GONZÁLEZ: Hey, everybody. I’m Ana.

NUNES: I’m Alex. And you’re listening to Mosaic.

GONZÁLEZ: So, Alex. We can’t really talk about immigration in America without talking about industrialization.

NUNES: Right. If your family traces its roots in this country to sometime in the 19th or early 20th Centuries, there’s a pretty good chance someone related to you worked in a mill or a factory.

GONZÁLEZ: And that relative’s story might be part of a larger narrative of the American Dream that still endures today.

BOB TERINO: This is the American story. It takes luck, skill, perseverance. But, if you want to come here and work, you should be able to better yourself.

NUNES: That’s Bob Terino, AKA...

BOB: Bobby T.

NUNES: His family is one of those success stories.

GONZÁLEZ: And the first thing you should know about Bobby T is he’s a big character. He’s a dreamer, a storyteller, and he likes the spotlight a little more than the average guy.

NUNES: Indeed. Last fall, Bob was at a historic preservation award ceremony on a mansion lawn in Warwick, when he interrupts the event, grabs the microphone and tells the audience all about his family’s rags to riches immigration story.

BOB: It was quite a thing. I evidently touched a nerve, and I got a standing ovation and people were in tears.

ason Bob got a historic preservation award is undeniably very cool. And it has to do with an old mill building in North Providence that’s connected to his family in a surprising way.

[Sound of walking through mill building.]

NUNES: Bob and I are walking around the Lyman Mill Lofts in North Providence. Bob bought this building years ago, and recently he and his partners completely renovated the old wool factory into this super nice, modern 109-unit apartment building. There’s a gym, party room, rec room, media room, and even a little space dedicated to four-legged tenants.

BOB: The doggy treadmill and the dryer. 

NUNES: So that’s a tub where you can wash a dog?

BOB: Wash a dog…I did research on this, and it really turned out to be a good purchase.

NUNES: This building is more than a real estate investment for Bob. Because this mill is really the place where everything started for his family when his grandmother Carmela immigrated to the U.S. more than a century ago.

BOB: In 1907, she came to this country from Italy, and this was her first job.

GONZÁLEZ: Bob says he was stunned the first time his Dad told him that story, and it makes him all the more proud of what he’s done with the building since.

BOB: If somebody told my grandmother, a little birdie said, “Someday your grandson’s gonna own this building and do this with this, have this kind of a result,” she would have thought it was crazy and impossible. This was a woman--they were poor as hell and whatever. So, that’s the American Experience. I got goosebumps just talking about the story right now. So, it’s a wonderful thing. 

NUNES: Bob’s family is the type of American Dream story people love to hear and others want to emulate.

GONZÁLEZ: After his grandma goes to work at the Lymansville Company Mill, her kids get jobs there, too. Bob’s dad eventually gets training to become a toolmaker. 

NUNES: He goes down to the draft board to enlist during World War II but he gets sent instead to the Bulova Watch Company in Providence’s jewelry district so he can make parts for the war effort.

GONZÁLEZ: After the fighting ends, other jobs come his way. Bob’s dad is enterprising and hardworking, so his bosses keep giving him more and more work.

NUNES: He saves up, eventually goes off on his own and opens a metal findings business. Then he gets into real estate investing.

GONZÁLEZ: So, Bob’s dad goes from being an average factory worker with humble beginnings to a very wealthy businessman. 

BOB: My father had a lot of talent, and he had a lot of guts. So he became a very successful man. Yeah, he owned 39 buildings in Providence, so he really was quite a guy.

NUNES: Bob’s family story is pretty remarkable for a lot of reasons, one being that it’s really unusual.

GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. The truth is: people love immigration stories like this one, but they were few and far between. When people did get ahead, it usually wasn’t so dramatic.

EVE: Sometimes upward mobility took a really long time. 

NUNES: This is Eve Sterne, professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. She studies immigration.

EVE: Sometimes upward mobility could take several generations--three, four generations. Often people went back home with their dreams dashed. 

