USA-Italy:  Changing and Stagnant Relations as Seen Through Oral Histories of Sicilian Emigrants

 

In writing for a predominantly Italian American/Italophile audience, I want to interpose one caveat from the outset:  I am not dealing here with the mass phenomenon of the old emigration, but with a current situation in a small Sicilian town reflective of prevalent trends all over Italy that I have studied as a scholar, participant observer and practitioner of oral history as recently as the spring of 1988.  Moreover, I would like to begin in the spirit of present actuality by quoting from three Sicilian poems that can in no way be construed as curios of the past or figments of nostalgia.  The first, a living product of folk culture, is known by heart and sung today by Sicilians of all ages.  The other two, produced by engagé dialect poets, have been written in this past decade.

 

Sicily is a desert—

look down her streets:

nothing but the aged and dogs

and children without shoes . . . (Sicilian folk song)1

 

They leave for snows

fogs and darkness . . .

where they are branded

no-good dirt-eaters . . . (Ignazio Buttitta)2

 

The train whisks off

pieces of my flesh

blood of my blood

 

 

children of my earth . . .

It’s just as hard to stay . . .(Vito Ferrante)3

 

The folk song embraces that tragic dimension of emigration which is the result of the disintegration of community and the erosion of indigenous culture.  Buttitta links this tragedy to a global socio-economic issue:  its victims, the emigrants, provide a cheap and cheapened labor force for highly industrialized countries, where they are stigmatized and reviled for doing work no citizens of those nations deem worthy of doing.  Ferrante captures the excruciating pain of separation that emigration entails and reflects how this experience involves the people’s whole culture, now irretrievably fragmented.

By implication, these poems are denunciations of a bias that prevails in varying degrees all over the world.  Even in scholarly literature which appears sympathetic to emigrants’ plight, their way of life is often assumed to be inferior.  As Alberto Traldi notes, “to appreciate our ‘paesani’ in terms of their worth, one has to keep in mind that, when they disembarked in America, their culture began practically from nothing . . ., rooted in ignorance and illiteracy.”4   As many of us know from the direct experience of prejudice, such a judgment was extended to the immigrants’ offspring whose ears even today may ring, willy-nilly, with Giuseppe Prezzolini’s quip:  “Italo-Americans represent a virtually insurmountable barrier in the struggles of Italy and America to understand each other.”5   One might argue, to some extent persuasively, that the economic and social progress made by Italian Americans in this country has obviated such a sweeping generalization.6   However, a comment tossed at me only five years ago by a prominent Italian American author reminds me that a gross misunderstanding separating Italy and America lingers:  “I had a strange experience yesterday,” this pundit gloated, “I met a cultured Sicilian.”

The feeling seems to be quite mutual in Leonardo Sciascia’s La zia d’America,7  where certain distorted cultural and ahistorical attitudes developed by the first two generations of Italians in America are satirized.  The ex-Sicilian family returning to the Old Country speaks a bastard language neither Italian nor Sicilian (giobba, farma, carro, boifrendo, etc.)  and envisions Mussolini as the Great American Hope.  Sciascia ironically depicts this family’s retracing of la via vecchia8  as the flaunting of arrogance of Philistines showing off their money, fear of flies, and an abysmal ignorance of the Resistance and post-war, anti-Fascist Italy.  This major contemporary author sees no more hope in cross-cultural migration producing changes for the better than did Carlo Levi earlier, in Christ Stopped at Eboli.9   The choices in 1958 (when Sciascia wrote his novella) still seem to be either (1) emigration and repatriation, which means a regression to a previous state of muffled despair, or (2) quasi-Americanization, which signifies, in spite of economic gains, a vulgarization of the folk spirit and material culture that gave meaning to an old way of life.

