Salvatore Salerno has long been one of this country’s leading scholars on labor and cultural activism among Italian immigrant workers, particularly in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, California State University, Sacramento and in the Sociology departments at Macalester College, Metropolitan State University, and Minneapolis Community and Technical College. He is currently a professor on the Community Faculty staff of Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Sal’s collection of materials donated to ESFL includes rare items in working class poetry and fiction, as well as original documents pertaining to the prosecution and deportation of Italian labor activists.
Sal has written extensively on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He is the author of Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World, Direct Action and Sabotage and has contributed to anthologies on the IWW. Red November, Black Novemberis a study of the culture of the I. W. W. movement at the turn of the twentieth century. It analyzes the Wobblies’ use of cultural expressions such as songs, poems, and cartoons as a means of educating and unifying workers, and as weapons in the struggle against the repressive social conditions of industrial development.
His most recent book, Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, is an anthology he edited with Jennifer Guglielmo. This collection of original essays from some of the country’s leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question – “Are Italians White?” Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.
Sal is currently writing a book on industrial unionism and transnational radicalism in the early twentieth-century Italian anarchist community in Paterson, New Jersey. He has contributed articles to the Haymarket Scrapbook and many other publications.