Becoming Italian in the US: Through the Lens of Life Narratives

Abstract

Sociologist Francis Ianni suggests that immigrants from Italy and their children lacked ethnic identity based on their common national ancestry when they came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. In his view, when they eventually acquired the consciousness of being Italian, such outcome was an invention of the new world (202). Ianni's interpretation of the changes in Italian Americans' ethnicity resulting from their interaction with the adopted society can be easily placed in a broader perspective with implications for other immigrant communities in the US as well. Italian Americans, not unlike other immigrant groups, are subject to two widely-held notions about ethnicity in the US: first, that individual's attachment to his or her ethnic group undergoes a process of transformation over time, and second, that the social boundaries of ethnic minority are continuously re-negotiated through real-life encounters. Furthermore, in the last few decades, the category of ethnicity as a social or a cultural construction has been central not only to sociological research like Ianni's but also to other disciplines (Steinberg; Vecoli; Waters; Conzen et al.). In particular, Werner Sollors contends that ethnic affiliation is less a matter of descent than a question of consent. In his deconstructionist approach, he also shows that the notion of ethnic identity as a state of the mind is expressed in symbols in literary texts (Beyond Ethnicity; The Invention of Ethnicity). Indeed, narratives are a means as apt as social behavior to reveal the changing meaning of ethnic identity over time. The purpose of this essay is to examine Italian Americans' autobiographical accounts and narrative sources in order to cast further light on the process that Ianni describes from his sociological standpoint. The survival of strong regional and local identities was the legacy of Italy's belated unification in the second half of the nineteenth century (Putnam 18). Such a delay caused the Italians to retain a sense of attachment to their origins that hardly went beyond the borders of their native regions, provinces, or even villages. It also split the population of the peninsula along lines of local origins and fuelled the flames of subnational rivalries among people of disparate geographical extractions. Separate villages often meant separate worlds. As author Maria Laurino points out, even towns only about forty miles apart ... had a distinct dialect, nurtured for centuries by separate cultural influences and foreign (102). Immigrants carried such divisions to the US and usually kept fellow countrymen from different geographical backgrounds at arm's length. A number of eyewitnesses stress the lack of ethnic homogeneousness within what superficial observers regarded as being cohesive Italian settlements in American cities. Consular officer Luigi Villari, for instance, argues that, in turn-of-the-century New York City's Little Italy, Some neighborhoods are inhabited exclusively by newcomers from a given region; we can find only Sicilians in a street, only people from Calabria in another street, and immigrants from Abruzzi in a third one. There are even streets where only individuals from a single town live (216). Marie Di Mario similarly observes that an Italian seldom refers to himself as Italian among his compatriots; he identifies himself with a tiny town.... differences in dialect, food, and occupation tend to segregate provincial groups.... Each group lives its own life, has its own leaders, celebrates its own holidays (19). Among other factors, the retention of a disparate range of local Italian dialects prevented newcomers from reaching out to Italians from other regions and helped the survival of the breakdown of each Little Italy into subnational enclaves. Novelist Jerre Mangione, for example, maintains that my parents made it a strict rule that we speak nothing but Sicilian while we were at home (My Experience 67). …