New Orleans’s Daily Picayune described Italians as fitting in, contributing to the “prosperity of the city and state,” “falling in line,” behaving like “proper citizens,” and being an “industrious, honest and peaceable” people. Opinions around the state, including those expressed in the Richland Beacon, advocated the “advantages of an influx of immigrants” and explained, “We have room for immigrants, who will meet with a cordial reception and find a genial climate.”

Louisiana’s more tolerant attitude toward Italian immigration—at least in the 1870s and 1880s—stemmed in part from the demographic and migratory patterns of the Sicilian majority, who typically worked seasonally, arriving with the citrus fleets in the fall and leaving after the sugarcane harvest in the spring. Initially settling in rural sugar parishes, Sicilians labored in strawberry fields, on cotton plantations, and in lumber and railroad yards. While the press in the North painted Italians as unassimilable and criminal, Louisiana’s commentary favored their presence and recognized their value in the post–Civil War period.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Sicilians had migrated from rural areas to urban centers like New Orleans, establishing businesses as fruit vendors and grocers and gradually ascending into the local economic elite. They primarily settled in the lower city around the French Market, which became known as “Little Italy.” Unlike in northern cities, there were no large-scale tenement constructions. While some concentrated settlements emerged, such as in Independence and other areas across Tangipahoa Parish, Sicilians in New Orleans primarily settled in decentralized patterns that fostered interaction with diverse communities. Such settlement patterns facilitated integration, since Sicilians and other Italians were obliged to learn English, adopt local customs, and communicate and interact with non-Italians more regularly than they would have had they been isolated in a community of their peers.

New Orleans’s unique cultural landscape played a significant role in successfully integrating Sicilian immigrants. After the Civil War the city was home to a cosmopolitan population, including French Creoles; people of African descent who were free before the war; formerly enslaved Black Americans; and European, Caribbean, and Latin American immigrants. New Orleanians who practiced culturally Mediterranean traditions—such as Creole, Spanish, and Irish Catholics—did not consider Italians especially foreign nor discriminate against Sicilians and other Italians because of their religion. This cultural fluidity allowed Sicilian immigrants to thrive in an environment that was more welcoming than other parts of the country.

Some anxiety arose among native-born white Americans regarding the economic advancement of Italians. Yet the significant number of “colored saloon licenses” that Italians held in Louisiana’s sugar parishes meant that Italians specifically targeted some of their enterprises for Black customers and neighborhoods. This strategy often reduced perceived threats to white business interests and enabled a more harmonious coexistence. By 1890 these spatial, cultural, demographic, and economic factors contributed to a well-established, distinctly Sicilian, and physically integrated community of Italians living in Louisiana, especially New Orleans. But this changed in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Lynching of Italians

On March 14, 1891, the Daily Picayune, Times Democrat, and New Delta newspapers ran the following announcement: “Justice. Do the Good People of New Orleans Want It? All good citizens are invited to attend a mass meeting . . . at Clay Statue to take steps to remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessy Case. Come prepared for action.” Incensed by the acquittal of nine alleged “mafia” members believed responsible for killing New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob of nearly ten thousand New Orleanians assembled to answer the call. “Murderers must be given their desserts. The jury has failed,” one speaker shouted across the square. “Kill the Italian,” the horde chanted in retort. Following rousing speeches, the amassed mob stormed the city prison. Within hours eleven Sicilians and other Italians were lynched in one of the largest mass lynchings in US history.

The infamous 1891 lynching was one of several in Louisiana during the same era. More than two dozen Sicilians and other Italians were lynched in the Gulf South between 1886 and 1910, including Lorenzo Salardino, Salvatore Arena, and Giuseppe Venturella in Hahnville in 1896 and Giuseppe Difatta, Carlo Difatta, Francesco Difatta, Giovanni Cerami, and Rosario Fiducia in Tallulah in 1899.

The lynchings of Italians in Louisiana have often been explained as the result of longstanding tensions, but evidence suggests that widespread anti-Italian discourse emerged primarily after the violence to justify it. Public discourse in the aftermath of lynchings marked a dramatic departure from the previously positive reception of and discourse surrounding Italian immigrants in Louisiana. In the aftermath of the violence, community members and the English-language press employed race to defend the killings. The Times Democrat entitled their report “Citizens Plead Necessity for White Supremacy” and defended the New Orleans lynching on the grounds that it was necessary for “white supremacy.” The native-born, white community in Tallulah felt “obliged” to commit the lynching and “to insure [sic] white supremacy, no other course was possible than the course pursued.” Relegating Italians to a position outside of “whiteness” presented a popular means to validate the lynching and to ensure the legitimacy of violence. Even if race was only tangentially related to the conditions that instigated the killing, lynching violence was justified in explicitly racial terms, thus racializing Italians as an aftereffect.

Lynching violence also sparked debates about the citizenship status of the victims, which led to strained diplomatic relations between the US and Italy. An 1871 treaty between Italy and the United States guaranteed “the protection of the subjects of a friendly power;” in the aftermath of each lynching, Italy requested that the United States pay indemnities to the families of the victims for the “killing of [Italian] subjects without due process of law.”

