Articles by: Laura e. Ruberto

Art & Culture

Youth Masses, Black Skin, and Italian Beat Music

A few years ago, Duck Records released on CD “La messa dei giovani” (“The Youth Mass”), a recording from 1966. Youth masses, or le messe dei giovani, were driven by the Second Vatican Council, which led the way for, among other things, a decreased use of Latin and an increased use of electric guitars inside church walls.

It’s unclear how many teens were drawn to the Catholic Church because of the masses, but the distinctly 1960s events mark a curious cultural moment. They offer an unexpected occasion to consider some of the relationships between Italy and the United States and the way race sometimes gets constructed by and against popular culture.

With the popular and the official mixing in a sanctified space, le messe dei giovani turned into hardcore beat concerts. On April 27, 1966, three bands—I Barrittas, the Bumpers, and Angel and the Brains—performed in the chapel of San Filippo Neri in Rome, turning out one of the most memorable live performances of the Italian beat era.

After the San Filippo Neri concert, the LP La Messa dei Giovani (Ariel Records) was released; in 1969, an English version came out as The Mass for Peace (Avant Garde Records, a New York-based Catholic folk rock label). At the time of the Italian release, Time Magazine gave it this capsule review:

The Mass of the Young is about as far out as an LP can get. Three big-beat groups sing an

entire Mass accompanied by electric guitars. The Latins call it the Messa Ye Ye, and it had

its world premiere April 27 in a Rome church while youngsters frugged in the aisles and

priests clapped hands. (July 6, 1966)

The Bumpers and Angel and the Brains were both Roman bands; they were later featured on other messe dei giovani LPs, many written by the soundtrack composer Marcello Giombini. At the time, I Barrittas had a stronger following, especially in their native Sardinia, where they played various musical styles—from more traditional folk music sung in Sardinian, to straight garage rock and the spiritually-inspired beat sound heard in La Messa.

HERE'S ONE OF I BARRITTAS'S SARDINIAN-INSPIRED BEATS

I was first turned on to I Barrittas by their signature anti-violence number, dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., called “Non uccidere” (“Don’t Kill”)--listen here. I discovered it more than a decade ago on the compilation 60’s Beat Italiano(Get Hip Records, an independent label out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).

Another track on the album, “Balbettando,” was released in 1967 by I Cinque Monelli (The Five Rascals—could they be alluding to their Italian American paesani, The Rascals?).

There’s not much out there about I Cinque Monelli, but I recently came across a contemporary cover of “Balbettando” by a group out of Florence called I Ganzi, part of the neo neo-beat movement. For me its double-neo status is made most obvious by the presence of a female vocalist. Italian beat groups, as with much of the rest of the world’s garage rock, were definitely dominated by young men.

HERE ARE I GANZI COVERING I CINQUE MONELLI'S "BALBETTANDO"

The track “Balbettando” is a straightforward romantic tune about a guy who can’t talk, and balbetta (stammers) in front of a girl who clearly has a thing for him. What interests me about the song isn’t the beat so much as that the girl is from New Orleans. It’s a lyric I always found a bit unexpected; on reflection, the reference to New Orleans, a city with such a rich musical and cultural history, makes perfect sense.

And then the former college radio DJ in me kicks in and I think: New Orleans + music = an opportunity to talk about race in America. And with that I get to Nino Ferrer’s hit "Vorrei la pelle nera" (“I’d like black skin”) first released in France as “Je voudrais être noir” in 1966--listen here. Nino Ferrer (1934-1998) was born Agostino Ferrari in Genoa to an Italian father and a French mother. He grew up mainly between France and the French territory, New Caledonia, and was turned on to American Jazz and R&B early on.

His ode to some of the great American musicians of all times—James Brown, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett—attacks racist practices while it plays into long-standing ideas connecting dark skin to entertainment. With lines like “I do all I can to sing like you guys, but nothing can be done, I’ll never be able to and I think it’s only because my color’s not right,” the song makes an all-too-common essentialist argument about singing abilities and race.

And yet it goes on to critique the violent racism against black people (with an outdated/derogatory word, “negretto”) that are “burned now and then with utmost serenity,” asking for a response from “Signor Faubus” (six-term Democratic Governor of Arkansas known for turning the National Guard on nine African American students entering Little Rock Central High School in 1957).

Here are some of the song’s lyrics, in its Italian version:

            Ehi, ehi, ehi dimmi Wilson Pickett
            Ehi, ehi, ehi dimmi tu James Brown

            Questa voce dove la trovate?

            Signor King, signor Charles, signor Brown

            Io faccio tutto per poter cantar come voi

            Ma non c'è niente da fare, non ci riuscirò mai

            E penso che sia soltanto per il mio color che non va

            Ecco perché io vorrei, vorrei la pelle nera

            Vorrei la pelle nera

            Ehi, ehi, ehi dimmi tu signor Faubus, dimmi come si può

            Arrostire un negretto ogni tanto con la massima serenità

            Io dico Nino tu non ci dovresti pensar

            Ma non c'è niente da fare per dimenticar

            Sto maledetto colore di pelle che mi brucia un po'



            Ecco perché io vorrei, vorrei la pelle nera

            Vorrei la pelle nera

Taken together, I Barrittas, I Cinque Monelli, and Nino Ferrer, suggest an intriguing cultural mash-up between Italy and the United States, one that raises questions about how popular culture gets disseminated and how ethnic identities get formed against, between, and within assumptions about skin color and gender roles.

