By the turn of the century, more enterprising Sicilians, frustrated with the status quo, began to look beyond Sicily’s shores for a long-term solution to their discontent.1 While many migrated to the North in search of seasonal work, most responded to La Mèrica’s increasing demand for both skilled and unskilled labor. Although Sicilians were among the last to leave in the great migration out of Italy between 1880 and 1920, the ultimate intensity of their movement exceeded that of all other regions. What began with a handful of resourceful individuals determined to improve their economic lot mushroomed rapidly into an exodus of staggering proportions, transforming the island into a venue of collective grief. So marked, in fact, was this movement out of Sicily that in 1906 alone 127,000 of Italy’s 200,000 departing emigrants were Sicilian (Foerester 1924, 104). By 1913, an astounding 1 million of the island’s 3.5 million residents had departed for foreign shores. While official policy insisted that emigration provided a safety valve for those most affected by a downturn in the southern economy, chiefly disenfranchised day laborers and peasants, more recent scholarship has concluded that others, “who were a little better off and feared themselves to be slipping down the social ladder,” were leaving the island as well, draining the South of its most enterprising individuals (Lopreato 1970, 35).

As brother called for brother and father for son, the resulting unprecedented “chain migration” left countless women, children, and elderly parents either temporarily or permanently abandoned. While Mistretta did not suffer the 50 percent male emigration rate experienced by still more depressed areas in Sicily, official registers reflect the phenomenon’s impact on small, urbanized centers scattered across the island. Between 1903 and 1909, years that coincided with Maria Messina’s residence in Mistretta, 1,517 of its estimated 15,000 citizens departed for American cities, a figure that would reach nearly one-third of the town’s population by 1924 (“Centonove” 2006).

For all of its tragic consequences, emigration on a grand scale spurred profound and decidedly positive changes in certain segments of Sicilian society. Cash remittances from across the Atlantic bolstered the flagging economy and facilitated upward mobility for families of emigrants (Cinel 1984, 59–60). Demands for basic education also soared, as wives and daughters of emigrants emerged from the strict confines of domestic life during their husbands’ absence. Activities that a mere generation earlier would have been inconceivable for any proper Sicilian woman were now considered necessity rather than choice. Running small shops, paying taxes, purchasing supplies, and managing more than a family budget, all required basic literacy and mathematical skills. Education—historically considered the realm of the elite and viewed with suspicion by the working classes for its associations with leisure—was now seen as key to socioeconomic advancement (Reeder 1998, 106).