ABSTRACT
In the earlier years of Italian migration to America, Italy didn’t even exist as a unified state. For instance, in a slender pocket of the northeastern coast of Sicily a special celebratory dish, cuscuszu, most likely takes its origins from Arab Sicily-from which source John Allan Cicala charted its movement to his grandmother's own celebratory dinners in Detroit, Michigan. For instance, Smith reports that in some western Sicilian towns, the mayors' friends were exempted from taxation, the local authorities taxed mules rather than cows, and raised nearly all of the local revenue through consumer taxes, rather than property taxes. Compounding the burden of taxation was the loss of land on the part of smallholders who could not afford to pay the increasingly burdensome property taxes and the continuous chipping away of the rights of the landless to the common land that existed under the Bourbon regime.