A number of scholars who have dealt specifically with issues pertaining to music in Italy and the United States are already keenly aware of the connections I’m suggesting, and so I note some of their work here:

- John Gennari’s analysis of the Italian American appropriation of African American culture and vice-a-versa in his essay “Passing for Italian: Crooners and Gangsters in Crossover Culture” was a breath of fresh air when I first read it in 1997 and continues to be relevant to questions of cultural appropriation and race;

- Thomas J. Ferraro’s Feeling Italian suggests how a sense of Italianness gets connected to a particular set of race, class, and gender identities that in turn sustain the consumption of Italian American popular culture (be it Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, or Frank Sinatra);

- Pasquale Verdicchio’s Bound by Distance uses the work of Antonio Gramsci to consider how Italian hip hop and other popular culture, developed out of and in dialogue with Italy’s history of emigration, the Italian North-South (racialized) divide, Italian American’s relationship to African American culture, and contemporary (non-western) immigrants to Italy;

- Joseph Sciorra’s posts on this site, as Joey Skee, or at italianrap.com has furthered the critical discussion of music and performance by linking the Italian diaspora, contemporary (non-western) immigration to Italy, folk culture, and various (hybrid) ethnic/racial identities, most recently in his consideration of Italian American hip hop.

To wrap things up here, it’s not so much that the Italian messe dei giovani have anything explicitly to do with the construction of race but rather that perhaps more than other performance arts, music can really stay with us, well after we’ve experienced it, swaying beyond its original intent. As such, music can be seen, as Theodor Adorno talked about, an example of the “aesthetic relations of productions,” that is, art as “both an autonomous entity and a social fact” (from Aesthetic Theory, 245), continuing to reflect on and live within the world.

Art & Culture

Mujeres Migrantes Italianas

The exhibit “Miradas de luz” (a poetic translation might be “Expressions of Light”)—culled from testimonials, photographs, and other ephemera—recently closed in Buenos Aires. The show documents the story of Italian women immigrants in Argentina.

Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, roughly 2.5 million Italians arrived in Argentina, over half a million of whom were women. This exhibit looks at their lives and the role they had on the nation generally. The show highlights Italian-Argentine women’s activism in labor unions, in the push to change child labor laws, and in other major movements, such as the 1907 “huelga de las escobas” (literally, the “broom strike”), which protested the high rents and squalid living conditions of many poor immigrants.

An Argentine friend recently forwarded me a review about the exhibit; it was published in an Argentine daily, the center-left newspaper Pagina 12 (in its “Las 12,” the paper’s women-focused supplement).

I was taken by the previously untold stories of the women recorded in the exhibit and described in the review, women whose lives were generally overshadowed by the machismo pervading both their native and adopted countries. But I was particularly interested in the description of how the show ends in the contemporary moment, showing today’s heterogeneous and multicultural porteños: even with an economic downturn that has pushed thousands of Argentines (back) to countries like Italy and Spain, new immigrants, mainly from other Latin American countries, continue to seek work in Buenos Aires.

Alicia Bernasconi of the Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos (Cemla)—an academic center connected to Scalabrini Migration institutes worldwide—is quoted in the review, commenting on the connections between historical and contemporary moments of migration. She hopes for projects on the history of Italian emigration that would be organized in Italy itself,

para que la sociedad italiana sea capaz de revivir su pasado como inmigrante para

tener una actitud más positiva hacia los inmigrantes de hoy

(so that the Italian society is able to re-live its past as immigrants so that they can

develop a more positive perspective on the immigrants of today).

As I’ve suggested in other posts, seeing these links made—especially in light of the EU’s changes in immigration laws, the U.S.’s failure with respect to immigrant rights—makes me hopeful.

3328_Westward_1215488193.italian

Art & Culture

Westward the Women

William Wellman’s relatively unknown 1951 film Westward the Women documents an Italian American woman’s conditional acceptance in society. Through the character of Signora Moroni, the film depicts Italian Americans as ethnic whites—at once different from but part of the status quo.

The film, written by Frank Capra, tells the story of 140 women pioneers who traveled from Chicago to California in 1851 as mail-order brides for men who had been living in the fictional Whitman’s Valley. Similar to some of the films Capra directed, such as Meet John Doe and State of the Union, Westward the Women’s Italian American characters have important supporting roles.

In great part the film is a typical western, invoking the idea of manifest destiny, a wild west with rugged terrain and savage Indians, helpless women, and a morally complex male hero. Yet it also incorporates ideas about gender and ethnicity quite unusual in Hollywood cinema: by featuring a post-World War II view of Italians as ethnic whites in a story set in the 1850s, and by emphasizing the experience of one woman, the film becomes a reflection on a certain kind of Italian American female identity.

