“The way some people link every Italian to the
Mafia in a half joking way does not bother me. Actually, the Mafia has always
been considered glamorous. I don’t know why people find bullies that glamorous,
yet it seems to be an unending source of fascination to Americans. Some things
have reached a level of the classic.”
-
Frank Stella, artist, Growing Up Italian [i] -
An Offer They Could Not Refuse - Italian American Ethnicity in American Culture
Few ethnic groups have had a
more dominant and lasting impact on American culture than the Italian
Americans. The United States itself is in its entirety a product of immigration
and from the very first colonist to the current immigrants arriving in the US, almost
every American has recent roots in immigration. It should come as no surprise
then, that the initial streams of immigrants, such as those from Italy, combined
with all the other ethnic influences over the years, created an entirely new
forms of ethnicity, that still exist to this day. These new ethnicities, such
as the Italian American one, however, faced numerous obstacles and challenges
throughout their existence. Italian Americans have had to struggle against
discrimination and the ever present link to the Mafia.
In this paper I will investigate the subject of Italian
American ethnicity in the United States and how it is represented in popular culture.
Principally I will attempt to establish an general overview of the creation and
development of the Italian American ethnicity through literature. From this I
will examine the representations of the Italian Americans in American popular culture.
In doing this, I will primarily focus on the quintessential pieces of Italian
American cinema, The Godfather
trilogy, and television, The Sopranos.
By comparing and contrasting the two, I will endeavor the come to an analysis
of how Italian Americans are represented in these aspects of American media and
whether or not this image has changed significantly in the years that passed between the two
productions.
The bond between Italy and “the New World” has always
been a close one. Primarily, there is of course Christopher Columbus, who
became a hero after discovering America. Besides Columbus, there were several prominent
Italian explorers who, according to La
Storia authors Mangione and
Morreale, created enough excitement in their homeland to become a major
subliminal force in initiating the mass migration towards the United States in
the nineteenth century.[ii] From
the moment America became colonized, there was a small but steady stream of
Italian colonists. It is estimated that approximately twelve thousand Italians
came to America between the founding of the American Republic in 1783 and the
establishment of modern Italy in 1871, a relatively small number when compared
to the 1.5 million German and 2 million Irish migrants between 1820 and 1860. The
Italian group scattered throughout the land and was made up mostly of
tradesmen, artists, teachers and political refugees who had the intention of
staying in America.[iii]
Up until the mass migration, cultivated Americans generally considered the
Italian migrants as a civilizing influence on a society that still very much
relied on Europe for cultural guidance. [iv]
It was the aforementioned unification of Italian states
into one country that drastically changed the situation. This unification led
to a period of great civil unrest, as many Italians, most notably the
Sicilians, refused to subject themselves to the new central authority. Italy
was a land divided, as evidenced in the 1870 statement of an Italian statesman:
“although we have made Italy, we have yet to make Italians.”[v] And
indeed, from 1880 and onward, one of the greatest migration streams in the
history of the world took place, reducing Italy’s total population by one
third. The most common reason for the move to America was simply economic
survival and the inability of the impoverished population to feel any
allegiance to the new Italian regime.[vi] To
really grasp the position of the poor Italian peasant one should consider
Booker T. Washington’s quote: “The Negro is not the man farthest down. The
condition of the colored farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern
States in America, even where he has the least education and the least
encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of
the agricultural population in Sicily.”[vii] By
1930, more than 4,5 million Italians had entered the United States, a number
that would have been doubled had it not been for the 1924 American immigration
laws, aimed to keep out immigrants from Eastern and Western Europe, and the
newly established fascist regime in Italy, which prohibited almost all
migration from Italy. [viii] As
one might expect, the post 1880 migrants received a rather different welcome
than their predecessors. The contrast with the earlier wave of Italians was
enormous, as most these mass-migrants were not the educated adventurers,
artists and scholars, but uneducated, poor Northern Italians, with little to no
skills. They were described as “foreign looking,” and were looked down upon
even by their Southern fellow Italian Americans, a situation that already
existed in the “Old Country.” The sheer number of new Italian-Americans also
rubbed the earlier German and Irish migrants the wrong way, as they feared for
their own economic welfare.[ix] The new
conclusion was that the Southern Italians, especially the Sicilians, “were an
undesirable lot, who had neither the wish nor the capacity to assimilate into
the American population.”[x]
As
with almost all of ethnicities in America, Italian American roots cannot be
viewed without the cultural impact of migration and the strain it puts onto new
cultures always in the back of our minds. In the article ““Literary
Acculturation: What makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” Berdt Osentdorf opens
with the statement that “the very act of emigration forces a disintegration of
self, culture and society, and its subsectors. The self is pushed into marginality,
and has to deal, from a situation of reduced political participation, with two
cultures in a stratified social relationship which assigns to his old heritage
the role of subculture within an alien dominant context.”[xi] The
description illustrated the struggle that all emigrants have to face in order
to establish their culture in a new environment. In this case American society was
