The Wild Around the Corner

Immigrants’ Feral Ecologies in New York, San Francisco, and Naples During the Age of Mass Migration 1870-1924

Daniele Valisena

With this research project, I intend to reconstruct migrants’ multispecies ecologies in New York City, San Francisco, and Naples during the Great European Migration. Filth, industrial nuisances, and animal-driven diseases were part of migrants’ everyday lives. But from their liminal urban settlements, they develop original ecological interpretations of their environments in alliance with various non-human actors such as gardening in empty lots, collecting waste, bones, and rags, hunting birds and hares in parks, gathering spontaneous herbs on the sidewalks, keeping chickens, sheep, and goats in their yards and then letting them roam around freely. Those hybrid practices of the urban emerged from the original ecological and urban lay knowledge that migrants brought with them across the Atlantic, producing socio-environments of alternative urban life that questioned to the core the process of urban modernization championed by planners, social reformers, and hygienists.

Building upon a vast series of newspaper articles, court records, oral history sources, migrants’ autobiographies, scientific and medical studies on urban hygiene, and migration surveys and reports produced by the U.S. and Italian Governments, I intend to show how migrants forged multispecies alliances with various non-human subjects, thus performing a different kind of modern urbanism. Additionally, this research wants to highlight the historical process through which modern urban planning, emerging ideas about urban hygiene, and new racist, gendered, and classist politics of space eradicated a century-long history of multispecies co-existence in urban environments in the Global North.