1. 1. St. Joseph’s altars are found in New Orleans churches, especially those with predominantly Italian parishioners, and in private homes, halls, Italian pastry shops and restaurants, and public spaces throughout the city.
2. 2. In 2015, I visited St. Augustine Catholic Church in Tremé to view the St. Joseph’s altar. (Founded in 1841 by free people of color, St. Augustine was the most integrated Catholic church in America, with black, Creole, and Sicilian congregants.) An African American woman informed me that she used to bake the Sicilian fig cookies called cuccidati for the altar. When I asked how she learned to make them, she replied that her mother taught her, and she had learned from a neighbor, “a nice old Italian lady.”
3. 3. “Second line” refers to a tradition in which onlookers join a parade or funeral procession, dancing behind the marching band and those who comprise the “first line,” i.e., mourners in a funeral procession or dignitaries and other formal participants in a parade. As a noun and a verb, second line has become a metonym for New Orleans African American musical culture.
4. 4. In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump won in all the New Orleans suburbs with large Italian American populations. Republican Congressman Steve Scalise, a New Orleans-born Sicilian American who is the current House of Representatives minority whip, is an extreme conservative who became notorious when it was revealed that he had spoken at a convention of a far-right, racist organization founded by former Ku Klux Klan head David Duke.
5. Belletto, Al. 1981. Interview by Jason Berry, October 28, 1981. Digitized, Box 43 (ID: NOEMRP05), Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.