1. Maria Giannuzzi: When We Were Italian ©2016
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When We Were Italian
[Published in the weekly newspaper The Italian Voice (La Voce Italiana) on January 21, 2016].
“Go back to where you started,” James Baldwin advised his nephew, “or as far back as you can,
examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep
it to yourself: but know whence you came.” For the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the
Italians who immigrated to the United States between the years 1880 and 1920, the road to
America begins in the Mezzogiorno, the southern lands dominated by the brilliant light of the
midday sun.
A region of breathtaking physical beauty, Italy’s South was also a place of starvation, disease
and high taxes, where absentee landlords owned most of the good agricultural land. Unable to
control their environment and overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, Southern Italians felt
manipulated by fate. Is it any wonder they viewed a bustling, optimistic America as the Promised
Land, a place of opportunity and redemption.
In the space of just four decades more than four million mostly poor, illiterate and unskilled
Italian peasants left their villages in Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Apulia and Basilicata for the
New World. Fifty percent of those who entered the United States returned to Italy, some earning
enough to help their families back home, some no better off than when they came. Others,
seeking a different life from that of their fathers and mothers, knew when they boarded the
passenger ships leaving Naples or Palermo they would never go back to the country of their
birth.
While America’s factories and mills wanted their cheap labor, Italian immigrants were looked at
with suspicion and fear by the native born. They were considered a separate race, non-whites,
foreigners, whose customs and traditions were not welcome. To succeed, it was necessary that
the immigrants cast off their Italian identity and become Americanized. The price of the
American ticket,” observed James Baldwin, “was to pretend you didn’t know where you came
from.” The price of the ticket was to cease being whatever you had been before, and to become
“white.” There was no room for hyphenated Americans in the land of the free.
Comparisons are often made between Italian and Jewish immigrants, but there were significant
differences. Many Eastern European Jews were from large towns and cities and thus the products
of sophisticated urban cultures with high literacy rates. The great majority of Italian immigrants
were uneducated peasants whose agrarian folk culture most closely resembled that of America’s
black rural population.
The immigrants often had difficulty reconciling the old rural folk culture of Southern Italy and
the new urban industrial culture of the United States. Disparaged and despised by America’s
elites, most Italians sought refuge within their group and refused to assimilate. They held on to

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their customs and beliefs, formed their own self-help organizations, and continued to speak their
native tongue.
First generation Italian immigrants and their children respected the educational aspirations of
their Jewish neighbors, but believed that academic achievement was not within their grasp. Once
on American shores they retained the peasant belief that they could not escape la forza del
destino, the force of destiny. “I have always lived on the threshold. I have never known the real
America, the America of those who rise, of those whose minds and souls are uplifted from the
darkness of ignorance and superstition. I’ve always lived among these immigrants who fell or, at
the best, made no progress,” declares Louis Podesta, the character in Louis Forgione’s
autobiographical novel Reamer Lou, whose painfully beautiful words mirror the bitter experience
of many immigrants.
Louis Forgione’s friend and fellow writer, Pascal D’Angelo came to America seeking one thing
and stayed searching for another. The sixteen-year-old D’Angelo and his father arrived in New
York in 1910 with the goal of making enough money to provide for their family back home.
Sensitive and intelligent, but unable to read and write, D’Angelo works as a pick-and-shovel man
in railroad yards, mines and road construction. “I had resigned myself to my fate. I was a poor
laborer—a dago, a wop or some such creature—in the eyes of America,” confides D’Angelo in
his autobiography, echoing the despair of Italian immigrants confronted with the bigotry of the
unseeing native born.
D’Angelo, paradoxically, decides to remain in America after his father returns to Italy, held fast
by the “lingering suspicion that somewhere in this vast country an opening existed, that
somewhere I would strike the light.” Through his interactions with his Anglo co-workers
D’Angelo is surprised to learn he possesses an affinity and aptitude for English. It is the longed
for opening he had sought. Suddenly alive to new possibilities, the twenty-two-year-old laborer
teaches himself to read and write English and spends long hours in the New York Public Library
reading.
Awakened to the magical properties of the English language which make it possible for him to
transcend his everyday existence, a reborn D’Angelo is determined to become a writer in his
adopted language. Like the fictional Huck Finn, D’Angelo walks away from the gray promises of
safety and sameness and instead lights out to find his place in the challenging terrain of America.
On the way he encounters physical danger, poverty, and prejudice—what he calls “the meanness
and the hard jokes of the world.” But alongside the ugliness D’Angelo discovers beauty, and
finally love—a love of poetry and love for his fellow laborers.
In the early 1920s D’Angelo publishes poems in leading magazines and his memoir, Son of Italy
is published in 1924. Unlike other immigrant writers, D’Angelo refuses to conform to America’s
vision of material success, declining to take a position in the publishing world after Son of Italy
receives good reviews and its author is favorably profiled in the popular press. As Dennis

