Where Have You Gone Joe Dimaggio?

Anti-Southern Italian Bias Alive and Well in the USA

NBC’s Friday night hit show Who Do You Think You Are?  is in it’s third season and is a wonderful showcase of who make up America through the family histories of some of our celebrities.  

So far, the show has featured 3 Italian-Americans family histories.  Starting with Brooklyn’s own Steve Buscemi last year and this season’s paesans were Marisa Tomei and Edie Falco.   

Oddly enough, two of these “Italian” actors Southern heritage was completely ignored in lieu of their “more interesting” WASPy lineage.  In the case of Buscemi, it was his great great grandfather, an American Civil War veteran of Anglo descent who featured.  For Edie Falco, again, her northern European ancestry was deemed more interesting than her Napolitan lineage, despite her most acclaimed role as an actor, playing Carmela Soprano, a Napolitan-American housewife.  Finally, Marisa Tomei, a self proclaimed “proud” Italian, descends from Tuscan blood lines.

 I wonder why NBC has decided to ignore the heritage of over 25 million Americans to feature their hidden heritage, that makes them more “American”?  Just another example of our history being brushed under the rug.  Who do they think they are?

How Hard Was It? Part Two - Baby’s Gone Home to Momma

When we think of the immigrant experience that our ancestors lived, many of us have a hard time of separating ourselves from the world we live in today.  A world where communication is instant.  We may realize that fact in our lives if we think about it, but the immediacy of communication today may not be in the forefront of our minds, until we think of how delayed communication was the way our forefathers experienced it.  Carmine Pietropinto’s story hopefully will shed some light on just how difficult living in an age of slow communication was, even if he faced the same challenges many Southern Italian American men face today.

Arriving from San Fele, Basilicata on January 1, 1892, Carmine settled on MacDougal Street in what is today SoHo.  Unlike today’s neighborhood of million dollar apartments with the luxuries of the 21st Century, MacDougal Street one hundred and twenty years ago was a very different place.

He settled quickly into his new life, becoming a tailor in an age when you couldn’t take a trip to the mall to pick up your clothing.  It was an era when if you wore something, you wore it all the time.  This is because many of the garments you wore, in an age when the impact of Victorian England was felt in the ways people dressed, were made by hand based on your own personal measurements.  This process is incredibly time consuming, and because of that, fairly expensive.Cloth was cut by hand based on your individual measurements and body shape that was analyzed by a skilled craftsman, who then pieced each part together, including the inner canvassing which gives the garment shape.  All of this responsibility was placed in the hands of one’s tailor, and often the relationship between tailor and client was a lifelong one.  Carmine played an important role in the lives of many NYers, he dressed them.

As different as Carmine’s working life may have been from the lives we lead today, his home life was not so different.  Growing up as a Napolitan-American boy, one person played a very important role in my emotional, physical and psychological well being.  My mother.  Almost every Napolitan and Sicilian-American man that I know today has a very unique relationship to his mother, the head of the family, and many times, a very intense one. 

The subject was more than touched on and played a crucial role in David Chase’s HBO Drama, The Sopranos.  Of course, done cheekily by David Chase, the role of the mother in a Napolitan family, was beautifully portrayed by the older generation in Livia, Tony’s mother, and modernized even better with the evolution of the character of Carmela, Tony’s wife and father of his two children.  Regardless of the generation, women played a vital role in teaching, caring for, and raising their men well into adulthood and the actions of many Napolitan men today are in part, to please their mother.  They also sure know how to lay on the guilt, just like Livia.  “You never call,”, “You never visit,”, “Only when you want something,” are phrases that are spewed at me constantly and I’m sure I’m not the only one. 

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Carmine’s mother, was no different.  If you think the zings of a mother today can hurt, imagine how it must have been 100 years ago, when those zings did not come via a telephone line, separated by a short car ride, but from the permanence of a handwritten letter, separated by a tumultuous sea and a multi-week boat trip.

Let’s examine the letter that Lucrezia Pietropinto, Carmine’s mother, sent to him in 1919.

The guilt starts almost immediately.  “I was pleased to hear you are enjoying the best of health, it being the opposite with me,” “…my end is near and…I would love to embrace you once before I die.”  Let me paraphrase here, “No pressure Carmine, but if you can take a second from your family, and busy life, I’d be nice. I am your mother you know.”  It continues:

I really enjoy the invocation of God in this paragraph.  Its as if Lucrezia is telling Carmine, “if you don’t leave immediately, you won’t just be letting me, your mother, down, but God.”  Believe you me, Lucrezia knew plenty well that she held a place in her sons mind right up there next to the big fella.  And Carmine knew, just as the plagues of locusts and rivers of blood were the result of an angry God in the Bible, that an angry mother can bring her own right there along side of Him. 

She then goes into the pity party again.  You know, the “in the end you die in your own arms” racket that Livia Soprano played so well. 

