Ottobre is Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month: Part 1
A perfect time to reflect on my family history, pepper in some Italian-American history pit stops, and drop some project previews
Here in the United States, it’s Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month, and what I thought would be the perfect time to highlight two particular projects I have in the works, as well as get a little personal on my own background, mixing in some history lessons along the way.
It seemed especially seasonally relevant, considering both of these books, one a graphic novel and the other a non-fiction book, are so heavily motivated by my own family and ethnic ancestry, which in turn, has provided quite a bit of influence on my self-identity, as family does with us all.
This piece is going to be a bit longer than the usual newsletter since it’s incorporating those elements of the personal to historical and weaving in current creative projects.
I mean, it’s big. So lengthy I’ll be breaking it into several parts.
So, I hope you can stick around, and if not, I’ll see you in November.
Now, generally speaking, as much of my identity has been influenced by my Italian heritage, I’m not usually one to call much attention to it for several reasons.
The biggest being too often when someone hears Italian-American, that human lizard brain that is so good at pattern recognition, too often triggers associations with the ‘gabagools,’ Jersey Shore, Gotti’s, you know…that stereotype.
Keeping it PG, I don’t have a positive ‘opinion’ towards many of those elements mentioned.
Second, I live in Jersey, South Jersey, to be slightly more specific, and you’d make a decent chunk of change if your job were to guess which person has a vowel at the end of their last name. However, even still, it’s a greatly watered-down and almost completely Americanized area of the Italian diaspora and a subconscious element that has so tightly weaved itself into the region that it’s a commonality—a majority.
It just doesn’t stand out as special or out of the norm.
It’s not like certain pockets of Little Italy in major cities, areas of New York or New England, that are truly a Little Italy. The Philly Italians have all mostly moved out to the burbs AKA South Jersey.
There’s a bit of my contrarian, maverick, natural ‘outsider’ personality or need to be difficult that also plays into this topic as an extra ingredient. Plus, I also genuinely subscribe to the Bruce Lee philosophy of “I think of myself as a human being.”
But, couch psychology aside, I prefaced the other two points for a reason.
It’s 2023, and I’m generally just considered a ‘basic white dude’ since America has mostly moved past major ethnic differences among European Americans. Again, it’s just not a super glaring or big thing in my day-to-day existence. Yet, you’d be surprised how often that also isn’t the case.
Thanks to the travel opportunities provided by Uncle Sam, I’ve spent some decent time outside of my geographic bubble on enough occasions to the wider U.S., where both my last name and even where I’m from have elicited the response of ‘Joy-zee,’ hand motions, and pasta or pizza references.
Lizard brains get activated.
My favorite was a woman in Texas, who, while getting my hair cut, actually insinuated I might have ties to the Mafia, as well as the entire emphasis on saying Jersey as ‘Joy-zee,’ doing hand motions, and talking about the Sopranos, the whole nine. This all occurred only because she asked where I was from, apparently my accent, and seeing my name on the appointment ticket. I know she didn’t mean any harm by it; she was probably just trying to make conversation and break my “I don’t want to talk, just cut my hair and let me leave exterior.” I think she found some commonality to talk about, as clunky as it was.
Honestly, I was more surprised she thought the Mafia was still a major thing. This now perfectly segways me to our first stop on our history tour since it is Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month.
Fun Fact: Italians weren’t always considered ‘hWite’ and at some point, we’re an honest sub-culture in the U.S.
Now, that either elicited some *eye rolls,* browser/phone exit clicks or taps, and maybe, a slight few of you are a little more intrigued, ready to take a side step down this short history lesson I hope would be up to the
standard.But, before moving forward, no, this will not be me trying to play the victim Olympics of who had what worse or pull the cliche, “No Irish Need Apply” card in the aforementioned Lord’s year of 2023, when compared to minority groups like Afrifcan-Americans. There is no comparing the difficulties Italian-Americans faced to that of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and so on.
Did Italian-Americans face discrimination and treatment as a historic ‘other’ group? Yes. That’s the small taste of history I’m going to highlight, only because it has had direct effects on my own family and thus these two projects.
Were those treatments worse or better than other European groups? Subjective.
Is it on the level of African-Americans?
That small bit of house cleaning accomplished, now back to Rampart.
