Italianamerican
I wrote a piece on The Vulgar Boatmen for I Enjoy Music, a great new blog that covers a wide range of music and features writing from contributors from a variety of backgrounds. Look for more pieces from me on there in the future!
Growing up, I didn’t give much thought to my ethnic identity. I’m sure a lot of that was to do with my reality. Neither my mom nor dad had any ties to Indiana. We moved to the Hoosier state because of my father. We moved four times by the time I was eight.
I always felt I lacked the roots my classmates had. Their parents attended our high school, and their extended family lived near; I had none of that. My dad was from Weiser, Idaho, and my mother was from Brooklyn, NY.
Dad’s side of the family was interested in genealogy, both the English and the Norwegian sides. I am connected to the tree that members of my extended family have put together over the decades on Ancestry. Thanks to their diligence, I can trace my ancestry back to the 15th century on the English side of things.
The English side has been in North America since colonial days. I am related in some way to Rogers Sherman of Connecticut, the architect of the Great Compromise that established bicameral legislation, and Benedict Arnold. A study in contrasts!
The Norwegians arrived in the 19th century and made a living as farmers in North Dakota. While I am not connected to an extensive tree for that side, I know that genealogy was important to my grandmother’s extended family. She and my grandfather corresponded regularly with relatives in Norway.
I feel no real connection to those sides of the family apart from it being nice to know where my roots are from. My dad was an only child, and I had never really met his father or his mother’s extended family. The ones I’ve met were all very fine people, and I’m glad to know them, but they have not been a big part of my life. The nature of being a child of divorce and living in another state. Maybe it’s because my dad hasn’t been part of my life, or maybe they assimilated too well, but beyond lefse and lutefisk, there is nothing really tangible.
Sure, there’s my interest in Norse mythology and appreciation for Ibsen and Grieg, but those are more shallow connections. Hüsker Dü is maybe the Norse-adjacent cultural item that means the most to me. Or maybe it’s track two on Rubber Soul.
That lack of connection does not mean dislike; quite the contrary! There’s a lot to like about Norway and its history. When I took AP Euro, we had to do a report on a country. I opted for Norway, and I learned a fair amount about Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg. The latter did music for the former. Two compositions for Peer Gynt were likely introduced to me by the Looney Tunes: “Morning Mood” and “In The Hall of The Mountain King.” I’ve seen some Norwegian films that I enjoyed and am eager to explore more. I think my next one will be Flåklypa Grand Prix.
When I was living in North Dakota, it was nice seeing the impact of Scandinavian culture on the northern part of the state. I visited Minot multiple times while living there and loved visiting the Scandinavian Heritage Park, including a Norwegian stave church, among other Scandinavian cultural objects.
Those sides of the family had been in the States so long that they had assimilated, and asking them what was specifically English or specifically Norwegian about them would be like asking a fish about water. I feel at a distance from Norse culture. I wonder if that might be related to the general temperament of Scandinavians.
That part of my heritage is like my rooting interest in the Cubs: I have a very casual relationship with it. It was a nice feeling when they won in 2016 because one of the players attended my alma mater, and I could think of my grandfather and how happy it would have made him. Baseball was one of the few ways he and I could bridge the 70 years between us.
I have a more tangible connection to the English side even though it’s far more assimilated than the Norwegian one. I can trace my family back to the early days of the United States when it was a British colony. For one thing, I’ve been to England. And like many men of similar temperament and interest, I like a lot of British culture. British music, books, film, and television were a big part of engagement with the UK. Only a few things are as central to my identity as The Beatles are. Beyond that, maybe it’s basketball, film, and being a Hoosier and Italian-American.
According to the DNA test I took, I have roots in Merseyside, which is fitting given my musical preferences. We took a cruise before my freshman year of high school, and our dinner table companions were some British people: grandparents and their grandkids. They were lovely people, and we had a nice time getting to know them and sharing meals. One night, I said that I was most proud of my English ancestry. And that was nearly all because of The Beatles. I’ve listened to them since I was 11 and still feel the same way about them more than two decades later.
Listening to and talking about them all brings me back to my youth—when I was less prone to irony and cynicism and could lose my mind over music.
I regret saying that now, not just because of Great Britain's lengthy history of choosing to do the wrong thing but also because it probably hurt my mother’s feelings, and I don’t feel that way anymore. Englishness is an abstract idea to me.
