Contrary Notions

by Michael Parenti

  Before I finally gave up on The Sopranos, I found myself enjoying the arcane Southern Italian slang words and expressions that were slipped into the show’s scripts. Italian dialect terms (some of them not very nice) that I had not heard since my youth in the old neighborhood I now heard on a major media show. It was a source of some satisfaction, an inside joke over America’s airwaves.

  Having been fed all these mafia shows, we need to remind ourselves that not all gangsters are Italian and not all Italians are gangsters. As with other ethnic groups in the last half century, Italian Americans have moved in noticeable numbers into government service, political life, sports, law enforcement, education, organized labor, the professions, entertainment, and the arts. But very little of what constitutes non-criminal Italian-American life has been deemed worthy of cinematic treatment. (There have been some worthy exceptions such as the films Marty, Moonstruck, and Dominic and Eugene.)

  When Italians actually are portrayed as law-abiding people, it is usually within the framework of working-class stereotypes: action-prone, loud-mouthed, simple-minded, visceral, living a proletarian existence worth escaping (for instance, Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive, and Hard Hat and Legs). The media’s Italian ethnic bigotry is also a class bigotry.

  Additional Italian-American stereotypes can be found in the world of television advertisements, as Marco Ciolli describes it: there is the Latin lover who wins his lady with his right choice of beverage; the Mafia don ready to start a gangland massacre if the lasagna isn’t magnifico; the nearly inarticulate disco dimwit who can barely say “Trident” as he twirls his partners around the dance floor.35

  Above all, there are the uproarious family meal scenes of blissfully chattering Italians shoveling food around the table and into their mouths. In the world of commercials, Italians are represented as noisy gluttons feasting with lip-smacking exuberance on endless platters of pasta, volunteering such connoisseur culinary judgments as “Mama mia! datza spicy meatball!,” an expression that served as a running joke for years during the 1970s. The food stereotype has continued to this day. In 2006, a Pizza Hut television commercial featured an elderly Italian couple, dressed in the style of oldtime immigrants just getting off the boat. She exclaims “Oooh, mama mia!” when the pizza appears, and he asks her in a scolding tone, “Why you no make-uh pizza like-uh dat?”36

  The stereotypical linking of Italians with food is so predominant as to preclude this ethnic group’s association with other realms of activity (except, of course, crime). Thus a PBS documentary mini-series on the English language, written and narrated by Robert MacNeil (of MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour fame) dwelled at length on how various foreign languages have enriched the English language. However, Italian was something of an exception, MacNeil asserted, since the only Italian words he could find that have passed into English “all relate to food.”

  MacNeil should have searched a little more carefully. The food stereotype so preempted his myopic vision as to cause him to overlook such inedibles as: aggiornamento, bravo, bravado, brio, buffo, ghetto, dilettante, cognoscenti, illuminati, literati, virtuoso, crescendo, diminuendo, fresco, divertimento, falsetto, forte, fortissimo, politico, graffiti, piazza, imbroglio, inamorata, incognito, malaria, paparazzi, pietà, prima donna, diva, regatta, rotunda, impresario, piano, soprano, contralto, sotto voce, libretto, maestro, staccato, stiletto, studio, umbrella, viola, vibrato, vendetta, vista—one could go on.

  Their days taken up with runs to and from the kitchen, or with shooting people in the face, Italians doubtless are a poor choice when it comes to chairing a board meeting, offering medical advice, writing a cogent social analysis, debating a public policy, arguing a court case, or conducting a scientific experiment. As Ciolli observes, “Certainly no commercial has ever shown an Italian American involved in any professional activity.”37

  It has been argued that the media merely reflect reality: after all there actually are Italian gangsters, and Italians really do like to drink wine and eat pasta (as do many other people). But such assertions overlook the distorted dimension of the “reality” presented. More often than not, the media’s approach is to propagate and reinforce the cheap, facile notions about one group or another rather than challenge such views in any measured way.