the “new social area,” in which people had to adjust to an entirely new set of
social and cultural circumstances.[xii] Ostendorf
himself mentions that this model offers a somewhat simplified view on a culture
before leaving the homeland, as if “prior to migration the self was peacefully
integrated in culture and society.”[xiii] A
valid point and especially relevant in Italy’s case, where, as we have seen,
there was no one national identity. Actually, Italian culture appears to have
been in crisis even before the great migration. In Feeling Italian Thomas J. Ferraro delves deeper into this subject,
as he tackles the idea “feeling Italian in America.” The mass migrated peasants
thought of themselves not as Italians, but in terms of the particular family
they belonged to, the town they came from or perhaps the area in which all
spoke the same dialect. Italy, the new nation that had just been formed, and
its government “they distrusted, even despised.”[xiv] It
was, in fact, the move to America that started to create an Italian identity
for these people, an Italian American identity. It was not until they were
confronted with the suspicion and racism of the settled Americans that they
started to think of themselves as a unit. Ferraro describes it as Italian-like
feelings that were turned into the feeling of being an Italian. “A historical
dialectic of representation and self-representation, yes, but it was lived in
the blood, the flesh, the soul.”[xv]
It is not surprising then that Ostendorf argues that
“ethnicity is a conflict term,” which involves a battle between different
cultural groups in a new social arena. And the key to creating and retaining
this new ethnicity lies in striving towards hegemony, or “cultural and
political self-determination and self-authentification.”[xvi] This
of course leads us to the subject of ethnic art and literature, which is used
to assert a sense of self-worth in a new group of people and to actually bind them
with a common feeling of a shared culture. Ferraro quotes author and literary
and music critic Albert Murray: “Art provides mankind with a definition of
itself, its circumstances, its situation, its condition, and also its
possibilities. That is what I think stories and poems are about. It is what
paintings and sculptural forms are about. It is what music is about—which after
all is nothing more if not a soundtrack to which we choreograph our daily
activities.”[xvii]
Here we see described the importance of art in migrated group of people. An
importance maybe even more relevant in the case of the Italian American
population, as their new ethnicity had to actually mend the broken up cultural
relation that already existed in Italy and successfully combine it with the new
challenges the New World offered the new Italian American community. No wonder
then that, according to Ostendorf, immigrant literature tends to focus on what
he call the “strain of ethnification,” or on the “disjunction of the old and
simultaneously on the search for a new integration of artistic self.” The term
most appropriate in this case is “creolization,” the practice of constantly
assimilating, adding or disposing fragments of old and new culture. [xviii]
The process of Italian American creolization can be
observed very well in their migrant literature. The result of the fact that it
was not the Italian cultural elite that came over to America was that the first
bibliography of Italian American writers, composed in 1949, contained only 59
writers on a population of nearly five million.[xix] The
early mass immigrants, most of whom did not know how to write or read, relied
on traditional storytelling to relate stories of their homeland. Early
novelists copied this style, still wrote in Italian and mostly focused on
stories of “courtly romances and fantasies.” Most early novels, provided an
image that American readers wanted to read, not an realistic portrayal of
Italian immigrants. [xx] This
again seems to fit in with Ostendorf’s theories on ethnification, in the sense
that he argues that “the act of migration causes people to withdrawal into a
traditional, often conservative auto stereotype.” The new Italian Americans
held on to their cultural legacy, which all of a sudden was more relevant and
present than it was before the migration, and were very conservative and
traditional in their literary tastes.[xxi] The
aforementioned “strain of ethnification” started to really show in the so
called “second generation” of Italian American writers. These writers started
to use English in their work and focused more on hardship their community faced
in everyday life. Famous authors from this period were the poet Pascal
D’Angelo, Pietro DiDonato, Constantine
Panuzio and Emanuel Carnevali. D’Angelo
wrote Son of Italy (1924) about his
struggle to turn from a ditch digger into a poet. The theme of entering America and facing new
challenges for survival became the primary subject one in early
Italian-American literature.[xxii] Panuzio wrote Soul of an Immigrant (1921), an autobiography in which his initial
hatred for American society changes in a positive outlook on it, aiming to
teach readers the value of self improvement.[xxiii] Most
authors, though, spoke of their ambivalent feelings towards both Italy and
America. An example is “In America” by Carnevali:
“…everything / Is bigger, but less
majestic… / Italy is a little family: / America is an orphan
Independent and arrogant, / Crazy
and sublime, / Without tradition to guide her,
Rushing headlong in a mad run which
she calls / Progress.” [xxiv]
As Ostendorf writes, there are
three forms of immigrant and ethnic literature. First, there is the literature
for immigrants and ethnic groups written from the point of view of the old
culture. Then there is literature that evolves from the experiences the ethnic
group has in America, which appeals to both the groups in question and to a
larger audience. Both forms have been discussed above, but is in the third form
that we find the real trouble. Namely in the “literature about immigrants and ethnics written from the point of view (actual
or implied) of the dominant culture.”[xxv] It was
in this literature, and mostly media later on, that stereotypes were
established, based on the prejudices people had about Italian Americans the day
they set foot in America. It is this last form of literature that has probably shaped
the current image of Italian American culture the general public has the most.
