4 ms·
Saw an episode of the show "Finding Your Roots", exploring the ancestry of the guests. One of the guests was of Italian descent and one of his ancestors moved
by JJMcJ 3y ago
Saw an episode of the show "Finding Your Roots", exploring the ancestry of the guests.
One of the guests was of Italian descent and one of his ancestors moved from Sicily to Louisiana in the late 19th Century. Many of those Italians worked as laborers on the sugar plantations.
So, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host, said, Sicily was so poor that working on a Louisiana sugar plantation was better.
- leafmeal 3y agoI learned about the plight of Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans at that time from Annie Proulx's historical fiction book "Accordion Crimes". She was inspired in a large part by a lynching of Italian immigrants which was depicted in the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings