The Italian thread: Calabrians who stayed

1909 — present

The Italian community is the record's thinnest, and it is printed at its true size: the documented account is the University of Notre Dame–affiliated study the Indiana University South Bend Ethnic Heritage Studies Program published in June 1975, The Italian-Americans of the South Bend-Mishawaka Area, by Viviana Fotia and Clayton Rasmussen. Its findings: Calabrian miners from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan came seasonally to shovel coal for the Indiana & Michigan Electric Company; some Italian arrivals bound for the steel mills of Gary — United States Steel's works, from 1909 — stopped in South Bend and stayed; and the factories, Studebaker, Oliver and Bendix, drew the rest. Through the 1920s and 1930s a small Calabrian community settled in St. Joseph County for manufacturing work, and some of its families founded groceries and bakeries; three present-day specialty food shops in the city — Bamber's Superette, Macri's Italian Bakery, and Oh Mamma's on the Avenue — descend from that settlement, in their own tellings. Italian ancestry stood at 2.6 percent of the city in the 2013 American Community Survey count carried in the population file. No Italian national parish appears in the record reached for South Bend, and none is invented here: the community's institutions were its shops, its families and its work, and the 1975 study — a scholarly local record, archived in full — is where its fuller telling waits.

Sources:

1. Fotia & Rasmussen, The Italian-Americans of the South Bend-Mishawaka Area, IUSB Ethnic Heritage Studies Program, June 1975 (ERIC ED 117 025; full text, archive.org)
2. Edible Michiana — "The Calabrian Connection," 2013 (the 1920s–30s settlement; the three shops)
3. Population & Demographics, this history (2013 ACS Italian ancestry, 2.6 percent) — banked fragment