L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 2022 www.italoamericano.org 12 L'Italo-Americano W e were sit- ting in Adele Ne- g r o ' s kitchen in Albany, CA in 1993. There were four of us, contemplating the exhibit we were about to construct—on the WWII story "When Italian Americans Were 'Enemy Aliens,'" and what we could formally name it. We ran through all kinds of titles, try- ing to focus on how the story was all but unknown, but none seemed quite right. Then Pina Piccolo, who was teaching Ital- ian in Berkeley at the time, said, "How about this: Una Sto- ria Segreta. In Italian, La Sto- ria means 'history' but Una Storia means both 'a story,' and 'a history.' So Una Storia Seg- reta carries two meanings: both 'a secret story' and 'a se- cret history.'" Immediately, we knew we had our title: Una Storia Segreta: When Ital- ian Americans Were 'En- emy Aliens.' That title and that exhibit have since become famous, though it took weeks and weeks of work by four peo- ple meeting and laboring with- out compensation, to make it a reality. It had all started much ear- lier, when I began hearing about these amazing (to me) events that had impacted Ital- ian Americans on the West Coast during World War II. It was in the 1980s, when I was President of the American Ital- ian Historical Association's Western Regional Chapter (AIHA/ WRC, now IASA/WRC, the Italian Amer- ican Studies Association, West- ern Chapter), centered in and around San Francisco. I kept hearing these accounts of what had happened to 600,000 Ital- ian immigrants nationwide: having to register and carry pink ID booklets, having to bear the stigma of the name, "enemy aliens," thousands hav- ing to move from their homes and observe dawn-to-dusk cur- fews, still-burning animosities between the few who had in- formed and those informed-on, internments and evacuations, and much more. Having been born in Connecticut and grown up in the East, I had never heard a word about any of this. But it sounded important to me, and I kept insisting that we had to schedule some sort of program and promote re- search on this wartime story. Yet every attempt to discuss it was met with negatives: "there's still too much animos- ity, too much shame" people kept saying, "no one will talk about it." I was dismayed by this, but without willing infor- mants, there seemed no way to open up the subject. Then, in 1992, Stephen Fox, a historian at Humboldt State University, produced a book called The Unknown Intern- ment. He had initially heard about these events in class from one of his students, followed up the lead, and decided to look into it. His groundbreaking book was the result. But, as books are wont to do, it didn't make much of a dent in the ig- norance and indifference in most of the nation. Still, for us in the AIHA/WRC, it was a green light. The cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and there now appeared to be no reason to delay bringing the local story to light. In March of 1993, therefore, the AIHA/WRC sponsored a half-day conference we called "A House Divided," which was held at the University of San Francisco. During that half- day, a panel of speakers for the first time bore public witness to the ways in which the wartime restrictions had marked their lives and the lives of those they knew. The speak- ers included Dr. Rose Scherini, Judge John Molinari, Maria Gloria, Gian Banchero, and Ge- off Dunn of Santa Cruz. No one could hear what had happened to Italian Americans in those dark days without realizing that far more remained to be told. The question was, how? Then, at the close of the conference, Maria Gloria, a longtime columnist for the newspaper L'Italo Americano, and someone who had previously helped put together an exhibit on Italian-designed motorcy- cles, passed on a thought: "Why not do an exhibit?" Had any of us in the WRC suspected what such an endeavor would re- quire, or where it might lead, Una Storia Segreta might have been stillborn. As it turned out, innocence prevailed, and we agreed to try. The exhibit crew was com- prised of four members of the WRC, working mostly at the Museo Italo Americano in San Francisco: Adele Negro, then President of the WRC; Dr. Rose Scherini, then Curator and someone who had been re- searching these events almost alone for nearly twenty years; Elahe Shahideh, our designer who had earlier mounted an exhibit at the Museo called "Out of the Trunk;" and myself, agreeing to take on the job of Project Director. The Museo's art director at the time, Bob Whyte, had agreed to host our