From Segusino to Chipilo The Venetian Immigrants Who Built a New Home in Mexico
“They crossed an ocean to build a new home in Mexico without leaving the memory of Veneto behind.”
Domenico and Giuseppina are fictional characters. They do not correspond, in this story, to a specific documented couple in the records of the Chipilo colony or of Italian immigration to Mexico. They are two imagined names chosen to tell the story of thousands of men and women who, in the nineteenth century, had to learn one of the hardest lessons life can impose on a family: it is possible to love one's homeland deeply and, at the same time, be forced to leave it. Domenico and Giuseppina represent a generation. They represent the families of Segusino who, in 1882, placed a few belongings into a suitcase, turned one last time toward the mountains of the Treviso area, and set out on the road toward the ocean. The details of their daily lives are imagined, but the world in which they move is real: the rural poverty of Veneto in the late nineteenth century, the great wave of agricultural migration to Mexico, and the birth of Chipilo, one of the most remarkable Venetian communities established outside Italy. In 1881, Segusino had 1,985 inhabitants. It was a small community in the Prealps of the province of Treviso, a place where the landscape was not merely something to admire, but a concrete part of everyday existence. The mountains determined the paths, the work, the pastures, the crops, the distance between houses, and even the way people measured time. For those born there, the village needed no explanation. They knew the neighborhoods, the families, the fields, the church, the paths and the familiar voices. They also knew hardship. There was little land. There was much work. A family could labor through an entire season and obtain barely enough to make it to the next one. It was an economy in which thrift was not a virtue but a necessity. Nothing was wasted. Bread had value. Milk had value. A chicken had value. A pair of shoes had to last as long as possible. A garment passed from one child to another. Farming families lived within a fragile balance in which an illness, a poor harvest or an especially harsh winter could turn hardship into desperation. Domenico, in our story, had known that life since childhood. He had learned to distinguish the sound of rain from the sound of hail. He knew that the mountains had their own character and that agricultural work demanded patience. He had never owned much, but he had learned to regard whatever he possessed as precious. Giuseppina knew the same poverty through the work of the household. Her day began before dawn and ended when everyone else was already asleep. Women's work rarely appeared in the official accounts of the rural economy, yet without those hands the family could not have functioned. There was bread to make, milk to handle, food to prepare, clothes to wash, older relatives to care for, children to raise, and a long succession of tasks that no one called work because they were simply life itself. When news of emigration to Mexico began to circulate through the Venetian communities, it entered people's homes through conversations, letters, stories and rumors from those who had heard about new lands across the ocean. Mexico was promoting agricultural colonization by European immigrants as part of the policies of the government of Porfirio Díaz. The goal was to bring foreign farmers into new colonies and establish them as agricultural producers. To the organizers, they were colonists. To the Venetian families, they were people searching for a chance. The journey to Mexico was, of course, not simply an economic decision. Leaving meant abandoning a network of relationships built over generations. It meant leaving loved ones in the cemetery. It meant not knowing whether one would ever see again the house in which one had been born. Above all, it meant accepting that one's children might know the old country only through stories. For this reason, the decision to emigrate rarely came from a single moment. It grew slowly. A family listened. A neighbor left. Someone wrote a letter. News arrived. Another family decided to follow the first. Migration became a current. In 1882, that current would carry people from Veneto to Mexico from several communities in the provinces of Treviso and Belluno. Segusino would play a particularly important role, but it would not be the only place of origin. Chipilo would also receive emigrants from Valdobbiadene, San Pietro di Barbozza, Volpago del Montello, Quero, Feltre, Vas, Miane, Maser, Alano di Piave and other communities. The community that emerged in Mexico was therefore not simply a colony of people from Segusino. It was a broader Venetian community in which different places of origin came together and, over time, contributed to the formation of a new cultural and linguistic identity. Domenico and Giuseppina left, then, like so many others. We do not know what they put into their luggage, because there is no suitcase belonging to them. But we can imagine what an emigrant of that period might have considered essential: a few clothes, perhaps a religious object, the most necessary tools and possibly a photograph, if the family could afford one. Photographs were still precious objects, and not every family could have one. But there was something no passenger list or baggage inventory could record: language. Venetian traveled with them. It traveled in the words of mothers and the reprimands of fathers. It traveled in prayers, recipes, nicknames