The Neapolitan-born Renata Vanni plays Signora Moroni, a widow with a young son. In the 1940s, Vanni was signed on by Warner Brothers, and her first credited film work was in Westward the Women. She had previously performed in Italian theater and radio in New York City; later she would go on to work in TV and film, including playing a Mexican woman in Gunsmoke, the landlady in That Girl, and Donna Toscana in the 1989 film adaptation of Wait Until Spring, Bandini. She died in 2004.

We first meet Signora Moroni in Chicago, where women are being chosen to make the trip to California. Her stereotypical peasant look is striking in comparison to the other women. In fact, we are never told she is Italian until the very end of the film, and thus we’re immediately encouraged to rely on our recognition of popular culture markers of an Italian immigrant to determine her ethnic (and national) identity.

Neither she nor her son, Tony (played by Guido Artufi), utter a word in English; their Italian is neither translated nor subtitled for viewers. Pantomime and shot-reverse-shot cues help the non-Italian-speaking audience, as well as the characters on screen, understand the Moronis’ dialogue.

That Signora Moroni gestures at a gunshot when she tries to explain “mio marito è morto” may merely be because it’s the easiest way she can think of to explain her husband’s absence. On the other hand, for a 1950s film audience—already schooled in images of Italians and the mob—the gunshot becomes a reference to a violent underworld in which Mr. Moroni may have been involved.

[BTW: the confusion many immigrants encounter(ed) with their names being mispronounced and misspelled—I, for one, am continually correcting how others spell my last name—seems to have been inadvertently documented in this film as well. The family’s surname is variously spelled and pronounced as Moroni and Maroni. The credits and the Anglo Roy Whitman give it an American pronunciation and spelling (Maroni). The woman and son, as well as the son’s headstone, say/read Moroni.]

Out of pity more than anything else, Signora Moroni and her son are permitted to join the wagon train west, but their outsider status remains. Midway through the film, Tony dies in a tragic scene (shown here).

From the point of his death on, Signora Moroni becomes a hysterical and degraded (and even more stereotypical) figure, tied to a wagon, wailing for her child; her isolation becomes even more pronounced.

But the film’s final sequence offers a significant turning point for Signora Moroni. It’s as though after overcoming death, draught, hunger, and the like, Signora Moroni can at last find a place for herself in this country. It’s as though under the sun of the Golden State, her ethnic identity can shine, still an outsider but now part of the crowd, too.

Once in Whitman’s Valley, the women all approach a dance pavilion where they pair off with the eager men. Signora Moroni notices an orange tree nearby and guiltily picks a piece of fruit. The use of the orange here both as a symbol of California and of Italy is clever, however ahistorical. According to Jay Mechling’s history of the orange (found in Rooted in America), by the 1850s oranges were not very common in California, though by 1950 they were. Similarly, in Italy, oranges were mainly only known in the Southern regions.

With fruit in hand, Signora Moroni approaches a man (played by Zacharias Yaconelli) and, still speaking unsubtitled Italian, asks him if he is Italian, since, she gathered that he would be by his photo. Their exchange—half in English, half in Italian, curiously— leads to a love match. They are both from the North (Milan and Genoa), and they both like oranges! (Their Northern Italian origin works against a longstanding misconception that all Italians in the US come from Southern Italy, and at the same time reflects the history of Italians in California, most of whom came from Northern regions.)

In many ways, the film rather simplistically portrays the history of California and US racial politics (there are other immigrant characters, too—Irish, French, and Japanese). And yet the fact that it even approached such topics in the postwar years suggests that it merits more attention.

The film, with its majority female cast and interesting sexual and ethnic perspective, could tell us much about the centrality of maleness and whiteness in this country at mid-century. But like so many other creative works that ask us to consider the role of women in the formation of culture, Westward the Women barely rates a footnote in US film history.

Clemenza and Tessio are like Britain and France

A critique of the US capitalist system. A comment on the Cold War. We’ve all heard these (and other) political-economic readings of both Mario Puzo’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s film(s).

I came across John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell’s article “Pax Corleone” while checking out the “Readings” section of the July issue of Harper’s that has been lying around my house for a few weeks now. It was first published in February 2008 in The National Interest Online, a site that describes itself as a place that houses “informed analysis and frank but reasoned exchanges on foreign policy and international affairs.”

For the sake of getting out a quick blog post, let’s put aside all the cultural readings of the film and novel that intertwine such ideas as assimilation, ethnic identity, masculinity, gender, domesticity, religion, etc.

And let’s not even humor the idea of taking on those anti-defamation issues that always come up when someone utters the word godfather. Yawn.

Instead, take some time (10 minutes should probably do it) and read Hulsman and Mitchell’s description of what they call “the Sicilian art of alliance management” (could this be irony?).

In other words, what happens when the stories of the Tattaglias (misspelled in the article), Sollozzo, the “cakemaker” (Enzo the baker, unnamed in the article), and of course Michael and his family are meticulously applied to contemporary US foreign policy and the 2008 presidential race?

And does it make a difference that Barack Obama names The Godfather as one of his all-time favorite movies?

Op-Eds

The European Union’s Immigration Policy and Italian Immigrants in Latin America

Earlier this month, the European Parliament passed a controversial “Return Directive” immigration policy. The legislation is meant to give all EU countries a more balanced immigration policy, but in fact it opens the possibility for individual countries to adopt harsher practices toward undocumented immigrants (e.g., undocumented immigrants who do not voluntarily leave can be detained for up to 18 months, children can be detained and deported, a five-year “re-entry” ban will be implemented).