My family has been here too long to feel any real connection to it beyond cultural ones. I do really like my last name; it’s pretty cool, I think. But I also would be happy if I had a last name that ended in a vowel and might sound like a pasta shape to the undiscerning.
Going into Latin class, I hated the Romans. I admired the Greeks because of the culture they created, and I didn’t like that the Romans put an end to that and ripped off Greek culture wholesale.
The Greeks made for interesting reading in history class and they had so much to offer in the arts. One of those ancient civilizations that is endlessly fascinating because of how different it can be from our current way of living but also wholly relatable. I loved reading Greek myths, when I was insecond grade I lost track of how many times I checked out D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths from the school library.
When I read R.L. Stine’s memoir, It Came From Ohio, mythology books were one of the things he mentioned getting from the library. I read Norse mythology as well as books collecting Native American mythology and myths from China and Japan. I recall one book that collected creation myths from around the world. It pulled from a variety of sources, and some parts of it were strange, some familiar.
I can see why Joseph Campbell reached the conclusions he did. I take comfort in the fact that the foundational myths of every culture have something in common. They typically feature heroes who follow a higher calling, who aspire to overcome the weakness of the flesh and body, and who sometimes fall short.
We have more in common than not. That’s why I tend to get along well with people from similar cultures. We understand each other on some level and won’t bat an eye at behavior that others might consider eccentric or rude. I think the connection of a common linguistic ancestor may be why I tend to hit it off with people from similar backgrounds, generally speaking, those with ancestry from places around the Mediterranean.
Greek was the language with a lot of scientific terms. The Greek I knew was mostly from paleontology. Later I’d pick more up from English class as well as Latin. There were many borrowed Greek words and even attempts at recreating some Greek verb tenses. Virgil uses it in The Aeneid at times. Those were tricky to translate because Latin doesn’t have a middle voice. The one example I can think of was translated something like “with respect to her long flowing robe.”
Latin class is where I fully embraced Rome. Latin was one of two languages my school offered with Spanish being the other. I’d had a sampling of it in middle school and liked it, but I was intrigued by a chance to study something new. And I’d heard great things about the teacher. What I heard was accurate and she was one of my favorite teachers I’ve ever had.
A passionate educator and an engaging classroom presence. She made it a point to enrich our learning beyond the scope of the class by talking about other pieces of work that would stimulate us, get us thinking of the world in new ways, and enrich our life. She was quoted in A Companion to Catullus on why she opted to teach his works.
In furnishing her own pedagogical perspective on why she teaches Catullus, and why she thinks her students like to read him, Nancy Wilson, a teacher at Decatur Central High School in Indiana who studied with Frank O. Copley at the University of Michigan, also emphasizes the emotional appeal of the poems as well as the aesthetic achievement:
“I teach Catullus because his poetry is beautiful and extremely well structured... [T]een-agers relate more to him than to Caesar and his war battles and descriptions of terrain they’ve never seen.... [H]is poetry is so emotional and it allows us to see that these ancient Roman people we study were just like those of us today. They possessed jealousies, fear, hurt, and love. It makes them more real to the students. By reading Catullus we also get a chance to examine ourselves, our motives, our pains and sorrows - in other words, to examine our humanity.”
It was in this class that I began to develop an appreciation of all that the Romans had achieved. Their story was more complex than just a world-bestriding colossus that fed on blood and suffering. There was a deep humanity, full of the contradictions found most anywhere.
Latin expanded my vocabulary exponentially. If I could recognize a Latin stem or root, I could figure out its meaning. My freshman English class also tested my knowledge of stems and roots and included Greek as well.
The first year of Latin, we learned Greek history, which I knew the basics of. Roman history the following year felt even more granular. I’d knew the general beats of the story of Rome, but this was more in depth and the way my teacher lectured, these long dead historical figures felt incredibly real. They were less like marble statues and more like how the statues appeared in antiquity: painted in varied vibrant hues.
At times the past can feel like a completely different planet and the people who lived then an alien species. But then you learn. Things like the pettiness of the long dead, their quotidian squabbles written in Vulgar Latin in form and contact. Accusations of philandering, vows to swear off the opposite gender because you feel wronged by them. Not so different from modern social media.
