The cat was out of the bag. A commercial on MTV in December 2009 announced the channelâs new reality show that would feature âGuidosâ. The promise of a show immediately grabbed the attention of a national audience and the mainstream media. Jersey Shore represented Guido as a party culture revolving around a beach house and dance clubs in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, a resort with an amusement park and boardwalk that had become popular with summer âgrouperâ shares. It portrayed the âself-professed âguidosââ as a youth subculture identified with Italian American ethnicity as well as with hedonistic style (Roberts 2010; Brooks 2009). American audience response was robust with 4.8 million viewers for the Season 1 finale (Roberts 2010) and ballooning to 8.9 million viewers for an episode in January 2011 which was âmore than most of the network shows on that nightâ (Denhart 2011). High audience ratings reverberated throughout the commercial media including national television talk shows and fashion magazines like Vogue, Harperâs Bazaar, and GQ (Alston 2010). This commercial synergy further hyped the series and Guido style was merchandised in myriad directions including workout videos, clothing lines, and hair gel (Roberts 2010). Meteoric ratings success turned JS into âan iconic franchiseâ, the blueprint for âcharacter-driven reality seriesâ that continues to inspire MTVâs search for other âsubculturesâ like white southerner youth on the Florida-Alabama gulf shore and justified a âreunionâ show in April 2018 (Angelo 2017).
An Italian American youth culture called Guido became the focus of my scholarly research in the late 1980s. It fit into my broader interest in Italian American culture in New York City beyond the immigrant generation, an ethnic agency aligned with urban institutions. An ethnography conducted in the southern Brooklyn community of Bensonhurst , its ritual and symbolic center, and other outer borough Italian American neighborhoods complemented by participant interviews led to a journal publication that described Guido as âan urban youth subculture , comparable to Hip Hop and Metal, primarily engaged in the spectacle of styleâ (Tricarico 1991: 43). I was especially interested in the significance of ethnicity which was ârooted in urban social structureâ and âexpressed in youth culture symbols and meaningsâ (44). I was fairly convinced that Guido would remain local and well off the pop culture radar in contrast to Hip Hop and Metal. I based this opinion on the low impact of Guido style to that point, a style that was without musical distinction, a point that left it unrepresented on MTV. Thus, I assumed that it would go quietly into the good night of assimilation with the decline in Italian ancestry population in outer borough areas like Bensonhurst and Howard Beach ; in particular, I did not envision staying power comparable to Hip Hop and other racialized youth subcultures. Guido and the Bensonhurst Italian American community had also been framed by âimages of moral panic in the mass media â in reference to a âracial killingâ in 1989: âlabelled as a moral problem, in the manner of Black youth defined by âwolfpackâ violence and âwildingâ episodes, it may be difficult to sustain the claim that it is âinâ to be Guidoâ.
Guido was not neither fragile nor ephemeral and, thus, indicative of a more bounded subculture . Although preoccupied with dance club culture , it not only outlived the demise of the âdisco movementâ it was instrumental in the revival of a local dance music radio station, WKTU FM , in the late 1990s. It survived the damaging association with racist âwolfpackâ violence in the mainstream press, even drawing on outsider enmity to strengthen insider cohesion (see Chapter 8). It colonized new scenes including a social media scene on the Internet (âchat roomsâ) when service became available in the late 1990s. I did not expect the transplanting of Guido style to the suburbs , in effect a second-generation style of consumption that absorbed new pop culture trends like tanning and bodybuilding. Above all, I never anticipated the mainstream media showcase initiated by MTV which slighted dance music in the 1980s and 1990s in favor of rock and, then, Hip Hop . Jersey Shore accorded Guido a pop culture credential that it lacked. My miscalculation did not foresee the impact of a commercial project that married reality TV and youth culture . When its business model was exclusively based on music videos, there was no room for Guido on MTV and Guido did not seem to leave much room for MTV. We will see that there has historically been ample room for the representation of urban Italian American youth culture in the mass media . However, Guido awaited the right media vehicle.
MTV brought the noise in more ways than one. JS immediately invited a bias complaint with the flagrant use of Guido. Before the first episode aired, Dominos Pizza pulled its advertisements when Italian American organizations complained that Guido was an ethnic slur (Brooks 2009). Although my research continued the conversation about Guido at low decibel levels in academic circles, it suddenly touched a political nerve. MTV defended itself from anti-defamation protests by arguing that Guido was a youth culture and, therefore, its métier. Ethnic identity politics remained a background noise that greatly subsided after the first season and failed to prevent Guido from becoming a category of popular American culture .
