“Doing Diaspora” Well

Italian Americans watching a flag raising ceremony at the Feast of
San Rocco in NYC, photo ca. 1942, by Marjory Collins (1912-1985)

Guest Op-Ed

Submitted by Erasmo Russo

It has been jokingly said that the average Italian maintains that his fellow Italian is not authentically Italian unless he too has suffered to the same degree at the hands of the state with its poor governance and malfeasance as he himself has suffered. There is some truth in this linkage of shared suffering as an eternal bond, sufficient enough to unite the ethnos or nation, or indeed to create the nation. Those of us old enough to have lived through the Second World War or been raised with parents and grandparents who did, know well this notion. The older people often said, “you don’t know what sacrifices and misery we had in those days.” Or, “I never complain because my parents suffered more than I ever did. They came through the war.” Italians often even joke that unless you studied and passed the Italian driving test with its mechanical and road components, or have been through a grueling oral examination in an Italian school, or had to memorize more than 20 lines of Italian poems to recite aloud, you can not possibly be a “real Italian.” We may add, if you have not had to live on 800 euros a month, paid once monthly at the end of the month, had a motorino or Fiat as your first vehicle, you can not be a “real Italian.” Until recently mandatory military service was a bonding right of passage for Italian men, something most diaspora Italians did not experience. Those who remain abroad for long stretches of time often exhibit a modification of their pronunciation and even their native gestures. There is a certain reality to this. Being raised in Italy, one of course is infused with the history and culture. Diasporic communities often have children who attend the local foreign schools and coupled with their physical distance and separation from Italy, this often leads to a dissonant formation. While we are blessed with a nation state as a firm reference point and perennial font of our culture and language, there can be a significant disconnect between those who are able to be nurtured by them and those who are not. Without still living in the Patria, our diasporic communities must both remain in constant contact and travel back, or in the least, as historically happens, must successfully replicate and transmit language and culture. Further complicating matters, when one is fortunate to have a nation state, one must be continually updated because the arts, literature, and culture in general evolve and change and that very font or source becomes more complex. In assimilationist host countries our children are quickly pressured to spend more time on notions such as the American “our founding fathers” or the French “our ancestors, the Gauls,” both equally rather silly fictions employed to create a shared foundational myth around which to rally diverse unrelated peoples. Our culture and civilization should not be filtered through translation, but lived organically. At the same time, the natural diversity of the Italian regions and islands is a vast richness and there should be many ways of “doing diaspora.”

Prince Line poster depicting steamship
departing the Bay of Naples for New York

Diasporic communities are often backward-looking while the Patria is present or future-looking. Emigrants and their children abroad often resort to nostalgia for the time and place they left and construct their version of the ethnos and the culture based on time capsule thinking, while those who remain at home are living as citizens in the actual contemporary State. For this reason, interactions between those who left decades ago and those who still live at home inevitably are subject to a gap of sorts. The popular culture references to shows, trends, styles, music and commercials are vastly different. Some diaspora Italians had been away so long they never adopted such things as Nutella or following San Remo or Festivalbar songs. Meanwhile, greater wealth and Europeanization of large parts of Italy has lead to a loss of many local dialects and traditions which now survive abroad. In some cases old folkways at home have become a source of embarrassment for younger generations. For example, the now popular false narrative that all people ate a primo, secondo, and dolce all the time has taken root. Ask your grandparents and parents and they will tell you that often a one dish meal was the norm for many families, especially during the 1930’s and the World War. Also, pasta with polpette or polpettine was indeed a meal in many regions and should not be denied or shunned as a lower class diaspora invention. Conversely, diaspora communities hungry for their roots often serve with pride humble dishes to guests and at formal occasions which would be unthinkable in modern Italy.