and the names of ordinary things. It traveled with children who could not yet know that this language would one day become one of the most important traces of their origins. In 1882, emigrants from Segusino reached Mexico in different groups. Research by Eduardo Montagner Anguiano shows that 211 people from Segusino arrived in Mexico between February and September of that year. But not all of them ended up in Chipilo. Forty-three passed through the colony of Porfirio Díaz; eleven were sent to Diez Gutiérrez; another eleven went to La Aldana; thirty-nine left Chipilo beginning in 1883; while 107 remained in Chipilo from the beginning. Altogether, 146 people from Segusino reached Chipilo at some point in the migration process. This reality makes the story even more human. Migration was not a straight line drawn across a map. It was a journey marked by detours, mistakes, transfers, disappointments and new beginnings. Some immigrants arrived at a colony and discovered that the land was not what they had expected. Others were transferred. Still others decided to move again. An immigrant was not simply someone who had changed countries. An immigrant was someone forced to make repeated decisions inside a world he or she did not yet understand. Even before Chipilo was established, the Venetian language of Segusino had already begun to be heard in Mexico. On February 24, 1882, the steamship Messico arrived at Veracruz carrying immigrants bound for the colony of Porfirio Díaz. Some of those settlers would later enter the migration process that led to the formation of the Chipilo community. The major arrival at Chipilo took place on October 2, 1882, while the official founding of the colony is dated to October 7. For Domenico and Giuseppina, the day they arrived would have had a very different meaning from the one it would eventually acquire for their descendants. For them, it was not yet history. It was hard work. The future did not have the romantic face that later generations often give to pioneers. It had the face of land that needed to be worked, a house that needed to be built, food that had to be found, animals that had to be cared for, and the fear of not succeeding. The colony was not a finished town waiting for them. It had to become one. The immigrants had to transform themselves from passengers into settlers, from strangers into neighbors, and from separate families into a community. In that transformation, the family was fundamental. When an immigrant owned almost nothing, he still had the work of his hands and the solidarity of his neighbors. When one family did not yet have a house, it could help another build one. When someone needed a tool, someone else could lend it. When a woman gave birth, the other women knew what to do. When a man became ill, the community could help. Survival was not only individual. It was collective. Giuseppina would transform the new place into a home through the same gestures she had learned in Segusino. She would make bread, prepare food, preserve milk, mend clothes, teach the children their prayers and protect those small habits that seem insignificant until they become the only evidence that a family has not forgotten who it was. The kitchen would become one of the first forms of continuity. The ingredients did not have to be exactly the same. It was enough to remember the gestures. The way a dish was prepared, food preserved, bread shared or milk used could survive even when the landscape was completely different. Domenico would look for something in the new land that reminded him of Veneto. But it would be work that created the connection. The Venetian immigrants knew farming, livestock raising and the practical economy of the household. When the difficulties of agriculture made it necessary to seek other possibilities, milk and dairy production gradually became more important. Livestock became an essential part of the community's economy. Cheese, butter, milk and other products became not only food but also sources of income. The immigrants' ability to adapt transformed hardship into a new skill. It is one of the deepest characteristics of Italian immigration: the country of arrival changes the immigrant, but the immigrant also changes the country of arrival. Domenico could not recreate Segusino in Mexico. But he could carry with him what Segusino had taught him. The land could be different. The climate could be different. The crops could be different. But the principle remained the same: work, save, preserve and build. The community would do the same. Meanwhile, homesickness would take new forms. In the beginning, Segusino was the place they missed. Later, it would become the place they talked about. And eventually, it would become the place their children and grandchildren imagined. This transformation is one of the deepest experiences of immigration. For those who leave, the homeland is personal memory. For those born far away, it becomes inherited memory. A child born in Chipilo might never have seen Segusino, but would know the name of the town. That child would hear stories about the mountains. He or she would know that ancestors had left from there. Some Venetian words would sound familiar. Traditional foods would be prepared according to family customs. The child would learn that there was a distant place where someone in the family had once been a child. In this way, an imagined homeland is born. It is not less real because it was never personally experienced. It is simply a homeland received through memory. And it was through this memory