The EU’s Return Directive—barely noted in the U.S.’s English-language press—has been closely followed in Latin America, especially in countries that have high numbers of citizens working in Europe today. Politicians and activists in countries such as Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador have been speaking out against the directive, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has threatened to slow oil exports to countries that implement the policy.

Like the U.S., Europe has increasingly relied on foreign workers to fill both skilled and unskilled jobs that many native-born citizens appear to have no interest in taking. At the same time, Europe’s immigrant populations send home significant amounts of money, creating a complicated transnational reliance on this ever-expanding workforce. (In 2007 remittances to Latin America from Western Europe totaled over 10 million dollars, with most coming from Spain and Italy.)

Latin American critiques of the policy have again and again been couched in terms of Europe’s own history of emigration. It seems that unlike many in the United States and Western Europe, Latin Americans have not forgotten that their social and economic development came on the backs of thousands of Europe’s “destitute” (not to mention out-and-out colonization!). It takes just a few clicks on the web to find critiques of the EU policy that invoke this past.

Watch the extremely outspoken Hebe de Bonafini, one of Argentina’s Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, on YouTube (in Spanish).

Towards the end of the speech, in her usual fervent style, de Bonafini attacks the developing anti-immigrant stance of European countries by calling attention to the shared migration experience of Argentina, Italy, and Spain. I quote a roughly-translated excerpt here:

We refute what’s happening in Italy, we refute what’s happening in Spain …Don’t they

remember when they came to this country, where no one asked them anything? All of us

are children of immigrants, people who came to this country, where no one asked them

where they came from and no one threw them out like is happening now [in Europe].

She closes by creating a familial link among all immigrants: “Immigrants are our brothers and from this Plaza we declare that they all have our solidarity”.

Similary, Chávez declared the EU policy a human rights violation, one that is particularly hurtful from a continent whose people were pushed out of their own countries by poverty; he notes the “legions” of starving Europeans who made lives for themselves in Latin America, where “none of them was mistreated or returned to Europe.”

In Bolivia, President Evo Morales put out a statement that included this historical reading:

Europeans arrived en masse in the countries of Latin America and North America, without

visas or conditions imposed by the authorities. They were always welcome, and they

continue to be, in our countries on the American continent, which therefore absorb the

economic misery of Europe and its political crises. They came to our continent to exploit

its wealth and transfer it to Europe, with a very high cost for America’s original population.

Such is the case in our Cerro Rico, in Potosi, where the fabulous silver mines provided the

European continent its coinage from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The goods and personal

rights of the European migrants were always respected.

These examples (and there are plenty of others—see the brief list of blog posts and news pieces linked below) no doubt exaggerate the level of acceptance Latin American countries historically had toward immigrants.

As such, I’m reminded of what Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Argentine writer and nationalist, thought about European immigration to the Americas. In the mid-nineteenth century he traveled throughout Europe and the United States, writing letters that were later published in newspapers in Chile and Uruguay. He was not confident that all Europeans were meant to support the development of a nation; he wrote:

I come from touring Europe, from admiring her monuments, from prostrating myself before

her science, still stunned by her prodigies; but I have seen her millions of peasants,

proletarians and vile artisans, degraded, not worthy of being counted among men; the

encrusted scabs that cover their bodies, the tattered rags that they wear, do not sufficiently

reveal the darkness of their spirit; and in political matters, of social organization, some of

this darkness reaches and obscures the minds of the wise…

Indeed, as Tomás F. Taraborrelli explains, Sarmiento, “displaying his own brand of racism, offers a word of caution to his readers in Latin America who believed that immigration would cure all of the nation’s problems.” Sarmiento thought that “the new wave of immigrants he sees arriving in the United States…would add an element of barbarism to an otherwise progressive nation” (in “The Conquest of the American Western Frontier in Sarmiento’s Imaginary,” Journal of the West, 2004).

Nevertheless, turning back to the present moment, rhetorical strategies which call attention to Europe’s history of emigration in light of its position as a receiver of new immigrants helps build symbolic and (perhaps) real points of solidarity among people across national and cultural boundaries.

In the Italian example, plenty of artists who recognize the lived experiences of past and contemporary migrants form such connections in their work (think of Amara Lakhous’s novel, Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio, Gianni Amelio’s film Lamerica, or even Italian and Italian American hiphop artists). It will be interesting to see what long-term policy changes come from political activists taking up a similar theme.

Op-Eds

Forgetting the Past: Ethnic Identity and How Italian and English Fail Us

How might the U.S. presidential race present a moment to consider the role of race in Italy and the U.S.? Having read Ottorino Cappelli’s and Maria Laurino’s recent posts on the topic, I thought I’d take things into a new direction of sorts.

The subject of Italian Americans, race, and politics brings together two topics of particular interest to me: the role of memory in the creation of an Italian American white ethnic identity and the terms used to talk about different generations of post-immigrant “ethnic” individuals. And in this sense, I agree with Laurino’s and Cappelli’s respective views that the current election brings to the surface important issues about race and identity in the U.S. and Italy.

