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 Sturm's struggle with infertility, the crisis of faith that it engendered, and the creation of the first altar she offered with the hope of getting pregnant. 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. The perfect book for anyone who wants to understand the lived experience of diaspora.