In The Immigrants Speak, Italian Americans Tell Their Story LaGumina has fashioned fourteen personal life histories that include miners, shoemakers, a poet, an artist, theater people, a social worker, a soldier, a lawyer and an entrepreneur. Through their recollections they have increased our understanding of the Italian American experience. Their stories. told in the first person, both dramatize and illuminate the role of ethnicity in the twentieth century. As LaGumina states, “These stories detail the lives of a people bridging two cultures in modern history.
