Articles by: Laura e. Ruberto

  • Life & People

    “Ti abbraccio teneramente,” Christmas from Prison


     

    Earlier today, through the International Gramsci Society’s listserv, I received a note from Piero Zucaro with best wishes for the season to those on the listserv. Zucaro had compiled a series of excerpts of Gramsci’s letters regarding Christmas. I post here the three excerpts he compiled (in their original Italian) and two other excerpts translated into English. The letters were written to his sister-in-law Tatiana “Tania” Schuct, his mother, Peppina Marcias, and his older son, Delio.
     
    Peace to all.
     
     
    (I)
     
    19 dicembre 1927        
     
    Carissima Tania,
     
    …come trascorrerai le feste natalizie? Sono contento perché sarai in compagnia e potrai avere una qualche distrazione. Farete l'albero di natale? Io ho fatto l'ultimo albero di Natale nel 22, per far divertire Genia che non poteva ancora levarsi dal letto o per lo meno non poteva ancora camminare senza appoggiarsi alle pareti e ai mobili. Non ricordo bene se era levata; ricordo che l'alberetto era collocato sul tavolino accanto al letto ed era zeppo di cerini che furono accesi tutti simultaneamente appena Giulia, che aveva tenuto un concerto per gli ammalati, rientrò nella camera, dove anch'io ero rimasto a far compagnia a Genia.
     
    Cara Tania, vorrei consolarti, perché mi rimane l'impressione di un tuo stato d'animo addolorato e sconfortato.
     
    Ti abbraccio teneramente
    Antonio
     
     
     
    (II)

    26 dicembre 1927
     
    Carissima Tania,
     
    e cosí è passato anche il santo natale, che immagino quanto sia stato laborioso per te. In verità, io ho pensato alla sua straordinarietà solo da questo punto di vista, l'unico che mi interessasse. Di notevole non c'è stato che il fatto di una generale tensione degli spiriti vitali in tutto l'ambiente carcerario; il fenomeno poteva essere rilevato già in isvolgimento da tutta una settimana. Ognuno aspettava qualcosa di eccezionale e l'attesa determinava tutta una serie di piccole manifestazioni tipiche, che nell'insieme davano questa impressione di uno slancio di vitalità. Per molti l'eccezione era una porzione di pasta asciutta e un quarto di vino che l'amministrazione passa tre volte all'anno invece della solita minestra: ma che avvenimento importante è questo, tuttavia. Non credere che io me ne diverta o ne rida. L'avrei fatto, forse, prima di aver fatto l'esperienza del carcere. Ma ho visto troppe scene commoventi di detenuti che si mangiavano la loro scodella di minestra con religiosa compunzione, raccogliendo con la mollica di pane anche l'ultima traccia di unto che poteva rimanere attaccata alla terraglia! Un detenuto ha pianto perché in una caserma dei carabinieri, dove eravamo di transito, invece della minestra regolamentare fu distribuita solo una doppia razione di pane; era da due anni in carcere e la minestra calda era per lui il suo sangue, la sua vita. Si capisce perché nel Pater Noster è stato messo l'accenno al pane quotidiano…
     
