Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site
Main
Page This family-friendly site celebrates Italian culture for the enjoyment of children and
adults. Site-Overview
Some pages with Hyphenated stories:
RB and
GP and Jacqueline Miconi and
Robert Tinnell
Click on the image of actor-director Vince Spano to visit a nice fan
site dedicated to the man and his work.
Fieri Providence
is the Providence, Rhode Island, chapter of
Fieri International, an Italian culture association for young
professionals. There are chapters throughout the U.S., Canada and
Italy. Membership is open to all young professionals interested in
Italian culture. Trivia: Rhode Island is the U.S. state with
the highest population percentage of Italian-Americans, 19%. (And
grazie mille to Fieri Providence founder Sam Brusco for his kind words about
my website.)
Anglo-Italian Family
History Society, a wonderful resource for tracing your family tree. Click here to
read an account by D. H. Lawrence of an Italian immigrant to America from
1916. He describes the complex nature of the immigrant's motivations
and the results of his uprooting from a traditional society. This Italian-Australian site is dedicated to women of Italian origin
in Australia, and includes a wonderful archive of articles. The site
visitor who recommended the site, also calls attention to a fascinating
article from July 2000 by Elida Meadows on the Italian North-South divide. Click on this rather dry academic article to read, in Italian, about
Italian immigration to the Americas. The list of sources at the end
of the article is more interesting, and many of the sources are in
English. Click on the Italian-Argentinian blogger to read, in
Spanish, the views of hyphenated Italians in Argentina. And check out Italian-Argentinian
journalist Bob Frassinetti's blog.
To read his entertaining take on the TV show 'The Sopranos', just
click on his topic in his left column 'Italian Community'. Click on the Italians in the World logo to visit a site funded by
the Gianni Agnelli Foundation that discusses migration movements and
people of Italian origin around the world. Click on the CyberItalian logo to read their article, in Italian and
English, about Italian Immigrants to New York, and the Italian-American
experience. Click on the Italiargentina.com logo to visit the first and largest
site dedicated to Italian-Argentinians. Nearly half of all
immigrants to Argentina came from Italy. There's a new site for
Latin American Italians set up by an Italian governmental agency: Italianos.it. Click on the Virtual Italia logo to visit their forums where
Italian-Americans and other hyphenated Italians discuss issues that
concern them. Click on the title to read an interview with the author Helen
Barolini. In the words of the interviewer: 'Her novel
Umbertina, a saga of four generations of Italian-American women, carefully
explores some of the tensions of women caught between two cultures and
between traditionalism and feminism.' Click on the title to read an article about Italian-American women
who visit Italy, and how some react. This is the Italian Ministry for Italian citizens who
live abroad, not for hyphenated Italians. The link keeps
becoming obsolete, so it's just best to Google it. The Corriere della Sera newspaper has a forum,
in Italian, that is fun to follow for Italian opinions on all kinds of
subjects, suggested by a site visitor. Click on the logo for the website of the National Congress of
Italian Canadians - Toronto District which aims to be a virtual portal
into the Italian-Canadian community from Canadian coast to coast. Click on the News Italia Press logo to visit their Italian language
news site. Note that they differentiate between Italian citizens
abroad (Italiani nel mondo) and hyphenated Italians (Italici nel mondo),
and group hyphenated Italians together with all those who appreciate
Italian culture, almost as I do on my site, but I include native Italians,
too! Click on the logo of the Order Sons of Italy in America to visit
their website. This is the largest Italian-American association in
the States, and despite the name, not just for sons, also for daughters. Click on the logo of the Order Sons of Italy in Canada to visit
their website.
An Italian-American writing portal:
Italian-American
Writers.com
I’ve seen numbers like 58
million Italians in Italy, and an estimated 50 million abroad of Italian
descent. But if, as is
estimated, 27 million people emigrated from Italy from 1870 to 1970,
then the numbers of those of Italian descent abroad are quite likely higher.
Italians moved to places like Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay,
Canada,
Australia, the USA, Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, and more. In the
USA and Brazil alone, there are an estimated 25 million people of Italian
descent in each country.
The Italian diaspora, like most diaspora, is
active abroad but largely ignored by the Italian government.
The Ministry for Italians Abroad looks after the interests of only
Italian citizens abroad. People
of Italian origin are not considered Italian, and in the legal sense,
the Ministry is correct. But
for people who have all their lives been labeled “Italian”, that can
come as a surprise, if not a shock.
This
article looks at the relationship between hyphenated Italians and native
Italians. And now for some comments from
hyphenated Italians and native Italians, and some ruminations of my own… P.S. from Sicily comments
that hyphenated Italians can be intimidating for some Italians
because of their physical beauty.
