Ethnic Rivalries Loosen Hold on Boston Politics ; Being of Irish Descent Is No Longer a Prerequisite in Bay State Politics. More Italian-Americans Now Hold Top Posts

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There was a time when no matter what mastery a tradesman named Donato Salvucci possessed, he could never get a job as a bricklayer in Boston.

It was the early 1900s, and a friend suggested he change his name. "Whereupon Dan Sullivan was miraculously admitted to the bricklayer's union," says Boston historian William Marchione of his great-great uncle, who emigrated to Boston from Italy at the turn of last century.

That ethnic tribalism is of another era, of course, when the Irish in this city hung fiercely to the power they had secured from the old Yankee establishment - keeping it out of the grasp of Italians and other immigrants flooding into Boston. But the …