Padrone system

Okay, so let me try to explain the padrone system like you are five years old.

Imagine you want to sell lemonade. You make a lot of lemonade but you need help delivering it to people's houses. So, you hire some big kids to help you with that.

But, when you sell lemonade, you want to make sure you get all the money from it. So, you tell the big kids to sell the lemonade for you and bring you back all the money they make.

This is kind of like the padrone system.

In the padrone system, bosses called “padroni” would hire Italian immigrants to work in their factories or on their farms. But they would also control where the workers lived, what they ate, and even how much they got paid. It's kind of like they were in charge of everything to do with the workers.

Sometimes the workers would have to pay the padroni back for things like food or housing. This could be really hard because the workers didn't make very much money.

Some people thought the padrone system was unfair because it took advantage of the workers.

So, in the early 1900s, laws were made to stop the padrone system and to give workers more rights. This meant that workers could make their own choices about where they lived and worked and they could keep all the money they made.

So, that's the padrone system!