The Italian American Heritage

A Companion to Literature and Arts

Pellegrino A D'Acierno, Pellegrino A D'Acierno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000525557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

First published in 1999. The many available scholarly works on Italian-Americans are perhaps of little practical help to the undergraduate or high school student who needs background information when reading contemporary fiction with Italian characters, watching films that require a familiarity with Italian Americans, or looking at works of art that can be fully appreciated only if one understands Italian culture. This basic reference work for non-specialists and students offers quick insights and essential, easy-to-grasp information on Italian-American contributions to American art, music, literature, motion pictures and cultural life. This rich legacy is examined in a collection of original essays that include portrayals of Italian characters in the films of Francis Coppola, Italian American poetry, the art of Frank Stella, the music of Frank Zappa, a survey of Italian folk customs and an analysis of the evolution of Italian-American biography. Comprising 22 lengthy essays written specifically for this volume, the book identifies what is uniquely Italian in American life and examines how Italian customs, traditions, social mores and cultural antecedents have wrought their influence on the American character. Filled with insights, observations and ethnic facts and fictions, this volume should prove to be a valuable source of information for scholars, researchers and students interested in pinpointing and examining the cultural, intellectual and social influence of Italian immigrants and their successors.

Part I

Identity

The Contradictions of Italian American Identity

An Anthropologist's Personal View

THOMAS BELMONTE

In 1914, as Italian immigration into this country was close to peaking, the eminent sociologist E.A. Ross advised his readers to observe immigrants, not in their workclothes, but “washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. … Not that they suggest evil,” he was careful to write, “they simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collars, since clearly they belong in skins. … These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.”¹

I am the son of the son of one of these “oxlike men.” I have been more fortunate than he. Perhaps because I have encountered so little ethnic prejudice in my life, I have never become inured to it. I have never taken it for granted.

I don’t remember my grandfather’s hands, but my father does. My grandfather died when I was two years old. My father tells me how he bounced me on his lap and toasted his wife, whom he revered always as his bride. He praised the greatness, not of warriors, but of poets, and even composed verses of his own. My grandfather was a man of the Puglian earth, although he never owned even a small parcel of it. His index and middle fingernails were split from wielding a scythe that was so sharp it cut through the clothespins he used as makeshift guards.

Of America my grandfather also sang, of his pride in being a citizen, and in having the right to vote.

I can still see my father’s hands. Even in old age, they are as powerful as a champion boxer’s but capable of the finest precision. My father is a master mechanic, five years retired. The creases of his hands are still stained with black engine grease. His palm may not tell you his future, but from its lines you can read the story of his life. He labored.

In south Italy and in the cities of America, the children were early workers, sent out into the city to forage or get a menial job. The early insistence that the child contribute to the family was to have portentous consequences in a society where the mastery of high literacy was the only legitimate means by which an immigrant might gain access to the corridors of power. So my father, who was the son of a peasant-poet, a bard, spent his youth gathering coal in rail yards and worked in a German American delicatessen. He never did earn a high school diploma.

After serving in the Pacific during World War II, my father worked, through the 1950s and 1960s, ten hours a day, six days a week, fifty-one weeks a year. Like so many Italian American men of his generation, he was a working man more than he was any other kind of man. He took great pride in his much sought after skills as a diagnostician of car engines. But the professional notion of “gratifying” work would have been alien to him. Like the gasoline he rinsed his hands with at the close of every day, the work saturated his pores and burned away at the nerve endings of his fingers.

As a child I took the full measure of my father’s hands, but somehow I always knew that these overworked hands were possessed of a rage of their own and that he, himself, was a tender man, whose sense of grief and beauty was too great to ever be fully acknowledged. On Sundays and holidays he would tell vivid tales of the war, of New Guinea and Japan. Indeed, Kyoto was a place better known to me than Rome. My father never accompanied the rest of us to church. Our formica table was his altar. Italian bread and cheap California wine were sacred enough for him.

I recall many Easter Sundays, but one in particular stays in my mind, that of 11 April 1971. I was two years married. My daughter Christina was four months old.

The linen tablecloth that my mother had so carefully unfolded and spread out was interwoven with silken crowns and diadems that caught the sunlight in mauve and amber tints. What covers a table is important to Italian Americans.

On that day we began with antipasto, sliced eggs and anchovies and provolone cheese, oven-roasted red peppers, olives, and marinated shallots, known in Italian as cipolline (baby onions), but, in the far more expressive Pugliese dialect, referred to as bombascione: literally, bombs that split the air like an ax! We ate artichokes stuffed with garlic, bread crumbs, parsley, and cheese. We drank red wine and champagne. We didn’t always eat pasta. That day, we ate roast turkey and baked ham, buttered asparagus, broccoli, salad, plenty of stuffing, and hot rolls.

