Ottobre is Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month: Part 2
We're continuing on from last month with some family history that includes murder, f-yous to the KKK, and more upcoming comics
Welcome to Part 2 of my Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month series.
If you haven’t already, you can check out Part 1 linked here. I hope I provided enough breathing room between the two newsletters since the last one was a bit girthy.
Now, continuing from where we left last, that Italian-American cultural pull in me has always existed. Outside of the daily influence of my father and those in my extended family, I also made efforts in the area myself.
While the other kids on my soccer team were buying the latest Brazilian boots of Ronaldinho, I was trying to find the latest Diadora cleans from Francesco Totti. As Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were on their early career rises, and everyone wanted to emulate these men, I was trying to mold my game around Alessandro Del Piero, Andrea Pirlo, Genaro Gattuso, Alberto Gilardino, or Daniele De Rossi, any Italian player I could watch.
All very, very different in style and position, but you get the point.
My friends bought Brazil or England national team jerseys or Manchester United, Chelsea, or Real Madrid club kits; I purchased the Azzurri and Juventus, Roma, AC Milian, Inter Milan, or Palermo.
Now, as an adult, I understand the folly of my youth and the ickiness of having multiple team kits, and I have since reformed: Daje Roma.
You see a trend starting to build.
Most of my close friends from Middle School to High School got to choose between Spanish, French, and Italian; they decided on Spanish, so I took Italian. My Italian name was always either Francesco or Alessandro, obvious choices motivated by calciatori.
In our family, we did the Festa dei Sette Pesci or the Seven Fish Dinner, a purely Italian-American tradition on Christmas Eve for those of the uninitiated. When taking drives to South Philly, my dad would point out all the nuances of where our family had lived, provide history lessons of the area and the stories behind things, you know, the usual dad stuff, and on occasion, we would hit the Italian market in the process.
But as I got older and spent less time with my father’s side and relatives passed, things faded from the little that was there.
Even within my own immediate family, a running issue for my father has always been he’s felt like he’s lost his culture over time. I don’t need to go into personal dynamics, but my dad, over the years, has expressed in various ways feeling like he never got the support or help in fostering his culture, the Italian-American one, versus what he felt was a lack of culture. I’m not picking sides here or putting the blame on my mom within their relationship; that’s their business. I’m just adding to this mix of the personal brew and putting forth how it all comes together.
Also, on top of a personality much like my own, my dad’s introverted or hermit genes probably did not help in carrying those cultural legacies forward either.
So even within my smaller, immediate circle of interaction, things disconnected further and got more ‘Shawned’ with multiple factors at work.
And externally, there’s also the Italian-American culture as a whole which has become Shawned, too.
Thus, making connecting in circles outside of family even harder. While I’m a member of the National Italian-American Foundation, NIAF, and belong to a local lodge of the Order of the Sons and Daughters of Italy, OSDIA, these organizations are not the same organization or have any level of real subculture power that they did in the past.
Italian-American-ism has become Americanized, and there’s been no major preservation across the broader scope in trying to stop it.
Fred L. Gardaphé, a Distinguished Professor of Italian and American Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, says from a research paper in 2002:
For Italian Americans, “making it” has come with a high price tag. It has cost them the language of their ancestors--the main means by which history is preserved and heritage passed on from one generation to the next. They’ve had to trade-in or hide any customs which have been depicted as quaint, but labeled as alien, in order to prove equality to those above them on the ladder of success. In this way, Italian Americans have become white, but a different kind of white than those of the dominant Anglo/Saxon culture. Italian Americans have become whites on a leash. And as long as they behave themselves (act white), as long as they accept the images of themselves as presented in the media (don't cry defamation) and as long as they stay within corporate and cultural boundaries (don't identify with other minorities) they will be allowed to remain white. This behavior has led to Italian Americans being left out of most discussions of multiculturalism.
Apologies to any Shawns out there. It’s a placeholder name to use for analogy purposes.
Loss of culture is big, especially the language aspect.
Three years ago, I wrote a piece about Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, China, who are facing forced assimilation into the majority Han culture by the ruling Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China for
, you can check it out here, through mandated language programs within the schools.There are no insinuations of parallels here to what I’m talking about.