To begin, Danielle Romero’s NYTN YouTube Channel does a great piece on YouTube for the video inclined on just that subject, titled Finding Your Roots: How Italians Became White.
But for those into letters strung together, a short excerpt from Columbus Day Helped Italians Become ‘White’
Like the mass of Irish famine refugees who preceded them four decades earlier, the majority of the four million Italian immigrants to the US were fleeing grinding rural poverty in Southern Italy and Sicily. They were peasants stuck in medieval socioeconomic relations, while others were proletarian sharecroppers and migrant farmworkers, all without skills beyond agriculture. Most were motivated by jobs in the booming US Industrial Revolution, with plans to earn money to return to Italy and buy land or start businesses. In the United States, Italian migrants were met with endless insults in newspapers and magazines, which described them as “swarthy,” “kinky haired,” and criminally inclined, and regarded as racially impure in an era of the pseudo race theory of eugenics. Their children were often refused access to schools, and adults were turned away from public places and labor unions, and even in church, forced to sit in segregated church pews set aside for Black people. They were catcalled on the streets with epithets like “dago” and “guinea”—the latter a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants—and more racist insults like “white n****r” and “n****r wop.” In 1912, the US House Committee on Immigration debated whether Italians could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians,” and immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe were considered “biologically and culturally less intelligent.”
But for those into letters strung together, a short excerpt from the New York Times article How Italians Became ‘White’:
A Times story in 1880 described immigrants, including Italians, as “links in a descending chain of evolution.” These characterizations reached a defamatory crescendo in an 1882 editorial that appeared under the headline “Our Future Citizens.” The editors wrote:
“There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians who have been crowding our docks during the past year.”
I don’t want to extend this already lengthy article; in short, Italians, as a part of the white majority, were just not always a thing until post-WW2, late 1940s, and honestly, not really until after the 1980s.
In fact, on March 14, 1891, the largest lynching in the United States took place in New Orleans, taking the lives of 11 Italian-Americans."Mediterranean" types for a long period, were considered inherently inferior to people of northern European heritage and Italians, criminal in DNA:
From the late 1880s, anti-immigrant societies sprang up around the country, and the Ku Klux Klan saw a spike in membership. Catholic churches and charities were vandalized and burned, and Italians attacked by mobs. In the 1890s alone, more than 20 Italians were lynched.
One of the bloodiest episodes took place in New Orleans in 1891. When the chief of police was found shot to death on the street one night, the mayor blamed "Sicilian gangsters" and rounded up more than 100 Sicilian Americans. Eventually, 19 were put on trial and, as the nation's Italian Americans watched nervously, were found not guilty for lack of evidence. Before they could be freed, however, a mob of 10,000 people, including many of New Orleans' most prominent citizens, broke into the jail. They dragged 11 Sicilians from their cells and lynched them, including two men jailed on other offenses.
The Times even praised the lynching:
“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest without mitigations. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them.” The editors concluded of the lynching that it would be difficult to find “one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”
Now, in the current U.S., Italian-American heritage is less relevant generations past the original Great Arrival, and that legacy becomes less ethnic and more homogeneous through the simulation abilities of the Melting Pot. Nationally, politically, and culturally, it’s nearly non-existent. Because in my generation, at this time in America, that’s all history.
But, in my tiny subjective world, it’s still a big part of who I am, regardless.
Since Substack is one of those unique opportunities for sneak previews, I wanted a project I’m currently working on to take the floor.
From the book I’m writing about this very subject:
Like most Americans of European ancestry, I occupy this weird sphere of self-ethnic identity that, unless you were born in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a few other pockets of lands settled by colonial powers, can be challenging to relate compared to where national, ethnic and cultural identities are much more longstanding.
'We,' those Americans of European descent, quite often, don't find ourselves as just Americans in the same way a German is a German and a Brit is just a Brit. 'We' often regard ourselves as German-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, or a combination of some sort or another. Generally speaking, one of our mixed ancestral heritages takes on a more dominant role in our self-identity than the other. For 'us,' the story of our forebears traveling the Atlantic to seek a better life and preserving the remaining cultural elements of that ancestral past varies from person to person and family to family, in what exactly remains of that heritage and the practices that came with it.
