Migrants and the making of the American landscape

This chapter explores how migrants have adapted, fought with, and reshaped the environment they moved into, changing themselves and nature at the same time. It argues that immigrants' environments were never only "natural". The chapter provides several examples from the history of various immigrants' groups, especially Italians, in the United States. The ingenuity of immigrants, their ability to mobilize natural and cultural resources in order to make a living, but also to articulate their relationship to the environment, is the central pillar of the chapter. Looking at how immigrants transformed the land should not mean obliterating class, race, and gender inequalities, ignoring the complicated socioecological relationships among groups and with the environment. In the migrants' experience, environment and the body, space of work and space of living were not separated by rigid barriers; rather they overlapped, both metaphorically and materially. The relevance of the health of the land emerged from several sources.