Patsy Caravetta Oral History | Italians and Prejudice (00:44)

Mary: Were your parents mistreated for being Italian?

Patsy: I can’t say that they were Mary. The early years there was a lot of prejudice and, in some cases, a lot of discrimination too. Foreigners had a pretty tough time. Only because they didn’t know how to speak English, not because anybody was any smarter than anybody else. But you were in an English speaking country so they had a distinct advantage. If you couldn’t speak English it was a disadvantage, there’s no two ways about it. So that was the case and you just had to live through it, that’s all.

When my father worked in the coal mines in Michel there was a lot of that. A lot of the foreign guys who went there were treated badly.