Mary Bucci Bush’s novel Sweet Hope has recently been named a winner or finalist in three awards: 1. Winner: Working Class Studies Association’s Tillie Olsen Award for Published Book 2.“Finalist”: Binghamton University’s John Gardner Book Award (they will note this on announcement flyers & on their website. (Winner: Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling).
3.“Finalist”: 2012 Paterson Fiction Prize. (Winner: Steve Almond’s God Bless American: Stories).
Sweet Hope (Prose Series)
Sweet Hope is a novel about the friendship between two families, one Black and one Italian, living and working together on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation 1901-1906. Italians were illegally imported to the South under false pretenses and held in a contract labor system designed to put and keep them in debt while the few remaining African American sharecroppers taught the Italians to work cotton, speak English, and survive. A vicious manager/ overseer, an absentee plantation owner, a rape, an interracial “Romeo and Juliet” love affair, a murder, and hints of a Federal investigation complicate the characters’ lives as they learn bitter truths about race and friendship in America.
The novel was inspired by the childhood experiences of Bush’s grandmother and her family who were unwitting participants in the “Italian Colony Experiment.”
Italian American Writers Blog 
It’s great to see a book about the hardships Italians faced when they entered this country. It’s something that’s almost never discussed.
But it has been written about..I suggest the following books:
Umbertina by Helen Barolini
The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo
Christ in Concrete by Pietro di Donato