Maybe it’s a holiday. Possibly a few family recipes that were handed down. Or a phrase or two that lingered without any other bilingual proficiency or featuring an Americanized version, i.e. calamad versus calamari. Whatever it may be, it's not unheard of for a small strand of the ‘Old World’ to have carried generations into the ‘New World.’ Surviving complete assimilation into the American Way but remaining limited and minuscule from their original cultural origins.
Unfortunately, while we might identify as a strong Irish-American or have great pride as a 'paisano,' ultimately, that cultural heritage of our immigrant ancestors is no more. What we really are...are just 'white' Americans.
We are no longer an ethnic minority but now part of the majority. I know that can be a tough pill to swallow for some, but it's the reality of the American ‘Melting Pot.’
I know I have difficulty with that reality.
I don't resonate with 'white' culture. And I don't view myself as a 'white' American. My food choices and taste palette prefer other things over 'typical' American food. While I begrudgingly engage in the practice, I really, really don't like being a part of the American fast food and supermarket diet. I know how unhealthy even the 'healthy' food I buy is, but convenience generally wins over locally sourced products. My regard for culture, cuisine, education, music, tradition, or view towards family are usually less American WASP-ey and more Southern European-ey, and yet, that’s even a pendulum of my American identity constantly swinging between.
And yet, as much the national sentiment checks me off as ‘Caucasian,' you'd be surprised how quickly outside of the Tri-State and Delaware County areas, my last name, more animated hand motions, and slightly more passionate tone of voice in volume get much more notice.
I say that tongue in cheek, but honestly, between longer periods, thanks to military travel in Texas, Mississippi, and even upstate Pennsylvania, what is taken as more mainstream in areas where Italian-American ancestry is more than half, the same isn't the rest of the country. Even as nationalized as America can be.
But, even in those less influenced parts of the country, at the end of the day, something more distinctly ethnic still gets lumped in that bucket of 'whiteness.' Because whether I like it or not, or I even agree, I'm part of the majority of a nationalized-based culture and how identity is viewed.
But the self-identity issues begin here: I don't feel like “I am.”
My self-identity is different than that of a proto-typical 'white' American. I had a different ethnic culture my entire life influencing me, that of an Italian or Italian-American, thanks to my father, who was born to two second-generation Italian-Americans, and his side of my family.
As you can imagine, my father's self-identity within Italian-American culture makes sense.
Both his mother and father, my grandparents, were born to immigrants from Italy who spoke the language, celebrated the holidays, and attended Catholic churches with other Italian-Americans. They made the food, had friends of similar ethnic backgrounds, and grew up in South Philly in the Italian neighborhoods. And, of course, my father was surrounded by those elements and relatives in the same cultural boat, no pun intended, as well. On top of all that, my father lived alongside his grandmother, my great-grandmother, who immigrated from Norcia, Italy, was a winemaker and whose English remained limited until her passing.
He, my father, even told me this great story the other day about how my great-grandmother, when reading the newspaper, kept confusing backboard with the word blackbird and how distressed she became one day thinking someone killed “50 blackbirds.” He, as an eight-year-old, kept trying to explain basketball to her, but she kept insisting someone had killed 50 blackbirds.
My great-grandmother’s native tongue was Italian, and my father's identity towards Italian culture and staunch self-image as an Italian-American make sense from the everyday influences. He was surrounded by in almost entirety growing up. That's what he saw, that's what he heard, that's what things were.
His household was, in essence, a commune disconnected geographically from Italy.
But me? Where do I fall into this?
My language skills for most of my life have been minimal until only recently when I made a real effort to learn. My food choices are that of effort, not simply my unconscious diet. My cultural surroundings are all incredibly minor in comparison. I didn't grow up in a disconnected commune. It was a typical South Philly suburb with some heavy Italian roots in population, thanks to history.
Honestly, all I have is an affinity towards my father's side of my family heritage versus my mother's, who has no Italian ancestry. So, the logic of my self-identity holds less weight by comparison.
Now, without dropping the entirety of an entire chapter from this unannounced and mostly secret at-the-moment book, I’ll provide a bit more of a preview in the spirit of relevance to this piece:
While yes my father's heritage is distinctly straightforward, my mother's side is not and probably closer to most 'white' American's experience, encompassing a mixed bag of Nordic and Gaelic descendants.
