Texas Tavola

By exploring the vibrant devotional practice of creating altars for Saint Joseph, this deeply personal ethnography showcases the lived experiences of diaspora for Sicilian-Americans in East Texas.

Every spring in Bryan, Texas, Sicilian American women gather to build altars honoring Saint Joseph. Like Sicilian Americans elsewhere, they do so to safeguard the well-being of their loved ones and express thanksgiving. Houses are emptied of furniture to make way for weeks of community effort spent cooking and designing the altar, and the ritual culminates with a single family hosting nearly 1,000 guests in honor of Saint Joseph. Saint Joseph’s altars contain hundreds of hand-made decorative breads, cookies, and other food items and are accompanied by elaborate religious rituals and prayers spoken in Sicilian dialect. They don’t just occur on the Saint’s feast day, but punctuate the entire spring, providing rhythm, meaning, and structure to the lives of Sicilian American women.

This engaging autoethnography travels through different stages of the author, Circe Sturm’s, life—such as granddaughter, daughter, and migrant—to offer a window into Sicilian American women’s lives across generations. At the heart of the book is a question: how and why has this elaborate Sicilian tradition survived and thrived in the most unlikely of places? Through intimate portraits of the women who keep it alive, Sturm reveals the deep wells of faith and cultural memory that bind this community across time and distance. Tracing the origins of the tradition back to several small towns in Western Sicily, Texas Tavola documents the faith traditions of an Italian American community about which little is known, offering a detailed portrayal of the profundity of their religious devotion, challenging assumptions about immigration and cultural loss, and delving into ethno-religious community life. An ideal text for anyone seeking to understand the lived experience of diaspora and cultural belonging.