New Italian Migrations to the United States: Vol. 2

Art and Culture since 1945

Laura E Ruberto,Joseph Sciorra

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252099991
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States explores the evolution of art and cultural expressions created by and about Italian immigrants and their descendants since 1945. The essays range from an Italian-language radio program that broadcast intimate messages from family members in Italy to the role of immigrant cookbook writers in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture. Other works look at how exoticized actresses like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty; overlooked forms of brain drain; the connections between countries old and new in the works of Michigan self-taught artist Silvio Barile; and folk revival performer Alessandra Belloni's reinterpretation of tarantella dance and music for Italian American women. In the afterword, Anthony Julian Tamburri discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.

Contributors: John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore, Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, and Anthony Julian Tamburri.

1“Don’t Forget You Have Relatives Here”

Transnational Intimacy and Acoustic Communities of WOV-AM’s La Grande Famiglia

JOSEPH SCIORRA

In 1955, my paternal grandmother Filomena sent a message from Carunchio, an Abruzzese town in the Apennines, to her only son, Enrico, and his wife, Anna, in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. My father had left Italy three years earlier in search of work and in New York City met his future bride, who had also sailed across the Atlantic in 1950. Enrico and Anna married in 1954 and had me, their first child, the following year. In her message delivered in standard Italian, my grandmother rebuked the young couple, who with their new responsibilities were not making the time to communicate regularly, in her opinion, and expressed her anguish at their collective transgression:

Come mai questo silenzio? Perché non mi scrivete? Non sapete che io soffro molto, maggiormente adesso, Anna, che hai portato a luce il piccolo Joseph. Ricordatevi che avete solo la madre e che ha sofferto molto. Io ricordo che durante il tempo del vostro fidanzamento, ricevevo una lettera alla settimana. Ed adesso perché siete cosi trascurati?

How come this silence? Why haven’t you written me? Don’t you know that I suffer greatly, especially now, Anna, that you brought into the light of day little Joseph. Remember that you only have your mother and that she has suffered greatly. I remember during your engagement, I received a letter each week. And now, why are you so negligent?1

This impassioned admonishment did not come in the form of a letter, a telegram, or a telephone call but was instead broadcast on a New York City radio station for millions of potential listeners to hear. My grandmother’s pleading voice—recorded in Italy and aired in the United States—was the product of a unique commercial radio program that linked Italian American families with their relatives in Italy during the post–World War II era.

Filomena Sciorra’s message is found on one of six unlabeled and undated 10-inch 78 RPM acetate records from my parents’ personal collection, made, in my approximation, between 1952 and 1955.2 They are the product of La Grande Famiglia (The Big Family), a fifteen-minute radio show that aired from 1948 to 1961 on WOV-AM, a New York City station with extensive Italian-language programming. La Grande Famiglia was an ingenious marketing campaign devised for the Italian American food company Progresso Italian Food Corporation (Progresso) that would, with proof of purchase for products, have a Rome-based representative drive to Italian Americans’ paesi (hometowns) to record mundane family news, chastisements and pleas, and heartfelt expressions of love and longing. These affectionate, joyful, desperate, and sometimes pained messages from afar were in turn broadcast twice daily for all to hear. In the course of a decade, it was reported that half a million families in the United States had participated in this unique transnational communication project (“Progresso’s 26-year” 1958, 39).

La Grande Famiglia emerged out of a history of Italian migration in the twentieth century that encompassed both pre–and post–World War II waves. These broadcasts were aimed at immigrants who arrived before and after 1945 and thus created continuity between members of those migration streams. It sonically reunited families that had been apart for a few years as well as those who had been separated for decades. The Sciorra collection of WOV recordings reveals—through careful analysis of the individuals involved, their migration trajectories, and the content of the messages—the links between different eras and generations of Italian diasporic movements. Post–World War II migrants Enrico and Anna were part of an ongoing flow of transatlantic individuals that included the speakers living in Italy, some of whom had spent time working in the United States before the war. The program’s success was predicated on the historical separation of family members and their continued desire to communicate about their physical, economic, and emotional states. La Grande Famiglia was part of a continuum of the “transnationality of communication in migration processes” (Cancian 2010, 7) that spanned first letters and telegrams, then telephones, and eventually the internet. In this case, radio played a pivotal role in connecting individuals through the maintenance and reproduction of affiliations and emotional bonds.

The messages recorded in Italian villages, towns, and cities and broadcast in the United States were examples of what Loretta Baldassar and Donna Gabaccia refer to as “intimacies across borders” (2011, 4). The radio program facilitated and became integrated into the work of maintaining continued connections and affective associations between family members separated by distance. These transnational intimacies were aided and perpetuated by commercial entities and initiatives, thus illustrating the role that “consumption has had in shaping the diasporic identities of Italians in America” (Cinotto 2014, 1). The voices of those who were left behind could be purchased, in a matter of speaking, for the price of canned tuna fish, jarred capers, and gallon tins of olive oil, thus creating a sonic association between the migrant’s desire for family members and ethnically keyed consumer goods. As a result of Progresso’s promotional campaign, these commodities conjoined mass-produced and marketed brands and the intense sentiments toward families that included regret, nostalgia, guilt, and apprehension for and about those living in the aftermath of the calamitous war. The coupling of such emotions with a commercial product resulted in, as a trade journal at the time reported, “thousands of thousands of people are now your best salesmen” (“Progresso’s 26-year” 1958, 39).