    …Ti voglio raccontare un episodio quasi natalizio della mia fanciullezza, che ti divertirà e ti darà un tratto caratteristico della vita dalle mie parti. Avevo quattordici anni e facevo la 3a ginnasiale a Santu Lussurgiu, un paese distante dal mio circa 18 chilometri e dove credo esista ancora un ginnasio comunale in verità molto scalcinato. Con un altro ragazzo, per guadagnare 24 ore in famiglia, ci mettemmo in istrada a piedi il dopopranzo del 23 dicembre invece di aspettare la diligenza del mattino seguente. Cammina, cammina, eravamo circa a metà viaggio, in un posto completamente deserto e solitario; a sinistra, un centinaio di metri dalla strada, si allungava una fila di pioppi con delle boscaglie di lentischi. Ci spararono un primo colpo di fucile in alto sulla testa; la pallottola fischiò a una decina di metri in alto. Credemmo a un colpo casuale e continuammo tranquilli. Un secondo e un terzo colpo piú bassi ci avvertirono subito che eravamo proprio presi di mira e allora ci buttammo nella cunetta, rimanendo appiattati un pezzo. Quando provammo a sollevarci, altro colpo e cosí per circa due ore con una dozzina di colpi che ci inseguivano, mentre ci allontanavamo strisciando, ogni volta che tentavamo di ritornare sulla strada. Certamente era una comitiva di buontemponi che voleva divertirsi a spaventarci, ma che bello scherzo, eh? Arrivammo a casa a notte buia, discretamente stanchi e infangati e non raccontammo la storia a nessuno, per non spaventare in famiglia, ma non ci spaventammo gran che, perché alle prossime vacanze di carnevale il viaggio a piedi fu ripetuto senza incidenti di sorta. Ed ecco che ti ho riempito quasi interamente le quattro paginette!
     
    Ti abbraccio teneramente.
    Antonio
    Ma la storia è proprio vera; non è affatto una storia di briganti!
     
     
     
    (III)
     
    15 dicembre 1930
     
    …Carissima mamma,
     
    ecco il quinto natale che passo in privazione di libertà e il quarto che passo in carcere. Veramente la condizione di coatto in cui passai il natale del 26 ad Ustica era ancora una specie di paradiso della libertà personale in confronto alla condizione di carcerato. Ma non credere che la mia serenità sia venuta meno. Sono invecchiato di quattro anni, ho molti capelli bianchi, ho perduto i denti, non rido più di gusto come una volta, ma credo di essere diventato più saggio e di avere arricchito la mia esperienza degli uomini e delle cose. Del resto non ho perduto il gusto della vita; tutto mi interessa ancora e sono sicuro che se anche non posso piú «zaccurrare sa fae arrostia», tuttavia non proverei dispiacere a vedere e sentire gli altri a zaccurrare. Dunque non sono diventato vecchio, ti pare? Si diventa vecchi quando si incomincia a temere la morte e quando si prova dispiacere a vedere gli altri fare ciò che noi non possiamo piú fare. In questo senso sono sicuro che neanche tu sei diventata vecchia nonostante la tua età. Sono sicuro che sei decisa a vivere a lungo, per poterci rivedere tutti insieme e per poter conoscere tutti i tuoi nipotini: finché si vuol vivere, finché si sente il gusto della vita e si vuole raggiungere ancora qualche scopo, si resiste a tutti gli acciacchi e a tutte le malattie. Devi persuaderti però che occorre anche risparmiare un po' le proprie forze e non intestarsi a fare dei grandi sforzi come quando si era di primo pelo. Ora mi pare appunto che Teresina, nella sua lettera, mi abbia accennato, con un po' di malizia, che tu pretendi di fare troppo e che non vuoi rinunziare alla tua supremazia nei lavori di casa. Devi invece rinunziare e riposarti. Carissima mamma, ti auguro tante cose per le feste, di essere allegra e tranquilla. Tanti auguri e saluti a tutti di casa.
     
    Ti abbraccio teneramente.
    Antonio
     
     
     
    (IV)
     
    Turi Prison, December 12, 1932
     
    Dearest Tania,
     
    …It has been announced that we are entitled to receive ‘one’ Christmas parcel from home. I imagine you’ll already have thought of sending me something. But honestly, I think you’d be far better to hand on to the money for other purposes. If you really are dead set on giving me something for Christmas, seeing that the possibility exists, please don’t make it anything lavish. If you really want to, send me something—but just a very little, something quite simple. If you’d like to know the things that would give me pleasure, here they are: a little panettone and, if possible, a few pots of that concentrated vegetable extract you once sent me. Please believe that I’m not just being polite, I can hardly digest anything, and I’m incapable of chewing. Maybe you could add a small bottle of bitters. I honestly don’t know what brand to recommend: Ferro-china or something of that sort. However, let me assure you again that even if you send me nothing but your own greetings I’ll be quite content—maybe even more. …
     