One intriguing issue related to the question of Italian American whiteness is the way in which popular memory contributes to the creation of identity. Whatever we call it (popular memory, public memory, collective memory, cultural memory, historical memory), shared recollections in part construct “a group, giving it a sense of its past, and defining its aspirations for the future” (as James Fentress and Chris Wickham put it).

The display of that memory—in what we read, what we watch, how we dress, how/if we worship, how we vote—becomes in part how ethnic identities become codified within larger social and cultural structures. Anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo in looking at Italian American communities considers how these memories more often than not become sentimentalized, especially around issues of gender, race, and class, creating a “rhetoric of nostalgia” about a past that never existed.

This kind of selective popular memory leads to, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the reliance on stereotypical images of Italian American men and women in cinema, among other places. This nostalgia, what Jennifer Guglielmo refers to as a loss (“Italians were not always white, and the loss of this memory is one of the tragedies of racism in America,” in Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America), might very well be connected to how individual Italian Americans think of themselves and, in turn, the choices they make in the voting booth.

Italian American identities, as the I-Italy site makes very clear, are vast and complex. And yet when we exercise our right to vote we align ourselves with likeminded voters, and in so doing cement our own identities as belonging to some greater community (surely not only an Italian American one!).

This discussion of the construction of identity is in great part an academic one alone. (In other words, individuals’ everyday lived experiences are caught in very real and very messy combinations of how power plays out with race, class, gender, and sexuality.) And so we might consider the role language plays, but not though with regard to identifying terms and slurs used for different groups (think of that great clip from Do the Right Thing that Cappelli uses in his post).

Instead, I’d like to bring up the failings of both English and Italian to have given us specific words to help us remember the past, especially in relation to Italian migration. I’m thinking of words like those that exist in Japanese, words that describe the variety of Japanese transnational migration.

Here are a few of the terms, now part of American English:

~ Issei

The generation who emigrated from Japan, generally referring to pre-WW II emigration (not eligible for U.S. citizenship until 1952).

~ Nisei

The first generation born abroad, generally of an issei couple.

~ Sansei

The child of a nisei couple, or the second generation to be born abroad.

~ Yonsei

The child of a sansei couple, or the third generation to be born abroad.

~ Kibei

An individual of Japanese descent born in the U.S. but mainly educated in Japan.

If adopted uncritically such terms no doubt may actually obscure rather than clarify. On the other hand, these terms have come to underscore legal issues related to race and citizenship rights in U.S. history (click image below to view this recent satirical take on that history care of The Onion).

("U.S. Finally Gets Around to Closing Last WW II Internment Camp")

I wonder at times what the upshot might be if we had such words to talk about Italians. Terms in any language that would begin to clarify some of the nuances of the history of the Italian diaspora could perhaps be one way to keep nostalgia at bay (and if the world turns my way, keep progressive politics at the forefront).

The result (perhaps a tad oversimplified) might be Italians who, faced with new immigrants in Italy, remember their brothers’ and sisters’ own history of migration, and Italian Americans who, faced with new choices for president, remember not to look at the past through rose-colored glasses.

------------------------------------------------------------

Select Bibliography

di Leonardo, Micaela. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender Among California Italian-Americans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1984.

Fentress, James and Chris Wickham. Social Memory. London: Blackwell Press, 1992.

Guglielmo, Jennifer and Salvatore Salerno, Eds. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Hayashi, Brian Masaru. Democratizing The Enemy: The Japanese American Internment. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2004.

Facts & Stories

Becoming Italian American: POWs and National Identity

June 2, la Festa della Repubblica, marks the day in 1946 when a referendum passed to rid Italy of a monarchy; it comes a week after Memorial Day in the U.S., first celebrated to commemorate fallen soldiers of the Civil War. The two national holidays remind me of some of the ways ethnic identities get formed in relation to larger national ones, that “imagined community” we are all part of to one extent or another.

Consider the experience of Italian prisoners of war in the U.S. during the Second World War. Over 50,000 Italian soldiers, sailors, and airmen were brought to the U.S. as POWs—most had been captured by the French or British in North Africa or Sicily and turned over to the U.S., whose resources were stronger.

For the majority of them, prison time in the U.S. became a liminal period during which they created and participated in a particular kind of Italian American experience. These men built what we might consider as micro-Italian American neighborhoods within the camps—keeping up traditions and customs as they did back home, speaking regional dialects while learning English, building religious altars and presepi, playing bocce and soccer, cooking Italian meals, and interacting with local Italian American communities outside of the camps.

An unknown number of POWs, after being repatriated at war’s end, returned to the U.S. as immigrants, putting an interesting spin on the concept of “return migration.” Social historians often distinguish between pre- and post-war Italian emigration, but the experience of Italian POWs asks us to develop a more fluid understanding of the history of emigration.

(ITALIAN SERVICE MEN, BENICIA, CALIFORNIA)

After the armistice was signed in 1943, the position of POWs was unclear, but eventually POWs had the option to sign a statement of allegiance to the U.S. Close to 45,000 men swore allegiance to the allied war effort and were placed into the newly formed Italian Service Units. ISU is a vague term for an equally vague position: members of the ISUs were no longer POWs in the same way as the Fascist Italians, Germans, or Japanese were, but neither were they free men nor regular U.S. military service men. (The Italian “non-collaborators” were placed in isolated, high-security prison camps. Check out Armando Gnisci’s Fame in America and Donald Mace Williams’ Interlude in Umbarger.)