GONZÁLEZ: And the people who stay don’t have it easy.

NUNES: Right. When you look back at the history of the Industrial Revolution in Rhode Island and the effect it had on immigration, you see it’s not a simple and always positive story. It’s long, complicated and sometimes unsettling. 

GONZÁLEZ: It starts in the late 18th Century with an immigrant named Samuel Slater who comes to Rhode Island with the tricks of the textile trade he learned in England, and he helps found a mill in Pawtucket.

EVE: And that opened the doors for the development of industry in Rhode Island and then spread to neighboring Massachusetts and eventually across the nation.

NUNES: This creates lots and lots of jobs that draw in immigrants from Northern and Western Europe: places like Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland.  

EVE: So Rhode Island was the first state to have an immigrant working class, and that had a profound effect on society and politics in the Ocean State. 

GONZÁLEZ: The old New Englanders who have been in Rhode Island for generations fear the potential voting power of this new group, so they enact laws that effectively disenfranchise immigrant men.

NUNES: The Irish begin coming over in huge numbers because of the potato famine in the mid-1800s, and they face major discrimmination because they’re Catholic. 

GONZÁLEZ: They’re also blamed for being poor and dismissed as drunks and brawlers.

NUNES: But despite all of this, Eve says these earlier waves of immigrants actually have it easier than the people who will come later, people like Bobby T’s relatives.

EVE: They tended to fit in reasonably well because they were white, they were Christian, for the most part, they were Western and Northern European, and they arrived at a time when the nation needed immigrants to continue to settle the expanding country. 

GONZÁLEZ: But by the end of the 19th Century, things have changed dramatically. 

NUNES: For one, the manufacturing landscape is different. Rhode Island businesses have expanded into areas like machine tools, jewelry, and higher end fabrics. There are still tons of jobs being created, but now native-born Americans have come to see immigrants more as job steelers and low-wage laborers who are bringing down other people’s paychecks. 

GONZÁLEZ: And ethnic factors come into play. This newer group of immigrants is made up mostly of people from places like Italy, Portugal, and Eastern Europe. And people in America see these immigrants as being just different.

EVE: None of them spoke English as their native language. Very few of them were Protestants. They were darker complected, and ideas about race at this time were really, really different. So groups today that we would see as undeniably white--and I’m putting air quotes around the word white--were seen as non-white: Italians, Greeks, Portuguese.

NUNES: And by this point, the once-persecuted Irish are more settled in America, and now they’re at odds with new Italian Catholic immigrants who resist the Irish hierarchy of the local church.

GONZÁLEZ: And there’s also this entirely new type of anxiety in America.

NUNES: At the end of the 19th Century, the U.S. Census announces the American frontier is officially closed. There’s still plenty of open space, but there are no longer enormous swaths of unsettled land. 

GONZÁLEZ: Immigrants are pouring in, and people worry there’s just not enough land for everyone.

EVE: And that set off a sort of scarcity-consciousness, the idea that there was no longer a safety valve, this idea that even if, you know, thousands or millions of however many immigrants were coming in every year, they could always just move west. There was room for them to go. Americans were now fighting for pieces of a limited pie.

NUNES: So, today we may think of this period as being a time when immigrants come to America, establish roots, and start climbing the economic ladder. But the truth is the work is tough, the people already here are far from friendly, and a lot of immigrants decide they’d rather go back home instead.

GONZÁLEZ: Of all the Italian people who come over during this era, Eve says more than half of them go back to Italy.

NUNES: Many of the immigrants who do stay in America fight labor battles with factory owners and struggle mightily to get ahead. 

GONZÁLEZ: See, the state is controlled by a business-friendly Republican Party for years, and it’s not until the 1930s that the state flips to a Democratic Party that’s more friendly to organized labor.

NUNES: Laws eventually get passed in favor of working immigrants, and, for many, factory work becomes a genuine ticket to a middle class income.

GONZÁLEZ: But Eve says people today should remember that the path to get there wasn’t easy.

