Essays

Strategies for Success:
The Tirocchis, Immigration, and the Italian-American Experience

 

 

Anna, Laura, Eugenia, and Frank Tirocchi represent the third, but not necessarily the latest, branch of the family to settle in Providence. Anna and Laura came to the United States in 1905. Anna, Eugenia, and Frank were the children of Nazzareno and Rosa Fraticalli Tirocchi, and Laura was their half-sister, the daughter of Rosa's second husband, Giuseppe Tirocchi (the deceased Nazzareno's brother). Family oral tradition holds that Anna and Laura first worked in New York before arriving in Providence. By 1910, they were boarding with their sister Eugenia and her second husband Luigi Valcarenghi at a store-and-apartment block at 324 Pocasset Avenue in Providence, about two blocks from their uncle Salvatore and their cousins in uncle Tito's family. Eugenia and Luigi Valcarenghi had entered the United States in 1907 and most likely settled in Providence soon thereafter. Their son William was born in Rhode Island in 1908 or early 1909. By 1910, Luigi was working as a house painter and owned the block on Pocasset Avenue with the help of a mortgage. Frank Tirocchi, brother to Anna and Eugenia and half-brother to Laura, also immigrated in 1905, but does not appear in the Providence City Directory until 1914. Frank Tirocchi spent a part of the time between 1905 and 1914 as a labor contractor (padrone) for railroad construction in Canada [fig. 58]. A dated photograph in the Tirocchi Archive captures him and his crew at a "B. &A. R.R." (Bangor and Aroostoock Railroad) work site in 1909 [fig. 59]. Laura appears in another photo with Frank and a gang of construction workers [fig. 54, p. 78]. Railroad work and sojourns in Canada were also a part of the early experience of other family members. Tito's sons Eugenio and Giuseppe told their children of laying rail in the Canadian "wilderness." Another son, Angelo, spent time in Maine, where he joined the American military in 1908. Salvatore's eldest son, Federico Achille Tirocchi, served as a priest in Quebec before being assigned to build a parish for Italian and French Canadian immigrants in the Natick section of West Warwick, Rhode Island.(7)

In 1914, Frank and his new bride Maria Del Signore, a woman with artisan and middle-class family ties in Italy, set up housekeeping at 39 Bradford Street on Federal Hill following their marriage in February. Frank was listed in the 1914 Directory as a clerk at the Roma Pharmacy on Federal Hill's Atwells Avenue, the heart of Providence's largest Italian settlement.(8) He also worked in a machine shop briefly before starting a trucking business and hiring out his services to the City of Providence. From 1928 through 1931, he ran his trucking business [fig. 60] from Anna's Broadway residence and lived in one of her apartments on nearby Tobey Street. His son, Frank Jr., became a dentist. His daughter, Primrose, had a long career in fashion and sales at the Outlet Department Store, where she specialized in millinery. She designed hats and had her own show downtown at the Biltmore Hotel in the 1930s [fig. 61].

Anna and her siblings were adults at the time of their departure from Italy. According to the 1910 federal census, Anna at thirty-five years of age was the oldest, Eugenia was thirty, Frank was twenty-five, and Laura twenty-two.(9) Both Anna and Laura spoke English and were literate, according to the census, although it is not known where they acquired this learning. Perhaps it was during their first years in the United States, when they worked for others. Eugenia was literate, but spoke only Italian. The 1920 census lists Frank as literate. Given his labor contracting and trucking activities, it may probably be assumed that he was proficient in his use of English. Such facility was an essential quality for padroni, who served as middlemen between North American employers and immigrant laborers having little or no English.

 

 

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