The high number of conscripted soldiers in Mussolini’s army, most of whom were not hardcore ideologues, explains in great part why signing allegiance to the US might not have been difficult. The promise of fewer restrictions, coupled with a long-standing image most Italians would have shared of America as the land of opportunity, surely did much to persuade men to sign. But the choice to sign was not necessarily easy either.

One former POW (now a U.S. citizen) I interviewed some time ago explained his decision to sign the allegiance:

at the POW camp in Florence, Arizona, an Italian American officer who spoke some Italian

told us, “Now you cannot be gray any longer.” I remember his words so well: “No longer

gray—either white or black; if you stay black, you remain a prisoner, if you become white,

you’ll be free, like American soldiers.”

(It is telling that the choice between black and white, with its Fascist “black shirt” resonances, here becomes practically a rhetorical comment about Italian Americans’ transformation into ethnic whites.)

When the war ended, the men were repatriated, but an unknown number of them left their hometowns once again, this time as emigrants. Some prisoners returned immediately to the US to marry (often Italian American) women whom they’d met while in the US, as Camilla Calamandrei’s documentary Prisoners in Paradise so skillfully details. Calamandrei’s film calls attention to, among other things, the crazy way national and cultural identity disregards the insidious divisions of war.

The photos posted here all come from the Italian Service Unit in Benicia, California, where my paternal grandfather was housed in what I like to think about as his first experience as an immigrant. (In his case, a few years after being repatriated to Italy, he immigrated to the U.S. by way of Venezuela.)

(BOCCE COURT BUILT BY ITALIAN SERVICE MEN, BENICIA ARSENAL)

(CHAPEL AT BENICIA ARSENAL)

Notice how the men adapted themselves to their space, developing a daily life that linked them to Italy, informed by preconceived notions of America, and altered by their situation as prisoners. Created with the resources offered to them, many of these photos and the stories behind them are reminiscent of much of post-war Italian-Americana: POW and immigrant identity meeting in the space of the ISU camp.

(DANCE HALL BUILT BY ITALIAN SERVICE MEN, BENICIA)

Of course German and Japanese POWs in the U.S. did not have it so good. Watch this anti-Nazi propaganda film from 1944, Greater Victory, produced by United Specialists and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. It imparts the lesson of “goodwill, mutual respect, and teamwork” in the face of “hatred and intolerance” (as the prologue tells us).

(CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW GREATER VICTORY)

In this case a German American turned Nazi meets up with an antifascist Italian American. (Keep in mind that in the first part of the 1940s the lives of thousands of Italian Americans were altered by restrictions of different degrees placed on them as “enemy aliens,” making the patriotic Italian American shown here all the more relevant.)

In the film German POWs incarcerated in the U.S. escape and meet a number of American do-gooders, including one Luigi “Louis” Gusto (played by Tito Vuolo), who is running for county sheriff. Talking to the German escapees, who he assumes to be honest “fellow citizens” like himself, he explains: “America is the first-class land of opportunity. I come here thirty years ago. Then there’s nobody like the Italian fellow, only good for diggin’ ditch.”

He then goes on to promise that as sheriff he will “put all the bums, crooks, Fascisti, lazzaroni, gamblers, and Nazis in a great big jail.” That he parallels “lazzaroni” with twentieth century dictatorships adds a not-so-subtle complexity to his comment (especially in retrospect and in light of the June 2nd celebration of the Italian Republic).

The word “lazzaroni” generally refers to the Neapolitan working class; although for Marx they are the “lumpen proletariat,” and for an 1873 New York Times editorial they are an example of “superfluous humanity”. More specifically still, the lazzaroni are the class of ruffians/working poor who (perhaps against their better judgment) were pro-royalists and opposed the fledgling Neapolitan Republic formed in 1799.

So in honoring two nations’ histories, we might just take a moment to consider how male ethnic identity gets forged through the fires of war.

Select Bibliography

Cowell, Josephine W. History of Benicia Arsenal: Benicia, California: January 1851-1962. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1963.

Fiedler, David Winston. The Enemy Among Us: POWs in Missouri During World War II. Missouri Historical Society Press, 2003

Keefer, Louis E. Italian Prisoners of War in America: 1942-1946 Captives or Allies? New York: Praeger Publishers, 1992.

Williams, Donald Mace. Interlude in Umbarger: Italian POWs and a Texas Church. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech UP, 1991.

---. Italian POWs and a Texas Church: The Murals of St. Mary’s. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech UP, 1992.

Life & People

Holiday in Italy! (without Leaving the U.S.)

Most folks have heard of Venice Beach near Los Angeles and the canals built by Abbot Kinney in the early twentieth century to attract tourists to what was to be “the Coney Island of the West” and the “Venice of America.” Although today Venice Beach is better known for the eccentrics on its boardwalk than the few remaining canals, its mark as a U.S. cultural manifestation of what we might call the “cult of Italy” is pretty deeply set.