What is happening in Inner Mongolia is a true cultural genocide or conscious effort to erase old culture and force a state-approved one. What I want to point out is that in all of the interviews I conducted, which definitely landed me on some lists in China, and the research conducted, was how much language played into the psyche of culture.
For the Inner Mongolians, their Mongolian dialect directly reflects their region’s history, traditions, and identity, and the loss of such is almost certainly, what they believe, the doom to them as a people. This is something all major minorities in China are currently facing, specifically the Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolians, as part of PRC laws and pushes for ethnic suppression.
When a language dies, so does it’s culture. That’s the crack in the foundation that brings everything else down. However, sometimes as things fade, there is a renaissance too.
Sorry, had to.
In 2020, a series of things happened. I started looking at work abroad, my first son was born, my Grandmother (the Italian one) passed, and avoiding another long rabbit hole you don’t care about, I started to view things differently. To think differently.
I wanted to leave my children (on the birth of my third last month) some kind of legacy. You know, I got hit with that human existential crisis of things happening after your death, and mortality started to itch in the back of my brain.
What impact can I have in the future after I’m long gone?
However, what honestly exacerbated this tick further, was in looking at working abroad, I found out how Italian citizenship worked, and guess what? I found out I qualified and thus could pass it on to my children. Simply through Jure Sanguinis or what translates to "by law of the bloodline."
Italy’s citizenship laws have long been a touchy and complex subject within the country, politics that have zero relevance to this piece. That said, it’s not something I want to pass up on especially because it can provide my children with academic and athletic opportunities in Italy, as well as the European Union as a whole.
If they choose to use these opportunities or the stars happen to align, and they’re an outlier athlete and good enough to wear the Azzurri blue (fingers crossed for wrestling or soccer). Why not provide that chance as a parent?
I like providing options and flexibility, and it’s a unique opportunity to pass those things to my children, along with the cultural aspects-language, food, and tradition, I have been consciously and forcefully trying to bring back to life.
For example, I’ve been really trying to hone in on culinary traditions at least once a week, and after months of watching
’s aglio olio e pepperoncini recipe on his Patreon over and over again, I think I’ve finally gotten the right balance of spice and oil.And I have to say, my linguine alle vongole ain’t too bad either.
I’m even trying to nail down my grandmother’s red sauce recipe, but I know for a fact she never told anyone how she actually made it. Secretive old grandmom nonsense, something my Filipino friend has also experienced with his own family recipes and knows my pain in this area.
I’ve been working with two different fantastic instructors on Italki to re-learn and brush up on my very basic, toddler-level Italian, with the goal of getting my B1 certificate and, eventually, some hopefully choppy but competent enough fluency.
In fact, one of my teachers is even a cooking fantastic and foodie from my grandmother’s home region of Abruzzo. This gives me the perfect chance to learn about the food and culture of the Fortuna and Tucci lineage of my family. Which is even more important to me personally since I hope to make that area a frequent area of visitation in the future.
I’m listening to News in Italian Slow, and reading The Local. I’ve got more learning apps on my phone than I can keep up with that. I’m really trying to dive in as much as possible geographically removed until I am able to regularly visit Italy itself. I don’t want to half-ass this. I want something genuine to pass to my children culturally about their ancestry and family, especially with the citizenry aspect.
No uncultured American stereotypes are to be accepted.
I don’t want what meant so much to my grandfather Mario and my father to be lost. What has meant so much to my own identity to be lost in the next generation.
As much of a proud ‘Murican I can be as 3rd generation servicemember with both paternal and maternal grandfathers serving, as well as my father, I still very much view myself as an Italian-American, and outside of that ‘white’ label, as much as I struggle with those two cultural identities.
I always joke with my friends who I grew up with about this…
But they never let get away with it. Haha. (Please know this is a joke and don’t be an internet weirdo)
Overall, consciously putting forth these efforts, has really pushed me in a lot of positive directions of how I want to honor those of my past and mold the future.
I’ve spent a lot of time and effort researching family history in the process of gathering documents needed for my Italian citizenship, for which both myself and my wife qualify on our own. This process has turned me into a bit of a history detective, connecting dots in family lore or myth and going, “ahh, that makes sense now.”
I’ve deduced that both my great-grandfather Antonio and great-grandfather Edwardo, with near certainty, only gained their American citizenship in the 1920s due to the Johnson-Reed Immigration Acts of 1924 and not wanting to be caught up in something directed at limiting Italian immigration to the U.S.