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Because, you know, “this town is unpopulated and it is impossible to have anyone assist me for my emergency which may occur.”  But again, no pressure Carmine.

Now it’s time for the coup de grace, to make Carmine do exactly what she wants him to do.  The sugar:

“Bless you Carmine, son.  I will always love you, as only a mother could.”  Did he really have any other choice?  As a parent myself, my instinct is to, despite what my heart says, always think of my children before myself.  But Napolitan mothers have a different view.  Their love is so intense, that they would ask, no, they would DEMAND, that they get to see their children when THEY want to, despite what would be best for their children, and grandchildren.  How would Carmine, and his young family survive if Carmine were to take months off to go visit his ailing mother back home in Lucania?  They’d have to make do, and Lucrezia, would get what she wants.  As usual.

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So, back to Carmine.  As an immigrant, struggling and working hard as a tailor here in the United States, he needed to find a way to get back to Lucania to see his ailing mother.  Since he would be traveling overseas, he had to go and apply for a passport.  Although passports were not necessary between 1865 and 1917, once the First World War broke out, all US citizens traveling abroad needed to obtain a passport from the Department of State.

Enclosed in Carmine’s long dusted over passport file are two letters of recommendation, one from a fellow Lucanian-American doctor, Nicola Lanza of Spring Street, and the other, Carmine’s employers, “Wonderbread” American Chas J Nelson.  One can only assume that Carmine chose his employer as one of his letter writers because of his status as a “native” born American, and one can also wonder whether his application status would have gone from “approved” to “denied” without it.  Because, you know, we live in the land of the “free”.  For a $1 processing fee that is.

The answer to whether Carmine Pietropinto made it back to fulfill his ailing mother’s last wish has been lost to history.  But whether he made it back or not, we’re safe to assume that the guilt and love his mother laid upon him on his birth never left his soul and his essence of being, as is evident in so many Southern-Italian boys.  Momma mia.

Guess Who’s A Paesan? Part 1.

Too many Napolitan and Sicilian Americans are brainwashed into thinking that the only people of “Italian” decent worth celebrating and remembering are those from the regions north of Rome.  In an effort to to highlight our own people, and what they’ve accomplished since their exile from our homeland, I will feature some of our own, who have managed to leave an indelible mark on society.  Some of them you may know, some you may not, but all of them are our paesons.  These are people who have impacted American culture in almost every realm imaginable from entertainment, to politics, from the kitchen to the battlefield, but who all can trace their roots back to the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.  Hopefully these names and these people will replace in our collective consciousnesses the Padanians we mistakenly identify with as our own.

I’ll start with a familiar story.  As most immigrants found when they arrived here, Giovanni Tallarico found himself longing for the beautiful homeland he left behind, and before marrying and settling down, he traveled back to see his ancestral Crotone, Calabria, as evidenced in this Passport application from 1912.  You can make out that as far back as 100 years ago, Giovanni’s profession was listed as “musician” on his passport, showing that many immigrants didn’t fill the factory and laborer quota that most assume.  After immigrating to the United States in 1898, and obtaining citizenship in 1905

and establishing himself as a working musician,

(1911 NYC Directory)

, it was time to return home.

(Giovanni’s Passport Application and Photo)

Later on, in 1920, and on West 126th Street in Manhattan,

at #536 we again find Giovanni.  Giovanni Tallarico’s story was similar to so many others.  As a musician in his own band, Giovanni was able to support his American wife Constance and their two young children, Victor and Ernest.

(1920 US Census)

Giovanni’s son Victor, born in 1916, would eventually grow up, become a classical musician and pianist himself, and marry Susan Biancha.  They eventually setlled in Yonkers, and in 1948, gave birth to a son, Steven Victor Tallarico.  A real American idol.

Maybe you recognize a fellow paeson as Steven Tyler, front man for one of America’s longest standing rock and roll bands, Aerosmith.  Grazie Steven!

The View from Above.

“Nothing is done in the way of public hygiene, and one sees women washing linen in water which is nothing more or less than an open drain. There is no street-lighting whatever; a proposal on the part of a North Italian firm to draw electric power from the Neto was scornfully rejected; one single tawdry lamp, which was bought some years ago “as a sample” in a moment of municipal recklessness, was lighted three times in as many years, and on the very day when it was least necessary–to wit, on midsummer eve, which happens to be the festival of their patron saint (St. John). “It now hangs”–so I wrote some years ago–”at a dangerous angle, and I doubt whether it will survive till its services are requisitioned next June.” Prophetic utterance! It was blown down that same winter, and has not yet been replaced. This in a town of 20,000 (?) inhabitants–and in Italy, where the evening life of the populace plays such an important role. No wonder North Italians, judging by such external indications, regard all Calabrians as savages.”

Norman Douglas, Old Calabria, Chapter XXVI “Among the Bruttians”.

Some pretty harsh words about Calabrian culture from the Austrian born and exiled Englishman.  Especially considering he was exiled for sexually assaulting a 16 year old boy.