Picture a horse-drawn cart pulling up to a Chicago factory gate around the turn of the twentieth century, its owner ready to sell ice cream to the workers spilling out at the end of a shift. That was the “shop-on-wheels” of Vincenzo Pontarelli of San Vincenzo, Abruzzo, my great-great-grandfather, and it was how he fed his family. His daughter, my great-grandmother Maria Pontarelli Tosetto, was born in 1891, the fourth of five girls. Like millions of Italian peasants in the late nineteenth century, the family had crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life. Maria went to work too, filling and labeling medicine bottles for three dollars a week, and every penny went toward food and shelter for the family.
Great-grandmother Maria was raised a devout Roman Catholic during a time when the official church forbade the reading of Scripture among laypersons. One day, a travelling evangelist left a Bible in the Pontarelli home. First her parents, then Maria, guardedly picked up the book and began reading the story of Jesus in the Gospels. They found a congregation down the road driven by the same sense of religious freedom, the Assemblea Cristiana (Christian Assembly). This Chicagoan congregation, lit ablaze by the liberty of the Holy Spirit, became the mother church of the Italian American Pentecostal movement.
Great-grandmother Maria stood among the first wave of Italian peasants who braved the New World in search of freedom from their oppressive Old World religious and political circumstances. While her story is treasured every month, October is especially a fitting time to recall the legacy of our Italian American forebears. In 1989, the US formally declared October as Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month, setting it aside to honor the achievements of Italian immigrants and their descendants living in America. Congress passed a joint resolution, and then President George H. W. Bush (1989) signed Proclamation 6045, reserving October to commemorate the contributions of Italian Americans, recognizing especially their work in the arts, science, and culture. October was picked because it coincided with Columbus Day, dedicated to the work of the Italian navigator who pioneered a door to the New World and trans-Atlantic trade.
I chronicled Maria’s story among other forebears of vital Italian American spirituality in my book Embracing Our Roots: Rediscovering the Value of Faith, Family, and Tradition (Palma, 2021). It is heartening to recall the stories of those from lands across the Atlantic who Lady Liberty welcomed with open arms:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! (quoted in “Statue of Liberty”)
These words from the inscription on Lady Liberty, dedicated in 1886, resound today for countless poor and downtrodden souls arriving at America’s shores in search of freedom. As suggested in my recent book Bridge-Building Leadership (co-authored with Dr. Doris Gomez), you and I have an opportunity to build bridges among immigrants seeking a fresh start in America. Taking a moment to befriend another from a distant country may just broaden our own horizons as much as it shows God’s neighborly love to someone on the outside looking in.
Works Cited
Bush, G. H. W. (1989). “Proclamation 6045—Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month, 1989.” The American Presidency Project. Retrieved 2018-04-13.
Palma, P. J. (2021). Embracing Our Roots: Rediscovering the Value of Faith, Family, and Tradition. Wipf & Stock.
Palma, P. J., & Gomez, D. (2026) Bridge-Building Leadership: A Biblical Approach to Human Flourishing Across Ethnoracial, Socioeconomic, and Gender Divides. Palgrave Macmillan.
“Statue of Liberty.” Brittanica. Accessed October 24, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Statue-of-Liberty.
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