My maternal Grandfather, Herbert, has done some substantial work in keeping track of that family history. He was even able to trace relatives from their American immigrations in the late 1800s to their respective homelands in the early 1800s, for both him and his wife, my Grandmother, Helen, into this mixed bag of Irish, Scottish, and Norwegian origins, with a random Swede for good measure.
What I find lacking in what he's found and collected is the hollowness, the lack of ‘fulfillment’ it produces. It's just numbers and statistics. There isn’t a real interest in the culture, a passion or feeling for the history, a reason to discover the ‘soul’ of identity.
What I know about these relatives and their history is 100% due to my Grandfather Herb's tracing of roots and learning who they were. But, outside of a coat of arms, basic name research, visits to Scotland and Norway, a photo or two, and stuff like that, it's again...hollow. And not just for me, but for him too. He can tell me where some of them came from, even some whys, and a few vocations of ye ole, but not what makes that cultural impact, the regional distinction, or what those influences have had on him.
My grandfather Herbert has even connected with some relatives overseas, but still, what he's provided is just analytical. Essentially, numbers, names, and lines on a piece of paper linked to people I feel nothing towards and know anything about. I don't know anymore about what it means to be a Scot or an Irishman, and what it involves to be Norwegian, what these national identities and their histories entail. I don't speak the language. I can't cook the food. I barely know the national histories, let alone the regional ones. I don't know the inconsistencies between local, national, and regional state neighbors and their meaning to each ethnic identity.
Even my Grandmother Helen, as much as I love her, with her favorite mantras of Irish-American pride, it's only a statement. And that 'statement' is what I'd summarize as the previous discussion of what remains in the later generations.
Statements of identity. That's it.
If I were to ask her exactly what it means to be Irish, the answer would basically boil down to the Catholic faith and providing me a yearly reminder to make sure I wear green on March 17th. As proud to be 'Irish' as she is, she's Shawn, lacking the regional quirks, mindset, experiences, holidays, traditions, and general "identity" provided by a culture in the broadest and most micro of terms. She couldn't tell me what it means to be Irish in the same way someone from Kilkenny could, and she couldn't, in the same breath, tell me all that's wrong with being Irish like someone born and raised there, either.
No answers to the intrinsic and personal value the Irish identity brings with it. The subconscious ticks. The historical causes and effects that reverberate within societies. Nor how the indigenous language has shaped thoughts, views, or even the loss thereof.
Shawn would have no idea about ‘The Troubles’ and how contentious to this day it remains or how Brexit has impacted both Northern Ireland and Ireland.
There’s no interest. No knowledge. No context in how events like this completely shape a culture’s identity.
‘Shawn' for context, is mentioned at other points in the book as a literary device. Someone who uses his ethnic background as something more akin to AKC Kennel lineage: 25% German Shepherd, 25% Golden Retriever, 17% Pitbull, in parallel to their own, 39% Irish, 24% German, 19% British, 17% Scottish, and something about 1.97% Cherokee.
This fictional Shawn claims Irish-American nationality and proudly announces this ethnic history every March for St. Patrick's Day and possibly even owns a "No Irish Need Apply" replica sign for display over the bar in his home.
The fictional Shawn plays with 'numbers,’ rather than the typical markers of culture, with these ‘numbers’ the extent of his connection to his past.
He has no genuine ties to his Gaelic roots of Irish and Scottish ancestors—the same for his Germanic and Anglo-Saxon lineage. While one might question whether he is or isn't Native American, I think it should matter less in this context because even if his claims are authentic, what does he know about the Cherokee? Their history? Their culture? Their values? Their language?
Shawn has surely never experienced the racial biases and treatment of those Irish immigrants from history as a modern-day racial majority and white American of European ethnicity.
He most likely knows nothing about the treatment of Catholics during his immigrant ancestors' arrival or the country from where they came, their traditions, or what makes the Éire.
Even less so, I'd guarantee there is no animosity or conflict in the slightest that Shawn has a makeup of both British and Irish-Scot genes and the implications that follow. Nor does he have any feelings towards having his Gaelic traditions Anglicized over time.
Simply put, he sees these nationalities as badges of honor, callbacks, and like a set of collectible cards, rather than any historical connotations in the progress of society, even to have the ancestral background that he does.
Now, back to Rampart:
This brings me back to my struggle, where I lack many cultural identifiers and activities of 'Italianness' and simultaneously resonate and identify on varying levels with this same culture. While, in contrast, rejecting the 'white' label and knowing that's exactly what I am.