    I embrace you fondly.
    Antonio
     
     
     
    (V)
     
    December 1936
     
    Dear Delio,
     
    I’m looking forward to your reply on the question of Pushkin—but take your time. Get organized and do your best. How are you and Julik doing in school? Now you have markes given you every month, it’ll be easier to see how you’re getting on in general. Thank you for giving mamma a tight, tight hug from me: I think you ought to give her one every day, every morning in my name. I am always thinking of you, so every morning I’ll imagine you doing it and say: my sons and Giulia are thinking of me at this very moment. You’re the elder brother, and you should tell Julik about the idea too: every day you could have ‘Daddy’s five minutes’. What do you think of the idea?
     
    Kisses.
    Papa
     
    (English translations by Hamish Henderson, pages 246 and 237, Pluto Press, 1988)
     
     
    Gramsci died in prison on April 27, 1937.

  • Art & Culture

    The Other Rocky Movie


     

    A number of years ago I taught an Italian American film class at UC Davis, and one of my students put together a short video as part of a final project. He went around campus asking students and faculty alike if they recognized photos of famous “real” Italian Americans and famous “media” Italian Americans in order to make a point about how popular culture images of Italians were more widely known than historical figures. It was a straightforward piece, but smartly conceived and executed—Mario Cuomo vs. Super Mario; Al Capone vs. Al Pacino as the Godfather.
     
    Mario Cuomo                
     
                         MARIO CUOMO                                                       SUPER MARIO
     
     
    I thought of this video recently when I finally got around to watching the Rocky Graziano biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me. My student had made a visual comparison between Rocky Balboa and Rocky Marciano and the people he interviewed could all name Stallone’s Rocky but not Marciano. Watching Somebody Up There Likes Me I wondered if anyone in my student’s video would have recognized the other Italian American Rocky boxer? Would anyone have confused a picture of the real Graziano (né Thomas Rocco Barbella) with that of the one played by Paul Newman in the Robert Wise 1956 film? Probably not.
     
     
    Paul Newman and Rocky Graziano
     
    PAUL NEWMAN & ROCKY GRAZIANO
     
     
    Peter Bondanella in his Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys and Sopranosbegins his capsule review of the film by suggesting that the Italian American “ethnic content is limited” (105). I’d disagree, and suggest instead that the film, as with many others of the era, offers an Italian American identity—situated primarily within New York’s East Village—that is characteristically filled with subtly complex masculine bravura.
     
    It places Italian Americans against a backdrop of a diverse urban cityscape, with a focus on a working class, young male protagonist. It’s not that this is some kind of neorealistic gritty look at immigrant life, but there is a true-to-life ethnic feel to Newman roaming around the streets as a kid, getting in trouble, making his mother cry at his repeated arrests, fighting with his father, and yelling back at the old man: “All you ever gave me was a wine breath and the back of your hand!” 
     
     
     
     
    WATCH THIS SCENE BETWEEN NEIGHBORHOOD BUDDIES ROMOLO (SAL MINEO) & ROCKY (PAUL NEWMAN)
     
    This question of realism and authenticity comes to have particular relevance, though, when we stop to consider the actors and the character’s they played. In this film, a Jew plays an Italian, an Italian plays a Jew, and neither comes off as all that white. For the Jewish American Paul Newman, the film proved to be his breakout role. Newman’s take on Graziano is compelling, although theatrical in style. And is it of interest to us (or not?)  that Graziano’s wife, Norma Unger, the Jewish refugee, was played by the Sardinian-born Pier Angeli (née Anna Maria Pierangeli)? I, for one, think it’s cool to see actors cast against ethnic type.
     
    And, by the way, can anyone tell me when gum machines disappeared from the platforms of NYC subways?