In the last decades it has arguably been
popular culture, and especially television and cinema, which have taken over
the identity shaping role literature had in earlier years. Italian Americans
take up a prominent role in both media, but in a rather limited capacity. In
these media Italian American usually means Mafia, wise guys or street thug. In
cinema the examples are numerous, but the main source of an Italian American
identity in cinema can only be found by looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s
iconic The Godfather (1972). The
first thing one should notice is the fact that even though Coppola is an
Italian American, he is far from the street wise, though guy he would feature
in his movie. Coppola did not come from a working class background, but from
well to do family of intellectuals and artists. Born in 1939 in Detroit, he
attended UCLA film school and was educated in an intellectual and academic
climate. [xxvi]
In a way, this actually places Coppola squarely in Ostendorf’s third category
of ethnic literature; literature about ethnics written from the point of view
of the dominant culture. Even though Coppola is an Italian American, he is
completely detached from the actual immigrant culture he shows us. He is part
of the same age old separation in Italian heritage that all Italians
experienced back in Italy, that of the hard working, uneducated peasant versus
the intellectual Italians, who both looked down on each other. And as was
noted, this was indeed where problems began to arise. From the moment the film was
in production organizations such as the Italian American Civil Right League
criticized it for creating a denigrating image of Italians Americans. In a
compromise, Coppola removed all mentions of the terms “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra,”
fooling absolutely no one.[xxvii]
A big point of criticism about The Godfather is the fact that Coppola, and writer of the original
novel Mario Puzo, managed to make sympathetic characters out of vicious
criminals. This is done, one critic argues, by avoiding basic truths. The
sympathy for the characters is created by distorting reality. Don Corleone is
portrayed as a ruthless, but honest man, who would never double cross anyone and
who refused to go into the drug trafficking business; an image in direct contrast
to the actual Mafia leaders of 1930’s, who would not have shown such qualms. Don Corleone is represented as a good family
man, an “Italian American Papa.” He kills and maims only to protect the ones he
loves and in the name of family virtue. The Sicilians in the movie are strong
family men, whereas outsiders were not. In a time were traditional family
values started to disintegrate the movie going public cheered a man who would
do anything for his family. [xxviii] The
distortion does not stop there though. In the movie it is the non-Italian who marries
Corleone’s widowed daughter who cannot handle his wife in a way that Sicilian
women are apparently accustomed to in the cliché view world of Coppola. In his
relation with the Don, US senator Gerry is actually the corrupt one. Even
Michael Corleone’s academic education and heroic service in the US army during
World War 2 cannot suppress his Sicilian genes, when the time comes to seek
savage revenge for the sake of his family.[xxix]
Though it is easy to see how Coppola distorted reality in
order to create sympathy for his mobster family, it is also perfectly
understandable why The Godfather gained such an enormous popularity, amongst
Italian Americans and other ethnicities alike. Up to the 1960’s, Italian
Americans were thought of as exemplifying the theory of upward social mobility:
“success of a group is actually a function of its members breaking away from
that group.” It were traditional Italian American values, their “clannishness”
and reluctance to participate in mainstream society, that held back their
ascent on the social ladder. In comparison to other new successful ethnicities
in America, Italian Americans were “blue collar,” but never anything more.
