Arbëresh

(Only communities where the project has made recordings are mapped above)

AMAR: AMERICARBËRESHE — The regeneration of the old Italian-Albanian diaspora in the New World

Si bjuan mulliri i vjetër Arbëresh te dheu i ri Amerikan — How the old Arbëresh mill continues to grind in the American New World

AMAR: AMERICARBËRESHE is ELA’s project dedicated to the study, preservation, and promotion of the language and culture of the Arbëreshë, an Albanian-speaking minority community that has lived in Southern and Insular Italy since the 15th century. Developed in collaboration with Professor Giovanni Braico from New York University, AMAR sets out three key goals.

The first goal of AMAR is to create a multimedia linguistic archive that documents the evolution and current use of Arbërisht across various parts of the world. Initially, the focus will be on the United States, particularly New York City and the Tri-State area, as well as Southern and Insular Italy. However, the vision is to expand the scope of the archive to include Arbëresh communities in other countries, such as Argentina. This global approach seeks to explore how Arbërisht has adapted and persisted across diverse cultural and geographical contexts in response to issues connected with migration, cultural integration or assimilation, and generational change. The archive will feature historical audio and video recordings alongside newly produced and continuously updated recordings of current Arbërisht speakers.

The second goal of AMAR is to create a dedicated space — both virtual and in-person — where people can immerse themselves in Arbërisht while fostering a transnational community of Arbëresh descendants, scholars, and language enthusiasts. AMAR aims to achieve this by developing language learning materials, offering classes, hosting cultural events, and organizing community gatherings. Additionally, a large corpus of Arbëresh texts — including traditional songs and folkloric tales — will be made available with English translations. Through this, the project seeks to build a meaningful bridge between Arbëresh communities based in Italy and the United States, encouraging a rediscovery of shared heritage.

The third goal of AMAR is to investigate and document the history and current status of Arbëresh migration to the United States.

More information on the migration of the Arbëreshë to the United States and their history and presence in the country can be found in the following works. This list is provisional and will be expanded as the project and related research develop:

• Bolognari, Mario. 2004. Appuntamento a Samarcanda. Taccuini e saggi di ricerca antropologica. Catanzaro: Abramo.
• Bolognari, Mario. 2014. “Diaspora e cultura della migrazione. Arbëreshë di Calabria dall’esodo al ritorno simbolico.” Rivista Calabrese di Storia del ‘900, vol. 2, pp. 11-22.
• Bolognari, Mario. La diaspora della diaspora. Viaggio alla ricerca degli Arbëreshë. Pisa: ETS, 1989.
• Daddona, Maureen M., and Richard Renoff. 2000. “Italian American Albanians.” In The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, edited by Salvatore J. LaGumina, Frank J. Cavaioli, Salvatore Primeggia, and Joseph A. Varacalli, 299–300. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
• LaGumina, Salvatore J. 1988. From Steerage to Suburb: Long Island Italians. New York: Center for Migration Studies.
• LaGumina, Salvatore J. 2013. Long Island Italian Americans: History, Heritage & Tradition. Charleston, SC: The History Press.
• Renoff, Richard, Angela D. Danzi, and Joseph A. Varacalli. 1989. “The Albanese and Italian Community of Inwood, Long Island.” In Italian Americans: The Search for a Usable Past, edited by Richard N. Juliani and Philip V. Cannistraro, 106–132. Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association.
• Renoff, Richard, Angela D. Danzi, and Joseph A. Varacalli. 1986. “The Italian-Albanian-American Community of Inwood, New York.” Paper read at the 19th Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, Philadelphia, PA, November 14, 1986.
• Trotta, Louis. 2024. The Albanians of Inwood: The Story of an Arbëresh Community in America. Narangba, Queensland: Limelight Publishing; Durham, NC: Lulu Press.
• Wonk, Dalt. (October 16, 1983). “Sons of Contessa Entellina.” Dixie.