  • Op-Eds

    Blogging Obama


     

    Tuesday morning I remind my five-old-son that today is the presidential election. He’s well aware of the race: what with the general Obama buzz all around town and in our house, parents who’ve been phone banking, Obama jack-o-lanterns, posters, stickers and the like.
     
    He says, “Si, lo so” (yes, I know), speaking, as he generally does to me, in Italian. He states matter-of-factly: “vincera’ Obama,” (Obama’s going to win), and then, with the air of a political pundit, he adds very seriously, “lui ha fatto piu campaigning” (he’s done more campaigning). I ask him if he knows what that means, clearly a word he’s heard only in English. He’s not sure, but with the confidence of a child, he stands firm on his position.
     
    All day Tuesday I remind my college students to go vote, that even if they have voted they can make sure a friend or family member votes, and that even if they are not eligible to vote, they can make sure someone they know votes.
     
    I finish teaching and rush over to a party, meeting my family there. Friends, mostly from a babysitting co-op we are part of, gather to eat, drink, and watch the returns. It’s a diverse Berkeley crowd, and I walk in as Pennsylvania—the state I was born and raised in—goes blue. My Italian American West Virginia-native friend, gives me a hug. The wine tastes especially good.
     
    Driving home later, we pass through South Berkeley and North Oakland, right by the Northern California Obama Headquarters, and see lots of people on what are usually deserted streets. My son is taken in by all the action, the celebration. I wonder how much of this night he will remember.
     
    My 19 year old Italian-Swedish cousin writes me on Facebook:
    GO OBAMA!…we are following your election from my apartment. It’s a little bit uncomfortable that we are 9 hours before you, it’s 2.30 in the morning here and the results will stop coming in at 5 or 6 AM, but were staying hopeful! It’s funny how this election feels more important to us then our own =).
     
    Although the evening is bringing some news that worries me—California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, appears to be winning, for one—the night is thrilling, full of a happiness that cannot be contained.

  • Facts & Stories

    Radical Espresso: Mario Savio and Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement


    It’s not like no one knows who Mario Savio is.

     
    After all, he’s remembered as a significant part of the history of the 1960s Free Speech and Civil Rights movements. But his Italian American background is not often recognized in relation to the remarkable life he led as a political activist, public speaker, and teacher.
     
    Savio (1942-1996) was born to Italian American parents—his father was from Sicily—in Queens, where he spent his formative years. Although, as Gil Fagiani notes, Savio “until the 1970s had little conscious ethnic identity” (in Cannistraro and Meyer 248), from the mid-70s on, when trying to explain his early involvement in civil protest, he would remark on his working class, devoutly Catholic, Italian American family. He continued to do so throughout his life: just a year before his death, when speaking out against retrograde California legislation opposing immigration and affirmative action, he again took note of how his Italian background helped shape his view of public policy and the role of the individual citizen.
     
    Both the City of Berkeley and the famous university it is home to make (through various civic events and public markers) constant—and at times rather nauseatingly self-congratulatory—allusions to the area’s radical past and the succor it has long given to various kinds of alternative cultures.
     
    To those people aware of the city’s and university’s progressive attitude, it generally comes as little surprise to walk around the UC Berkeley campus today and take note of how the university honors Savio’s legacy. (The irony that the university opposed Savio’s actions at the time he was a student but now benefits from his fame is lost on no one.)
     
    In 1997 the steps at Sproul Plaza, where Savio gave many of his speeches, were officially renamed the “Mario Savio Steps.”
     
    Mario Savio Steps
     
    Then, in 2000, the Free Speech Movement Café opened on the first floor of Moffitt Library, dedicated to the memory of Mario Savio.
     
    Mario Savio poster at the Free Speech Movement Cafe, UC Berkeley
     
    Poster inside the Free Speech Movement Cafe
     
    The café offers the usual Bay Area array of outsize scones and complicated espresso drinks, and it promotes (and funds), as the FSM Café literature states:
     
    forums, panels, exhibits and other events in the FSM Café to generate critical discussion about contemporary social and political issues. 
       
