Over at The Baffler, Michael Nicholas writes: “Today, as Italian Americans continue marrying non-Italians, and membership in ethnic/fraternal organizations has declined, social media often facilitates the performance of a shared identity.” He’s talking about stuff like this:
Here is a taste of Nicholas’s piece:
The notion of a unified Italian culture in America is something of a recent invention. The primary waves of Italian migration into the United States took place from the late 1800s until the 1920s, while the process of Italy’s unification as a single country was still ongoing. Arriving in the United States, immigrants from different parts of the peninsula spoke distinct dialects and identified with particular regions, which ethnic enclaves in New York like East Harlem and the area around Mulberry Street (now known as Little Italy) often reproduced, each with their own exclusive mutual aid and fraternal groups. Southern Italians, Sicilians especially, were viewed as lesser than northerners, and faced discrimination even in Italy.
For many, the first experience of a shared Italian identity was facilitated by the experience of prejudice in the States, where Italians were viewed as one homogenous ethnic group, as evidenced by the Census in the early twentieth century, which clumped numerous identities under one nationality. Immigration quotas enacted in 1921 and 1924, as well as subsequent anti-immigration legislation, further dissolved differences as new immigration slowed.
A more unified Italian American identity began to form as regional identification waned and Italian Americans asserted a claim for their full integration. Historian Danielle Battisti writes in Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945-1965 that Columbus Day is just one example of Italian American revisionism in support of their claim to integration after World War II. In this case, Columbus was recast as the first immigrant to the Americas, which therefore meant that Italians were as American as any protestant. Battisti continues, “But in framing the Italian immigrant experience in this light, Italian Americans did not use Columbus Day to advance appeals for universal immigrant equality . . . They merely asserted Italian access to the pantheon of ‘desirable’ immigrant groups.”
In the time leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, many Italian Americans dispersed into the suburbs and joined the white-collar workforce. As subsequent generations rose in economic stature, attention turned from economic integration toward combating misrepresentation in the media. Groups like the Italian American Civil Rights League protested films, TV shows, and even commercials that encouraged Italians’ association with organized crime (even if some, such as the League led by Joe Colombo, were themselves directly associated with organized crime). Colombo, for instance, was successful in striking the words “mafia” and “cosa nostra” from the script of The Godfather. In the early 2000s, the Order Sons of Italy in America and the National Italian American Foundation protested The Sopranos, with the latter unsuccessfully demanding that HBO include a disclaimer before every episode that said it was “not representative of the 25 million Americans of Italian heritage.”
Consistent across these organized efforts to counteract stereotypes was the idea of a collective Italian identity. But now, those same stereotypes are often embraced on the internet.
Read the rest here.