Devastated during World War II, Italy, the Mezzogiorno included, has rebounded dramatically.  While this is not the place to elaborate on the reasons for the country’s economic progress, it is germane to reflect on the multifarious sources of such a phenomenon and the socio-political and global implications of Italy’s e- and de-volution:  the Marshall Plan and NATO, which have kept the country in the world’s capitalist bloc; the Sixties Boom, the consumerist revolution and big industry/high tech, that have benefitted the North, at the expense of the South; tourism and building speculation, which have increased the wealth of those who dominate these industries; the Mafia-controlled international drug traffic, which has brought the Honored Society multi-national status and power and had, despite its disastrous social consequences, a trickle-down effect on the economy; powerful labor unions and parties of the Left, that have fought successfully for workers’ economic gains but, in the process, lost their sense of direction in re political and social change; the family structure and emigrant remittances, that have kept people emarginated from mainstream progress more or less afloat.  In this complex historical context, for better and worse, Italy has emerged from its post-war ruins to become the fifth richest industrial-capitalist nation in the world.

Yet the country has also been one of the global leaders in the exportation of its labor force.  Reacting angrily to this apparent paradox wherein economic expansion and mass emigration have often gone hand in hand, many southern Italian people express the enduring feeling that emigrants are still caught in a vicious circle with psychological and cultural dimensions determined by the systemic exploitation of the Mezzogiorno as a source of cheap labor for northern Italy and its industrial, financial, and business partners—especially Switzerland, Germany and the United States.  In this current situation, the century-old misunderstandings between Italy and Italian America are all the more grave, not simply because they are perpetuated by intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic, but also because they misshape the experience of average persons who span these two worlds, consciously or not, as migrant workers, tourists and students.

In my research into this problem of both changing and stagnant relations between Italy and the USA, I had recourse to oral histories of Sicilian emigrants that I collected in 1988 in the coastal town of Trappeto (Palermo Province).  Out of its 3,281 inhabitants, approximately one-third of the population still seeks work all’estero (abroad), northern Italy included.  Yet ninety percent of those thousand Trappetese emigrate fully intending to make enough money in Milan, Solingen, Düsseldorf, Detroit, San Pedro, Alaska or South Africa so that they can return to their native soil, buy or rebuild houses for themselves and their children, purchase some or more land to cultivate, and spend their middle-age and/or retirement “where our sun can set”—over the Bay of Castellammare.

Contrary to a stereotype many of us hyphenated Americans have about southern Italy, these Sicilians are not living in a time warp as if the past century had not transpired.  In fact, Trappeto, partly because of constant migration and intermittent intermarriage, and to some degree because of the internationalizing influence of Danilo Dolci’s local nonviolent movement, is full of indigenous people now open to global influences from washing-machines, Mercedes Benzes, TVs, and video-games to ecology, grassroots democracy, regional planning, and Gandhism.  Taking into account that they will often respond with a skepticism rooted in their historical experience, you can discuss anything with the Trappetese, even Nicaragua, Irangate, Jesse Jackson and perestroika.

At the same time, Trappeto’s population is still deeply rooted in its own folk culture.  Even its natives who stay in America or Germany longer than they had planned to—mostly because they have children abroad who get used to the creature comforts of a more developed consumer society—return to their hometown for every possible holiday and haul olive oil, wine, cheese, caponata, home-made salamis, and fresh favas back to their industrialized places of work which they perceive as cultural deserts of Big Boys and Wimpies.  These emigrants, at any cost, continue to reorient themselves toward Trappeto for the most serious businesses of finding a spouse, improving their property, and feeling totally alive.  They embody the phenomenon described by Kristin Ruggiero:  “An important psychological fact, (the whole attitude toward work) is often expressed today as ‘I work in France, but I live in Italy’.”10   France, for the Trappetese, is synonymous with Germany or the USA.

Clearly, Sicilians have not ceased admiring America for the economic advantages it offers.  A number of my interviewees told me:  “America’s a generous land . . . One year of work in America is like five here . . . America is the country of Business.  If you have the will and the brains, America gives you all the opportunities you could ever dream of.”

