Maria Laurino - The Italian Americans: A History

For Bob and Henry,
and for Michael, the next generation

In memory of Henry M. Laurino and Constance Conti Laurino

C ut to scene: Don Corleone looks into the eyes of his nervous godson, who is desperate for a coveted part in a Hollywood film. Drawing him close, the Godfather assures him that the movie mogul will do the right thing, saying in the cottony mumble that Marlon Brando made famous, Im going to make him an offer he cant refuse.

The easy imitation of this line from The Godfather one of the most popular and parodied in movie historyhas become part of the American vernacular, helping to usher in decades worth of assumptions and stereotypes about Italian Americans. (The line was probably borrowed from the French novelist Honor de Balzac, and a variation appears in the work of Western cultures first mythmaker, Homers Odyssey .) Most contemporary depictions are as crude as that of a portraitist dabbing a canvas with a housepainters brush: menloud, dumb, violent; womenbig hair, big mouth, make-ah the macaroni.

Myths about Italian-American culture run deep into the fabric of American life, obscuring the complicated, nuanced, centuries-long story of the Italian-American experience that demands to be told. One of the goals of this bookalongside telling this historyis to tease myth from reality and uncover a more complicated story and deeper truths.

Italian foodstuffs continue to link past and present for many Italian Americans.

Understandably, hyphenated Americans tend to romanticize the immigrant journey and present these tales through a lens of heroism in the face of hardship, leading ultimately to success. We create private myths that conform to universal ones. As the American mythologist Joseph Campbell famously patterned, the structure of myth has remained the same through the millennia: a hero with limited awareness has a call to adventure, confronts dangers and enemies along the way and, if he survives this road of trials, rededicates himself with renewed mastery and greater awareness.

In many ways this mythic journey foreshadows the story of all immigrants coming to America. We ask ourselves, How did our grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents summon up the exceptional courage to cross the monumental oceanthat particularly American call to adventureand settle in the New World? How did they muster the bravery to face the isolation of leaving family behind and to accept the dangers and hardships of brute labor and the insults cast by others who saw themselves as more American?

Heroes surely. But often a heroism born out of desperation.

The immigrants who made this journey also carried with them the scars of the past: centuries of poverty and subjugation that wreak havoc on and deeply scar the psyche. The tension, then, in trying to honestly recount and reconstruct history is to balance both concepts: the heroic journey to modernity and the damage left behind by a feudal and impoverished past.

Unlike other nineteenth-century immigrant groups, Italian Americans had several calls to adventure, crossing the perilous ocean more than once. Although they left Italy in unprecedented numbers, most had no intention of making the New World their permanent home. They saw themselves more as migrant workers than as immigrants, and they adopted a transnational life, coming to America to earn money and then returning to Italy, much as many Latinos today aspire to spend a few years in the United States in order to build the foundations for a more stable future in the country of their birth. Many Italians stayed longer than expected; some settled down forever. But over 50 percent of those who came to America went home.

The Italian Americans begins in the latter half of the nineteenth century, explaining why the immigrants left Italy and telling the stories of those who stayed in America. This book implicitly asks why so few Italian Americans know the full range of our history and responds to these potential gaps with a narrative that touches many regions of the country.

We may know about deeply rooted family bonds in the face of American individualism, about hardworking immigrants laying the foundation for a newly industrialized country, about Little Italies and tenement living, about a tenacious mayor named Fiorello La Guardia, the Hoboken crooner Frank Sinatra, the athletic grace of Joe DiMaggio, and the graceful articulations of Mario Cuomo.

But do we know about the plight of Italian Americans working on sugarcane plantations in Louisiana or those who were lynched in New Orleans? Or the story of a banker named Amadeo Giannini, who helped rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake? Or a labor leader and poet named Arturo Giovannitti, who was arrested for trying to change terrible factory conditions in Massachusetts? Or do we know that when Joe DiMaggio was at the peak of his baseball career, the government branded his parents, hardworking citizens of San Francisco, enemy aliens because the United States was at war with Italy and the DiMaggios were not naturalized citizens? This designation prohibited the DiMaggios from entering Fishermans Wharf or visiting their sons restaurant there.

Recent psychological research suggests that children who know their family history may experience a higher self-esteem and stronger sense of control because they are able to participate in a narrative larger than the individual self and nuclear family. It seems hardly a leap to imagine that adults, too, benefit from knowing their past. Family history helps fulfill an innately human desire to replace the more somber shades of the isolated self with a color-infused pattern of belonging. Perhaps readers, intrigued by the rich, multifaceted history of the ethnic group, will embark on their own particular quest of Italian and American identity and, like the hero of the journey, emerge with a fuller sense of self.

T o better understand the ethos of Italian-American cultureits stubborn insistence on the primacy of family and bafflement of Americas ready embrace of individualismis to trace the steps of a group of southern Italian men from Roseto Valfortore to the United States, who settled in Pennsylvania and built a community in the foothills of the Poconos that would replicate the one they had left behind. Leaving Italy in 1882, the men came to America desperate to escape the poverty of their mountain village in the region of Apulia, near the Adriatic coast.

There they labored as peasant farmers, traveling by foot for up to ten miles each day to reach land owned by the gentry. Some quarried marble from a neighboring town, and those lucky enough to have inherited a craft became stone carvers. The Rosetans lived in cramped two-story homes, the kitchen and stable on the first floor and bedroom above. Like their fellow countrymen throughout southern Italy, they heard about the promise of America.