Controlling images and mean streets: the cultural space of Italian American Women
They describe us. […] That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
This chapter surveys the nature of ethnicity, discussing in particular how certain representations of Italian Americans have become iconic. It explores those dominant or “controlling” images (Collins 2000) that have generally plagued our perceptions of this community, including women’s place therein. One of the ethnic stereotypes that never seems to disappear is that associated with Mafia or organized crime. Numerous studies urge us to consider the “immortalizing” influence of media and provide figures about the historical discrepancy even in the “heyday” of this ‘real’ phenomenon, since “Italian gang members never numbered more than 5,000, which amounts to less than 0.3% of the overall Italian-American community” (Lawton [2002] 2008, 72). The gendered imaginary of the gangster and the ‘mean streets’ has prevailed in popular representations and conceptions of Italian Americans. Although now applied more generally, this is a far-reaching trope commonly associated with this ethnicity since the homonymous Martin Scorsese 1973 film. In fact, according to Peter Bondanella, it is not only a Hollywood genre, but also an established Italian American one:
There is also a subcategory of wiseguys films that propose comic parodies of works depicting serious Italian American criminals. Hollywood Italians thus appear in thematic clusters of films that are both Hollywood generic films and specific illustrations of Italian American versions of such traditional genres.
(2010, 217)
In the survey “Italianità in 2003: The State of Italian American Literature,” Mary Jo Bona also makes reference to the insidious impact of film, arguing that due to “the sheer proliferation of such negative imaging, the multiple experiences of Italian Americans are erased and muted” (2003a, 9). She calls attention to the operations of stereotyping—or what she terms “mutilating images”—since, quoting from William Boelhower, such discursive practices connote the word “Italian” immediately with a “series of conventional expectations and associations related to the mental image of this racial type [that] arise to precondition the scene of actual contact” (9).
In “The Hollywood Curriculum on Italian Americans: Evolution of an Icon of Ethnicity,” Carlos Cortes accounts for the way in which the Italian American experience has been imaginatively (re)created by looking at media representations. In particular, attention is directed to the reality disclaimer of The Godfather film to make sure that “viewers would not mistake [it] for members of any specific group” (1994, 107). For the first time, this message explicitly recognized the powerful influence of the media and the serious effects which such misrepresentation or open stigmatization entailed for all ethnic groups in the United States (90). Seen as successful immigrants, Italian Americans epitomize the American dream on the one hand, but they are occasionally regarded as dubious Americans, on the other. As a result, their history was not always sufficiently recognized as entailing a kind of limbo or schizophrenia, affecting identity in a number of ways. Italian Americans are generally believed to have ‘made it’ to the point that not everyone would readily consider them as ethnic and admit any legitimate claims as such on their part. Yet, representation and discourse often continue to remind spectators of their criminal and other suspicious un-American ways. A popular TV series of recent years, The Sopranos, may be referred to as a barometer of the dual status as ethnics and Americans. As Bondanella notes,
most audiences reacted to The Sopranos as more than just another continuation of the gangster stereotype (although this aspect is certainly present); they enthusiastically followed the lives of a group of Italian Americans who were so completely assimilated that they became universal representations of us all, even if some of their activities took place outside the law.
(2010, 221)
The perception of their well-off economic and social position is indeed quite ambivalent when comparing different sources or strands of the population: “[w]hile the vast majority of Italian Americans in Hollywood cinema remain members of the blue-collar classes, demographically, according to the 2000 census, Italian Americans have moved into the upper and middle classes” (219). On the East Coast, the main area of immigrant settlement particularly from Southern Italy, the agreed period of catching up with the national socioeconomic status began after World War II, where Italian Americans constituted the largest ethnic group. Higher education advanced the children of immigrants thanks to the war funding from the GI Bill (Veteran’s Benefits). Those benefits also promoted the acquisition of houses and thus facilitated the so-called flight to the suburbs, despite the fact that Italian Americans were at the same time the longest enduring ethnicity in the inner cities. In the West, where Italian immigrants also settled but where the Chinese population were the main target of discrimination, anti-Italianism (LaGumina 1973; Connel and Gardaphe 2010) and ethnic progress is considered entirely d...