But, no matter how moderately well-off they become, most Trappetese do not assimilate in Germany or the USA.  Theirs is a conscious choice not to do so.  Furthermore, they seem particularly convinced of the rightness of their decision when they encounter first- and second-generation Italian Americans in the USA and in Sicily.  Again, I quote a Trappetese, a thirty-three year old who spent eight years in Detroit, to elucidate this persistent dilemma wherein realities change but certain people’s feelings lag far behind:

 

I ran across all these Italians who were dead sure that in Italy . . . time had just stopped forty years ago . . . They had these fixed pictures of how everything in Italy had come to a halt while they had gone on to bigger and better things they called Progress . . . For them, Italy was a dump and Sicily was a pigsty . . . The most nauseating thing of all was to listen to the children of these immigrants . . . The mentality of the young kids was twenty years out-of-date.11

 

The town barber of Trappeto also lucidly articulates aspects of the problem of cross-cultural relations:

 

Those Trappetese who’ve emigrated and stayed in America, for better or worse, tend to lose their culture . . . Unfortunately, tourists coming from America seem reluctant to recognize us for who we are.  Maybe they have a superiority complex because they’re American, so they’re always standoffish, looking down on us Italians . . . I suppose Sicilian Americans are still looking for that ancient Sicily of cocked black caps and sawed-off shotguns and are disappointed when they find something else.  But still, they refuse to surrender their preconceptions.

 

The Trappetese I have interviewed and met informally in the twelve years I have been visiting and working in the town are perceptive in knowing themselves and criticizing their economic and socio-political environment.  What they politely ask of others is the effort to understand and respect their culture for what it has been, is, and is becoming, and to evaluate their folk and modernized world in the inter-related terms of what is preserved and what is transformed.  As my barber friend says, “this change is a slow process, but coming from a primitive system, I’m comfortable with the pace . . . People my age recognize that while we’ve plodded ahead, we’ve done so with giant steps.”

The expectations of the Trappetese in dealing with other peoples embody, it seems to me, what is signified in Italian by the idiom avere cultura.  Like all idioms, this phrase makes no sense in a literal translation.  Logically, as Erich Fromm pointed out in To Have or To Be,12  one cannot have or possess culture any way—unless one intends to classify and ultimately embalm it.  On the contrary, says Fromm, culture must be lived, preserved in organic forms, modified, transformed if necessary for survival, via the languages, customs, morals, thoughts, actions and creations that keep us human.  Thus, culture entails that corpus and ongoing opus of relationships with other things and humans that we cultivate interdependently with nature, our man-made environment and fellow beings:  from crops, tools and machines to minds, bodies and souls.  In this context, searching for a better translation of avere cultura, as linked to essere educati, I would propose to be well-brought-up in certain mores as guides to behaving civilly and, if possible, to be educated as a civilized person with an open mind and liberal spirit regarding one’s own community and those of others; to be schooled in the hard knocks of life and/or the comforts and discomforts of an educational institution; through experience, to develop a wise sense of the active and contemplative virtues of a civilization.  In a few words then, I am talking about a collective, integral transmission of living culture, elite or folk, that can be absorbed, produced, and reproduced according to established, adapted and improvised molds and values.  What William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, called “the old verities . . . and universal truths”13  can be expressed and even transmuted by peasants, artisans, artists, merchants, professionals, politicians, philosophers—provided that they are sufficiently human, i.e., culturally developed, to be capable of treating other living things and material objects civilly, with respect for their function and dignity.

This redefinition of culture can be particularly relevant to Italian American and Italophile intellectuals insofar as we accept responsibility for the education of ourselves, our students, our readers, public opinion and cultural establishment elites in the United States as to the Italic peoples and the history of their civilizations, past and present.  However, no Italian Americans, intellectual, educator or other, can help to sharpen the perceptions of Sicilian or Italian reality and values if they do not learn to relearn their ancestors’ languages as spoken today, or if they go to Italy to display how much “real money,” success or cultural baggage they have acquired in the Promised Land about which they persist in feeling insecure enough to have to sell.  If Italian Americans try to prove that Frank Sinatra, Lee Iacocca and twenty-six million others plus Cher (one of our recent Honorary Italos) have to be right, then the barriers against comprehension and authentic dialogue between the USA and Italy will grow higher and thicker.

