The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem [Paperback]

Robert A. Orsi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 23, 1988

In an evocation of Italian Harlem and the men and women who lived there, Robert Orsi examines how the annual "festa" of the Madonna of 115th Street both influenced and reflected the lives of the celebrants. His prize-winning work seeks to offer a new perspective on lived religion; the place of religion in the everyday lives of men, women and children; the experiences of immigration and community formation; and American Catholicism. This edition includes a new introduction by the author that outlines both the changes that Italian Harlem has undergone since the publication of the first edition and significant shifts in the field of religious history.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A richly tapestried portrait-narrative... Orsi is to be commended for a truly significant contribution to the annals of American social history." Francesco Cordasco, USA Today "Orsi has fashioned an impressive fusion of the inner histories of immigrant social and religious life." John W. Briggs, American Historical Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

Reviews of the earlier edition: "A richly tapestried portrait-narrative. . . . Orsi is to be commended for a truly significant contribution to the annals of American social history." —Francesco Cordasco, USA Today "Orsi has fashioned an impressive fusion of the inner histories of immigrant social and religious life."— John W. Briggs, American Historical Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 289 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (March 23, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300042647
• ISBN-13: 978-0300042641
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,139,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THE THEOLOGY OF THE STREETS, November 14, 2003

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Orysya Hachko (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (Hardcover)

Robert Orsi's Madonna of 115th Street is a brilliant multi-dimensional research on the meaning of "popular religion" in the Italian community of Harlem in New York. However, to be just, Orsi himself is rather cautious about labeling his study by the term "popular". It is "religion in the streets," Orsi says, that is in the center of his examination: "This study began in a sense of the limitations of the meaning of popular religion and a desire to broaden and deepen our understanding of this phenomenon" (Orsi, 1985:xiv). Robert Orsi raises pertinent and engaging questions regarding the melding of ethnicity, religion, and community values which have implications beyond the scope of the present work.
The study of Italian American religion begins with the people themselves as a story of suffering, conflict, and hope intimately related to Mary. The men and women of Italian Harlem, the Sicilian refugees brought to the United States along with their modest material goods their incredibly rich religiosity and devotion to the Marian cult. The latter, unlike in the case of Polish Catholics (Orsi, 1985:xvi), was hardly controlled by the Church structures. This unique feature of the Southern Italian Catholicism defined people's religion as the totality of their ultimate values, their most deeply held ethical convictions, their efforts to order their reality, their cosmology: "This also could be called their "ground of being", but only if this is understood in a very concrete, social-historical way, not as reality beyond their lives, but as the reason that, consciously and unconsciously, structured and was expressed in their actions and reflections" (Orsi, 1985:xvii). Orsi's analysis resembles Durkheim's research on The Elementary Forms of Religious Life who believes that religion is "a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity". The reality of religious forces is to be found in the real experience of social life, according to Durkheim (Durkheim, 1995:36). Interestingly enough, in the same way as Durkheim finds the birth of that idea in rites, as moments of collective effervescence, Orsi finds the annual festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel in the 115th Street in the heart of the socio-religious dynamics of the Italian Harlem.
Symbol, ritual, and myth - the entire experience of Mount Carmel emerged from and referred back to the people's lives; the men and women of Italian Harlem shared and found themselves in the destiny of symbolic meanings when they attended the festa of the Madonna of 115th Street. In turn, their experience of the Madonna shaped their American destiny.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Madonna of 115th Street By Robert Anthony Orsi. Review By: Lisa Panetta-Sawaya, MA, Michigan, USA, June 8, 2010

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Lisa Panetta-Sawaya - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, Second Edition (Paperback)

The Madonna of 115th Street is the study of Italian immigrants who settled in East Harlem, New York City. It is additionally, a story of a religious celebration, the annual festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel on East 115th Street in New York City. The book highlights personal experiences of this particular ethnic group as they adapt to life in America while striving to preserve their heritage. These Italian immigrants use the festa to pass on to the children their deepest, most important values of faith in God, rispetto (mutual respect), and the domus (family).

