The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City

Chapter 2: "Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!"

2 “sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!” Making Food, Family, and Nation in Italian Harlem, 1930–1940 The Generational Contract: Family Food rituals and eating Cultures On a summer afternoon in the late 1940s, Orlando Guadalupe, a student who was preparing a paper on East Harlem street life for Leonard Covello’s class, ventured deep into the Italian section of the neighborhood. Back then, that could be a dangerous trip for a dark-skinned Puerto Rican boy. Guadalupe briskly walked the streets of Italian Harlem, memorizing the images that struck him the most. He knew that “the Italians brought over with them their love of the opera, the most favorite games and sports of their dear Italy, customs and habits such as eating spaghetti, mourning their dead for months and months while dressed in black, religious processions, and the singing of Italian folk songs. [But] despite their well-ingrained folkways, the younger generation ha[d] discarded them with no difficulty and ha[d] assimilated the American way of life with surprising rapidity.” Guadalupe noted more details: “My attention was focused on the large mustaches the old Italians wear. This is not common around the rest of the community. However , the middle-aged Italians and the younger ones did not have them. Coming back home I saw an Italian movie house advertising a film shown in their vernacular language. I stopped for a while to see what sort of people went in. Very soon I observed that mostly old people bought tickets. The younger generation mostly patronized the other American movie nearby.”1 The rigid generational boundaries in the streets of Italian Harlem may have seemed strange to Guadalupe when compared to those of the Puerto Rican community just a few blocks away. The public spaces where food was consumed suggested the segregated worlds of Italian immigrants and their children. On one side 48 . part i of the street, young Italian Americans congregated at candy stores to sip sodas and chat about sports and girls in New York street slang, while on the other side of the street a group of immigrants sat talking in southern Italian dialect.2 One of Covello’s student researchers noted: In the matter of places where persons can go for a “good time,” there is a saloon at 2123 Second Avenue, Italian owned, where friends in the neighborhood get together afternoons and evenings, to play cards, horses and no doubts “policy slips [illegal lottery],” as in the short time I “hung” around, I noticed evidence of all three. It has no dance floor, or music at any time, but a radio giving the results of the races, etc. There are 6 tables in the premises, with about 22/23 chairs, and the element there is noticeably of the gambling type of Italian Americans. No Italian spoken and to my address in Italian was answered in English. Another saloon is at 245 East 109th Street, where cards are also played and the element going there is exactly the opposite of that at 2123 Second Avenue. Here are all Italians of the old Italian ideas, hardly understanding any English. Cards of the Italian game similar to Casino, were played. No women go there on afternoons, but I was informed that at night they did go there. The first place is very clean and typically American; the latter European in most every respect.3 In the streets of Italian Harlem each generation claimed its own spaces and carefully avoided one another’s territory. This distancing was a consequence of the generational shifts that defined the community between the 1920s and the 1930s, when immigrants started relinquishing direct control of their children’s public life and discarding traditional methods of parental authority. Earlier in the century, immigrant parents had closely controlled their children, especially girls, following the patriarchal code of honor and shame of rural southern Italy, in which a girl’s offense against a rigid sexual morality would jeopardize the respect (rispetto) of the community for the entire family—especially its males. But even boys’ leisure time was seriously policed. Activities outside the home, like sports, were generally considered useless and detrimental to good upbringing. The idea of adolescence as an intermediate time between childhood and adulthood, when children had special needs, was foreign to immigrant contadino culture.4 However, immigrant parents soon realized that American life had so changed the balance of family power that any effort at preventing their children’s independence and development outside...