Mobility: ideas and people

News of the Italian working-class struggle and their iconoclastic ideology travelled to Detroit through activist-intellectuals such as Ferruccio Gambino and Bruno Cartosio, who both spent a long time in North America, also visiting the resilient Correspondence leaders, such as Martin Glaberman, James and Grace Lee Boggs, who had acted as mentors to the generation that now agitated in the factories. Writer and cineaste Dan Georgakas, who also spoke some Italian, worked incessantly to connect the two sides of the Atlantic. As we have seen, in the early 1970s Radical America, the journal of the student movement, ran several pieces by Italian radicals, but these could not have been written without the extensive connections previously built between Turin and Detroit.