This book is about Guido as an Italian American youth culture practice based in New York City. It tells a story about being Italian American in and through the engagement with popular American culture at a particular historical juncture, beginning with a turn to disco in the 1970s, including the appropriation of their own image in the film Saturday Night Fever which fueled a national trend. The âdisco movementâ is one of many critical transactions with the mass media , a dialogue or feedback loop of appropriations by youth agents on the one hand and commercial media texts and outlets on the other. SNF and JS are the textual bookends for the development of an Italian American youth subculture called Guido. SNF, which functions more as a blueprint for Italian American youth on the margins of contemporary youth culture , created the promise of enfranchisement in contemporary youth culture through media recognition despite being anti-disco and portraying a dysfunctional Italian American urban culture . JS documents a youth style that is largely unknown in the mainstream, affording a measure of recognition thirty-two years after SNF marginalized Italian American youth culture in southern Brooklyn although still leaving the issue of respect or inclusion unresolved.
Italian American youth continue to appropriate a popular American culture that is still appropriating them. This book situates this dialogic process in a local culture . Therefore, it is necessary to place these transactions within a system of urban social stratification âstatus hierarchies based on the intersections of class, race , and ethnicity . This entails the recognition of a minority ethnic group culture (Marger 2012), rooted in the mass immigration from Italy, and replenished by recent arrivals after 1945 which produced important nodes of internal differentiation. In New York City and other urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest, this ethnic culture was distilled in the Italian American neighborhood . Youth culture identity reflected this segmentation and stratification , negotiating differences with communities on their borders. Guido is not just an ethnic label imposed from the outside to stigmatize a youth category. It is, more importantly, a collective identity embraced by Italian American youth, not in an act of ethnic self-loathing but as a symbolic reversal mediated by popular American culture ; here, Guido reevaluates being Italian American for being âin styleâ. Having Italian ethnicity was necessary but not sufficient in this equation, it had to be mediated and authenticated by youth popular culture . A new, collective Italian American subject not only surfaced in urban style markets but later in the mainstream culture and in global markets (Roberts 2010).
The story of Guido has been branded by MTV so it is in the service of commercial power. It has appropriated a youth style based on the appropriation of popular American culture into a global commodity . As a gatekeeper to mainstream youth culture, Jersey Shore Guido is no match for the anti-defamation efforts of Italian American organizations that protested the MTV narrative that, in their view, gave Italian Americans a bad name. At the same time, these âofficialâ views are, themselves predicated on certain positions inside the ethnic boundary. Because Guido is now in the popular culture , it has emerged as a dominant motif for constructing Italian American identity; it is the anti-defamation fear that JS promotes the perception, not just that Guidos are Italian Americans but that Italian Americans are Guidos. With this intervention, the story became bigger than youth culture .
This book takes up these new questions about Guido. However, it is principally motivated by an old story, a theoretical concern with Italian American difference. Guido does not register in the conversation about Italian American ethnicity in academic sociology specifically in the field of racial and ethnic relations which has viewed European immigrant groups from the perspective of straight-line assimilation (Sandberg 1973; Marger 2012). The classic statement envisions a linear development in which ethnicity inversely declines for successive generations. In the case of European ancestry groups, there a reasonable expectation that the third generation has become âpost-ethnic whitesâ (Doane 1998). Italian Americans have been slotted into this paradigm. Their assimilation timeline is adjusted to mass immigration which began around 1880 and ended in 1924, when legislative quotas drastically restricted the outflow from Italy. Almost 100 years removed from the imposition of immigrant quotas, Italian Americans have completely vanished from many of the newly published texts on ethnicity and ethnic groups (Iceland 2017; Fitzgerald 2017).
Italian American Difference in New York City
This book presents Guido as an Italian American story that, when carefully unpacked, can be read as a narrative of roots and routes that define an urban Italian American culture in the outer boroughs of New York City at a particular historical juncture. It is a collective agency , an assimilation strategy oriented to popular youth culture which is a response that is typical for an age fraction in contemporary society but, at the same time, reflecting the position of Italian Americans in a system of ethnic stratification that dovetails with status hierarchies of class and race . The construction of ethnic identity is located in the process of assimilation not as âsymbolic ethnicity â, but in response to status dilemmas associated with an ethnic minority group culture . Guidoâthe style of young Italian Americans âsymbolizes the negotiation of a negatively privileged ethnicity with American society. This is a departure from straight-line assimilation theory which only allows âtraditionalâ culture to decline. Guido, and Italian American youth culture more generally, is a break with tradition that is not a break with Italian ethnicity .
This is not a scenario that resonates with establishment sociology in no small part be...