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ITALIAN 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

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.

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