Relations between these two major Western countries will go on changing no matter what.  Their dynamics of growth and shrinkage, flux and reflux, progress and backwash, evolution and devolution, is a fact of our interconnected, wired world.  The question to pose then is how to attempt to mediate change, preserve what is worth preserving, dispose of dross, create something genuinely new for our own good and/or someone else’s.  Otherwise, if we as groups of people have no solutions to propose and push, media manipulation of stereotypes will dominate and decide for us the messages to be communicated and bleeped out.  In my worst dreams, after reading Sciascia and doing oral history, I see flashes of the most crassly materialistic version of know-nothingness and national/ethnic chauvinism being perpetuated by us in our children, who wind up believing that all Standards are American and that all emigrants smell and look funny.

Finally, the choice can be ours as to how Italy, Italian America, and America perceive each other:  we can mind our own business and let men in power and the media decide; we can illude ourselves and each other via nostalgia, plain white lies, pomposity, or something even more dangerously deceptive; or we can educate ourselves so we educate others in the process.  In the final case, naturally, we may also have to listen to some pretty unpleasant truths.  But, then again, how else do we grow up?  As the Czech film14  says, there are lies our fathers have told us.  Let us not blame them, however, because we do a good job in that area ourselves.

To close, I would like to underscore a few deceptively simple truths expressed to me by a highly cultured boy of eleven who has never left Trappeto:

 

We have a wonderful sea and all the treasures left by the Greeks . . . And look at the rich cultural heritage of Palermo and Monreale’s cathedral with its beautiful Arab mosaic.  It’s one of the most beautiful in the whole world. . . That’s why what we children want most is for our parents not to have to emigrate.  We want them to invest the fruits of their labor in their native soil . . . I want to study.  Maybe I’ll go into political science.  But if I don’t find work in my field then I’ll cultivate the earth—which is a real beautiful trade.

 

Evaluating the complexity of such a cultural heritage—elite and/or folk—with the respect born of relativity could be a humble step toward improving American/Italian relations—a step grounded in what Albert Camus has called “frugal and lucid thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands.”15   Cultural relativity and generosity—or what the sociologist Franco Ferrarotti has termed “inter-subjectivity”16—represent an approach to understanding another reality which necessitates that we participate on an equal footing with the people of that culture to analyze their unique world and ours together.  Listening to them and letting them teach us, we begin to discover the multiple and complex truths and falsehoods we all live everyday.  In this manner, the voices of new emigrants and their children deserve to be heard and evaluated without mystifications pro or con so that we can grow in mutual understanding via a network of relationships that we choose to cultivate productively—or to leave up to others it may not be wise to trust.  This means nothing less than a quest for a sense of wholeness, even oneness with other peoples—or nothing more than the assuefaction of being manipulated, fragmented, and rootless.

 

Justin Vitiello

Temple University

 

 

 


1See Arba Sicula 9, 2 (September 1988), pp. 16-19.

2Ibid., pp. 30-33.

3Canti del golfo (Poggibonsi:  Lalli, 1987), p. 91.

4“La tematica dell’emigrazione nella narrativa italo-americana,” Comunità 30, 176 (August 1976), p. 270.

5I trapiantati  (Milan:  Longanesi, 1963, 1st ed. 1909).

6Two of the strongest cases for the dignity in esse of Italian American culture have been made by Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975), and Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street:  Faith and Community in Italian Harlem.  1880-1950 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1985).

7In Gli zii di Sicilia (Turin:  Einaudi, 1958).

8See Gambino 1975, especially Chapter I.

9Cristo si é fermato a Eboli (Turin:  Einaudi, 1947).

10“Social and Psychological Factors in Migration from Italy to Argentina:  From the Waldensian Valleys to San Gustavo,” in L. De Rosa and I. Glazier, eds., Migration Across Time and Nations:  Population Mobility in Historical Contexts (New York:  Holmes and Meier, 1986), p. 161.

11For a pertinent view of cultural lags and conflicts, see Paul J. Campisi, “Ethnic Family Patterns:  The Italian Family in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 53, 6 (May 1948):  443-49.

12(New York:  Harper and Row, 1976).  Chapters I and II.

13In Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, James B. Meriwether, ed.  (New York:  Random House, 1956), p. 120.

14“Lies My Father Told Me.”

15The Rebel (New York:  Vintage, 1956), p. 306.

16Storia e storie di vita (Bari:  Laterza, 1981), p. 49.