Little Italy

This guide to Little Italy in San Diego traces how tuna, a fish once dismissed as worthless, drew roughly six thousand Italian families into work as deckhands, netters and cannery hands along this waterfront. You'll hear about the strict division of labor between the men who chased tuna on wooden boats and the women who mended nets and cleaned the catch on the wharf, and about the canneries that by the nineteen thirties employed over a thousand people. It follows the neighborhood through the Navy's wartime requisition of the tuna fleet and the foreign competition that followed. Look for the mural along Kettner Boulevard that still tells part of this story.