Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

Notes

notes notes to the introduction 1. Sociologist Mary C. Waters reports that, given a choice, more Americans would opt to be Italian than any other ethnicity. Choosy Americans choose Italianness ? The reasons offered by the interviewees are warm and fuzzy, suggesting either that the nation at large is gullible enough to believe the Italian American public relations racket or they’ve become Italian enough to know how to keep the omerta. Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 142. 2. In the chapters to come, I’ve kept the notes light. The narrative bibliography at the end is for those interested in matters of Italian American history, art, and literature beyond the scope of this book. notes to chapter 1 1. When the U.S. Congress called a halt to open immigration in 1924, with a series of immigration-restriction laws highly prejudicial to Southern and Eastern Europe (Asian immigration had been eliminated entirely), several million Italians were settled in the United States for good. Four to five million is the accepted estimate: the problem in reaching a precise figure is balancing the number of Italians who returned home, often after several crossings, to stay (the returnees tended to call attention to themselves but left scarce records) against those who entered the United States illegally and thus slipped into the general population unrecorded (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language traces the slur “wop” to the dialectic phrase for thug, guappo, but popular legend hears “wop” as an English acronym for “WithOut Papers”). 2. There were, of course, other trajectories of departure and settlement. For instance, emigrants from the north of Italy—seeking religious freedom or political asylum, fleeing military service, or looking to put skills to greater economic use—began trickling into the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century; the Gold Rush brought them West, and the truck farms, vineyards, retail food industry, and fishing boats of California (where, not coincidentally, the largest concentrations of Italian American Protestants are to be found) became their fallbacks. Commensurate with the beginning of the Great Migration, contract labor brought gangs of men onto the Louisiana cotton, sugar, and beet plantations, where they worked side by side with the descendants of slaves, but 209 New Orleans with its docks and food industries was the long-term post-contract attraction. See Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among Californian Italian-Americans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984); and Vincenza Scarpaci, “Walking the Color Line: Italian Immigrants in Rural Louisiana, 1880–1910,” Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 60–78. 3. From a century’s distance, it is arguable that there is nothing so surprising about Maria’s case than the very fact that we know anything at all about it. This is not just a gentle reminder that the vicissitudes of academic interest serve Italian American history none too well, but something vaguer and more portentous, that the gods of fortune ultimately looking after Maria seem to have set fire to her historical trail only to light the imagination of Idanna Pucci, author of The Trials of Maria Barbella, an Italian with a distantly American genealogy and much New York experience, who was prone to take such fires as a sign of special election to a special challenge. If I had the space to do justice to Pucci’s detail (read the book!), you would see how unbelievably ripe Maria’s history is for all kinds of contemporary investigation: in her case the penal-industrial complex, transcontinental surplus labor circulation, the science and psychiatry of racial categorization, and women’s-status law all meet. 4. Pucci is my documentary source throughout. For the occasional direct quotations , I’ve supplied page numbers in parentheses from the standard English edition: Idanna Pucci, The Trials of Maria Barbella, trans. Stefania Fumo (New York: Vintage, 1997). 5. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, trans. Frances Franaye (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963), 4. Levi, a painter and a doctor of Jewish extraction, was an Italian opponent of fascism whom Mussolini banished in 1935 to Basilicata, then called by its Roman name, Lucania (as if it were Italy’s Siberia, which, in fact, it was). 6. Actually, to one of the Americas, with New York City superceding Buenos Aires as the cheaper destination from...