Hopelessly Alien

Louis Corsino is Professor of Sociology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of The Neighborhood Outfit: Organized Crime in Chicago Heights.

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceIntroduction: Hope in a Sociological and Community Context1. Hope, Cultural Capital, and Habitus within an Italian Community2. Drawn into the Social Spaces of Hope: The Italian Social Journey from Italy to America3. Purchasing an Acceptance in American Society: Occupational Mobility as Cultural Capital4. Purchasing an Acceptance in American Society: Homeownership as Cultural Capital5. Purchasing an Acceptance in American Society: Children as Cultural CapitalConclusion: Individualized Hope and Communal HopesNotesIndex

"…[Corsino] masterfully challenges the widely held belief that immigrants left Italy solely due to a desire for greater social status and upward economic mobility in their adopted homeland … While this book is an important contribution to both Italian American studies specifically and immigration and ethnic studies more broadly, it also is a wonderful contribution to furthering readers' understanding of the tension and struggle between individual and communal hopes and between private aspirations and common meanings and desires." — CHOICE"This book upends the widely held belief that immigrants' decision to leave Italy was fueled solely by a hope for upward mobility and a greater social status than could be attained by remaining in Italy. While nominally a case study of Italian immigrants in Chicago, Corsino's findings will certainly spur researchers to examine not only the experiences and motivations of Italian immigrants elsewhere in the United States, but those of other ethnic groups as well, and have the potential to lead to a wholesale reexamination of immigration motivation en masse." — John R. Mitrano, Central Connecticut State University