As he explained it, the good diets, organized exercise, good
medical care from a young age, anti-acne medicines, and wealth all
contribute to this impression. He
and his friends often felt like the ugly relations when their relatives
from abroad came to visit. C.G., an Italian-Australian,
touches on beauty too but from a different perspective, and on
several other topics. In
her words: "Regarding
my foreign experiences in Italy, I can’t say I could pinpoint an actual
incident. It’s more of a
realisation I feel whilst I’m there.
The instant I step off the plane I feel a foreigner.
I’m easily identifiable as a foreigner, although my Italian is
fluent, they can still tell and instantly I feel in a
“me/them” situation. Of
course there all those customs and the way things are done in Italy that
truly frustrate me and this adds to my “foreignness”.
For example their totally chaotic ways, that once I am removed from
them, I find so endearing." "Furthermore,
I feel so antagonised by the women, especially those
in the services and retail industries. I find them insufferable yet so
aesthetically perfect, that I find myself trying to dress like them
within days of my arrival. I
warm to the men, I have a lot of time for them. I find them pleasant, much easier to deal with.
However I am not naive to their ways, let’s face it they are
masters of their craft." "I
guess what I’m trying to say is that I cannot identify with the Italians
when I’m in Italy. My
Italian friends (those living in Italy) accept me as one of their own,
they see me as one of them. Yet
I feel estranged, perhaps it is due to my long absences.
Although I can express myself well, I still lack those every day
spontaneous expressions that make all the difference. My communication lacks that spontaneity." "The
humour, unique, this I can identify with, theirs is more a
satire...which doesn’t lend itself easily to translation.
It’s brilliant, I also speak a dialect and there are certain
satirical expressions that can only be said in dialect.
To translate these, even into Italian, robs them of their essence." C.G. brings up language, in which
she is fluent and she also speaks a dialect.
But language can be a divide between hyphenated Italians and
native Italians. When the
Italian-American actor-director, Vince Spano, was filming in
Sicily, he was invited to participate in Pippo Baudo’s popular variety
show, “Fantastico”. But
when Mr. Spano answered Pippo’s questions, Pippo, a native of Sicily,
had to translate from the old Sicilian dialect that Mr. Spano
spoke rather fluently, to modern Italian. Pippo had no problem understanding
him, as he explained, because it was the dialect he had spoken with his
own parents and grandparents, but for modern Italians brought up on
modern Italian dominated television, and with dialects being banned in
schools, Mr. Spano was nearly incomprehensible.
At the time his grandparents emigrated to America, modern Italian
was not the lingua franca it is today in Italy. About language, P.S. said
when he and his friends tired of trying to understand the old dialects
their visiting hyphenated relations spoke, they often ditched them with
grandparents who still spoke those dialects and enjoyed hearing them
spoken again. P.S. from Sicily also
recalls his parents suffering from the nouveau-riches or nuovi-ricchi
attitudes of the emigrants. His
parents would regularly receive letters accompanied by photographs of
all the possessions their relatives had recently purchased.
Some even sent photos of the insides of overly full, man-high,
double-door refrigerators. And
when they came to visit, they were constantly comparing and critiquing
his parent’s lives with their own in their new country. The emigrants were probably trying
to prove to those back home, and to themselves, that they had made the
right decision to leave Italy, and to overcome the guilt they felt at
having left family and country behind, and perhaps, to encourage more to
follow their example. But the
effect was to build much resentment and envy, that was often
passed on to the next generation and directed at the descendants of the
immigrants. G. from Florence mentions her
envy of the financial freedom of her relatives when they are
visiting Italy. Because of
their relative wealth, and reliance on credit cards, when they see
something they like in a store window, they just go in and charge it,
something she can’t afford to do. When
they come to visit, she gets depressed because it makes her focus on
how much poorer she is. She understands they are not flaunting their wealth, that the
behavior is normal in their country, but it also upsets her and makes
her feel worse off, even inferior. Italians have only now started
using credit cards instead of debit cards, and they still are far from
carrying the same weight of debt as many citizens of other industrialized
countries. Socially, it is
less acceptable, and in a country that can suffer sudden turns in economic
well-being, it is unwise.
The
growing economic ties within the European Union, namely with the Monetary
Union that some members, including Italy, have joined, have made economic
shifts less dramatic. This is
leading to greater debt levels, but Italians savings levels are still
some of the highest in the world.
Economic prudence is the norm. L., a Italian-Swedish (mother Swedish, father Italian), never set foot in Italy until she was
twenty years old. Up to that
time, she had dreamed of Italy as the place she would
finally fit in. The petite,
dark haired girl always felt out-of-place in tall, blond Sweden.
To Swedes, she was not Swedish, but some kind of anomalous bastard;
anomalous because she spoke Swedish fluently with no accent, a bastard
because she was obviously not “pure-bred”.