  If the representations can easily be made plausible, amusing, or sensational, then the corporate media will use them. The goal is to manipulate rather than educate, to reach as many people as quickly as possible with prefabricated but readily evocative images. For those on the receiving end, it’s not fun.

  NOTES

  1. Quoted in Cristobal Cavazos, “Violence against Mexicans: A Neglected Part of Our History,” People’s Weekly World, 17 June 2006; see also Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America, a History of the Chicanos (Longman, 2006).

  2. Recently edited and reissued by Marcus Jacobs as: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans (Propaganda Press, 2006).

  3. Scott Marshall, “North Carolina Confronts Shameful History,” People’s Weekly World, 18 March 2006.

  4. For some of the many cases of police brutality and murder perpetrated against African Americans in recent times, see Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson, 2007), chapter ten, “Unequal Before the Law.”

  5. Los Angeles Times, 22 December 2005.

  6. United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population Report 2000.

  7. New York Times, 18 June 2004.

  8. U.N. Population Fund, State of World Population Report 2000.

  9. The disappearance of females is discernible when census data is markedly out of line with normal gender birth rates.

  10. Report by the United Nations Department of Public Information DPI/1772/HR—February 1996.

  11. This account given to me, 19 October 2004, by Emilie Parry, former researcher in Ghana; also see the documentary film, Witches in Exile (2004).

  12. Andrew Cockburn, “21st Century Slavery,” National Geographic, September 2003.

  13. Quoted in John Pilger, “Afghanistan—What Good Friends Left Behind,” Guardian (UK), 20 September 2003.

  14. Yanar Mohammed quoted in Christian Parenti, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press, 2004), 24.

  15. Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Women Face Greatest Threat of Violence at Home,” New York Times, 6 October 2006; this article summarizes a ten-nation report by the World Health Organization.

  16. Maria Roy, The Abusive Partner (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982); Richard Gelles and Murray Straus, Intimate Violence (Simon & Schuster, 1988).

  17. For further exploration of cultural themes touched upon in this selection, see Michael Parenti, The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006).

  18. Quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, 25 October 2004.

  19. Nina Bernstein, “Polygamy, Praticed in Secrecy, Follows Africans to New York,” New York Times, 23 March 2007.

  20. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

  21. Quoted in Calvin Sims, “Justice in Peru,” New York Times (international edition), 12 March 1997.

  22. See the studies by sociologists and social psychologists cited in Kimberly Blaker, “God’s Warrior Twins,” Toward Freedom, Fall 2003.

  23. Blaker, “God’s Warrior Twins”; see also Kimberly Blaker (ed.) The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (New Boston Books, 2003).

  24. Jane Ganahl, “Women in Asia Are Starting to Say ‘I Don’t,’” San Francisco Chronicle, 14 November 2004.

  25. U.S. Census Bureau report, Associated Press, 2 December 2004.

  26. As reported in Mother Jones, January/February 2005.

  27. New York Times, 20 November 2004.

  28. Russ Baker, “The House Flunks Ethics,” Nation, 15 February 1999; Dennis Bernstein and Leslie Kean, Henry Hyde’s Moral Universe (Common Courage, 1999); Washington Post, 29 September to 5 October 2006.

 
29. New York Times, 3 to 5 November 2006.

  30. San Francisco Chronicle, 1 January 2005.

  31. New York Law Journal, 7 July 2006.

  32. Quoted in Chris Thompson, “Gay Couples Aren’t Inclined to Apologize,” East Bay Express, 10-16 November 2004.

  33. Crosby’s column appeared in various newspapers on 22 March 1961; quoted in Richard Gambino, “Living with the Mark of Cain,” I Am, August 1977.

  34. Quoted in Garry Wills, “Nixon, Italian Style,” La Parola dal Popolo, March/April 1975.

  35. Marco Ciolli, “Exploiting the Italian Image,” Attenzione, September 1979.

  36. ABC-TV, Bay Area, California, 5 September 2006.

  37. Ciolli, “Exploiting the Italian Image.”

  IV.