Radio has historically been the site of dynamic interplay between private and public spheres and the resulting tensions concerning the blurring of said boundaries. The disembodied voices streaming into people’s homes created what Jason Loviglio refers to as an “intimate public,” a new acoustic social space where mediated intimacy was performed in the interwar years (2005, xii–xxix; see also Razlogova 2011 and Kelman 2009, 107–121). Listening alone but along with millions of others instilled a sense of belonging to a larger group, not merely members of an audience but of a community of listeners that was, with network broadcasting, nationwide. The soundscape of local, community-based intimacy that we hear in the recordings of La Grande Famiglia was not confined to a group of Italians in one U.S. locale but instead was part of a transnational sphere connecting various sites in Italy and the United States, creating an “acoustic community” of family and strangers alike who were “linked and defined by sounds” (Traux 1984, 58).

Advancements in recording equipment and radio technology in the mid-twentieth century provided the means by which such communication was possible, allowing for emerging transnational networks of what Arjun Appadurai would define as “scapes” consisting of “dimensions of global cultural flows” (2003, 32–43). Recent literature on current means of communication (e.g., the internet, satellite dishes) explore how they aid, advance, and contribute to cultural identities in diasporic formations (Alonso and Oiarzabal 2010; Georgiou 2006; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). My study, on the other hand, seeks to uncover and examine an earlier manifestation of transnational mediated communication and the strengthening of diasporic identity specifically among Italians. It thus expands on past studies dealing with transatlantic mediated exchange involving books, newspapers, radio, and film (Bertellini 2014; Choate 2008, 101–128; Luconi 2001; Ruberto 2014).

My article first looks at the history of WOV and the program La Grande Famiglia within the context of mid-twentieth-century ethnic consumerism and transnational media exchange. I then historicize the recordings as part of a continuum of communication among the Italian diaspora but more specifically through the narratives of migrants Anna Sciorra (née Annina Anniballe) and Enrico Sciorra, whose migration histories span both the pre–and post–World War II migration waves. I also examine the recorded messages’ textual content in an attempt to understand them within their original social and transnational contexts. Ultimately, my goal is to reveal the ways in which intimacy for these individuals was created, reestablished, and maintained sonically across the geographic divide that separated them via a media process that was informed by and relied on a continual migration of Italians to the United States.

WOV-AM: “La Voce Italiana d’America”

Italian-language radio programming proliferated on AM transmissions during the 1930s and contributed to the engendering and “preservation of the ethnic identity and sense of community” (Luconi 1998, 63) among Italian Americans. By 1940, there were sixty-five stations broadcasting Italian-language programs (Horten 1993, 13), the most prevalent being in northeast cities (Luconi 1998). One of the principal, significant, and long-lasting radio stations broadcasting in Italian was WOV in New York City.

WOV was founded in 1928 when Sicilian immigrant importer Giovanni Iraci purchased a radio station. By focusing on a “single market” (Ranson 1938, 18), WOV would come to have “the city’s most extensive Italian schedule” (Jaker, Suley, and Kanze 1998, 159) by the mid-1930s. It became the hub for the International Broadcasting Corporation, a far-reaching network of fifteen stations featuring Italian-language programs (ibid., 157; Kiczales 1938, 524). By the mid-1950s it billed itself as “La Voce Italiana d’America” (The Italian Voice of America) (WOV ad, 1954, 19).3

Programming during the 1930s and 1940s featured variety shows and live soap operas with eminent performers of the Italian immigrant theater including Riccardo Cordiferro and Maria Maiori (Aleandri 1999, 53, 61, 101–113; Frasca 2014, 36; Muscio 2004, 343–351). In the early 1930s, we see the first forays into transatlantic transmissions with In viaggio per l’Italia, a Sunday program in which an elderly couple visited touristic sites (Cinotto 2013, 139–140). In 1940, antifascist exile Gaetano Salvemini accused five WOV announcers of promulgating Fascist propaganda, which the station denied (“Says Italians” 1940, 5; “Propaganda Charge” 1940, 5), but nonetheless it replaced the broadcasters with recently arrived Italian refugees (Horten 1993, 22).4 It redeemed itself from these accusations by airing government-sponsored shows and producing antifascist programming during World War II (ibid., 18–22; Jaker, Suley, and Kanze 1998, 159).

WOV’s major advertisers were primarily food companies geared to Italian Americans but marketed nationally, including Ronzoni Macaroni Company, Filippo Berio (olive oil), and Mondavi winery (Hartley letter January 17, 1994, 5).5 These companies did more than buy commercial time; they sponsored programming branded with their names, which was distributed to various cities through the station’s network and, in turn, “influence[d] the tastes and habits of consumers” (Cinotto 2013, 139).

In 1947, WOV conducted a survey of the Italian American radio audience, confronting the perception of a declining immigrant listenership. The study estimated that there would be only a 4 percent decline of Italian-language listeners over the course of a decade, a relatively minor decrease, and as a result the radio station decided to continue its Italian programming “indefinitely” (“Only 4%” 1947, 13). The radio station could not predict, however, that two years after the war’s end potential listeners would increase due to a new wave of immigration from Italy.6 This survey in turn became a key component in a concentrated promotional campaign in the trade magazine Broadcasting in 1951 and 1952 that featured the Italian American community’s imposing demographics and “buying power,” as well as the continued presence of spoken Italian (“More Italians* Listen” 1951, 45; “More Italians in” 1952, 51; “These Signs*” 1951, 57). Clearly not all of the city’s Italian Americans listened to WOV, and certainly not all of them were Italian-language speakers or even passively bilingual. And yet the two communities of Italian Americans—those who were part of the great wave of Italian immigration (1880–1924) and those who had recently arrived—were linguistically linked and given an aural space at the station.

After World War II, Italian-language ...