The shock was great then, when she arrived in Italy to study
Italian and learn more about her father’s culture, only to be treated
as, yes, an anomalous bastard. She looked Italian but
spoke the language with a Swedish accent, and had very liberal social views.
She became deeply depressed when she realized she would never find
a place where she felt she belonged.
She eventually returned to Sweden because she could not live with the
Italian views of women and their more limited roles and rights in Italian
society.
L.’s views are
natural for someone from liberal and sexually egalitarian Sweden.
The views of hyphenated
Italians visiting Italy differ greatly based upon where they grew up.
The views are in the eye of the beholder. Those from socially liberal and
economically strong countries often find Italy parochial, illiberal,
poor, disorganized, inefficient and corrupt. Those from socially conservative
and economically precarious countries often find Italy liberating,
open-minded, wealthy, well-ordered, amazingly efficient, and less
corrupt than back home. V., an
Italian-Canadian, actually followed her native Italian boyfriend’s
advice and pretended, for their Italian friends, to be distant cousins,
by way of explaining their close relationship.
He was afraid (this was in the early 80’s) that his friends and
strangers would think her a “free whore” if they knew they had met
and fallen in love over a four week period during her vacation, before
starting Italian language studies, in preparation for attending Italian
university. They maintained the
fiction with all their Italian friends, but revealed the truth to all their Canadian
and American friends, who found the whirlwind love story beautifully
romantic. Another source of
conflict may come from views about other cultures and mixed cultures.
Italy is not an immigrant country, even with the new influx of
economic immigrants from North Africa, Eastern Europe and Equatorial Africa.
The numbers are relatively low, and their welcome into Italian
society is practically non-existent.
Sadly,
in Europe, excluding immigrant England (except for that neo-fascist fringe
that seems to inhabit all immigrant countries), immigrants are largely
treated as outsiders who pollute and dilute the native culture.
So it is no wonder that some see descendants of Italian emigrants
as something less than Italian because of their polluted and diluted
Italian culture. J. is an Australian
woman, who grew up in immigrant Australia, and is married to an Italian. She has lived all her married life in Italy.
She was horrified when she encountered the anti-mixed culture
attitude of Italians. It
was all the more horrifying when it came from her daughter’s school
teacher who explained: “You
can’t expect your daughter to do as well in school as Italians, because as
everyone knows, children of mixed cultures are usually retarded.” To read the interesting and
at times tragic experiences of globe-trotting Italian-American G.P. and his native Italian parents, click here. To read about
Latin-American-Italians from the perspective of someone who's lived there,
and in the States as an Italian-American, click here. Different
Formative Experiences The views of hyphenated
Italians and native Italians will always differ because of their different
formative experiences. Here are
some of the more striking, and how they can affect relations between native
Italians and hyphenated Italians. Continues Below
Native Italians did not grow up in a
mixed culture society, while most hyphenated Italians did.
That exposure to various cultures and the respect and familiarity
that immigrant countries try to foster between the cultures is not the
norm in Italian society. In the
80’s it was big news when the first Chinese restaurant opened in Italy,
for example, and the only customers in the beginning were Chinese
expatriates and tourists from immigrant countries who had tired of Italian
food. The place was vandalized
and suspected of everything from drug processing to white slavery.
This is just a small example of some the hostility other cultures can
suffer when they try to preserve their heritage in mono-culture Italy.
Native Italians did not grow up as a
minority, except within the confines of
regional migration and the native Italian Jewish community.
Minority status can produce many psychologically defining
characteristics: feelings
of inferiority, hyper-sensitivity to offense, a sense of not belonging, a
search for identity, strong ties to an ethnic community, activism to promote
one’s ethnic group in the larger multi-cultural society.
Native Italians never experienced minority status on this
scale, so they don’t share these characteristics and needs on the
same scale as most hyphenated Italians.
Native Italians grow up in a social
democracy with a mixed economy that has strong roots in
communist-socialist theory. Many
Italians proudly proclaim their left-leaning politics, even if many
are laughingly called “armchair-socialists”.
The ideas of economic egalitarianism and the equality of opportunity
are ingrained in Italians. The
flaunting of extreme wealth, and the ridicule and blaming of the poor for
their poverty is almost always condemned.
This can be in stark contrast to the experiences of many
hyphenated Italians who come from more purely capitalistic
societies, where conspicuous consumption is either encouraged or laughed
off, and blaming poverty on character flaws in the poor is common-place.
Native Italians grow up in a highly
politicized society where everything from work unions to art sponsorship
to government television stations are separated along the political divide.
This is the case in some of the countries that received large numbers
of Italian immigrants, such as those in Latin America, but it is not
(yet?) the case in the purer immigrant countries like Canada,
Australia/NZ, the USA and England. The
idea that one’s political affiliation could determine one’s career
advancement in the civil service is actually illegal in these
countries, something most Italians would find incomprehensible.