My great-grandmother Felicia, who gained American citizenship in the 1940s, over 20 years after arriving and 20 after her husband gained his, with near certainty, was most likely caused or influenced by attitudes towards Italians at the time—the whole ‘enemy aliens’ ordeals for Japanese and German Americans.
Even Joe DiMaggio’s family, whose parents lived in the country for 40 years, were affected by this:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt deemed many of our ancestors as “enemy aliens,” and hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German immigrants were also targeted.
They were instructed to only speak English; they lost their jobs, they were relocated and they weren’t allowed to own everyday items, like flashlights and radios, as the government feared such things could be used to signal and communicate with Nazi sympathizers.
All the while, more than one million Italian American soldiers — far more than any other U.S. ethnic group — were fighting the real enemy overseas.
Italian fishermen along the West Coast were stripped of their boats and livelihoods; one such fisherman was Joe DiMaggio’s father, Giuseppe.
In 1942, Giuseppe was banned from working in San Francisco’s coastal wharves, despite living in the U.S. for 40 years. This decision came just six months after his son set the still-unbroken 56-game hitting streak, according to PBS.
I don’t believe Felicia had any intention of naturalizing up until this point. Most Italians at the time didn’t, a topic you're more than welcome to learn more about in the series The Italian-Americans.
I have to believe there were some great fears of being considered an ‘enemy alien’ as an immigrant widow with only her two surviving children left in the world. The situational pieces just come together. Which is sad in retrospect if that was the case, considering both of her sons, my grandfather, Mario, and his brother, my Uncle Joe, were both drafted into World War 2.
This leads me to the final portion of this two-part series, my grandfather Mario.
I’m currently working on a graphic novel directly inspired by various pieces of my grandfather’s life, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t, learning while playing amateur historian.
I took several key aspects of his history and plugged and played them in a mix mash of fiction and non-fiction, what in marketing is called a story that is “inspired by true events.”
One of those big aspects is my grandfather’s experiences while owning a restaurant in Virginia. Particularly with the KKK, as an “Eye-talian,” and his relationship with his staff, who were African American.
Now, with all of these, family stories are family myths…
And the level of historical accuracy can range from Romulus and Remus or Xia Dynasty level of accuracy to the kind we have for World War 2, with ten new documentaries and books on the subject annually from source material out of the butt.
Like we don’t have enough? Where’s that kind of love for the Spanish-American War, am I right?
So, we learned in the last piece, Part 1 that Italian-Americans were not always viewed as white or had a place with the majority, and in many areas, particularly the South, that was more present than others.
For the period Mario lived in Virginia, that was felt.
One of his daughters, my aunt, was ineligible for the National Honor Society at the time because of her ethnic background, and as a Catholic and the big one, the centerpiece of the graphic novel, was him and the KKK.
As an amateur historian, my two sources are secondary since the primary ones have passed.
The first is a story from my cousin, which Mario told him at some point and to him, my cousin, Mario never told it any different or added deviations.
This makes me think it’s probably, almost entirely true.
Supposedly, at some point, the KKK picketed the restaurant he was managing in Chesapeake, VA, due to him being Italian and Catholic. A restaurant called Bradford House, inside the department store W.T. Grants, sort of like a Woolworths.
Or so the story goes.
My dad, who comes in as my second secondary source, has said he can’t remember a whole lot from the period, and because of his age at the time, he didn’t pick up on a whole lot from looks, comments, etc.
If there were any. He’s unsure.
From my dad’s own accounts though, Mario had a lot of African-American staff he would sit and eat with openly, drive to and from work, among other very public interactions. His staff, in turn, would tell him, you really shouldn’t do that.
The racial implications of separation. The element of the KKK. All the potential consequences that could follow from the mixed-race interactions. His staff, understandably so, had reason to be cautious.
Mario’s answers were usually along the lines of, “Nah, I can do what I want to.”
There is one memory my dad says does stick out, and as he describes it, the most cliche caricature of pants pulled up to his chest, “you best move along out of town,” backwater individual made some kind of comment to Mario, or ‘Big Yank’ as he was nicknamed, along racial lines about being Italian, and something negative about his staff.
The response was of the nature, “you can go f*** yourself.”
