The story of Little Italy’s Feast of San Gennaro is the story of how Italian immigrants became American

The Feast of San Gennaro marks its 100th anniversary in New York's Little Italy this year, drawing crowds to Mulberry Street for a festival founded in 1926 by parishioners of the Church of the Most Precious Blood.

The event began as Italian immigrants' rare public claim to a cultural identity that had drawn discrimination, including a 1928 attempt by the police commissioner to ban the procession over dollar bills pinned to the saint's statue, later overturned by a court. A medievalist's research traces the feast's roots to a bishop beheaded in AD 305 and rituals like the liquefying blood relic still venerated in Naples.

Today the festival mixes sausage carts and Sinatra impersonators with statues carried through the streets, evidence, per the piece, of a long assimilation process that outsiders once mistook for stubborn foreignness.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.