ABSTRACT
Italian Americans are a paradigmatic case for American assimilation. Not only did the great initial distance of the group from mainstream America test the reach of assimilation pathways, but its patterns of assimilation, especially during the several decades after the middle of the twentieth century, have contributed to redefining the concept’s meaning. Italians demonstrate the falsity of a core assumption—still widely accepted—of the classical assimilation model, according to which assimilation remade an immigrant group into a copy of the majority population. What the Italian American experience reveals is the ultimate success of a gritty struggle to gain acceptance and middle-class status without surrendering valued aspects of identity, with each generation reaching beyond the achievements of the preceding one. The Italians are the paragon of generation-by-generation progression into the mainstream.