    But neither near the Mario Savio Steps, nor in the café’s in-house informational placards, nor on its website is there reference to Savio’s Italian background. (Let me be sure not to forget that the City of Berkeley recently dedicated its own Italo-free homage to Savio in a 30-foot public sculpture that sits atop a footbridge spanning Highway 80.)
     
     
    Berkeley Big People sculpture (Mario Savio detail)
     
    "Berkeley Big People" Public Sculpture (by Scott Donahue), w/Mario Savio detail
     
    There are more and more voices associated with a decidedly Italian American perspective that lay claim to, as Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer put it, The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism, and in so doing place Savio alongside other forward-thinking intellectuals, politicians, activists, and artists. In particular Gil Fagiani’s essay about Savio in The Lost World comments on one of the consequences of this so-called amnesia:
     
    The amnesia about Italian American radical legacy made it easier for Savio and others who came of political age in the ‘60s and early ‘70s to view the Italian American community as an obstacle to the progressive agenda. (249)
     
    Interestingly, even as Savio may not have initially seen the potential usefulness of linking his Italian American identity to his leftist position, Fagiani and others note how Savio recognized the possibility of progressive action that could come about by connecting the needs of  various disenfranchised groups (in a truly Gramscian fashion, I might add)—from African Americans in Mississippi and UC Berkeley in the 1960s, to undocumented workers and minority college students in the California of the 1990s.
     
    Indeed, as others have said before (see, for instance, online pieces by George De Stefano, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, and Joseph Sciorra), it is time to lay claim to such visionary thinkers as Mario Savio. And, yes, I’ll take an enormous scone with my cappuccino, per favore.

     

  • Art & Culture

    Garment Workers and Union Activists in Tinsel Town



    I’m a Netflix subscriber, of course, but I still on occasion rent from Berkeley’s best video store, Reel Video. Walking around its labyrinth of DVDs is similar to strolling around the stacks of a good library. It’s a surefire way to come across titles that will keep you dreaming of holing up in a hotel room in Sardinia in the middle of winter with nothing to do but watch movies.
     
    And so it was at Reel last week that I came across a newly released series from Sony, “Martini Movies;” films that according to the box copy are “hip and iconic films for the cool film lover.” I’m not really sure what that means—to me they just seemed like B movies on a crime theme. I was drawn to all of them, but most of all to 1957’s The Garment Jungle (directed by Vincent Sherman), which promised to bring together Italian Americans and labor in the shape of a noir.
     
    The opening credits state that the film was based on a series of “articles” without any more explanation. A couple of email exchanges with Tom Zaniello of Northern Kentucy University (author of Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff and The Cinema of Globalization) led me to at least one of the articles the screenplay was based on: Lester Velie’s “Gangsters in the Dress Business” from Readers’s Digest, July 1955. (The original trailer, linked here, calls attention to the featherweight American magazine as a way to establish the film’s journalistic credibility.)
     
    A series of Velie’s articles—Red Scare-era all the way—were collected in Labor U.S.A. Today (first published in 1958), a book my husband brought home at my request from Oakland’s Laney College Library, where it hadn’t been checked out since 1973. In Velie’s chapter “The Boys from Seventh Avenue,” in a section called “Garment Jungle,” he outlines the different ways in which (mostly Italian American) “hoodlums” violently attempt to keep the garment industry non-unionized, mainly by coercing sweatshop owners, blackmailing and threatening union organizers.  
     
    And it is here that Velie outlines the 1949 murder of William Lurye, a union activist in the garment industry who was brutally murdered by union-busting (mostly) Italian American organized crime figures. As a cultural critic, I’m fascinated at how this real historical event gets reinterpreted on screen. Sherman’s film relocates the Italian American identity of the original gangsters to the union organizers themselves.
     
    Of note is a character by the name of Tulio Renata (played by a young Robert Loggia), who more or less depicts the real-life Lurye. He’s written basically as a garment workers’ version of Pete Panto!
     
