Guido Culture and Italian American Youth: From Bensonhurst to Jersey Shore by Donald Tricarico (review)

Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Pauly D in Jersey Shore. Gold chains, Cadillacs, The Godfather, "gym, tan, laundry," and "fuggedaboutit." This book traces the emergence and evolution of Guido youth culture in the United States. Donald Tricarico delineates Guido performance and identity as a product of a particular sociohistorical context—the 1970s—and the "turn to disco," specifically placed in Bensonhurst, New York. Tricarico defines Guido as an "Italian American youth culture practice" that serves as a collective identity, an ethnic identity, and a commodified identity, characterized by the conspicuous consumption of material objects, styles, clothes, hair, and media images, particularly celebrity and celebrity culture as illustrated in the imagery and references above (30). As Tricarico explains, "Saturday Night Fever and Jersey Shore are the textual bookends for the development of an Italian American youth subculture called Guido" (3).

Through a collection of essays, the product of several book chapters and journal articles written over the course of twenty-six years, Tricarico explores multiple domains of Guido identity and culture, including style, cool, and the media. Tricarico is a professor of sociology and urban studies at Queensborough Community College. He locates himself as a cultural insider, with access to individuals and groups that self-identify as Guidos. While Tricarico does not describe a research methodology, he mentions personal conversations and joining chat rooms, while often quoting first-hand communications as evidence. The book is firmly situated in Italian-American studies, primarily sociology, especially in its theoretical applications of youth subcultures and ethnicities as social constructs.

While centered on the "turn to disco," Tricarico historicizes the roots of Guido culture in the baby boomer generation, those born after 1945, first in moments like American Bandstand in the 1950s, then to the "greasers" of the 1960s, and then later evolving with hip-hop and club culture, and eventually in online communities. Tricarico also describes Guido as a distillation of Italian ethnic identity, informed by and in response to immigration, where the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants were able to claim their Italianness as Americans while also distancing from an old-world past. Guido was initially waged as an ethnic slur referring to a stigmatized performance of race, class, and gender, imposed by a more powerful majority. Like many other identity markers and social movements, Guido was then reclaimed and embraced as an insider marker of group membership and pride.

There are several strengths of this text, including the inclusion of delightful color photographs of John Travolta, the Jersey shore, nightclubs and discotheques, local Guido celebrities, and ordinary Guidos and Guidettes out on the town. Tricarico is clearly an expert in urban studies and youth cultures, evidenced in his descriptions, explanations, and theoretical applications. He skillfully situates Guido as a performance of ethnic identity in a working-class context, exploring regional variations of Guido in the northeast United States and in Toronto, Canada. The introduction is strong and well written.

However, I was disappointed at the lack of analysis of gender and sexuality. Endemic to the term "Guido" is masculinity, embodied in a man's name. There is minimal discussion of the Guidette, or even an analysis of Guido as a particularly masculinist performance. While features of Guido identity are discussed that are certainly marked as masculine and heteronormative, such as bodybuilding, car culture, and cruising, there is little analysis of the Guido as a heterosexual man or the way that patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality function to sustain him. Perhaps this is due to the common challenge of claiming and interrogating privilege.

As a collection of essays, each chapter stands alone, which could be useful for instructors who choose to assign individual sections. However, the book is missing a narrative arc, as there is a great deal of repetition across chapters, leaving less space for a richer unpacking of the important domains that Tricarico unveils about Guido culture. Nonetheless, this...