Food, culture, and entrepreneurship among African-Americans, Italians, and Swedes in Chicago

This dissertation explores processes of settlement for African, American, Italian, and Swedish rural migrants to Chicago, Illinois and their descendants between 1900 and 1965. Specifically, it considers the impact of the transition from a subsistence to a consumer economy through one of life's most culturally symbolic essentials: food.;Like many other symbols of ethnic culture, food is a means of both continuity and change, of identity maintenance and economic integration. The social importance rural people attached to food made it an excellent strategy for maintaining cultural stability. On the other hand, the economics of moving from an agrarian community to a marketplace environment was a strong force for change for rural migrants. These forces provided a strong inducement to select from traditions established in the rural homeland or invent new ones to create an ethnic identity that was compatible with both homeland values and American consumer culture.;The dissertation considers the means by which rural migrants, despite origins in distinctly different cultures, transmitted ethnic values to succeeding generations via food traditions and integrated into the American economy via food entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur who provided the goods that made traditional practice possible had an importance in neighborhood life that went beyond his or her economic role. Food business owners became conduits through which a culturally transparent fact of daily life in the rural environment---eating---became remarkable, in a literal sense, in the city. Making choices about what to eat and where to shop educated migrants in the consumer culture of the urban society they were so eager to join, while at the same time, helped them to develop symbolic points of identification with their pre-urban values system.;In this way, food consumption became an important means of ethnic identity formation. This project, therefore, explores in detail the way a mundane fact of daily life like food choice made a great impact on the everyday lives of migrants, and on the political, social, and economic lives of ethnic neighborhoods.