The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. This short portrait, of Pietro Riccobaldi’s father-in-law, is taken from Riccobaldi’s autobiography: Pietro Riccobaldi, Straniero indesiderabile (Milan: Rosellina Archinto, 1988). 2. Giuseppe Prezzolini, I trapiantati (Milan: Longanesi, 1963), 409, 242. All translations of autobiographical and scholarly material in this book are my own unless otherwise indicated. 3. Ibid., 403. 4. The only work similar to mine is Camilla Cattarulla, Di Proprio pugno: Autobiografie di emigranti italiani in Argentina e Brasile (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2003) where she gathered eighteen autobiographies by Italian immigrants from the cities of Argentina and the Brazilian countryside. Cattarulla’s work presents several stylistic and sociological comments that find confirmation in my research. She started her research by regretting the absence of interest for these ‘‘submerged’’ writers that are catalogued as ignorant (11) and she saw autobiography as a vital way of ‘‘reuniting the different pieces of the mosaic of the I’’ (13). She claimed it to be a democratic right belonging to every living person, regardless of the life’s exemplary value. If there is one involuntary flow to her work it is that all texts are translated in a correct standard Italian that overly purifies them and does not reveal the truer broken voices of immigration that are evident in their original Italian. 5. Francesco Durante, Italoamericana: Storia e Letteratura degli italiani negli Stati Uniti (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), 2 vols. 6. These include excerpts by the bootblack Rocco Corresca, the pick-andshovel poet Pascal D’Angelo, the anarchist Carlo Tresca, the preacher Constantine Panunzio, and the teacher Francesco Ventresca. 157 7. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, Emilio Franzina, ed., Storia dell’emigrazione italiana: Partenze (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2001), and Storia dell’emigrazione italiana: Arrivi (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2002). 8. ‘‘È certo che l’autobiografia ha un grande valore storico, in quanto mostra la vita in atto e non solo come dovrebbe essere secondo le leggi scritte o i principii morali dominanti.’’ Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 1718. 9. The two largest waves came ashore in the period of the Great Migration (1880–1924) and after World War II (1947–1969). According to the Bureau of Census, 1880 is the first year to see more than ten thousand immigrants (12,354); in 1903 there were 230,622 immigrants, nearly twenty times as many. The peak year of the Great Migration was 1907, with 285,731 entries. The numbers decreased in the years generally around World War I (1915–1920), but saw another peak in 1921 with 222,260 immigrants. After the Quota Act of 1924 the numbers never raised to more than 22,327 (1930). After World War II, the highest number of immigrants entered in 1956 (40,430). U.S. Department of Commerce , Bureau of Census’ Statistical Abstracts and Reports, gathered in Luciano Iorizzo and Salvatore Mondello, The Italian Americans, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 285. 10. Jerry Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 364. 11. This expression ‘‘autobiographies from unexpected places’’ is from Martha Ward, A Sounding of Women: Autobiographies from Unexpected Places (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), devoted to autobiographies of women. 12. Ibid., xvii. 13. Holt was the editor of New York’s The Independent between 1892 and 1921. His collection was my source for the autobiography of the bootblack Rocco Corresca, discussed in this volume. See Hamilton Holt, ed., The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, As Told by Themselves (New York: Routledge, 1990). 14. Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 9. 15. ‘‘My mother-in-law could wield a spade and thread a needle with undisputed authority, but the one thing I rarely saw in her hand was a pen,’’ wrote Bea Tusiani in her autobiography dedicated to the powerful figure of her mother-in-law, Maria, from whom she was always divided by the language barrier. 158  Notes to pages 3–4 16. The original Italian of the quotations from autobiographies is included in the endnotes as a reference. 17. As Werner Sollors explains, ‘‘our own age of multiculturalism has tended to ignore language as a factor in American literary and cultural diversity’’; see Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds., The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (New York: New York University Press...