The Daily Bulletin Archive

By Mary A. Durlak

A special exhibition, Dear America! The Italian Immigrant Experience in Buffalo and the Thomas Sgovio Story, is now on display in E. H. Butler Library’s lower lobby as the result of an agreement between the History and Social Studies Education Department and Biblioteca del Mediterraneo, the regional public library system of Apulia, Italy. The agreement, facilitated by Lucia Caracci Cullens, honorary vice consul in Buffalo for the Consulate General of Italy in New York, established a collaborative research venture encouraging scholars to study emigration from the Apulian region—the heel of Italy’s boot—to the United States. The exhibit is also showing in Bari, Italy, where it opened in June.

“Cullens was familiar with the department’s longstanding strong interest in local history,” said Martin Ederer, assistant professor in the History and Social Studies Education Department. “She also knows Buffalo State’s reputation for collaborative projects with the Buffalo community—and she knew Thomas Sgovio’s story.”

That story is a case study of the complexity of immigration to the United States. “Only about half the Italians who came into the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s stayed here,” said Ederer. “Many returned home, or went on to other countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, and Australia.”

Some immigrants—those who joined the communist party after being involved in labor activities and the socialist movement—were deported. Sgovio’s father, who came from the region of Apulia, was among them. However, he could not return to Italy because communists were under attack there by Mussolini’s government. So he went to the “workers’ paradise,” the Soviet Union, later sending for his family, including his teenage son Thomas.

The story that followed was one of disillusion, separation, and imprisonment. The younger Sgovio spent 16 years of imprisonment in the Gulag in Siberia for the crime of attempting to return to Buffalo. Twenty-four panels depicting the story, using Sgovio’s drawings as well as contextual material, are on display in E. H. Butler Library during September. St. Anthony of Padua Church in Buffalo covered the costs of the exhibit’s production.

Sgovio’s art also adorns offices at the GM Powertrain plant in Tonawanda, where he worked after his return to Buffalo in 1963. He self-published a book in 1979, Dear America! which described his ordeals in the Soviet Gulag.

The exhibition opened in June 2009 at an annual conference in Bari, Italy, which attracted librarians, archivists, and historians from almost a dozen countries, including Russia. Ederer and David Carson, professor and chair of history and social studies education, presented at the conference.

The next scholarly activity of the collaboration is a conference at Buffalo State. Dear America! The Italian Immigrant Experience in Buffalo and the Thomas Sgovio Story will take place on campus on Saturday, September 26, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Classroom Building C122. An opening reception will be held on September 25 from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. in E. H. Butler Library. The event is free and open to the public.