Doña Elvira Elena Capriotti, o la historia de una marchigiana en pergamin

Abstract

Doña Elvira Elena Capriotti arrived in Argentina on November 26, 1921, at the age of 7, from the port of Genoa, on the ship called Napoli. In this text, in the heat of the journey of Doña Elvira and her family, we will try to give an account of the reasons that led them to settle in a certain area of the country, reviewing central concepts and methods of the study of international migration. For this particular case, we have a series of sources in which we will seek to establish our assertions, while at the same time, through an intensive exploration of them and the questions that arose, we believe that the bases are left for an investigation that can answer these questions to have a more complete picture of what was the migration from a particular region of Italy to one of Argentina. Possible search routes will also be established to achieve these objectives, such as file location and source references, especially oral ones. We will start from a central statement to approach the treatment of the issue: that the family decision to migrate and settle in the northern region of the Argentine pampas, specifically in the Pergamino district, was influenced by a network of family contacts already established in the area, for which, the concept of “migratory chain” becomes central in the analysis and explanation of how things could have happened.