In a similar vein, but of more recent development, is the Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, sitting on the grounds of the former Sands Hotel (of Rat Pack fame). I’m not a big fan of Vegas, but everyone should see Las Vegas at least once. Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal—the lack of distinction between reality and fantasy—vividly plays itself out in Sin City. And the Venetian is a particularly great example of how Italian romantic identity gets reconfigured outside of Italy for moneymaking purposes.

(Can I seriously mention Las Vegas and not jot down, however travelogue-sounding, some of the town’s less-visible Old School Italian American establishments? The Liberace Museum and the Italian-Polish-American entertainer’s favorite restaurant, just steps away, Carluccio’s? The singing, roving accordion player who accompanies your meal at Battista’s Hole in the Wall, just off the strip? Or Capozolli’s, where I once shared a midnight meal with some AIHA conference-goers while listening to a Louis Prima cover band—check out Capozolli’s abrupt end. But I digress.)

What my point is in bringing up LA and Vegas is that there are plenty of examples of how U.S. culture has been taken in by Venice, and Italy more broadly, and repackaged for U.S. consumption. Venice, itself an Italian city that has in great part survived because of tourist money, is particularly susceptible to such treatment—in other words, I don't think anyone has made a passionate-getaway theme park out of a lesser-known city, say, the town of Pavia.

Simply put, Venice Beach and the Venetian seem to be related to a long tradition of non-Italians artists and writers incorporating their tourist perspective of the boot into their creative productions—from Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Byron, Keats, Goethe, Stendahl, Dickens, Shelly, Hawthorne, James, Radcliffe, Tennyson, Lessing, Bulwer-Lyton, Thackery, Benjamin, etc. Again and again we find exoticized depictions of Italy, its landscape, its people, its history.

My interest at the moment lies in the connection these images have to consumer culture.

- How is the “cult of Italy” used to make big bucks?

- What type of Italy gets refashioned in the U.S. for entertainment and profit?

- What happens to the image of Italy when this branding happens?

- How are these romanticized images a form of nostalgia, of an Italy that has never existed, devoid of references to poverty or emigration, emphasizing only the tourist potential of the boot?

Think for a moment about the post-WWII “Hollywood on the Tiber,” or HOT, films, that capitalized on cheap Italian labor, Marshall Plan economic subsidies, and exotic Mediterranean settings. The result was dozens of “sword and sandal” epics (e.g., Ben Hur, Spartacus, and Quo Vadis) and romantic travel films (e.g., Roman Holiday, It Started in Naples, and Summertime, the latter set in Venice).

Keenly aware of this deep-rooted American fascination with (and profiting from) Venice, I recently took a ride on Oakland’s own hyperreal Venetian moment when my children were invited to ride on an “authentic” gondola in Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland.

Oakland is renowned for many things, but generally none of them coincide with the kind of escapist consumer culture I’ve been talking about. With its gang violence, stark class differences, and earthquakes, Oakland indeed resembles parts of Italy, but few would associate it with the romantic myth of Venice.

And yet although the city’s older Italian American history is very much under the radar (as I’ve noted in previous posts), Gondola Servizio—owned and operated by an Italian American woman and her recent-émigré Venetian husband—suggests an intriguing moment of the hyperreal: Italian American identity reconfigured by the cult of Italy. It suggests something interesting for a new generation of Italian Americans that may in fact have broader repercussions for how ethnic identity gets created and sustained by work, consumer culture, and just everyday life.

Regardless of the academic attention I give such a scene and whatever Baudrillard (who passed away just last year) might have said about Oakland’s Venetian flare, I have to end by noting that it was fascinating to take in the city from that angle—I had a great time riding around Lake Merritt in a gondola!

Select Bibliography

Balboni, Alan. Beyond the Mafia: Italian Americans and the Development of Las Vegas. Las Vegas, NV, 2006.

Black, Jeremy. Italy and the Grand Tour. Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press, 2003.

Cosco, Joseph. Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions. New York: SUNY Press, 2003.

Davis, Robert C. and Garry Marvin. Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most Touristed City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Eglin, John. Venice Transfigured: The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660-1797. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.

Franci, Giovanna, Federico Zignani and Jose Gamez. Dreaming of Italy: Las Vegas and the Virtual Grand Tour. Las Vegas, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2005.

Hanney, Delores. Venice, California: A Centennial Commemorative in Postcards, 1905-2005. Santa Fe, NM, Center for American Places, 2005.

Lovell, Margaretta M. A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860-1915. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Holiday in Italy! (without Leaving the U.S.)

My interest at the moment lies in the connection these images have to consumer culture.

- How is the “cult of Italy” used to make big bucks?

- What type of Italy gets refashioned in the U.S. for entertainment and profit?

- What happens to the image of Italy when this branding happens?

- How are these romanticized images a form of nostalgia, of an Italy that has never existed, devoid of references to poverty or emigration, emphasizing only the tourist potential of the boot?

Select Bibliography

Balboni, Alan. Beyond the Mafia: Italian Americans and the Development of Las Vegas. Las Vegas, NV, 2006.

Black, Jeremy. Italy and the Grand Tour. Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press, 2003.