Success stories were always individual successes (Frank Sinatra).[xxx] This
was a trauma reaching back to the Old Country, where, as we discussed earlier,
most peasants lived under extremely impoverished circumstances. What The
Godfather did, however, was create an Italian American family organization that
was successful and respected in the business world. According to The Godfather, the Sicilian family
mentality was the secret to a successful criminal organization and the Italian
Americans no longer formed the insignificant industrial underbelly of America,
but were the “capitalist nation’s underground brain trust.”[xxxi]
Vera Dika expands this idea, by quoting from Frederic
Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture: “…all contemporary works of
arts – whether those of high culture and modernism or of mass culture – have as
their underlying impulse – albeit in what is often distorted and repressed
unconscious form – our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both
as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather be lived.” After
the social unrest of the 1960’s and the war in Vietnam, The Godfather presented
the illusion of family unity, and justified violence by an organized group,
sometimes against the perceived unjust government.[xxxii]
Next to the stereotypical Mafia connection and family
ties, The Godfather gave the Italian
Americans a new representation of themselves. Over the years the film
representation of the Italian American male had been that of “a man of
excessive passion for sex or violence, the dumb fool, stumbling over his words
and often getting a laugh.” [xxxiii]The
social rules of behavior for the Southern Italian male, however, were much
closer to the way Vito and Michael Corleone acted. The real Southern Italian
man is “a creature of control, a man of pantience, a man who holds his body
erect, but composed, his face impassive, and who plans, waits and then acts.”
This Sicilian level of machismo is not a notion of shallowness of character but
actually a way to focus and direct their passion, resulting in power. Vito and
Michael, who both adhere to this code, are successful, while the oldest son,
Sonny, fails to control his anger and passion, leading to his downfall. In its
own way, The Godfather defined the
limits of Italian American masculinity for entire generations watching the movie.[xxxiv]
If The Godfather
defined Italian American ethnicity in 1972, the HBO hit series The Sopranos (1999) showed how this
ethnicity was absorbed into daily life. It deals with mobster Tony Sopranos
tendency towards depression and his interaction with his family and his
“family.” A recurring theme is that of Tony being unable to deal with combining
his traditional Italian American values with everyday life in America. In the
first episode he confesses to his therapist a feeling of “coming in too late, at
the end, when the best of the American Dream is over.” Creator David Chase
mentioned that the show’s original joke was “life in America had become so
selfish that even a mobster can’t stand it anymore and needs therapy.”[xxxv]
Tony
Soprano views himself as a traditionalist and a true Italian American. When the
issue of whether or not it is politically correct to view Columbus as a hero is
raised in the episode “Christopher,” Tony, his inner circle, and especially his
right hand man Silvio Dante express moral outrage over the fact that people
would treat Columbus as anything other than a saint. “In this house Christopher
Columbus is a fucking hero!” Tony exclaims to his son when he makes a remark
about the situation. [xxxvi] His
traditional sense of family also seems to come directly from The Godfather. On the one hand Tony,
would do anything for his children, but on the other he cheats on his wife
every chance he gets. Tony is also often heard saying: “Whatever happened to
Gary Cooper? You know, the strong silent type.” Here we see his inability to
combine his traditional Godfather
inspired machismo behavior with contemporary life. [xxxvii]
Another strong statement about Italian American ethnicity
in America can be found in the episode “Commendatori,” in which Tony, Christopher
and Paulie travel to Italy, in order to do business with an affiliated family.
Their initial enthusiasm about visiting the “Old Country” quickly turns into
disappointment. Especially Paulie, who throughout the series is known for being
extremely proud of his Italian heritage, encounters feelings of estrangement
similar to those of the early migrants. Sculptor Attilio Piccirilli said in
1938: “I have been an American for so long – fifty years – that I often forget
that I was born in Italy. (…) Once I went back to my native city and planned to
stay there for a year or more. (…) What did I find? I was a foreigner in Italy.
I could speak the language of course, but I couldn’t think Italian.”[xxxviii] Paulie tries to communicate with the local
population, and talks with a prostitute about how both their ancestors probably
came from the same village, but is met with complete disinterest every time.
Even their colleagues express disdain for them, exclaiming, after Paulie asks
for ketchup with his spaghetti, “and you thought the Germans were classless
pieces of shit.” [xxxix] This situation underlines the aforementioned
detachment the Italian Americans experienced. There was no one Italian culture
in their homeland, so they created one in America. This Italian American ethnicity,
however, is unrecognizable to such an extent that Italians and Italian American
have almost nothing in common.
