In Wales, the historical narrative of Italian migration to Wales in the twentieth century has come to be dominated by the experiences of the widely celebrated Bracchi café industry. Academic interventions in the field of Welsh-Italian migration studies have largely followed suit, analysing the cultural contributions of Italians to Wales or the impact of the Arandora Star sinking and internment of members of the community during the Second World War.
Following trends in global Italian migration studies, this thesis seeks to construct a multi-faceted narrative of Italian migration to the country by focusing on marginalised voices and workers outside of the Italian refreshment industry. Drawing on a narrative approach to investigate Italian migration to Wales between the 1880s and 1950s, it departs from conventional studies by focusing predominantly on the narratives about work of Italian female café traders, prisoners of war, and metalworkers and miners. To do so, the thesis avails itself of a diverse corpus constructed of archival documents, 51 semi-structured digital oral history interviews conducted with Italians and Welsh-Italians of different generations, email communications, memoirs, and English-language newspaper articles published in the Welsh press.
In exploring the narratives of work from these sectors, the thesis shines a light on the different strategies used by Italians as they navigated a rapidly changing nineteenth and twentieth century Wales. It demonstrates how personal and family narratives represent how Italians challenged social stigmas and expressed a sense of emplacement in Welsh society, and the different processes of identity formation between work identity and individual identity. The thesis also employs insights from gender studies to research how entrepreneurial women in the café industry gained agency through active involvement in managing family businesses, as well as how Italian heavy industry workers performed Welsh-Italian working-class masculine values to reflect their belonging both to a mixed-culture Welsh workplace and the Italian community outside of work. Cultural practices and transcultural interactions between Italians and Welsh through merit of working also form a key pillar of investigation, with these being identified as defining Italians’ experiences in the country.
In all, the thesis proposes a heterogeneous reading of Italian migration to the country. In light of debates in Italian migration studies to the UK regarding whose voices are represented in the dominant historical narrative about Italians in Britain, the thesis argues the novelty of an approach that combines work, narratives, and identity in incorporating new perspectives into the wider picture.