Following the 1891 lynching, for example, while determinations were being made as to whether the victims were US citizens or Italian subjects (and thus owed indemnity payments), deteriorating diplomatic relations led to the United States and Italy each recalling their ambassadors. Meanwhile, Italian Consul to New Orleans Pasquale Corte claimed that the safety of Italians in the United States was at risk and requested that Italy send a war vessel to New Orleans. Although the ship was never sent, the request led to a lingering threat of war between the United States and Italy. The following year the United States paid indemnities in the amount of $25,000 for three victims of the lynching who were determined to be Italian subjects. In turn King Umberto of Italy lifted a ban on US pork products and ordered the resumption of diplomatic relations.

Voting Rights for Italians

Just as Italians in Louisiana were at the center of various international crises, they also emerged as a focal point in state politics. In 1898 Louisiana legislators proposed a suffrage measure designed to disenfranchise the state’s Black population. However, the proposal included a series of exceptions for those unable to meet the educational qualification under the new provision. The controversial exemptions included the “Privileged Dago” clause, which sought to enfranchise foreign-born voters even if they were unable to pass the literacy qualification. Calling it an “insult,” an “injustice,” a “scandal,” the Times Democrat maintained that the provision was a “glaring show of partiality in favor of the illiterate and naturalized foreigner as against the illiterate of native birth.”

Statewide debates ensued that revealed how Italians in Louisiana were available pawns within regional politicking. Those who contested the “Privileged Dago” clause articulated their opposition in terms of rightful citizenship, loyalty, xenophobia, and racial questionability. Others who favored the “Privileged Dago” clause did so because of the political functionality of Italians. Ultimately Italians retained their right to vote in Louisiana not because of their racial acceptability or elevated status but because of their value in serving the Democratic machine.

Italians in the Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, anti-Italian sentiment in Louisiana ebbed and flowed owing to national political agendas and regional economic needs. Northern and southern politicians were often divided on federal immigration bills, such as the literacy test for immigration. Northern politicians supported the push for federal immigration restrictions, while Louisiana representatives opposed restrictive measures that would hinder their access to cheap immigrant labor. For example, when the federal literacy bill finally passed Congress in 1897 with only a three-vote majority, both Louisiana senators opposed it. Sen. Donelson Caffery acknowledged that Sicilians were “less desirable” but identified those Italians from the “agricultural sections” as “industrious citizens.” Likewise, Sen. Newton C. Blanchard explained, “[The literacy test] might do in the populous cities, but not in the scantily settled localities of the south and west, where immigration was needed.”

By the 1920s, however, shifting labor dynamics and growing racial tensions began to align southern immigration policies with national trends. By 1924 Louisiana legislators who had previously advocated an open-door policy for immigrant labor voted lockstep with their regional counterparts. Each representative and senator from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi voted in favor of the “Bill to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States.” The resulting quota era dramatically curtailed immigration to the United States, particularly from southern and eastern European countries. For example, in the decade preceding the implementation of national quotas, nearly 200,000 Italian immigrants arrived to the US annually. Under the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, only four thousand Italians were permitted legal entry each year.

This shift, combined with residual social prejudices, meant that Sicilians and other Italians living in Louisiana faced renewed social and legal discrimination. In May 1924 Joseph Rini and five other Italian Americans were legally executed by the State of Louisiana for the alleged murder of a restaurant owner in Independence. Unlike the mob-led lynchings of the 1890s, this was a state-sanctioned execution, albeit one based on questionable evidence and flawed legal proceedings, marking one of the largest such executions in Louisiana state history since before the Civil War. Socially, Italians were excluded from joining New Orleans–based Carnival organizations alongside native-born white Americans during Mardi Gras. In response Italian Americans established the Krewe of Virgilians in the 1930s, with their inaugural Carnival ball themed around Dante’s Inferno. The Virgilians provided a space for Italian American participation in Mardi Gras celebrations into the 1960s.

Legacy of Italians in Louisiana

Italian immigrant experiences in Louisiana reveal a complex narrative of integration and acceptance alongside violence and exclusion. Over time the complex racial mobility of Italian immigrants contributed to the codification of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana. Yet as Sicilians and Italians in Louisiana navigated a complex landscape of exclusion and gradual assimilation, they helped shape an enduring legacy in the region. Italian-run groceries, including the French Quarter’s famed Central Grocery, oyster bars, pasta manufacturing, and the iconic muffuletta sandwich reflect the impact Italians and Sicilians have had on Creole cuisine. Similarly New Orleans jazz and musicians such as Louis Prima—born and raised in the Tremé neighborhood—showcase Sicilian and Italian influences upon a rich cross-cultural fusion that has contributed to the city’s unique soundscape. The March 19 Feast of St. Joseph, or Festa di San Giuseppe, is another testament to Sicilian heritage in Louisiana. This celebration of one of Sicily’s patron saints was brought to New Orleans by Catholics of Sicilian descent. St. Joseph altars in New Orleans and across Louisiana remain vibrant symbols of cultural folk art, community celebration, and regional identity.

In the twenty-first century Louisiana’s largest Italian American and Sicilian American communities reside in and around New Orleans, in nearby suburbs of Metairie and Kenner, and communities along the Mississippi River, like the town of Independence in Tangipahoa Parish. Annual celebrations of Louisiana’s Italian American culture can be found across the state, including the Independence Sicilian Heritage Festival, which has been celebrated since 1972, the Tickfaw Italian Festival since 1973, and the Irish-Italian Parade in Metairie, which has been a tradition since 1982. From heritage and foodways to music and celebrations, the cultural legacies of Italians remain woven into the fabric of Louisiana.