exhibit, though he had to over- come considerable resistance by board members who thought such a project "too negative." Though Whyte pre- vailed, the doubters succeeded in limiting our space at the Museo to the two back rooms. Yet we were undaunted. Scherini began assembling her materials and numerous con- tacts, sketching out what would become the six sections of the exhibit: Prelude to War, In- ternment, Restrictions, Evac- uation (to include material on the plight of Fishermen), Ex- clusion, and Aftermath. Shahideh started thinking about panels on which to mount the documents (an ear- lier exhibit from Italy had used black metal panels with docu- ments attached, which gave us the idea for black foam-core panels on which to affix our documents and photographs) and colors and placement for the narrative panels; and I started to research, mainly at the University of California Li- brary, newspapers and maga- zines of the time to copy, wher- ever possible, for our display. I also found a printing shop in nearby Oakland where we could get our narrative panels made, and affix them to the red backing panels Elie had chosen. Once we had enough mate- rials collected, the four of us, helped at weekends by my daughter Mia, began the task of constructing the panels. We spent days at the Museo, spray- ing documents with adhesive and affixing them to the foam- core, and working out how to order them. Elie was key to these decisions, figuring out the most eye-catching positions for the documents, and the colors and designs that would work best. We also found ways to use a few of the Museo's display cases to mount items such as cam- eras and binoculars that were designated "contraband" dur- ing the war, some home items that Rose Scudero found for us, and a case with letters that Costanza Ilacqua Foran had saved from the time of her fa- ther's internment. Rosa Alioto of San Francisco contributed fishing nets and other imple- ments that Elie placed strate- gically in one corner to signify the considerable impact on fishermen. Of course, we knew we needed some funding, but ini- tial attempts to secure it met with little success. The Califor- nia Council for the Humanities rejected our grant request, con- sidering the project's appeal "limited" and its premises questionable. Many in the Ital- ian American community re- mained distant, cautious. Yet with the encouragement of a handful of supporters, the ded- ication of several members (in particular, Neno Aiello, who in- troduced us to numerous in- formants from Pittsburg where he had grown up; and Gian Banchero, who not only let us use his grandfather's shortwave radio hidden under his bed during the war, but also drew the opening illustration that in- troduced the exhibit), and the help of a few individual dona- tions (Bill Cerruti gave us early support with a donation from his Italian Cultural Society of Sacramento), the exhibit opened at the Museo on Feb- ruary 24, 1994. It was the an- niversary of the deadline date in 1942 when thousands of Ital- ian enemy aliens in California were forced to evacuate homes, businesses, and lives suddenly off-limits to them. We quickly realized we had hit a nerve, mainly because of the crowds, and the way many people gazing at individual panels wept to see the re- minders of what they and their families had gone through in secret, and which was now val- idated publicly. And the press responded to the exhibit in a heretofore unprecedented way: stories appeared on the cover of the San Francisco Exam- iner's Style Section, and in sev- eral Gannett newspapers; a re- port on CNN was broadcast worldwide. Crowds at the Museo were among the largest ever recorded there, culminat- ing on March 27 with an Open Forum that played to a stand- ing-room-only crowd. Among the presenters that night were Rose Scudero, Michael Parenti, Adele Negro, Gian Banchero, and myself. But despite its ob- vious success, prior commit- ments by the Museo necessi- tated that the exhibit close in San Francisco on March 28. Despite this short run (a one-month run became the pattern we followed in all sub- sequent showings), Una Storia Segreta's second life was about to begin. The Italian Cultural Society of Sacramento man- aged, with the substantial help of Assembly Speaker John Foran—the husband of Costanza Ilacqua Foran, whose LAWRENCE DISTASI Lawrence DiStasi, project director of "Una Storia Segreta" and Curator/Newsletter Editor at IASA/WRC HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS PEOPLE Una Storia Segreta: genesis and history Continued to page 14

• Cover