Making America

Editors Note: Calogero Lombardo’s account of a Sicilian family migrating to Chicago in the 1950s is full of life. Thousands of people who experienced Little Sicily in that era will identify with the performance of family and ethnic identity in the neighborhood and the parish of St. Philip Benizi. Even while becoming “American,” the Lombardo family demonstrated a high degree of cultural retention. The Casa Italia Library is pleased to publish this narrative in our campaign to :”Save Our Stories.” -- Dominic Candeloro Making America is the second book in the five-volume series on the Lombardo Family Saga. Book One: Altavilla Sicily: Memories of a Happy Childhood, told the story of the Lombardo kids growing up in a small Sicilian town in the 1950s. It tells the history of Sicily while telling the story of the First Family of Altavilla, which is what I called us because of the free reign we had as children, and the respect the village bestowed on my parents. Altavilla ends in 1956, when we boarded the SS Queen Frederica and came to America.