that Chipilo would preserve one of the most remarkable features of its history: its language. The immigrants who arrived in 1882 did not all come from the same town. Their linguistic encounter contributed to the formation of a Venetian koinè, a community variety that cannot simply be identified with the dialect of Segusino. Historical and linguistic research emphasizes the presence of different Venetian varieties from the provinces of Treviso and Belluno. For Domenico and Giuseppina, however, this was not linguistics. They would not have spoken of a koinè. They would simply have spoken as they knew how to speak. They would call their children by the words they had learned in childhood. They would ask for bread, milk, water and tools in the natural language of their early lives. And because that language was not preserved as a museum object but used as a living means of communication, it could cross generations. An immigrant language survives not only because someone decides to protect it. It survives when it is still needed to say “mother,” “home,” “eat,” “sleep,” “come,” “wait,” “remember.” It survives when a grandmother uses it with her grandchildren. When a family laughs together. When a father scolds a child. When a mother calls everyone to the table. When a community celebrates a feast. A language survives when it remains connected to affection. Something happened in Chipilo that did not occur in quite the same way in every other Italian colony established in Mexico during that period. The immigrants from Segusino and the other Venetian communities eventually built a society in which Venetian language and culture maintained an exceptional continuity. Other colonies experienced much stronger processes of linguistic and cultural assimilation. In Chipilo, however, the small size of the community, its geographic concentration and its family connections helped preserve the language. This makes the history of Chipilo much larger than the story of an agricultural colony. It is the story of a memory that found a place where it could survive. It is also why it would be misleading to describe Chipilo as though it had been founded exclusively by people from Segusino. Segusino was fundamental. But Chipilo was built by a broader group of Venetians, especially from the Treviso and Belluno areas, along with people from other parts of Italy who became part of the community over time. The Chipilo Venetian language itself emerged from that encounter. The community was Venetian, but it was not a copy of any single Italian town. It was something new. Domenico would have learned this without ever needing to put it into words. He would meet men who spoke somewhat differently. He would recognize some words and not others. He would discover that a man from a nearby town could have habits different from his own and still share the same sense of family, faith and work. This is one of the riches of immigration: when different people meet far from their homeland, their differences can become part of a new shared identity. Giuseppina would watch the children grow. And perhaps, one day, she would notice that they were no longer afraid of Mexico. Mexico had become their world. They would not remember the voyage. They would not know the pain of departure except through their parents' stories. They would not feel the same homesickness. They would have different dreams. And this might have hurt Domenico and Giuseppina, because immigrants often want their children to remember what they themselves lost. Yet at the same time, that was the deepest success of their departure. If their children could feel at home in Mexico, it meant the family had survived. Memory did not have to prevent the children from belonging to their new country. It only had to allow them to know where they had come from. The old homeland and the new homeland could coexist. This is the secret of so many immigrant families. It is not about choosing between past and future. It is about carrying the past into the future without turning it into a prison. Domenico could continue to remember Segusino without asking his children to live as though they were still there. Giuseppina could prepare a Venetian recipe without demanding that Mexico become Veneto. Their family could become Mexican without ceasing to have Venetian roots. And Chipilo could become Mexican without completely losing the language of its founders. Time, of course, would continue to change everything. Some people from Segusino would leave Chipilo. Some would move to other colonies. Others would migrate again. Some would eventually become linguistically and culturally assimilated. But the community that remained in Chipilo would maintain a remarkable continuity. The municipality of Segusino still recognizes the historical and cultural connection with Chipilo, emphasizing that, more than eleven thousand kilometers apart, the two communities have preserved shared traditions and elements of their dialectal heritage. It is difficult to imagine anything more moving in the history of Italian immigration. A small mountain community loses part of its population. Those people cross an ocean. They arrive on another continent. They learn to cultivate unfamiliar land. They build homes. They raise children. They learn a new language. They enter Mexican society. And yet, more than a century later, some words born in the mountains of Veneto continue to live on the other side of the world. Perhaps Domenico, if he had existed exactly as we have imagined him, would have stood one evening near the doorway of his home