Columbus or Marcantonio: the two patron saints of Italian Americans

On 12 October the Columbus Day parade marched up Fifth Avenue as it does every year, with bands, floats and Italian flags. The mayor was missing. Zohran Mamdani chose not to take part, and when asked about it he spoke not of Columbus but of another Italian: Vito Marcantonio. Critics took it as a lack of respect for the community, and the episode has also found its way into analyses of the Italian-American vote in these midterms, such as one published today by Euronews.

We have already written about Columbus on these pages: before he stands for a conqueror, his statue stands for the grandparents who paid for it with neighbourhood collections in order to be accepted. Almost nobody in Italy knows Marcantonio, which is a pity, because his story says a great deal about what it means to be Italian in America.

The boy from 116th Street

Vito Marcantonio was born in 1902 in East Harlem, then the largest Little Italy in Manhattan, to a family from Basilicata. He grew up politically in the shadow of Fiorello La Guardia, whose seat in Congress he inherited. He entered the House in 1935 and, apart from a two-year break, stayed until 1951, from 1939 with the American Labor Party, a small party of the New York left.

In Washington he became the man of lost causes: bills against the poll tax, which in the Southern states kept Black citizens away from the ballot box, workers' rights, independence for Puerto Rico. In his neighbourhood, meanwhile, Puerto Ricans were arriving alongside the Italians, and Marcantonio spoke to both, in Spanish too. He held rallies on street corners, and his office was open to anyone with a problem over rent, a pension or immigration. For much of the twentieth century, East Harlem's secular patron saint was him.

For much of the twentieth century, East Harlem's secular patron saint was him.

The Cold War sent him the bill. In 1950 he voted against intervention in Korea, Democrats and Republicans joined forces against him, and he lost his seat. He died in August 1954, aged 51, of a heart attack on a Manhattan street. The archdiocese, which never forgave his politics, refused him a church funeral; but along 116th Street, as the coffin passed, thousands of people lined the way.

Two Americas, one community

Columbus and Marcantonio tell two paths Italian Americans took to feel at home. The first is pride in one's origins, the claim to have arrived first; the second is solidarity with those who came later, with those still at the back of the line. They are not mutually exclusive, and most Italian-American families have walked both, perhaps in different generations.

Which carries more weight today is hard to say, not least because Italian Americans, about 16.3 million according to the American Community Survey, do not vote as a bloc. A 2023 SocialSphere poll for the Italian American Policy Center split them into 41 per cent Republicans, 30 per cent Democrats and 27 per cent independents. "They are American through and through," observes historian Gregory Alegi of Luiss University: they vote on the economy, safety and daily life, like everyone else.

Perhaps that is the point. A mayor born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent who, to speak to New York's Italians, chooses an East Harlem congressman who died seventy years ago rather than a Genoese navigator, is saying that Italian memory in America is wider than a parade. You may agree with him or not; but it is worth knowing who Marcantonio was.

Sources: Euronews (Stefania De Michele, 3 November 2026); New York Public Library photo archive; La Voce di New York.