“Bird of Passage,” Where Is Your Home?

Do you have a “bird of passage” hidden in the branches of your family tree?

My grandfather, Concezio Perrucci, was un uncello di passagio. I repeated the words a few times when I first came across them while writing my book, Searching for Concezio. The words sound lovely to the ear in Italian, but they meant then what they still mean today: temporary or migrant workers who are welcome to do the dirty, and often dangerous, jobs in America until they go back to where they came from.   

I found several surprises as I searched for more information:

First I discovered that my grandfather never intended to stay in America. He arrived for the first time in 1906, when he was only 16 years old. Like most “birds of passage,” who were mostly young men from South Italy, he intended to make enough money after working in America to return back home.

Next I learned that Concezio returned to America seven years later, in 1913. Only twenty to thirty percent stayed in South Italy. Risorgimento, the political movement to unify Italy ended in 1869, didn’t improve life for South Italy’s poor farmers. They continued to farm the land under a system of tenant farming that had been in place for centuries. New taxes only added to their struggle to feed their families.

As I kept digging, I found the final—and perhaps most important—piece of information about South Italy’s “birds of passage.” From 1880 to 1920, during the years of mass migration to America, four of the twenty million immigrants who arrived from Western Europe came from Italy, but half—or two million—were “birds of passage” who came from one of the impoverished villages in South Italy’s Mezzogiorno where my grandfather had been born. The term signifies the heat in the middle of the day in South Italy and also describes the searing poverty.

My grandfather’s story reflects the struggles and successes of South Italy’s “birds of passage” who have never been given the credit for their role in building modern America. Would you tell me about the “bird of passage” hidden in your family tree and share their story with me?

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