Now, I’m not trying to paint my grandfather as some kind of progressive hero; the man just didn’t shy from conflict and embodied an attitude of you’re not telling me how to live my life.
Now, unfortunately, I can’t piece together the dates of different events or when this might have happened. When was the picket? What was the result? How often did he have issues, or were threats ever issued, kind of thing?
Mario, much like many from his time and immigrant background, left out a lot of information unsaid or never spoke about it.
The second was something that majorly affected him, probably until his death, in a ton of overt and nuance ways, and that was the murder of his sister.
And up until a year ago, neither my dad nor my aunt even knew her name until I found a funeral card online through all my family history research. They only knew she died and how.
Mario never said her name.
According to lore, the accuracy of this story is unknown, Augustina was killed at 16, across the table from Mario, at 11 years old.
Some background, my great-grandfather Edwardo died of a heart attack when Mario was 2. Great Depression, two other siblings, an immigrant mother widowed, plus lots of factors pushed Mario to work as necessity at a very young age.
Second, there was an older man, Deftcesare Della Valle, essentially stalking his sister Augustina. My great-grandmother and Augustina, from my understanding, tried to squash all advances continually.
The man did not accept no.
One night, while sitting at the dinner table, Mario, exhausted from work, was nodding out sitting across from his sister. At one point, his head drops, *BANG*, and his sister sits dead in front of him. Had he not been falling asleep, the shot fired by Deftcesare Della Valle would have killed Mario.
Things get murky at this point, was the target was really my great-grandmother or Mario, and not Augustina? Was it Augustina? Was it because she rejected him? Or was he directing his anger towards other family members? Did the timing really line up perfectly or is that after the fact, tramutamic re-telling trying to piece a tragedy together?
Mario was 11 and my great-grandmother spoke very little english, so there’s a lot of potential for lost in translation and even misrembering due to trauma at play here. I’m unfortunately unsure of exact details, but regardless, the murder did happen in front of them.
Mario supposedly ran down the police car with his sister’s killer in custody, trying to avenge her, but his brother Joseph stopped him or held him back. Again, more uncertainty in the details. But I do know their sister’s death became part of a longer saga of disputes between the two brothers.
Mario wanted revenge. Joseph wanted the law to take care of it. This is all from my family’s side, and I never heard my Uncle Joe’s.
All murky when wearing my historian hat.
However, what is true, is the police were actually so concerned about Mario killing this man before his release, they called to to make sure Mario wasn’t going to do anything once he was. My aunt believes the only reason Mario never did, was because of his own family and not want to hurt his own children.
Later in life, what we know as trauma or PTSD, but not then was very present for Mario. My dad describes stories of my grandmom calling Mario crazy for certain mood swings or actions, and that in the 1970s or 80s, Mario was even seeking mental health support.
In my dad’s words, “Can you imagine how bad it must have been? How much in the red my dad (Mario) was to go to a therapist during that time? The taboo? Even more the taboo for him as a male and an Italian-American one, to be seeking help like that?”
This event was a tragedy that affected Mario’s whole life, and to be honest, I do not know how my grandfather would feel about the story's content because of how his sister's death affected him. Even if it’s a fictional retelling.
However, I know he would be proud of what I am doing and trying to accomplish and my motivations for doing it.
He’d had have pride in how much I have for my heritage, my family, and wanting to show it to the world. To tell our stories.
Now, if you think you know the story from this, you do not.
These events only inspire and influence the graphic novel but don’t dictate or guide its entirety. I can’t spoil it before it gets read right?
These two upcoming projects from Part 1 and Part 2 are some of the most personal creative endeavors I can say I’ve really ever put forth, publically at least. And I hope all the stories, short histories, and tons of information put forth, were both interesting and intriguing.
At the very least, I hope it’s got enough of your attention and curiosity to see exactly what these unfold to be.
I don’t want to press my luck with your time considering this was a two part-er with both pieces in the “I have to sit down and dedicate some time to read this” category.
But, I’ll leave you with this.
I’m also working on a very Soul Eater-esque inspired series,that has some Hellboy and the B.P.R.D elemtns to it as well, currently in development with Malia Knight.
Malia is a very talented artist I’ve worked with in the past, who you might not know yet, but you soon will.
She’s that good.
Check out some concept art from the project.
Until the next addition, thanks for sticking around.