    Our sympathies lie completely with Tulio, not only because he’s on the side of the workers, but because he’s got a likeable wife, Teresa (played by Gia Scala, neè Giovanna Scoglio), and a young baby, Maria.
     
    The image of this young, Italian American, politically progressive family, was for me the best part of the film. Their relationship is touching and warm, even as Teresa has to negotiate at times Tulio’s all-too-typical (Italian American) machismo. They have an understanding about each other’s needs: we see him caring for the baby while she’s working (teaching dancing!), and we hear her characterize his commitment to the cause: “He’s not in it for himself, but to help others,” she tells the sympathetic son of a garment industry boss.
     
    Formally the film is straight-forward, nothing fancy. The box’s description of it as a noir is somewhat misleading, I think. It has no femme fatale, no fatalistic private detective, only a gritty underworld and questionable morality. Instead, it shares much with other great U.S. labor films from the 1950s, most conspicuously with two 1954 films: On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth. Both were filmed on location, whereas the majority of The Garment Jungle was shot on a Columbia sound stage. One notable exception is the use of stock footage, presumably from Lurye’s funeral with thousands of garment workers in attendance, to depict Tulio’s public funeral. (Check out a description of Lurye’s funeral in Fighting for the Union Label by Kenneth C. Wolensky, Nicole H. Wolensky, and Robert P. Wolensky).
     
    Cinema images of Italian Americans who are strong, courageous, and compelling--and not members of the mob or solely carried by the weight of stereotypes--are rare. They seem to pop up in unexpected places--like in the aisles of a hoary institution like a library or a video store.

  • Facts & Stories

    Cross-Oceanic Support for Barack Obama’s Bid for the White House


    A couple of unnamed gondoliers in Venice have taken a 1958 hit written by Italians Domenico Modugno and Franco Migliacci— “Nel blu dipinto di blu” (more commonly known as “Volare”)—and given it a 2008 U.S. presidential spin.

     
    The song has been recorded by over 100 artists, including Connie Francis, Frank Zappa, Dean Martin, Mina, and my favorite, Alex Chilton from Big Star.  
     
    This is the pro-Obama gondoliers' version:
     
     
     
     
    And here's the original version:
     
     
     
     
    How great (and outrageously goofy) to see cross-oceanic support for Barack Obama’s bid for the White House! Am I supposed to be pessimistic and wonder if this was just a gimmick to make tourists happy? Does it matter?

  • Art & Culture

    The Gate on the “Golden Gate”


    I recently read Valenti Angelo’s novel Golden Gate to my five-year-old son. The children’s book, published in 1939, tells the story of Nino, a young boy from Northern Italy who emigrates to California, passing briefly through Ellis Island and spending one night in “a lodging house run by a Neapolitan” somewhere on Bleecker Street (63).

     

     It’s a compelling story. For one, it’s unusual for any American novel, let alone one meant for kids, to emphasize the under-told story of everyday Italians in California. Second, it offers a series of details, couched in terms accessible to a child, about how Italian immigrants negotiated their entrance into US life, suggesting ways new immigrants sometimes ignored or refigured assimilationist pressures.
     
    Angelo (1897-1982) emigrated as a child from Massarosa (Tuscany) in 1905 and his family eventually settled in the town of Antioch, not far from San Francisco. He held a number of manual labor and factory jobs in and around Antioch, and later in San Francisco, until he landed a job at a photo-engraving shop in the city. It was there that he realized he had an artist’s mind. He wrote a number of children’s novels—Golden Gate is part of a series that feature Italian kids and take place both in the U.S. and in Italy. Angelo’s real calling, however, was as a book illustrator and engraver.
     
    Golden Gate, Valenti Angelo
     
     
    Golden Gate (title page) (The Viking Press, 1939)
     
     
    Among his book illustrations are those that adorn the first edition of John Fante’s Dago Red (1940).
     