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Barone points out in his study of Italian American writers, America/Trattabili, D’Angelo’s
autobiography is “the story of a writer’s struggle to prevail in his chosen art, not to amass
riches.”
D’Angelo rejects both Americanization and the Italian peasant belief in fate, choosing to express
his art through the lens of the outsider. Dennis Barone argues that D’Angelo’s “autobiography
and his life after its publication reveal the experience of a marginal man, not an assimilated
American.” Like James Baldwin, that other marginal man, D’Angelo faced down his beginnings
and became a writer in order to be a witness. He understood that the artist must be the odd one
out in order to be, as Baldwin stated, if not free, clear. That D’Angelo laments his obscure future
as a poet after his modest but significant literary success does not contradict his decision to
remain on the fringes of society. The writer may be a nonconformist, but he still wants to be
read.
The back-to-back shocks of the Great Depression and World War II prompted changes in
American attitudes toward immigrants from Southern Italy. Many middle and upper-class native
born Americans found themselves on the same shaky economic ground as poorly educated,
working class Italians. For the first time Anglo Americans had to confront the radical notion that
their white superiority did not shield them from the frightening realities of either poverty or war.
The bread lines and the front lines became the great equalizers in American society during the
middle decades of the twentieth century, helping to end the estrangement between the native
born and Italian immigrants.
At the same time, New Deal programs and wartime employment led to increased financial
security for first generation immigrants and their children. In the late 1940s and early 1950s
industrial expansion and government legislation such as the GI Bill brought about greater
economic and educational opportunities for Italian Americans. Upward mobility resulted in
Italian Americans’ long desired entry into the country’s growing middle class, but also hastened
their assimilation into the mainstream culture and the gradual loss of their ethnic identity.
In recent decades some Italian Americans have begun to question whether something important
was lost in translation when an Italian culture rooted in family, church and neighborhood was
replaced by the rootless monoculture of American consumerism. Perhaps speaking a certain
language and practicing certain customs and traditions is too narrow a definition of identity.
What is important is not how much of traditional Italian culture has survived, but our ability to
imaginatively rediscover the Italian American experience through the rich repository of literary
expression, an ability we share with Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Literature’s aim, notes
Jane Smiley in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, “is not to bring outlyers into the
mainstream, but to broaden the mainstream so it includes the outlyers without destroying their
uniqueness. It is the countervailing force against the homogenization of American life.” The
customs, traditions and language of the old country may have disappeared, but our Italian

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identity is secure in the poetry and prose of Pascal D’Angelo, Louis Forgione, Dennis Barone
and other Italian-American writers.
It is a bittersweet irony of Italian immigration to America that those immigrants who went back
to Italy were known as “the American” by the people in their villages. Whether they stayed or
returned, Italians were changed forever by America. For better and worse, the experience of
Italians cannot be separated from the greater and deeper American experience, with all its
contradictions and complexity. Italians in America have indeed journeyed from the threshold to
the center, but if we travel our road truthfully, the austere figure of the outsider will always be
walking alongside us. As Italian Americans we can keep this truth to ourselves, or we can
acknowledge this stranger and make her our Muse.