I stayed with Latin all four years, including two years of AP Latin. All because I liked the teacher. She was also my coach for Spell Bowl and Hoosier Bowl. The one year I took part in the latter was in Russia, and I got to read The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Chekov and listened to great Russian composers like Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I learned about Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky and loved their art, especially Chagall. She was such a great teacher that I never once made a Heart joke.
My Latin came in handy. Generally, I can recognize when a word has Latin roots, and if it’s a root I know and the word is unfamiliar with the word, I can make an educated guess on translation.
College is where I started thinking more seriously about my ethnic background. I’m sure some of that was the normal self-reflection that occurs when you’re taking early steps in adulthood. A class on Italian history — The Mafia and Other Italian Mysteries — made me think more about my background. It covered the development of organized crime across Italy and how the politics of the time responded to it.
Part of that course covered the Years of Lead, an era marked by tension between right-wing and left-wing that sometimes simmered over into violence. The government of that era exploited a strategy of tension to manufacture support for a strong government. It is an era worth studying because of the possibility of such an atmosphere developing in the United States.
As part of the course, we watched several pieces of Mafia-related media, including the pilot episode of The Sopranos and the scene in Godfather Part III with Cavalleriana rusticana, as well as a video of a full production of that opera.
The summer after that school year, my brother, mother, and I all watched The Godfather trilogy. It was a first for me. I’d seen clips of the films and knew many of the classic lines and moments but had never bothered to watch any of them. I’d never really been enamored with mafia media at that point. Something about them I found really slimy and loathsome in a manner that was separate from their crimes. It might have been their retrograde attitudes, stupidity, and propensity toward violence. Maybe I was just ashamed to share a common ancestry with those people, like Dr. Melfi’s ex-husband Richard LaPenna.
When Melfi says, “[Y]our Calabrese is showing,” that hits slightly close to home, as does her earlier remark about his affinity for Irish women. Guilty as charged! But it makes sense: ethnic whites with a Catholic background and a similar immigrant experience. It makes sense that Irish-Italian marriages are common for the same reason there are many Jewish-Italian marriages. There is a familiarity and level of comfort with one another’s culture, but the differences make things interesting. I love having common interests with someone, but it’s where we diverge that I am most interested. Otherwise, you’re just dating yourself.
However, I do agree with Christopher Moltisanti that a bar where it’s St. Patrick’s Day every day is my vision of hell. It's less because of the holiday — technically, he’s Italian if you have a very liberal interpretation of that word and consider Roman citizens Italians by a different name — and more about the clientele. It's a total amateur hour when it comes to drinking holidays like that or New Year’s Eve. Everyone wants to audition for The Replacements but can’t handle their booze. Not that The ‘Mats could all the time, but these amateurs aren’t performing drunken T. Rex covers while wearing the wardrobe of Tom Petty’s ex-wife.
My mom watched The Sopranos, and I would catch an episode with her from time to time. I must not have been paying attention because I found the mafiosos stupid and violent with no redeeming qualities.
“Pine Barrens” is one of the few I remember seeing as well as the episode where Ralph Cifaretto meets his end.
I didn’t bother to watch the full show until after my mother had died. I thought it might be too tough to watch because many characters reminded me of people I knew. Junior looked like my maternal grandfather when I knew him. I remember mom saying that her father had looked like Tony when he was younger. Aida Turturro, who played Janice, was supposedly related to my aunt’s godmother.
She was one of the "extended family members I got to know better while living in NYC. Though not blood relatives, her family treated me like I was one of their own. I learned a lot of family history from living with my grandmother. Her father had been friends with another man who immigrated from Italy. When the two friends were married, each couple served as godparents to the other’s children. This tradition continued down the line for generations.
My mother’s immediate family was small, just her mother, father, and sister. My aunt didn’t have kids, so I had no cousins. She had aunts, uncles, and cousins, but I was never that close with any of them growing up due to my location. I met several of them when I lived there, and I developed a good relationship with them. They took a liking to me. At a minimum, we could talk sports, though sometimes my rooting interests conflicted with theirs, and music as well.
In my last semester of grad school, my mother’s godmother passed away, and she came out for the funeral. While the occasion for the gathering was sad, the reception afterward was really enjoyable. I finally understood what a family reunion was like. I’d had a similar feeling attending Thanksgiving with that part of the family during my first year of grad school.