For dessert there was espresso (Italian coffee) in decorous little cups that belonged to my grandmother. My mother put out trays of pastries, egg biscuits covered with pink glaze, languishing in a sweet aura of anisette. She set down, ever so gently, a lemon meringue pie my sister made. (At Italian American meals you always credit the cook.) Finally, in the table’s center, she placed a round, ruffled, milk-glass bowl, arranged with oranges, red grapes, and a lemon that shone with an April Sunday’s lemon-yellow light. For Italian Americans the presentation, arrangement, and even the serving of foods is an art form that hides behind the appearance of spontaneity. To end the meal my mom poured out a heap of nuts directly onto the tablecloth, and we cracked them without regard for the mess.

We argued politics that day, my father and I. We talked unions, and music, and wine. And I heard, behind our boisterous voices, a lively, exuberant song, the voice of Lou Monte, singing “Eh Cumpare!” (literally, “Hey, co-father!” from the relationship of comparaggio, a ritualized fictive kin tie between a child, her parents, and her baptismal sponsor). Later, as the afternoon wore into dusk, the sounds of Puccini’s “bel sogno di Doretta,” from his opera La rondine drifted like a stream of liquid crystal to my ears, smooth and warm as a rich golden liqueur. You see, my father, the rough mechanic, was also a connoisseur.

I was reared in the multiethnic working-class suburbs of Long Island, far from the mean city streets that had been the testing ground of my father’s manhood. Whereas, for centuries and perhaps millenia, my ancestral fathers had worked beside their fathers in wheatfields, vineyards, and olive groves to one day become their fathers, my father was the first to have a life radically torn from its paternal roots. My own Icarus-like ambition to fly upward and past the peasant and working-class origins of my ancestral grandfathers was not without peril. Like so many upwardly mobile Italian American men of my generation, I ran the risk of soul-loss and rigidity that comes to all of us when we lose all memory of our roots and of our fathers.

My father still has a jagged white scar above his heart. It is not a war wound. While he was seated in the immense and fantastically ornate Valencia Theater on Jamaica Avenue (in Jamaica, Queens), a gang enemy crept up behind him and plunged the dagger deep, with intent to kill.

As Americans have fled to the suburbs, it is easy to underestimate the role that demarcated and defended city neighborhoods played in amplifying the already fierce Mediterranean masculinity of the immigrant males and their sons. This fierce masculinity is often caricatured by the media and by Italian Americans themselves, who are eager to embrace a mythos that would bestow, if not dignity, at least brute strength.

Southern Italian men had always defended their honor through the concept of female inviolability.² As long as the women of the natal group had vergogna (shame), the men retained their onore (honor as self-respect, and the respect and fear of other men). Indeed, the word rispetto (respect) still has deep emotional resonances in Italian American life.

But in the years leading up to the Great Depression and beyond, on sidewalks and brownstone stoops, in tenement corridors and shared hallway bathrooms, they were confronted with the challenge of ethnic alien male suitors of their daughters and sisters, suitors who knew nothing of their ancient Mediterranean honor code and cared not to know.

A second factor that pressured toward a rigid and heavily armored masculinity among Italian American men was the emergent contradiction between the mother-centered and oral-commensal values of the home and the more Darwinian, male-dominated world of the street.³ The cultural estrangement of second-generation sons from the austere world of their peasant fathers (a world that did not include baseball, boxing, and Coney Island) led them to redefine and readjust their code of manhood in terms that would compensate for the strong emotional hold that their mothers retained on their sexuality and that would also serve to keep outsiders out of local networks of illegal commerce and exchange. No wonder then that the favored American image of the Italian American male is still that of the prelinguistic tough guy. Toughness, more than the mere mastery of language, allowed a man to venture outside the home to a place other than church. Toughness could not be faked but was forged and tested in bloody combats of Homeric scale.

Gang wars of murderous ferocity were waged among Italian, Irish, Polish, and, to a lesser extent, African American and Hispanic youth on a weekly basis from the early years of the Great Migration (1880–1920) through the late twen-tieth century. West Side Story (1957), the Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein, uses the plot of Romeo and Juliet to dramatize the severity of these interethnic tensions. More recently the 1987 film China Girl, by the Italian American director Abel Ferrara, documents, in terms again reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, the love of a pizza boy in New York’s Little Italy for the sister of a young Chinese gang leader. The tendency of all humans to “pseudospeciate,” to treat members of another group as though they were members of an inferior, animal species, is portrayed through images that are both raw and poetic.

