Porco, Ettore
Abstract
Ettore Porco was born on January 15 1915 in southern Italy in the province of Cosenza. He was youngest of ten children. He came to America in 1933 during the depression. He immigrated to New York because the farm he tended to while in Italy bore no food. He went to stay in the Bronx with his oldest brother on Hollywood Avenue. His first job was as a shoe shiner and while he went to elementary school in Italy, he had to learn English from scratch once he came to the states.
He met his wife in the Bronx, she is Italian as well. They were married in Our Lady of Mont Carmel Church and they had five children, the first one was born during WWII around 1944.
Porco doesn’t remember being discriminated against when he first immigrated to the Bronx. He says that there weren’t many Hispanics in his neighborhood in the 30s and 40s. When large waves of Hispanics started settling in the Bronx, he still maintains that there was racial harmony and little tension.