I was used to it just being my mother, my brother, and me, so there was novelty and excitement in being embraced as a member of the extended family. From living in Brooklyn and staying with my grandmother, I had some concrete experiences with what being Italian-American meant.
My mother was very much assimilated. What little Italian I’d picked up from her had been curse words and affectionate but slightly insulting terms of endearment. No malice was ever intended in them. This is why I giggled at my high school’s production of Grease, including “Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee” and keeping fangool in the lyrics. I couldn’t believe we’d gotten away with something so vulgar. And it is extremely vulgar! It is an Americanized version of vaffanculo, which translate roughly to “go do it in the ass.” So essentially, it’s a raunchier way of saying, “Fuck you!”
She cooked Italian food, like gravy. When she said she was making it, I was baffled. Growing up in Indiana and far from most other Italians, I’d never encountered the sauce/gravy debate. I assumed she meant the stuff that gets poured over mashed potatoes. She used both interchangeably. I like to use gravy because it confuses outsiders, and I like the specificity of that over sauce. I’ll usually refer to it as Sunday gravy if I don’t feel like explaining it.
While I’m not exactly Dr Cusumano eating Sunday gravy out of a jar, I’m definitely closer to AJ than Tony.
I don’t really feel that Italian most of the time and I don’t think I look like one most of the time. And I know that’s because of my perceptions of Italian behavior and appearance. It’s more than stereotypical goombas, and Italians aren’t all swarthy and aquiline-beaked.
I don’t have the swagger and machismo that are a stereotype of Italian-Americans on the East Coast. Is that because I grew up in the Midwest, or is it because that’s only one aspect of the experience?
I feel most Italian when I’m talking at high volume, gesticulating while I speak, and interrupting people.
If I were to operate like Italian-American stereotypes, it would be more authentic in one sense and completely inauthentic in another. By just being myself, it’s more authentic than if I were to wear gold chains, substitute Cs for Gs, and shorten Italian food words.
I spend a lot of time talking about being Italian because it’s the one part of my identity for which I have any frame of reference. As interesting as the other parts of my background may be, there is nothing that really grounds my feelings about them.
Trying to find some way into those worlds without any road map feels like the initial reconstruction of the iguanodon, where one of the fearsome thumb spikes was deemed a nose horn due to the incomplete skeleton.
That connection is important to me because, along with cooking, it’s one of the ways I can still feel close to my mom. So I lean into it. Plus, there is truth in stereotypes about Italian men and their mothers. I must be loyal to my capo.
Last month, during a bout of despair, I spent the better part of a week binging The Sopranos. I think I slowed down a little by the time I got to season 5 and watched the remainder more leisurely. The whole show is great, of course, and as it gets darker, it’s perhaps wise to sit with the episodes some.
Every time I watch it, I notice something new. I appreciate how fleshed out the characters are and how even the most stereotypical characters can have one aspect that transforms them from stereotype to real person.
There are a lot of tragic characters on the show, whether that’s those harmed by the main cast as they pursue selfish means of fulfillment or even the main characters themselves. You see glimpses of potential in characters and wonder if things might turn out differently for them had they tried a different way of living.
None of these are groundbreaking thoughts; countless ink, digital and otherwise, has been spilled discussing these very matters. Things like the expectations of gender, culture, and society. There’s a hollowness in modernity, and people seek to fill that void with money, sex, drugs, power, and so on. Ultimately, it leaves them worse off and harms their relationship with others and with theirselves.
Christopher Moltisanti’s arc has tragic qualities. He yearns for a meaningful life and has impulses for other, more creative pursuits, but ultimately, he can’t reconcile that with what he thinks he must be.
He can’t be vulnerable in acting class, can’t follow through on writing, and generally fears being perceived as weak. He uses drugs to numb that inner torment, and when he manages to get sober, he falls off the wagon at the behest of Tony. He relapses, and that dooms him in the end.
It is a tragic arc, but at the same time, you can’t ignore his belligerent behavior or his casual violence and cruelty. But you see the potential in him, just as you see something similar in Tony or in the rest of his family and Family.
That tension between the flesh and the spirit makes it a very Catholic show. Reconciling those contradictions is a part of being Italian-American, part of being alive.
