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ITALIAN GULF COAST
ITALIANI DELLA
COSTA DEL GOLFO
by
Marcy Nathan, Rouses Creative Director
From the September/October 2016 issue of My Rouses Everyday
J
oseph P. Rouse immigrated to America from Sardinia, Italy’s
second-largest island, in 1900. He arrived at Ellis Island, New
York, accompanied by his parents, Anthony and Marie, and an older
brother. Joseph was barely a year old when he arrived in America.
The Rouses were part of the New Immigration of Italians. That
period between the 1880s through the 1920s saw the arrival
in America of more than four million mostly Southern Italian
immigrants who’d left their homeland in search of work and a better
life.Many arrived wide-eyed and anxious, having left family back in
their Italian homeland.
The Port of NewOrleans was amajor gateway for Italian immigrants.
Sicilians had been coming to New Orleans in significant numbers
since the 1830s, and New Orleans was America’s second-biggest
port for the Sicilian citrus fruit trade. Many immigrants were fruit
traders who set up shop on Decatur Street, working as produce
merchants and brokers. But the Sicilians and Sardinians, as well as
other Southern Italians who arrived around the turn of the century,
were not citrus traders; they were poor immigrants escaping not
only abject poverty, but corruption and danger in a newly unified
Italy. Some were financed by
padrones
(labor bosses) in Italy who
served as middlemen for Southern plantation owners looking for
inexpensive labor.
Nearly three-quarters of those who arrived during the New
Immigration were farmers and laborers. Those whose passages to
America were paid by
padrones
often went to work in the cane fields
of South Louisiana.
Sugarcane was the main crop in Louisiana, but the lumber business
was significant in areas like St. Tammany. And there was money in
vegetables. Italian truck farms operated all over the West Bank of
New Orleans, Harahan, Little Farms (now part of River Ridge) and
St. Bernard Parish, growing herbs, beans, peas, tomatoes, zucchini,
eggplant and cardoon, which are similar to artichokes.The produce
was trucked to New Orleans public markets, where Italian farmers
sold them wholesale.
Lauricella Family Farms and Picone Family Farms were two of the
larger tracts in what is now Harahan. Kenner was mostly farmland.
Produce grown in Kenner’s “Green Gold” fields was ferried to the
French Market via the O-K Rail Line, an interurban streetcar line
that ran between New Orleans and Kenner from 1915 to 1930.
Many Italians settled in Kenner, buying land and raising families
in the farming community on the outskirts of New Orleans. The
city of Kenner still has a large Italian population and still celebrates
St. Rosalie, the patron saint of Palermo, with a procession every
September. During these years, a teenage J.P. Rouse got a job at a
truck farm in Marrero raising potatoes and cabbages.
The railroads helped immigrants establish Italian communities all
over the Gulf Coast.The New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern
Railroad went straight through Tangipahoa Parish, the heart of
Louisiana’s strawberry industry. Newcomers settled in cities and
towns like Ponchatoula, Independence, Amite and Hammond. By
1910, so many Sicilians inhabited Independence it became known
as “Little Italy.”The name still resonates today — nearly one-third
of Independence’s residents have Italian heritage.
There was other work to be had besides farming. Businesses placed
ads in the New Orleans
L’ltalo Americano
seeking Southern Italian
immigrant labor for the South’s coal and steel industries, railroads
and plantations.
A burgeoning seafood industry along the Gulf Coast also drew
immigrants east to cities like Biloxi, where oyster and shrimp
canning factories and raw oyster dealerships operated. A live fish
market flourished on Reynoir Street. Vestiges of the area’s seafood
businesses remain in Biloxi today.Desporte & Sons Seafood Market
& Deli on Division Street is the oldest family-run seafood market
on the Gulf Coast.
[PG 42]The French Market, New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1910
[LEFT] Circa 1906. Decatur Street in the New Orleans French Quarter
[RIGHT] Vintage photo of Ponchatoula Strawberry farmers