Cosco, Joseph. Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions. New York: SUNY Press, 2003.

Davis, Robert C. and Garry Marvin. Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World's Most Touristed City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Eglin, John. Venice Transfigured: The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660-1797. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.

Franci, Giovanna, Federico Zignani and Jose Gamez. Dreaming of Italy: Las Vegas and the Virtual Grand Tour. Las Vegas, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2005.

Hanney, Delores. Venice, California: A Centennial Commemorative in Postcards, 1905-2005. Santa Fe, NM, Center for American Places, 2005.

Lovell, Margaretta M. A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860-1915. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Life & People

Gepetto (sic), Fairyland, and Oakland’s Lost Italian Americans

Children's Fairyland, an amusement park for preschool-age kids, sits on the edge of Oakland’s Lake Merritt, an artificial lake created in 1867 in the city’s downtown area. The park, with its child-sized diorama-like sets, celebrates fairytales and nursery rhymes. It opened in 1950 and still draws the juice-swilling masses today. Restoration of the park started (and is still going on) in the mid-1990s, but the place still feels pretty Old School. There’s a threadbare retro feel to the spot, made stronger by the heavily-pierced and tattooed teenagers who now work the concession stands and, dripping with irony, run the Jolly Trolly.

In addition to some of your standards—the houses of the Three Little Pigs and The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe—the park also boasts live animals (e.g., Coco, the 35-year-old pony and Bobo the sheep) and a live puppet show. Local lore has it that Walt Disney visited Fairyland and was inspired to develop the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955).

The throwback feel of the park is perhaps strongest around the Pinocchio exhibit. Carlo Collodi's wooden puppet sits with his long nose jutting out of a tower, as though someone confused his tale with that of Giambattista Basile's Petrosinella's.

Below him is the pen for Fairyland’s donkeys—alluding, perhaps, to one of Pinocchio’s more unfortunate moments. In front of the donkeys is Gepetto’s Workshop, with the gentle old carpenter busily at work. (Similar to other Italian American words--think Mama for Mamma, Nona for Nonna--Geppetto has dropped a double consonant in its trip across the water.)

But what makes the set stand out as a relic is the plaque that credits its funding to the Italian American Foundation of the East Bay (IAF), giving its donation date as 1953. The IAF, an umbrella organization for Italian American social clubs, still operates today, but, as with Oakland’s Italian American culture generally, it is much less visible.

Not too long ago, I briefly interviewed Robert Schultz, who worked at Fairyland for about 16 years as the Parks and Civic Department Designer and Builder. He told me he rebuilt Gepetto’s Workshop sometime between 1967 and 1969, he couldn’t recall exactly.

He said he re-shingled the old workshop and added a lot of detail to the interior.

An avid tool collector, he said he patterned the workshop on elements from his grandfather’s shop that he recalled from his childhood, using some old tools from his personal collection. Before building the workshop, as with the other dioramas at Fairyland, he would build a model and present it to whoever was paying for the set—like in this case the IAF.

I have yet to uncover some of the specifics of Pinocchio’s history—like did the IAF give more money to Fairyland around the time Schultz worked on it? And who decided on Pinocchio? Did the IAF come up with the idea as a way to represent Italian culture for children? (BTW: Disney's cinematic version of Pinocchio, with evil represented through the hyper-Italian Stromboli character, as Pasquale Verdicchio outlines in his Devils in Paradise, came out in 1940.)

In any case, seeing the ways in which an Italian American social organization played a role in the formation of the city by encouraging links between city planning and an Italian (American) identity says something, it seems to me, about community-building and place-making. That the exhibit emphasizes Gepetto's skilled labor might even suggest another important connection to a reality of Italian immigrant life that is all-too-often overlooked or whitewashed.

Italian American identity in Oakland is pretty much under the radar of public visibility today. The Temescal neighborhood barely suggests its Italian American past (see my previous post). And yet hundreds of people pass by this tiny marker, a notation that links its creation to a particular moment in the history of the San Francisco East Bay’s Italian American community.

Articles by: Laura e. Ruberto

Youth Masses, Black Skin, and Italian Beat Music

Mujeres Migrantes Italianas

Westward the Women

Clemenza and Tessio are like Britain and France

The European Union’s Immigration Policy and Italian Immigrants in Latin America

Forgetting the Past: Ethnic Identity and How Italian and English Fail Us

Becoming Italian American: POWs and National Identity

Holiday in Italy! (without Leaving the U.S.)

Holiday in Italy! (without Leaving the U.S.)

Gepetto (sic), Fairyland, and Oakland’s Lost Italian Americans

Pages

i-Italy

Search form

You are here

Articles by: Laura e. Ruberto

Youth Masses, Black Skin, and Italian Beat Music

Mujeres Migrantes Italianas

Westward the Women

Clemenza and Tessio are like Britain and France

The European Union’s Immigration Policy and Italian Immigrants in Latin America

Forgetting the Past: Ethnic Identity and How Italian and English Fail Us

Becoming Italian American: POWs and National Identity

Holiday in Italy! (without Leaving the U.S.)

Holiday in Italy! (without Leaving the U.S.)

Gepetto (sic), Fairyland, and Oakland’s Lost Italian Americans

Pages

i-Italy