The twilight of ethnicity among Americans of European ancestry: the case of Italians.

The course of ethnicity in advanced industrial societies continues to be debated without satisfactory resolution. Earlier social theorists, inspired by a vision of the erosion of traditional structures under the impact of a tide of modernization, tended to see ethnicity as receding. More recently, sociologists and others have proclaimed the resilience of ethnicity for some, this is because ethnicity is an affiliation apart, primordial and only superficially modified by currents of modernization, while for others, it is due to ethnicity's moorings in durable structures of inequality. Proponents of the view that ethnicity is resilient are the dominant voice in contemporary discussions, but their dominance is by no means assured, since the conceptual groundwork for interpreting ethnicity remains unsettled. This paper examines some of the interpretative difficulties surrounding ethnicity through the experiences of one group, Italian Americans. In particular, Italians are taken to constitute a strategic test case for some reigning assumptions in the study of ethnicity of European ancestry groups in the United States. Italian Americans are on the verge of the twilight of their ethnicity.