Remembering Italian America

Memory, Migration, Identity

Laurie Buonanno, Michael Buonanno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000349368
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity examines the life of Italians in the United States and the role of migration and collective memory in the history of the construction of Italian American identity.

Employing the concept of communicative memory, the authors explain the processes that gave shape to Italian identity in America and the ways in which a symbolic identity became concretized in Italian American oral histories. The text explores the Italy migrants left behind, transatlantic networks, the welcome received by the Italian newcomers, the socioeconomic fabric of Italian America, and the singular worldview that grew out of the immigrant experience. In exploring the role of memory in the construction of Italian American identity, the book analyzes the commonalities in the lives of immigrants, allowing the Italian American experience to speak to the circumstances of newer immigrant communities and allowing these new immigrant communities to speak to the Italian migrant history. Looking at Italian American culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, this volume brings various theoretical perspectives to bear on "what, why, and how" questions concerning the Italian American experience.

This book will be of interest to students of ethnic studies, immigration studies, and American/transnational studies, as well as American history.

Winner of the 2022 Italian American Studies Association Book Award

PART I
History

1
THE ORIGINS OF A DIASPORA

First Stirrings

While it is today convenient to speak of Italian immigrants, these immigrants more closely identified themselves with the regions of Italy from which they emigrated than with Italy as a whole. In fact, in the earlier years of Italian migration to America, Italy didn’t even exist as a unified state. Rather, the Italian peninsula, which had last been unified under Roman rule, was only reunified as the result of the Risorgimento: the Resurgence or Unification of the Italian people. The movement effectively integrated the various regions of the Italian peninsula, Sicily, and Sardinia into a single republic with its own parliament and prime minister under the aegis of the Savoy monarchy of Turin in 1861.

Previous to Unification, Italy existed as a patchwork of states, some independent but most governed by foreign powers or the Papacy. Sicily, for instance, suffered a tumultuous history of foreign conquest with the dissolution of Roman authority—Byzantine, Arabic, Norman, Swabian, French, Spanish, and Bourbon—each leaving behind its indelible trace, which, though most visible in its architectural features, is to be found in many other of its cultural forms: language, cuisine, even governmental structures. For instance, in a slender pocket of the northeastern coast of Sicily a special celebratory dish, cuscuszu (Sicilian couscous), most likely takes its origins from Arab Sicily—from which source John Allan Cicala charted its movement to his grandmother’s own celebratory dinners in Detroit, Michigan.¹ Even with the achievement of the Risorgimento, each Italian region had its own dialect, its own folkloric traditions, and its own patron saints. And, today, most Italian Americans are keenly aware of their regional heritage: after ascertaining that one another is Italian, we start asking about regional affiliation: “So are you Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian?”

Notably, while the majority of Italian immigrants prior to Italy’s unification came from the Northern regions of Italy, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of Italian immigrants who entered the United States between 1880 and 1920 came from the seven regions south of Rome—Abruzzo, Molise, Campania (centering on Naples), Basilicata, Apulia Calabria, and Sicily—which are collectively referred to as the Mezzogiorno: literally the Midday, but figuratively the land of the intense sunshine that characterizes midday. There were certain characteristics that the Mezzogiorno owned collectively: the residue of a culture communally affected by 400 years and more on the mainland, 800 in Sicily, of sometimes brutal, sometimes inept, Spanish and Bourbon domination, a domination that kept the Mezzogiorno outside the mainstream of Italian history.² And this residue, consisting of a life that was too often characterized by miseria (misery)—an existence without enough food, sufficient work, or decent housing; an existence characterized by an unending scramble to make a hard living—was, as we will momentarily see, only exasperated by the Risorgimento: probably because Southerners had held out so much hope in the benefits of Unification.³

In many ways the Northern Italian migration to America differed markedly from that of the South. In numbers and the financial status of the migrants, the Northern migration resembled that of the French, German, and even English migrations of the same time period, and most Americans—politicians, immigration officials, even the general populace—viewed the many Southern new- comers as distinct from their fewer Northern countrymen.⁴ And while many of these Northern migrants were—like their Southern counterparts—politically and economically oppressed, others were simply taking advantage of very specific economic opportunities. For instance, stonecutters from the Valle Cervo in Piedmont merely added another destination, America, to their already long history of seasonal outmigration. And longshoremen from Genoa, who had regularly plied their trade in various European ports, added American ports to their list of potential destinations.⁵

Yet Southern and Northern migrants alike were products of societies characterized by campanilismo, a term that we might translate as regionalism but with the distinct connotation of “living one’s life within the sound of the church bell.” Phyllis Williams attempted to explain this reality as it impacted the Italian immigrants among whom she worked in the 1930s, noting that the commune, or village, “formed the social center and circumscribed the social horizon” of rural Italians who depended “mainly on its own resources for economic support” and, for the most part, restricted marriage to fellow villagers. Italy’s mountainous terrain “contributed to this isolation” of rural villages located as they so often were “in narrow valleys, on hilltops, or by the seashore.” And no “cultural trait,” Williams maintained, “reflected more clearly the campanilismo of Italy than the array of dialects found throughout the kingdom. Each state had its own dialect, and each section of a state had local variations.” Finally, she aptly noted that campanilismo was “particularly apparent among immigrants in their exclusive use of the word paesano” to refer to “a person from the same district or town,” that is, paese, “as the speaker.”⁶ But if the church bell might be a source of comfort and reliability in rural communities, campanilismo could likewise engender a sense of isolation and mistrust of outsiders, contributing to a sense of “otherness” when venturing out of one’s home village even while “othering” outsiders.