     
    Dago Red, John Fante (illustrated by Valenti Angelo)
     
    John Fante's Dago Red (1940), Cover by Valenti Angelo
    (picture courtesy of Stephen Cooper)
     
     
    He preferred linoleum (linocuts) to wood in creating his engravings, and he worked on all kinds of books; his work helped establish the stark, geometrical aesthetic we now recognize as distinctly midcentury.
     
    Subway Entrance, New York City                                Christ
     
    "Subway Entrance, New York City" (1969)                           "Christ" (date unknown)
     
     
    The images in Golden Gate reminded me and my son of those of another California-Italian American children’s writer and illustrator, Leo Politi, the centennial of whose birth is being celebrated throughout much of Southern California and the Central Valley this year.
     
    wattsTowersPoliti             song of the swallows
     
     "The Watts Towers," by Leo Politi               from Song of the Swallows by Leo Politi
     
    The novel itself feels a bit dated, at least for a cookies-and-juice crowd: excessive description; old-fashioned word choice; questionable depictions of Native Americans. But at the same time it’s surprisingly fresh and contemporary in a number of ways. For starters, there is more than a passing reference to Nino’s immigrant neighbors, mostly Irish and Chinese families. And the narrative shares a particular Italian American sensibility that I found to be downright revealing.
     
    When Nino and his grandfather gather clay and stones around their farm and build Nino’s mother an outdoor oven so she can bake bread—“just like the bread back home in the village” (101)—I couldn’t help but notice how the novel shows Italian immigrant place-making. Before the oven gets used, Nino carves a rooster out of clay and fixes it on the oven as a decorative touch and as a reminder of a similar rooster he had back in Italy. In fact, when my son asked me why Nino had done that, realizing that the rooster had nothing to do with the utility of the oven, I had to refrain from starting a lecture on Italian American folk art (it took all my energy not to gather up our things and drive him out to Fresno to see the Underground Gardens right then and there).
     
    Likewise, when Nino goes to school for the first time, Angelo characterizes how the boy might have stood out—with his broken English, the wine be brought with his lunch, and his odd clothing (he goes to school wearing a smock—the classic Italian grembiulino kids still wear to school today— rather than the overalls the other boys were wearing).
     
    Nino
     
    Cover of Nino (1938), the first novel in the series,
    with protagonist in obligatory grembiulino
     
     
    It’s very much a boy’s story, and we see everything through Nino’s eyes. And of course I would have liked to have heard more about his mother, Allinda, or his baby sister, Gloria, whom she gives birth to under less-than-ideal circumstances.
     
    Certainly, too, I have to wonder what kind of readers would have picked up the novel in 1939, just before Italy and the US went to war, and what kinds of lessons were taken away about Italian Americans. Nevertheless, today it remains an interesting example of how books meant for children also play a part in shaping what it means to be Italian in the United States.

     

  • Art & Culture

    Italian Metal Gets Religion


     

    Check out The World’s review of Fratello Metallo, Cesare Bonizzi, the 62-year-old Capuchin monk, former Ivory Coast-missionary, who mashes up Catholic dogma and heavy metal.
     
    I’m not a big metal fan, but I’m always up for hearing new sounds. A few years ago when I was living in Campania, a neighbor, a University of Naples undergrad, made my husband and me a series of metal CDs after countless conversations about music, movies, and television. Except for an occasional Italian track (like “Siam tre piccoli porcellini” by Afterhours), most of it was US-based. And, I admit, I barely got through each CD once.
     
    Although Bonizzi's been playing metal for over ten years, he’s only recently started to get noticed outside of Italy and Christian metalhead circles. Listening to him is probably not going to make me a convert—either to metal or back to Catholicism. But it is yet another reminder of the crazy ways of popular culture and, not to turn all Gramscian again but, the power of hegemonic discourse to cultivate (and appropriate) potentially subversive forms of culture. 

  • Life & People

    Breastfeeding Breasts!