Aside from the memoir by Rose Musacchio Higdon and Hal Higdon mentioned above, another relevant source of information on the experience of the Arbëreshë in the United States is the account by Vincent Zavatt, an Arbëresh from San Martino di Finita, written in 1933 and printed in 1955. Forty Years After – Experiences and Observations of an Immigrant From Southern Italy. A personal manuscript gifted by the author to the Rock Hall Museum, Lawrence, New York.

Arbëresh descendants are also doing important work as local and community historians, retrieving and publishing a wealth of relevant information on the Arbëreshë in the United States through various websites and social media platforms. For New York, it is worth citing the Facebook page The Arbëresh of New York, managed by Frank Parise, who documents the lives and family histories of hundreds of Arbëresh-Americans.

By actively engaging with the Arbëresh descendant communities in the United States — interviewing individuals, documenting their family and community narratives, and preserving and giving prominence to previously overlooked or little-studied documents from personal and private collections and archives — AMAR seeks to delve into what scholar Margherita Ganeri has defined as the “historical and cultural substratum of resilience” of the Arbëresh-Americans (see “More Info”).

Through this process, the project aims to analyze the evolving contours of Arbëresh identity, extending its scope to encompass its manifestations within the diasporic context of the United States. In addition to ELA personnel and Professor Giovanni Braico, the AMAR project benefits from the scientific supervision of the Albanologist Professor Francesco Altimari from Università della Calabria and Professor Gazmend Kapllani, who holds the Hidai ‘Eddie’ Bregu Visiting Chair for Albanian Studies at DePaul University.

The AMAR project also benefits from the collaboration of two Arbëresh descendants living in the United States: independent scholar and Arbëresh language activist Linda Manus Diaz, and visual artist and professor Jane Archer, who aims to incorporate Arbëresh language and cultural references into her new graphic creations, particularly graphic novels.

Arriving within the large Southern Italian immigrant wave beginning in the late 19th century, Arbëresh speakers (from places such as Vaccarizzo, San Cosmo Albanese, Frascineto, and Acquaformosa in Calabria and Greci in Campania) came to live within broader Italian neighborhoods, beginning in Little Italy and later in the Bronx, Staten Island, and likely elsewhere. According to community historians, the substantial community of the Inwood-Lawrence-Rockaway area on the South Shore of Long Island was largely from Cerzeto, San Martino di Finita, and surrounding Arbëresh villages. From 1904 to 1946, the Arbëresh priest Papas Ciro Pinnola created a parish within the Archdiocese of New York, unique in North America, dedicated to the distinctive (Greek-language) Byzantine Catholic rite of the Italo-Albanian Church. In recent years, the rite has been revived at Our Lady of Grace church on Staten Island.

Especially in the early stages of migration, which are not much different from regional and national patterns, the mass emigration of the Arbëreshë stands out as a unique phenomenon: it is a diaspora within a diaspora, of great historical and cultural interest, due to the specific identity traits that come into play in the mechanisms of adaptation to new contexts. The traits of cultural preservation, which had been resilient in so-called Arbëria for about five hundred years, appear to progressively weaken from the time of the great migration at the end of the 19th century. This phenomenon is linked to the gradual Italianization of the Italo-Albanian communities, leading to a significant loss of linguistic competence. Nevertheless, many distinctive aspects of Italo-Albanian identity, though weakened and blended, resist both the processes of assimilation in the countries of arrival and the homogenization within Italian communities abroad, building a substratum of cultural resilience that is not always conscious and almost never socially recognized. What endures most is the pride in one’s origins, a pride intertwined with mythical memory. This is well illustrated in the memoir by Rose Musacchio Higdon and Hal Higdon, where the legendary narrative of Albanian diasporic glory is preserved as the main adhesive of that historical and cultural substratum from which the positive sentiment of a distinct identity derives [translation by Giovanni Braico].  

See the “Nota introduttiva” in Rose Musacchio Higdon and Hal Higdon, Falconara Albanese. L’odissea di una famiglia, edited and translated by Margherita Ganeri (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2024). The English original is Rose Musacchio Higdon and Hal Higdon, Falconara: A Family Odyssey, Michigan City, IN: Roadrunner Press, 1993.