Native Italians grow up understanding
Italian regional social and economic differences, and the historical
bigotries that accompany these differences, which exist in all countries. Hyphenated Italians have generally experienced a
coming together of all descendants of immigrant Italians for reasons of
solidarity in a faraway land. The
social and economic divisions, and bigotries, within Italy often come as a
nasty shock. For the native
Italians, the ignorance hyphenated Italians have of these differences and
the subtleties they affect in behavior, only accentuate, in their eyes, the
foreignness of the hyphenated Italians.
A few words of advice
to hyper-critical, hyphenated Italians from socially liberal, economically
strong countries…These are three common Italian “embarrassments” that
they might want to look at from different perspectives: For those who cringe at the idea of
the maffia in Italy, abroad, and in popular
entertainment… remember that criminal gangs exist in every country,
and Italian law enforcement fights them continually and very effectively.
Great strides were made in the in the 80’s and 90’s when
extraordinary laws were enacted that allowed for immunity from prosecution
and relocation for those who testified against the mob, and the confiscation
of assets from convicted mobsters. The strides were so great that when the controversial
laws (criminals were let off and “rewarded” with state subsidies, and
the state took possession of assets on which innocent family members relied)
expired, lawmakers decided not to renew them. The result has been as expected, a rise in criminal gang
activity and membership, but it has been noted by lawmakers and new laws are
in the works to help law enforcement tackle the problem.
And when the Mafia ceases to exist, there will be less
representations of it in popular entertainment.
As for having exported Italian organized crime around the world, that
is a charge not unique to Italians.
A recent Russian immigrant to New York complained:
“We thought we were escaping the Russian gangsters when we left
Russia, but we were wrong: we
brought our garbage with us.” And just to
point out, the word lost an “f” and gained a capital “M” in English
- Mafia, suggesting it no longer refers to Italy's organized crime
organizations but now refers to all organized crime organizations,
regardless of ethnicity.
For those who are embarrassed by what
they see as illiberal social mores…it’s important to recognize that
Italy (together with France) is the most socially liberal of all
predominantly Catholic countries on the planet.
Catholic religious traditions limit how fast and how far people are
willing and able to loosen society’s control over personal moral and
social behavior. For some
Catholics, including the Pope, Italy is decadent and has rejected her
Catholic traditions so she can have self-indulgent, life-denying
life-styles.
For those who are shamed by lower
economic well-being than they are used to…know that Italy has
few natural resources and yet counts among the top ten industrialized
nations in the world. Those from more purely capitalistic societies should be
aware that Italy’s mixed economy and social-democratic values mean that
while the middle class is less well off than some other middle classes,
there is lower per capita poverty than in those same countries.
The
experiences of hyphenated Italians differ from country to country, but there
are some similarities: a minority's solidarity in the face of the
majority society, past discrimination and social exclusion, current prejudices
and misconceptions within society, financial, emotional, and familial links
to Italy, the embracing of the Italian cultural heritage, a desire to
integrate into the larger society and create role-models for other
hyphenated Italians. But the
experiences of hyphenated Italians differ most in relation to native
Italians in Italy. Some see Italy as backward, yet others see her
as advanced. Some see Italians as inefficient and corrupt, while
others judge them to be more efficient and less corrupt than what they are
used to. Some see Italian society focused on what matters in life
(family and comfort), but others see Italian society as decadent and
anti-life (abortion and birth-control). Native
Italians, and most often relatives of hyphenated Italians, share some
experiences, too, when dealing with hyphenated Italians. Note,
however, that this relationship is most often in relation to hyphenated
Italians who are wealthy enough to travel to Italy. Native Italians
are subjected to much criticism and critique. Their lives are often
considered condescendingly "quaint". They can feel inferior
in the face of greater wealth and well-being. They suffer impatience
when put upon to validate the others' insecurities of ethnic identity.
They can, however, feel a kinship with hyphenated Italians, and often take
pride in their accomplishments in their birth countries. The
successes of hyphenated Italians are celebrated by native Italians.
Indeed, these are the moments when native Italians feel real affection for,
and take real pride in, their DNA-linked relations. Ironically,
lately, some hyphenated Italians have begun to reject this recognition when
they feel it does not fit their desired image in their birth
countries. Not only is this ironic, it is clearly a lost opportunity
for rare solidarity between the Italian diaspora and native Italians. Here are some books about the Italian immigrant experience.
Visit my Italian
Immigrants in New York City page
Read about Joe
Petrosino, a pioneering hero of anti-organized crime policing
John, an Italian
immigrant to the U.S. by D.H. Lawrence
Hyphenated
Italians, the Italian Diaspora
Introduction