How and why did it end up like this, and where does this self-identifying conflict begin? For me, it starts because I wasn't just raised in the 'Shawn' framework and provided something more than just numbers and countries.
My father might not know Italian, but he knows a few phrases and words, primarily Italian-American variations and slang, rather than anything proper. Most of what he learned, if not all, he learned from his parents. My grandfather, Mario, spoke the Italian-American slang dialect, as we'll call it, and a combination dialect from his parent's Norcia home in the Perugia province in southeastern Umbria, Italy. My Grandmother, Angelina, might not have spoken fluent Italian later in her life like her husband, but she could when she was younger, living in a home full of Abruzzi, carrying on some phrases into old age, and usually able to understand the gist of a conversation in Italian in those later years.
All of my Great-Grandparents, through my father, spoke Italian and their regional dialects, immigrating from Italy in the 1910s and 20s. First was my father's paternal Grandfather, Oadoro, Americanized as Eduardo or Edwardo, immigrating to the United States from Norcia before his wife later arrived, when they married in New York before moving south to Philadelphia, PA. Oadoro, or Edward, died shortly after the birth of my grandfather, Mario, having a heart attack as one of the laborers working on the construction of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. Edward's wife, my paternal great-grandmother Felicia, lived with my father throughout his youth and into his early 20s. She spoke very little English; as I mentioned, it was a unique situation for my father's immigrant grandmother residing with her son and daughter-in-law, but definitely not uncommon in Italian and Italian-American communities. Regardless, when she died in the early 70s, her primary language and only real means of communication with her son, my grandfather Mario, was her native tongue.
My grandmother's parents, Feliceantonio and Anna Fortuno, both immigrated from Carpineto Sinello and Casacanditella, respectively, from the providence of Chieti, in Abruzzo, Italy.
So, for my father growing up, living with three Italian speakers, one of whom lived in Italy until her early 20s, and maternal grandparents who also lived in Italy for the first 20 some-odd years of their lives, there is a very understandable impact on his own cultural self-identity. Something vastly different than my mother's, which falls into that 'American Shawn' category, and honestly, in many ways, my own too.
Had my grandfather not passed away when I was eight, I'd have a firmer grasp of Italian, if not fluently. When I was younger, he did try to teach me phrases and words, with a generational skip of my father - the usual taking for granted what's in front of you kind of thing, as well as no real need for it as a second-generation immigrant, that other common theme echoed throughout American history.
Sadly, only one word has stuck with me all these years that I know he taught me: 'gabadost," with its English translation being hard head or stubborn. In non-Italian-American slang, gabadost is correctly pronounced as Capa Dosta in traditional Italian, which, might I add, was lectured to me when on my High School trip to Italy and practicing my communication skills of broken Italian and familial experiences with a group of older Italian men. It's also been a point of regret that I never had the opportunity to learn more from Mario before he passed. It was never a situation where I missed the chance because I took it for granted. The time was taken. I loved when he taught me things and soaked them up; however, cancer had different plans for his future.
Luckily, outside of one phrase, he drilled, ironically, into my head, a pride about my Italian heritage, and to a lesser extent, my grandmother as well, however, not in nearly the same way. The same for my father, not in the same degree or manner as my grandfather, because their experiences of the culture were different, but both my grandfather and my father took and take immense pride in their Italian heritage and actively, in their own but different ways, tried passing it onto me.
It has clearly been successful.
At the end of the day, it's a connection that's fading and, for many, like myself in those later immigrant generations, third and fourth, those ancestral cultural elements are almost completely severed.
It is at this point I’m going to pause and leave the rest for Part 2, where I would like to dive more into what has driven me to write this particular book about a fading ancestral and family culture, as well as take the historic elements of Italian-American discrimination, particularly how they’ve affected my own family, and add them to a fictional story.
Why does that matter?
Because this inspired the current graphic novel that I am working on with artist Giovanni Valletta (JOHN WICK, RED SONJA, X-MEN), designer Renato Quiroga (MAD CAVE, SIX SWORDS), and script editor Drena Jo (SOURCE POINT PRESS), about the real-life experiences of my grandfather Mario’s life, mixed and mashed together into a fictionalized and retold narrative involving the murder of his sister, run-ins with the KKK, and the historic Italian-American experience.