    Among Tina Modotti’s better-known photographs is “Baby Nursing,” with Luz Jimenez nursing a young baby; it was first exhibited on October 7, 1926, in the Galeria de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and later appeared in a review of the exhibit in the December 15, 1926, issue of Art Digest. Like most of Modotti’s work, the image makes visible otherwise overlooked people and places, showing, if you will, the aesthetic of the everyday. As Art historian, Sarah M. Lowe puts it (in describing “Baby Nursing”):

     
                The photograph [is] tender without being sentimental and descriptive without objectifying
                its subjects…. The image is tightly cropped so that the geometric roundness of the breast
                and of the baby’s head become significant compositional elements.
                (Tina Modotti: Photographs, 31)   
     
    That Modotti’s subjects included a suckling child and mother reminds us of the importance of childrearing and daily, necessary, and very personal kinds of relations, relations that much of our contemporary society judges less than essential. In order for nursing to happen, it’s not just biology that has to be in place, but social parameters, a point alluded to by Modotti’s series of photographs of mothers and children. In short, she gave recognition to the value as well as the beauty of the relationship between mother and child.
     
     
    "Children Bathing"           "Mother and Child"
     
             "Children Bathing" (Tina Modotti)                                      "Mother and Child" (Tina Modotti)
     
    Tina Modotti was born in Udine (Friuli) in 1896 and immigrated to California at seventeen. Her basic biography (Italian immigrant; seamstress; film actress; anti-fascist revolutionary; photographer of Mexico’s indigenous people; Communist Party activist; first model and student, later lover and co-worker, to Edward Weston; friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera) is out there, knowable. Her status as one of a few early female photographers (albeit in the shadows of Edward Weston) is established in the world of art history. Nevertheless, she’s yet to be fully embraced within many Italian American circles. Do a few Google searches with terms such as “famous Italian Americans” or “well-known Italian Americans,” and you’ll see that she’s rarely listed. (The reasons for this I’ll leave for another post.)
     
    But allow me to return to women’s breasts for a moment. August is World Breastfeeding Month, an expansion of “World Breastfeeding Week” (August 1-7), itself a commemoration of the signing of the so-called Innocenti Declaration, adopted in 1990 by a consortium of international organizations, like UNICEF and WHO, which met at the “Innocents’ Hospital” in Florence. The document declares the overall benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and children and suggests public policy goals to further encourage nursing, especially in the first year of life.
     
    It seems quite fitting to me—a woman, a mother, a professor—that my posts on this site would now and then explicitly address this particular trifecta of my identity. Within Italian and Italian American everyday culture, motherhood, and specifically nursing mothers, evokes strong sentiments. Most women, mothers or not, have stories to tell, stories that get shared mainly with other women over the telephone, at the park, in the kitchen, at the water cooler—or on blogs!
     
    Before shutting down my computer so I that I can tend to my own nursing baby girl, I close here with another image of breastfeeding and motherhood.  Evoking a quasi-sublime experience, Carole Maso, Italian American author and Brown University professor of English, writes:
     
                This mythic elixir—so elemental, so essential. At the center of our living: a fountain.
                The very essence of how we live—since we have arrived, since we have been asked to
                enter this pact: curve of the world—earth bound, earth-linked, the love we pass. I am
                drinking the stars, the little monk said upon his chance  invention of champagne. I look at
                her drunken, pleasured face. That magic potion, her satiated face—a heady brew. With her
                small hand she pats my breast three times and she is at home.
     
                (Carole Maso, "Rose and Pink and Round," in The Milk of Almonds: Italian American

  • Op-Eds

    Italian Gambling Site and the US Presidential Election


    There's not much to say here; I can only present what I've learned (thanks SPD!).

     

    Actor (think "Law and Order"  or "The Hunt for Red October") Fred Thompson, a one-time Republican Presidential hopeful, started a website back in the fall, after announcing on Jay Leno his interest in running for president. The website imwithfred.com has since been bought by an online Italian gaming business. Is this a joke? You'll have to decide for yourself.

     

    The political bloggers are all over it--see wonkette. com. It makes me think it might be about time we start our own online Italian American-political blog spot, say, maybe...wopette.com.

     

     

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