Something that one immediately notices when watching The Sopranos is the way in which the
characters in the series are themselves influenced by The Godfather. Tony and his friends discuss the movies extensively,
quoting famous lines and comparing favorite scenes. Throughout the series there
are many references to Godfather
scenes, such as a dream sequence in which Tony enters the bathroom of a
restaurant looking for the gun hidden behind the toilet. He finds nothing,
while Michael Corleone found the weapon there, and proceeded to take his
revenge. It casually shows the way Italian American ethnicity and masculinity
was shaped by The Godfather. A small
example of this it the often told anecdote concerning The Godfather claiming that mobster did not use the term
“godfather” and did not kiss each other on the cheek before they saw it done in
the movie. [xl]
In
the end, we see that it was actually the transition to America that created a
sense of being Italian amongst the immigrants. Italian American ethnicity was
created through ethnic literature and pop culture. The Godfather provided a new sort of stereotype and something of a
role model for the Italian American population and did so along the lines of
several of Ostendorf’s theories on ethnicity. The Godfather was created by and for Italian Americans, but, in a
way also by and for outsiders. The film focuses on perceived traditional
values, but also contains the “strain of ethnification.” The discussion on
whether or not this was a positive development remains, as the new image was
created by glamorizing negative Italian stereotypes but also created a strong
sense pride and accomplishment amongst people who traditionally were in the
lowest class of society, both in Italy and America. That the movie had an
enormous impact on the Italian American ethnicity cannot be denied either way
though, as we have seen in the analysis of The
Sopranos. This series showed how Italian American incorporated The Godfather’s ethnicity in their lives
and how they did or did not incorporate it in American everyday life.
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[i]Vera Dika, “The Representation of
Ethnicity in The Godfather” in Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000, p. 76-108) p. 76.
[ii] Jerre Mangione and Ben
Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of
the Italian American Experience, (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1992,
p. 3-4.
[iii] Ibid., p. 8-14.
[iv] Ibid., p 25.
[v] Ibid., p 32.
[vi] Ibid., p.32
[vii] Ibid., p. xv.
[viii] Ibid., 33-34.
[ix] Ibid., p. 26-27.
[x] Ibid., p. 27.
[xi] Berndt Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation:
What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”” in Callaloo
No. 25, Recent Essays from Europe: A Special Issue, ( John Hopkins
University Press, Autumn 1985, p. 577-586) p. 577.
[xii] Ibid., p. 577.
[xiii] Ibid., p. 577.
[xiv] Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in
America, (New York: New York University Press, 2005) p. 3.
[xv] Ibid. p. 3-4.
[xvi] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation:
What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 579.
[xvii] Ferraro, Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in America, p. 205.
[xviii] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation:
What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 577.
[xix] Mangione, La Storia, p.354.
[xx] Martino Marazzi, Voices of Italian America: a History of
Early American Literature with a Critical Anthology, (Cranbury: Associated
University Press, 2004) p. 22-25.
[xxi] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation:
What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 581
[xxii] Fred L. Gardaphé, “You Are
What You Read: In Search of Italian-American Writers” in Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies, (New York:
Forum Italicum, 1999, p.113-124) p. 116.
[xxiii] Marazzi, Voices of Italian America, p. 45.
[xxiv] Mangione, La Storia, p. 361.
[xxv] Ostendorf, “Literary Acculturation:
What Makes Ethnic Literature “Ethnic”,” p. 583.
[xxvi] Mangione, La Storia, p. 410-411.
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 412-413..
[xxviii] Ibid. p. 412-413.
[xxix] Ibid., p. 413-414.
[xxx] Ferraro, Feeling Italian: the Art of Ethnicity in America, p. 107-108.
[xxxi] Ibid., p. 108-109.
[xxxii] Dika, “The Representation of
Ethnicity in The Godfather”, p.
77-79.
[xxxiii] Ibid., p. 88-89.
[xxxiv] Ibid., p.89.
[xxxv]Maurica Yacowar, The Sopranos On The Couch: Analyzing
Television’s Greatest Series, (New York: Continuum, 2003) p. 13-14.
[xxxvi] David Chase, “Christopher,” The Sopranos (Season 4, Episode 3, HBO
2002).
[xxxvii] David Chase, “Pilot,” The Sopranos (Season 1, Episode 1, HBO,
1999).
[xxxviii]
Mangione, La Storia, p. 23.
[xxxix] David Chase, “Commendatori,” The Sopranos (Season 2, Episode 4, HBO
2000).
[xl] Brett Martin, Sopranos The Book: The Complete Collector’s
Edition, (New York, Time Inc Home Entertainment, 2007) p. 34-35.
