L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, MAY 4, 2017 www.italoamericano.org 12 L'Italo-Americano HERITAGE COMMUNITY IDENTITY TRADITIONS FRED GARDAPHE W h e n N i c c o l o Machiavelli penned his masterpiece, The Prince, Italy was a land divided and besieged by many foreign forces. In his last chapter, "An Exhortation to free Italy from the Hands of the Barbarians," he calls for new weapons and for- mations to be used in warding off intruders and to prepare for n e w l e a d e r s h i p o f I t a l y . I n many ways, the current state of Italian/American culture is in similar straights. We need new tools and new alliances to bring a sense of unification to our cul- ture so that we can ward off the siege of total assimilation. F o r m a n y y e a r s , I t a l i a n / American culture has been pre- served in the homes, and over the years, more likely than not, in the basement or what Italian Americans have come to call the "basciument," where grandpa made wine, where grandma had a s e c o n d k i t c h e n , a n d n o w where we store our material legacies and memories. Outside celebrations such as religious feste became the most important public presentation of Italian/ A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e , b u t t h e s e annual events were never fre- q u e n t e n o u g h t o p r o t e c t Italian/American culture from the regular mass media bom- bardment of negative stereo- types. Where Italian Americans have never organized as a cul- tural group is in the mainstream institutions of education. The public programs that might have taught Italian Americans the value of their own culture and subsequently fortified future generations, the public programs t h a t w o u l d h a v e c h a l l e n g e d media-made impressions, were never created. We have kept our heads in our basements where Italian/American culture is safe inside family celebrations. N o w i s t h e t i m e t o m o v e beyond the basements of yester- day and out into the streets of today. The romance and tragedy of early 20th century immigra- tion can no longer serve as mod- els for identity. The key to cre- a t i n g a m e a n i n g f u l s e n s e o f Italian/American culture that m e a n s s o m e t h i n g t o t o d a y ' s youth is to first insure that they have access to histories, of their families and of their communi- ties, then we must provide them with historical and contempo- rary models in the areas of arts, business, and education, that t h e y c a n s t u d y , e m u l a t e a n d transcend. We have created scholarships for higher educa- tion, but we have done little to help those applicants understand w h a t i t m e a n s t o b e I t a l i a n American once they enter those institutions. This knowledge comes best when it is found in the very materials those students study, in the very stories they hear and read from childhood up through graduate school. At the end of a section of her n o v e l , U m b e r t i n a , H e l e n Barolini has the matriarch of a family sitting by herself near a tree during a family reunion pic- nic. She looks around and is proud of what she and her hus- band created out of the nothing that they brought with them to America. But then, there is a sadness that overcomes her to the point of tears, and that is when she comes to realize that of all the relatives here, there is no one to whom she can tell her story. Not one of her daughters o r s o n s , g r a n d d a u g h t e r s o r grandsons, can nor will they ever know her story. She had won, but who could she tell her story to? At times the doubt came to her whether she had really won, after all. All her life had been a struggle for family, and now in her old age she saw some signs that made her uneasy…. I t i s n o t l o n g b e f o r e t h i s uneasiness, becomes a dis-ease of sorts, and many of you know that it is not simply the stuff of novels. This occurs in every family in which the experience of one generation was denied entry into the consciousness of the next. More often then than not, this occurred when the lan- guage of the immigrants was not passed on to their children. R e m e m b e r , t h e i m m i g r a n t s ' experiences were processed in I t a l i a n , a n d w e r e t h e y n o t recorded, not passed on from one generation to the next, it m o s t l y l i k e w a s d u e t o t h e impossibility of communicating such complex thoughts and feel- ings in a new language. By the time I learned to speak, read, and write Italian, my grandpar- ents were dead and my parents stopped speaking the language. W h a t w a s l o s t o n l y I c o u l d imagine, so I went in search of those stories. What I found was that while they couldn't control how they passed down a heritage through conscious stories, they did pass down some unconscious ele- ments that we must understand before we can succeed as a cul- ture. Many of our stories have b e e n e x p l o i t e d b y o t h e r s t o make money. When we wish to tell our stories, no one wants the ones that won't make money. A publisher told me that while my novel was a good story, I should change the characters to Jews because Jews read and Jews buy books. I was appalled, and that was my call to become the pro- fessor and writer you are now reading. If we don't tell our stories, if we don't preserve them, then we will not have a culture to either protect or promote. When we don't tell our stories, we lose our souls. When someone else tells our story, they steal our souls. When we let them steal them, we are accomplices in an ethnic and cultural sui- cide. New alliances can be made by connecting the Italian U.S. American Italian experiences with those of Italian immigrants throughout the rest of the world. This focus on Italian Diaspora studies, something done through the collaboration of the John D. C a l a n d r a I t a l i a n A m e r i c a n Institute of Queens College and the University of Calabria in R e n d e t h r o u g h t h e i r a n n u a l summer seminar; and this year the National Italian American F o u n d a t i o n a n d t h e I t a l i a n American Studies Association are teaming up to create a joint- conference that will help us see better into the future of Italian American cultures and identi- ties. The key to creating a meaningful sense of Italian/American culture that means something to today's youth is to first insure that they have access to histories, of their families and of their communities, then we must provide them with historical and contemporary models in the areas of arts, business, and education, that they can study, emulate and transcend Beyond the Basement: Cultures Sur vive through Stories

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