  ROOTS

  16 LA FAMIGLIA: AN ETHNO-CLASS EXPERIENCE

  Decades ago in the northeast corner of Manhattan, in what is still known as East Harlem, there existed a congestion of dingy tenements and brownstones wherein resided one of the largest Italian working-class populations outside of Italy itself. The backyards were a forest of clotheslines, poles, and fences. The cellars, with their rickety wooden steps and iron banisters, opened directly onto the sidewalks. On warm days the streets were a focus of lively activity, with people coming and going or lounging on stoops and chatting. Small groups of men engaged in animated conversations, while children played ball in the streets or raced about wildly.

  On certain days horse-drawn carts offered a lush variety of fruits and vegetables trucked in from Jersey and Long Island farms. The cries of the vendors were of a Southern Italian cadence unspoiled by a half-century in the new land. Women sat at window sills with elbows planted on pillows, occasionally calling down to acquaintances or yelling at the children. There was always something of interest going on in the streets but rarely anything of special importance except life itself.

  It was in this East Harlem of 1933 that I made a fitful entrance into the world. My birth was a cesarean because, as my mother explained years later: “You didn’t want to come out. You were stubborn even then.” Since she suffered from a congenital heart disease, there was some question as to whether either of us would survive the blessed event. In those days, during a dangerous birth, a doctor might crush the baby’s head in order to remove it from the womb and avoid fatal injury to the mother, a procedure the Catholic Church strenuously opposed. The Church’s position was to let nature take its course and make no deliberate sacrifice of life. This sometimes meant that the baby came out alive but the mother died, or sometimes both perished. At the last minute the hospital asked my father to grant written permission to have my life sacrificed were it to prove necessary to save his wife. Obeying his heart instead of the Church, my father readily agreed. As it turned out, they decided on a cesarean section, a risky operation in 1933 for a woman with a heart condition. Happily, both of us came through.

  To talk of my family I would have to begin with my grandparents who came from the impoverished lands of Southern Italy (as did most of the Italians in America), bringing with them all the strengths and limitations of their people. They were frugal, hardworking, biologically fertile—and distrustful of anyone who lived more than a few doors away.

  One grandmother had thirteen children of whom only seven survived, and the other had fourteen with only nine survivors. This was the traditional pattern of high fertility and high mortality carried over from the old country. Given the burdens of repeated childbirth, both my grandmothers died years before my grandfathers. Their children, however, adopted the American style of smaller families. Having discovered birth control and urban living and trying to survive the Great Depression, they rarely had more than two or three children. The image of the large Italian family is an anachronism that hardened into a stereotype.

  My father’s mother, Grandma Marietta, was a living portrait of her generation: a short squat woman who toiled endlessly in the home. She shared the common lot of Italian peasant women: endless cooking, cleaning, and tending to the family, with a fatalistic submergence of self. “Che pu fare?” (“What can you do?”) was the common expression of the elderly women. Given their domestic confinement, they learned but a few words of English even after decades of living in New York. They accepted suffering as a daily experience, rather than as something extraordinary. They suffered while mending and washing clothes in their kitchens, or standing over hot stoves; they suffered while climbing tenement stairs, or tending to the children or sitting alone at the windows; and they suffered while praying to their saints in church and burying their dead. Most of them went through life dressed in black in an uninterrupted state of mourning for one or another kin.

  Marietta often cast her eyes up toward the kitchen ceiling and muttered supplications to Saint Anthony of the Light Fixture. She lived in fear of u mal’occhio, the evil eye. When younger members of the family fell ill, it was because someone had given them u mal’occhio. Like a high priestess she would sit by my sickbed and drive away the evil eye, making signs of the cross on my forehead, mixing oil and water in a small dish and uttering incantations that were a combination of witchcraft and Catholicism. Witchcraft was once the people’s religion, having been in Southern Italy many centuries before Catholicism and having never quite left. The incantations seemed to work, for sooner or later I always recovered.