Above all else, the domus was the most important thing to the Italian immigrants, and everything that they did was related back to concern for their family. Perhaps because of their oppression in the old country, southern Italians understood that first and foremost, they must support and protect their family because that is the only thing that truly matters. "They had traveled by steamship away from the world of la miseria, the great suffering of southern Italy, best translated as slow dying, an emptying of hope and ambition in the face of oppression and neglect. The immigrants themselves knew the spiritual consequences of this economic disease-a numb posture of hopelessness and despair. The world they left was characterized by unemployment, overpopulation, disease, over taxation, and internal colonization. They left to save themselves and their families." The decision to emigrate was a family decision, taken as part of a broader family strategy for survival. Some member or members of the family would leave home and travel to America to make money and send it back to the family."(18) "The family provided for everything. We ate as one family. We had no use for money as individuals."(78) The immigrants memories of the old country were memories of the domus. "The immigrants did not know an Italian nation-they only knew the domus in their paesi. So their memories and images of Italy were memories of strict family order and discipline, of family loyalty and mutual support."(78) "...And when I saw how industrious the Italian girls in the community were, how they brought reverently the weekly paycheck to the mother...I was willing to forgive their layers of lipstick and marry one of the American Italians."(78) Respect for each other within the family was also sacred. "Rispetto indicated a general attitude toward life, affirming the dignity of the person respected as well as the person respecting. This same respect was present in the their relationship with God, the Madonna, the Saint's and their community. "There was not one kind of respect for the Madonna and another for the community and domus; the posture was the same in both cases, and this was recognized and blessed during the celebration."(228)

The annual festa was a visual and spiritual celebration of faith in God and respect for Him as well as respect for the family here on earth. It was a way to preserve southern Italian traditions. The festa was a yearly event that brought all generations together through the celebration of the Mass, the saying of the Rosary, the Magnificant, a grand procession of the statue of the Madonna, and the traditional making of the vows. Heavenly vows of young and old were made during the festa and family vows were passed on from parents to children. Traditional Italian food was always prepared and the preparations for the festa began weeks in advance. "For one week a year, the immigrants could refresh themselves, reestablish their memories, and relocate their stability by returning to their hometowns in religious spirit. The immigrant was able, temporarily, to experience the smells, tastes and sounds of the lost world of his or her past. This annual moral reorientation and resituating could give the immigrants confidence and hope in the face of their fears that immigration had undermined their moral world."(169) "Parents and children together fulfilled vows, usually made by the former, to the Madonna; together they prepared for and welcomed guests into the domus, shouldered the heavy burden of the family's pain, cleaned the apartments and streets of the community."(170) "The invisible cables of rispetto which bound the members of a domus together and which bound one domus to another in Italian Harlem were revealed, celebrated, sanctified, and maintained on the sacral occasions of weddings, baptism, and funerals. These events, clearly important in the life of the domus, were the central public events, along with the religious feste, of Italian Harlem."(100)

The festa represented everything that mattered to the Italian immigrant; the communion of people and saints, the domus, and respect for all. Through popular religion, and the festa, these Italian immigrants shared their heritage with the next generation in America. Orsi succeeds in communicating that the domus was first and foremost to the Italian immigrants and that they took great pains to teach this value to their children here in America. The book contains rich immigrant stories and antidotes of a passionate, deeply spiritual people. "What was valuable about the mezzogiorno and what needed to be passed on to the younger generations in Italian Harlem was the domus."(78)

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This text is an excellent source for urban teachers, February 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem (Paperback)

To all teachers: Orsi's account of Italian culture and the "theology of the streets" is an excellent source for any church history, or urban history courses, even at the high school level. I teach it to seniors at a Catholic high school in New York City, and they love it. Many are able to identify with the family structure and theology of the Italian community Orsi describes. Some critics of Orsi's work state that he fails to deal sufficiently with the culture-religion that he describes. That is, Orsi himself is uncritical of what many neo-orthodox theologians would consider "magic," not religion. I find that Orsi's acceptance of this "theology of the streets" demonstrates a greater understanding of what Catholicism really means both to its adherants and its hierarchy. Again, a great text for upperclassmen/women in high school and in college. It may open their eyes to a new way of looking at religion.