Ines Cassettari (died 1943) was an Italian emigrant to America whose autobiography became famous.[1] She was born in 1866 or 1867 in Lombardy, Italy, and abandoned at birth, and lived in an orphanage and then a foster home.[1][2] She was forced to marry an abusive man.[1] They immigrated to the United States, where she refused to run a brothel for him and eventually left him.[1] She remarried and worked as a cleaning woman in the Chicago Commons until she died.[1]
Her name was changed to Rosa Cavalleri in Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant, which was her autobiography as transcribed by Marie Hall Ets; it was published in 1970 and republished in 1999.[1][3][4][5] She had met Ets in the Chicago Commons.[6] Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative by Fred L. Gardaphe calls her book "[o]ne of the strongest Italian American immigrant narratives".[2]
- ^ a b c d e f Ilaria Serra (2007). The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies. Fordham Univ Press. pp. 118–. ISBN 978-0-8232-2678-8.
- ^ a b Fred L. Gardaphe (1996). Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Duke University Press. pp. 31–. ISBN 978-0-8223-1739-5.
- ^ Caroline Brettell (1 January 2003). Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity. Rowman Altamira. pp. 28–. ISBN 978-0-7591-0320-7.
- ^ Marie Hall Ets (1 March 1999). Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant. Univ of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-16254-2.
- ^ James Ciment; John Radzilowski (17 March 2015). American Immigration: An Encyclopedia of Political, Social, and Cultural Change. Routledge. pp. 189–. ISBN 978-1-317-47717-4.
- ^ James Robert Payne (1992). Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives. Univ. of Tennessee Press. pp. 144–. ISBN 978-0-87049-740-7.