EVE: Sometimes people look back with rose-colored lenses. And to do so is to overlook the very real problems that the first, second, even third generation encountered, and the difficulty encountered by the labor movement as it struggled to be recognized and to have its demands met.

[Sound alongside riverbank.]

BOB: That’s pretty cool. 

ALEX: Yeah.

NUNES: Bobby T and I are standing alongside the Woonasquatucket River outside the Lyman Mills Lofts. This river once powered the mill where his immigrant grandmother got her start, making worsted wool. His grandmother had to toil away inside. And now Bob’s leisurely strolling the grounds, enjoying the fresh air and wildlife.

BOB: Two swans, and also there’s all kinds of birds around. It’s nice.

NUNES: So, Bob’s story is a kind of cinematic tale for the ages. 

GONZÁLEZ: His grandmother came here with nothing. His dad made it big against the odds. Now Bobby T’s a big deal too--and he’s not afraid to say it. 

BOB: I can’t tell you what an impact I’ve made in my life. Strangely enough: a lot of people kind of chuckle at this, but I am the person responsible for the popularity of fried calamari in the United States. 

NUNES: Really?

GONZÁLEZ: You know, let’s indulge Bobby T for just a minute, this tall tale goes that Bob travels to Italy, tries fried squid and loves it so much that he tells chef Cosmo at the Italo-American Club on Federal Hill when he gets back to Providence.

BOB: And he said, “Oh, Bobby T! Fried calamari”--never forget this. So, at any rate, he makes a platter of fried calamari. And two weeks later [laughs], Cosmo said to me, BobbyT, I hate you.” I said, “Why’s that?” He said, “Everyone wants fried calamari. That’s all they want.” So it became the dish there. And then other places...

GONZÁLEZ: OK. We can probably cut him off there...

NUNES: Yes. But the point is Bobby T has lived a charmed life. And, in large part, he has industrialization to thank. Without factories, his family’s story may have turned out different.

GONZÁLEZ: And, the truth is, things are very different for immigrants today.

NUNES: Right. Because so many of the factories that employed immigrants folded a very long time ago. Jobs went out of state and overseas. And a lot of the gains made by organized have labor slipped away. 

GONZÁLEZ: The net result is immigrants coming to America these days are a lot less likely to climb the economic ladder through industrial jobs. 

NUNES: And that makes things more difficult for some people. 

EVE: It’s really hard for immigrants to get that kind of toehold. The job experience is very bifurcated. You know, if you’re less educated, you’re going to go into a service industry job. And if you’re more educated, you might do really well in the information economy. 

GONZÁLEZ: Even if steady, middle-of-the-road jobs are harder to come by, Bobby T says the American Dream is still very much alive.

NUNES: He says he sees it around him. People are working their way up just like his grandma and making their own opportunities just like his dad did in areas like real estate.

BOB: I like the fact that they’re buying a house, then they buy another house. And that’s how you do it. If you have no bad habits--drugs, drinking, things like that--and you’re a good family man, then you can do it. This is the American Story. It takes luck, skill, perseverance. But, if you want to come here and work, and you have any intelligence at all, you should be able to better yourself.

GONZÁLEZ: Everyone might not agree, but Bobby T says he sees proof when he looks around his mill.

NUNES: Afterall, this is a place where a poor woman from Teano, Italy, got her first job. Now her grandson walks around here with the keys to the joint, greeting pampered dogs who are happy to see him.

BOB: [Sound of playing with dog] Oh, here! Look at this...Look at this…

GONZÁLEZ: Mosaic is a production of The Public’s Radio, edited by Sally Eisele with production help from James Baumgartner and Aaron Selbig. Our original music is by Bryn Bliska. Torey Malatia is the general manager of The Public’s Radio. I’m Ana Gonzalez.

NUNES: And I’m Alex Nunes. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the stories you've heard over the last few months, we'd like to ask you a small favor: Share this podcast with someone you know. You can tweet about it, post it to Facebook, or email your family with a link. We'd like for as many people as possible to hear about Mosaic, and we know that when you share it with friends, that can make a big difference.