The personification of Italy standing
between the old and new worlds

In broad terms, Italians have only endured diaspora conditions for approximately 150 years, ironically since the unification of Italy more inhabitants of the Peninsula and the islands have move abroad than any time in history; often due to the economic hardship and political oppression generated by the ill-conceived dominance of one state over the rest, rather than the mere pursuit of cultural or personal outlets or discretionary business expansion. In contrast to peoples such as the Greeks, Armenians and Jews, who for millennia found themselves not only ruled by foreigners, but often living in host countries which spoke alien languages and practiced other faiths and traditions, Italians are late-comers to living in diasporic conditions. The smaller ex-pat communities in the Greek islands, North Africa and the Middle East often functioned as trading outposts for the various pre-unitary states and did not often have numbers large enough to provoke hostile postures by the local populations and often consistently interacted with their homelands. One thinks of the Venetians and Genoese in Turkey and the Sicilians in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Consequently, most Italians are still slowly adapting and modifying survival strategies in their new distant contexts. Many Italians crave the stability and structure of the cities and towns they left and grow attached to the areas they now settle in foreign countries. This generates competing and inconsistent longings. Is our new ghetto worth preserving in perpetuity, as much as our native ancestral city or borough? Or should we conceive of it only as a transitory stop on our slow return journey home, hopefully in some sort of triumph, with a greater degree of prosperity and security, whereby our children may do what they want, rather than what they have to do.

A crude propaganda advertisement
from the 1942 Honolulu Advertiser

One of the chief areas of contention is that new arrivals often fairly note changes in more assimilated local populations, but also often assert their “authenticity” based on their perceived higher degree of suffering and grievances suffered while in the Italian state. While shared suffering can indeed serve as a bond, this is qualitatively different than suffering at the hands of a third party or foreign state and does not work well to unite Italian diasporic communities. The common bases of our nationhood or peoplehood are naturally, our language, our faith, our folkways, our customs and our food. Again, as shown by the examples of Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Jewish diasporic experiences, such bases are the most natural and strongest ways of maintaining our communities’ identity and most importantly, maintaining our linkage amongst our communities and keeping them in constant dialogue and cooperation across time and geography. We can even have recourse to koine languages which many of our communities have adopted. For example, like the Greek and Aramaic speaking Jews who abandoned Hebrew for daily communication, many of our communities could and do easily use English or Spanish in addition to Italian to speak to each other across regions. While Italian and regional languages are preferred, in some places like North America, the majority of the diaspora has adopted English by this late date. There is a sort of perversity in using another nation’s language while doing everything else from our own culture. Gradually though, constant use of another semantic field and cultural reference points from the other language begin to change us as much as the physical culture of the host country.

The proper posture should be one of peaceful, even grateful attitude, coexistence with the host country, but while maintaining a type of distacco, or separation or aloofness. It is healthy to recognize our otherness and remember we are indeed different. We can respect our host’s ways and laws and rules, but we don’t have to become our hosts. The notion that in order to “succeed” we must “change,” “evolve” or generally mimic our neighbors is always a losing strategy. Doing so renders one a poor copy of the host and lesser original. We risk falling into macaronic vignettes.

Still going strong: The San Rocco Society in New York City are preparing to celebrate their 134th Annual Feast of San Rocco this August in Little Italy

We are at a crossroads. In the 1970s Arthur Koestler argued that Jews faced two diametrically opposed choices. They either had to assimilate coherently into local host countries and create and maintain a hyphenated identity which tipped more to the host country, or move to Israel and become Israelis. While Koestler did assert that in some ways it was easier to live out one’s ethnic culture in a host country, especially in terms of religious practice, free of any nationalist pressure, it still retained a hint of incoherence. Many of us in our diaspora perceive ourselves as “Italians in the United States” or “Italians in Venezuela.” This posture is more and more yielding to “Italo-Americans” and “Italo-Venezuelans” etc. While we know we have a modern state to which we can always return, we still struggle with coherence. A broader question lurks in the background for another day- should we return to the Patria and reform and rebuild it, infusing it with our experiences from abroad? Or should we remain abroad as diasporic guests in someone else’s nation, and complain about the issues of our State? Or should we assimilate and become our hosts, to whatever degree we can or are allowed to become? Of course in the case of Italy, we ask, which State? The current iteration of the Republic; the Savoy Monarchy; The Pre-unitary states?