In September 1990 a young African American man named Yusuf Hawkins wandered into the Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, looking to buy a used car. He was brutally chased and murdered in cold blood by a gang of Italian American youths who thought he was the African American lover of a local Italian American woman.

The furor surrounding this tragedy was attributed entirely to the undeniable racist hatred that these young men bore for members of other ethnic and racial groups. Hatred, after all, holds people together, roots them to a neighborhood, and keeps invaders at bay. But the deeper issue revolved around the ancient code of female inviolability as sacred and unassailable by any outsider on pain of death. The homicidal rage that led to Hawkins’ murder was spurred by a young woman’s willingness to relinquish her vergogna and the consequent diminution in the group’s limited and vulnerable fund of male honor. Frank Pugliese’s prophetic play The Avenue U Boys (1993) documents some of these same intergroup conflicts from the inside out.

It was in such inward-looking neighborhoods as Bensonhurst, Little Italy, and Italian Harlem that the American Mafia was born. As in Sicily, the Mafia spread in the manner of an opportunistic social infection. Because there was a break in the connective tissues of the local civil society—the apparatus of police and courts that was supposed to regulate immigrant life—the Mafia was able to germinate in the empty spaces in the body politic where legitimate power should have been.

In Sicily the absenteeism of the aristocratic estate owners (who preferred lives of luxury in Palermo and Paris to the gritty details of agricultural enterprise) gave rise to a new class of gun-toting estate managers and tax collectors, known as gabellotti. It was this intermediary class of entrepreneurs, many of them shepherds by derivation (with no ties to the soil), who forged the complex system of alliances and cultural codes that became, in Sicily and, to a lesser extent, in Naples and Calabria, a vast but invisible edifice of power and influence that rose parallel to that of the official state.

There is scant historical evidence to support the notion that the American Mafia was transplanted to the cities of America by settler-founders with a clear organizational mission. In the cities of America (as Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale have emphasized), the Mafia probably began as an Italian variant of the gang and gangster subculture that had long been dominated by earlier ethnic arrivals.⁴ Just as in America’s contemporary urban war zones, two moralities contended for the hearts and minds of the community—one based on the “decent” values of the home; the other, on the code of the streets with its adulation of the power both to defend and to take. In the early part of the twentieth century, brutal but unstable gangs of extortionists (the most notorious of which was known as The Black Hand) attempted to intimidate local entrepreneurs and to control the food and retail trade within the ethnic enclave. During the Prohibition years, these criminal gangs expanded their operations. If the Italian gangs were unique, it was in the way they were able to appropriate the “decent” code of the family and subvert it to the purposes of the street. Thus did the most brutal and parasitic of thugs gain renown as benificent neighborhood patriarchs. By skillfully utilizing both the substance and the symbolism of the ancient famiglia, Italian gangsters could more effectively consolidate control over an expanding resource base.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Mafia extended “families” made inroads into the construction trades, into the rigging of unions and bids, and into liquor delivery and garbage hauling. More recently, they have moved their considerable wealth into legitimate family-run enterprises that both process the profits and serve to mask the illegal side of the business empire. As in the corporate organizations of Japan and northern Italy (both latecomers to capitalism), the evolving core of the mature Mafia corporation (so well described by anthropologist Frances Ianni) was a dynastic lineage of patrilineal kin—a father, his brothers, his sons, and their sons—who adhered to a strict code of obedience, vendetta, and silence.⁵

If the American Mafia can be said to have achieved anything positive, it was to demonstrate to the rest of American society the utility of kinship as a force for synchronizing behavior in the early phase of a business’s growth. The popularity of the Mafia as a theme for the mass media testifies to a fascination with an exotic but highly successful form of high-risk entrepreneurship, operating on the economic and moral frontier. In both America and contemporary Italy, the Mafia represents the historical survival of a pre-Christian and even actively anti-Christian ethos. The Mafia ethos privileges males over females, greed over charity, deception, trickery, and blood vengeance over honesty, reparation, and forgiveness. It revels in terror and sadistic cruelty over healing and compassion. Italian American lives are d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Preface: Making a Point of It
• Introduction: The Making of the Italian American Cultural Identity: From La Cultura Negata to Strong Ethnicity
• Part I. Identity
• Part II. Roots, Traditions, and the Italian American Life-World
• Part III. Writing as an Italian American
• Part IV. The Italian American Presence in the Arts
• Appendix I: The Italian American Experience, 1492—1998
• Appendix II: Cultural Lexicon: Italian American Key Terms
• Index