Italian American Studies Fall Lecture: A Different Kind of Italian America: Race, Radicalism, and Belonging in São Paulo's Italian Colony with Giulia Riccó

In this talk Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan Giulia Riccò draws on her book The Italian Colony of São Paulo (2025), to turn to Zélia Gattai’s celebrated memoir Anarquistas, graças a Deus (1979) to rethink Italian migration beyond the familiar North American frame. Through Gattai’s family saga, Riccò explores how Italian identity in Brazil was shaped by anarchist politics, regional rivalries, racial hierarchies, and competing memories of migration. The talk shows that São Paulo’s Italian colony was neither a unified ethnic community nor a simple story of assimilation, but a contested space in which Italians negotiated class, race, regionalism, and nationalism. By bringing Brazil into conversation with Italian American Studies, this talk asks how our understanding of “Italian America” changes when we follow Italian migrants across multiple sites in the Americas.