I am very proud to be an Italian-American, but there’s plenty to dislike. When Italians began arriving in large numbers to the U.S., they were perceived as the wrong kind of white for their tendency toward swarthy skin, their culture, and their religion. In a nation of Protestants, Catholicism was scandalous. They were perceived as mafioso, anarchists, and other identities deemed to undermine the American way of life. Irish immigrants received similar treatment for similar reasons, and some of that animosity reflected the historical tensions between Ireland and its colonial master and its descendants.
Whiteness is conditional and can be revoked at any moment. Italians especially had it tough in the South, where there were multiple instances of lynchings of Italians, such as in New Orleans on March 14, 1891. That specific incident is considered the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. It came in response to the outcome of a trial concerning the murder of NOLA police chief. Six of the defendants were acquitted, and three were given a mistrial.
A day after the trial, a mob broke into the jail and dragged out the prisoners to be lynched. The mob was large in size and featured many of New Orleans’ most prominent residents. Most of those killed were shot, and the press response was positive. A New York Times editorial about the event referred to the victims as “Sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.”
Theodore Roosevelt describes it as “a rather good thing.”
At the time of the lynchings, Italians living in NOLA were living and working alongside the Black people of the city in peace, a fact that is heartbreaking, knowing how reactionary and racist many contemporary Italian-Americans can be. And utterly shameful considering a shared history of lynchings, prejudice, and low pay.
At The Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, one of the exhibits featured wages offered for various ethnic groups, and I was shocked to see Italian-Americans at the very bottom.
Of course, you can hide being Italian, but generally, you can’t hide being Black, and the oppression faced by Italians pales in comparison to what Black people have faced over the course of their history in the U.S.
Italians experienced discrimination like other groups, but the forces of oppression generally seemed to pull their punches. During the Second World War, Italians were put in internment camps and spied upon. All at a much smaller scale than those of Japanese descent.
The same happened to Germans during the war, as it had happened to them during the First World War. Germans make up the one of the largest white ethnic groups in the country. In response to the outbreak of war with Germany, there was an effort to Americanize things, like changing the pronunciation of the city of New Berlin, calling sauerkraut victory cabbage, or changing the names of buildings. Das Deutsch Haus in Indianapolis renamed The Athenaeum.
Today, it is home to The Rathskeller, a German restaurant. Originally, it was a hub of social activity for the local German community. Kurt Vonnegut’s grandfather's architecture firm designed both wings of it.
Two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were put on trial and executed for their alleged role in the murders and robbery of a shoe factory paymaster and a guard. Evidence of wrongdoing was mostly circumstantial.
“There was plenty of reason to doubt that Sacco and Vanzetti had actually committed the crimes. The money was never recovered and neither suspect had a criminal record. Plus, another known criminal confessed to the crime. But, despite seven appeals, their request for new trial was rejected in October of 1926, and the two were sentenced to death in April of 1927. Temkin notes that it’s impossible to say for sure a century later, but that the idea that they were behind the murders just doesn’t line up.” - Sacco and Vanzetti Were Executed 90 Years Ago. Their Deaths Made History by Olivia B. Waxman for Time.
Though there was some later ballistics evidence that suggested the bullet was fired from Sacco’s gun, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on that.
After their final appeal was rejected, Vanzetti was quoted in the New York World.
“If it had not been for these thing[s], I might have live[d] out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die[d], unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we now do by dying. Our words, our lives, our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph.”
The government intended to make an example of Sacco and Vanzetti, much like they did later with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
The Rosenbergs were given an opportunity to save their lives by turning in others, but they refused. A notable thing, because Ethel’s own brother had testified against her to save his life and that of his wife. While Ethel was a communist, there was no evidence to support her engaging in espionage; it was assumed she was the ringleader because she was older than her husband.
“By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence, the government admits its own doubts concerning our guilt… we will not be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness,” said the Rosenbergs in a public statement.
Declassified documents did show that Julius had been a spy for the USSR, but he had not done what he had been accused of: passing on atomic secrets. Julius was a small fish in the grand scheme of things, but an example had to be made. Anti-communism sentiment was at an all-time high, and that’s why the Rosenbergs were slated for execution.
These are some of the many stains on American History: miscarriages of justice made all the more shameful by the behavior of those with an ethnicity or culture in common with those executed. They are content to let such wrongs happen again and again rather than prevent such injustice from befalling others. Never again should mean never again for everyone. Until we can rise above our own selfishness and unite with all oppressed people, these historical moments will recur over and over again. First as tragedy, subsequent times as farce.