Miseria

Why then did Italians, with an ethos of campanilismo, opt to leave their homeland in the first place? And why Southern Italians in particular? Certainly, Italy has had more than its share of sfortuna, bad luck. Beyond the prevalence of a number of infectious diseases (particularly malaria, cholera, and trachoma), the peninsula, squeezed as it is between the African and European continental plates, a circumstance that offers it much of its natural beauty, is susceptible to volcanic eruptions and devastating earthquakes. Naples’ Vesuvius and Sicily’s Etna (the latter Europe’s most active volcano) are part of the seismic zone running north to south along the Apennine Mountains that form Italy’s spine.⁷ At times, entire towns in Italy—and most assuredly in the Mezzogiorno—have been destroyed by earthquakes and rebuilt only to be destroyed once again. In 1908, the Sicilian city of Messina and the mainland city of Reggio Calabria were devastated by an earthquake of magnitude 7.1—followed by a deadly tsunami. Estimates of the dead range from 80,000 upwards to 200,000 people. Not surprisingly, emigration rather than rebuilding was one response to such devastation.⁸ But natural disasters alone couldn’t account for the magnitude of Italian emigration.

Hunger is a continuous theme of Italian immigrants’ memories of Italy. Gary Mormino and George Pozzetta open their study of emigration from the Sicilian village of Santo Stefano Quisquina, situated some 90 kilometers south of Palermo and the birthplace of Sicily’s patron Santa Rosalia, to Ybor City, in Tampa, Florida, with a story related by Angelo Massari. One of his fellow emigrants, Giuseppina Spoto, having already been to Florida and back, told him that in America “there was no scarcity of anything,” that “in Ybor City they used to make coffee in a big pot. Such a thing was not to be dreamed on in Santo Stefano.”⁹ Complaints about a scarcity of food abound in the literature of the Italian diaspora. Clementina Tedesco, who left her Italian Alpine village of Faller in 1930 and who is responsible for the best collection of Italian fairy tales to be preserved in America, spoke in the course of her interviews with Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa of the miseria that afflicted even the Northern Italian peasantry, in this case during occupation by Austrian soldiers in World War I:

I remember there was a young girl, Mansuetta. She was twelve years old, a beautiful blond girl, tall. She grew so fast, and she was always weak. She sat on the steps in front of the office of German officials, where they also had a kitchen, you know. There was food for the Germans, and she begged for a little food, anything. So she went under the kitchen window where the Germans used to throw out garbage, potato peels and so on, and there they dumped out a pail of hot water on her head. She began to scream and scream. And a little while later, she died.¹⁰

Our grandmother’s experience, like that of Giuseppina Spoto, highlights the contrast between the lack of food that characterized her youth in the small village of Valle di Maddaloni and the bounty she eventually found in America—especially once her children were grown, working, and providing her with regular weekly allowances. She had no interest in returning to Italy for a visit. “Nah,” she once said—uncharacteristically, in English—when her grandchildren suggested such a trip, “Nothing to eat.” And we could not convince her that starvation was no longer the reality of life in rural Southern Italy. Yet, in America, though well fed, she suffered with food anxiety throughout her life, always fearing that hunger was at her doorstep. If somebody left food on his or her plate, Grandma would invariably ask if they were going to eat it and, if the answer were no, she would invariably exclaim, E me lo mangio io! (Then I’ll eat it myself!)

Karen McCarthy Brown discovered an exact analogue to our grandmother’s fears when she examined the life of the Haitian Vodou practitioner Alourdes—affectionately nicknamed Mama Lola—who practiced her healing arts in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. Not only did Mama Lola share the food anxiety of our grandmother, despite the plenty that she experienced in America, but her Vodou healing ceremonies heavily mirrored those that our grandmother plied against the evil eye. Tellingly, Haiti’s intense poverty has given rise to the same conceptualization as Southern Italy’s did: mizè in Creole expresses the same reality as miseria in Southern Italy. In fact, Brown’s description of mizè answers almost exactingly to the Italian concept of miseria:

It is no exaggeration to say that Haitians believe that living and suffering are inseparable. Vodou is the system they have devised to deal with the suffering that is life, a system whose purpose is to minimize pain, avoid disaster, cushion loss, and strengthen survivors and survival instincts.

Perhaps this view of life is the reason that the people of Port-au-Prince, not unlike the people of Palermo, “may quiz a beggar on the street” as to the circumstances that have brought him or her there “before giving alms.” In both cities, it is as if a kind of personal empathy is the precedent to—or even an essential part of—charity. And the spiritual dimension of such charity is underwritten by the fact that Haitian beggars may be dressed in the patched denim and straw hat of Kouzen Azaka (one of the many Vodou spirits) while the Sicilian beggar may press a tattered saint’s card into one’s hands.

Both mizè and miseria are undergirded by poverty, hunger, and suffering.¹¹ Whereas the Haitian peasant would say, “People are born to die,” the Sicilian peasant would say, “We live in order not to die.” And if Mama Lola would combat mizè with the healing properties of Vodou, and our grandmother would combat miseria with her abilities as a healer of the evil eye, both healing practices depended on a number of similarities—including a close affinity w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Memory, Nostalgia, History
• Part I History
• Part II Socioeconomics
• Part III Worldview
• Conclusion: Memory, Migration, Identity
• References
• Index