  Some of the first-generation Italians were extreme in their preoccupation with the evil eye. I remember as late as the 1950s a few of the late-arriving postwar immigrants would put an open pair of scissors, with one blade deliberately broken, on top of the television set so that no one appearing on the screen could send u mal’occhio into their living rooms. As we now know, the contaminations of television are not warded off that easily.

  My mother’s mother, Grandma Concetta, was something of an exception to this picture of the Italian woman. Endowed with a strong personality and a vital intelligence, she turned to the only respectable profession open to rural Italian women in the late nineteenth century: she became a midwife, a skill she learned in Italy and brought with her to New York. In those days midwives did more than deliver babies. They advised families on the care of children, diagnosed and treated illnesses with herbs, dietary prescriptions, heat applications, and other natural remedies that were said to work with far less destruction and sometimes more efficacy than the expensive chemicalized drugs pushed by the medical and pharmaceutical industries of today. She died at the age of sixty, a few years before I was born. I knew her only from the testimony of others and from a few faded photographs of a woman who gazed into the camera with a friendliness and gentle strength.

  The men of my grandfathers’ generation had toiled like beasts of burden in the old country, trapped in a grinding poverty, victimized by landlords, tax collectors, and military press gangs. Having fled to the crowded tenements of New York, they found they had a little more to live on but sometimes less to live for .My mother’s father, Vincenzo, came to the United States from Calabria in 1887. He spent his working days in East Harlem carrying 100- pound bags of coal up tenement stairs, a profession that left him permanently stooped over. My father’s father, Giuseppe, arrived in 1909. A landless peasant who had worked for a large estate near Gravina, outside Bari, he was fleeing military conscription. Giuseppe worked as a ditchdigger and day laborer in New York, managing to raise an enormous family on subsistence wages.

  The Italian immigrant laborers were the paragons of the humble, thrifty toilers whom some people like to point to when lecturing the poor on how to suffer in silence and survive on almost nothing. In truth, the immigrants were not all that compliant—at least not originally. In fact, they had taken the extraordinary measure of uprooting themselves from their homelands in order to escape the dreadful oppression of the Old World. Rather than suffer in silence, they voted with their feet. We may think of them as the virtuous poor (although in their day they were denounced as the “swarthy hordes”), but they saw themselves as lifelong victims who were somewhat less vic
timized in the new land than in the old. Now they worked only twelve hours a day instead of fourteen and were better able to feed their children.

  Still, in their hearts, many of the first generation men nursed a sentimental attachment to Italy. As the years wore on “the old country” for them became Paradise Lost, while the new land often seemed heartless, money-mad, and filled with the kind of lures and corruption that distanced children from their parents. They felt little patriotic devotion. What kept them in the United States were the loaves and fishes, not the stars and stripes.

  The immigrant men drank wine made in their own cellars, and smoked those deliciously sweet and strong Italian stogies (to which I became temporarily addicted in my adulthood). They congregated in neighborhood clubs, barber shops, and the backrooms of stores to play cards, drink, and converse. They exercised a dominant presence in the home, yet left most domestic affairs including all the toil of child rearing to the women. Religion was also left to the women. The immigrant males might feel some sort of attachment to the saints and the church but few attended mass regularly and some openly disliked the priests. In the literal sense of the word, they were “anticlerical,” suspicious of clergymen who did not work for a living but lived off other people’s labor, and who did not marry but spent all their time around women and children in church.

  The Italians who came to the United States during the great migrations at the turn of the century, like other groups before and since, were treated as unwelcome strangers. Considered incapable of becoming properly Americanized, they endured various forms of discrimination. Like other ethnic groups that have felt the sting of discrimination, many of the immigrants developed a late-blooming compensatory nationalism, becoming more nationalistic regarding Italy while in the new country than when they had lived “on the other side.” Certainly that was true of Grandpa Giuseppe. For many, Mussolini appeared on the world stage in 1922 as something of a redeemer. Through his exploits in Africa and by “standing up” to other European powers, Mussolini won “respect” for Italy and for Italians everywhere—or so many of the immigrant men imagined.