and remembered Segusino. He would remember the cold mountains, the sound of footsteps, the church bells, the road, the house he had left behind. He would remember that he had once been afraid he would never find anything familiar again. Then he would hear his children speaking the language of their new country and, moments later, hear a Venetian word come from his wife's lips. In that moment, he would understand that he had not completely lost his old world. The world had changed, but it had not disappeared. It had become larger. Giuseppina, perhaps, would have understood before him that memory does not live in places. It lives in people. The house in Segusino could be far away. The mountains could be invisible. The journey could now be only a memory. But a family could continue to tell its story. And as long as someone tells the story, part of the past continues to live. This is what makes Italian immigration so profoundly human. Immigrants do not carry an entire homeland with them. They carry fragments. A word. A recipe. A rosary. A surname. A photograph. A prayer. A way of working. A way of sitting around a table. A way of raising children. And those fragments, brought together, can become a new community. Chipilo was one of those communities. It was born from poverty, hope and necessity. It grew through work. It survived through family. And it preserved its memory through language. Domenico and Giuseppina, then, are not important as individuals. They are important as symbols. They might have been them, or a couple like them, or hundreds of other couples whose names are difficult to remember today. The true story belongs to all of them. It belongs to the mothers who left with their children. To the men who left their fields behind. To the elderly who might never see their homeland again. To the young people who imagined a different future. To those who remained in Mexico and those who continued moving toward other colonies. It belongs to those who lost their language and those who managed to preserve it. Above all, it belongs to the children and grandchildren, because they were the ones who transformed migration into collective memory. In 1882, the emigrants of Segusino could not know that their departure would create a community remembered more than a century later. They could not know that their dialect would become the subject of linguistic research. They could not know that, thousands of miles away, someone would try to reconstruct their journeys through Italian and Mexican records. They could not know that Segusino and Chipilo would remain connected by a shared memory. They knew only that they had to leave. And they left. Perhaps that is the most important part of their story. Not the legend of the journey. Not the heroism later attributed to pioneers. Not nostalgia transformed into poetry. But the everyday courage of ordinary people who, faced with an uncertain future, decided to cross an ocean. They carried with them the little they possessed. They left behind almost everything they knew. And in a distant land they built something that was no longer Segusino, but that could never have existed without Segusino. This is the story of Chipilo. A Venetian, Mexican and Italian story at the same time. A story of departure and belonging. Of loss and continuity. Of a homeland left behind and a new homeland embraced. And above all, it is a story of a truth that every immigrant family understands, even when it cannot quite put it into words: you can cross an ocean without leaving your memory completely behind. Sometimes memory crosses the sea with us and, many years later, puts down roots on the other side of the world.
Author’s Note
In this story, I chose to portray immigration through Domenico and Giuseppina, two fictional characters who do not correspond to a specific documented family. Their purpose is to represent the thousands of men and women from Veneto who, in 1882, left their homeland to seek in Mexico a possibility of life that seemed increasingly difficult to find in Italy. The historical reality behind the narrative, however, is documented. Segusino played a particularly important role in the migration to Mexico: in 1882, 211 people left the municipality, and 146 of them reached Chipilo at different stages of the migration process. But Chipilo was not exclusively a colony of people from Segusino. Immigrants arrived from numerous communities in the provinces of Treviso and Belluno, creating a broader Venetian community and, over time, a distinctive linguistic variety born from the meeting of different original dialects. This point is essential to understanding the true meaning of Chipilo. It was not simply a piece of Veneto transplanted to the other side of the ocean. It became something new: a community born from the memory of Veneto but raised in Mexico, a place where immigrants had to learn how to live in a new environment without completely surrendering what they had been. Domenico and Giuseppina therefore belong to literature, but the experience they represent belongs to history. I chose to give them imaginary faces because this chronicle is not intended to reconstruct the genealogy of one particular family. It is intended to give a voice to the many families who left without knowing that, decades later, their descendants would still be speaking words born in the mountains of Veneto. Perhaps that is the most beautiful legacy of immigration: not preserving the past unchanged, but finding a way to make it live in a new land.
Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta
