Losing My Ethnicity
Once I was an Italian kid from Brooklyn. These days, though, it’s looking like I’m just some white guy. To some, this may not seem like much of a transition. To me, it’s been world shifting. I’m not totally sure how it happened. Maybe it’s because popular culture has moved away from its fascination with the Italian experience in America. But a lot of it is likely owed to the thousands of decisions, both my family’s and mine, that chiseled me out of the kid I had been.
Funny thing is, it’s only recently dawned on me that I haven’t been that kid for a very long time. And that maybe I never really was. That’s the thing about identity: personal, ethnic or otherwise. It’s really just a series of boxes we wind up in, either by our own choice or by letting others put us into them. So, for me, once I was an Italian kid from Brooklyn. No more.
Family photos provided by the author
Some pertinent facts: I haven’t lived in Brooklyn for a long time. I wasn’t born in Italy. My parents and grandparents weren’t either. My great-grandparents were the ones who packed steamer trunks out of the old country back in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet growing up I thought of myself as Italian. In those days the neighborhood was predominantly Italian, or Italian-American to be precise. Most of us didn’t speak Italian or any dialect among ourselves, but we were all permeated with the traits of Italy. Our foods came from there. Our mannerisms. Our obsessions with guilt and honor and loyalty. Our old men played bocce in the park and drank espresso in social clubs. Our old ladies wore black for decades for men who often weren’t worth the grief. Our neighbors watched out for us kids as we played in the streets. Our Sunday dinners were big family affairs held in the early afternoons after Mass. Our mothers’ honors were fiercely guarded. And people who weren’t us were to be distrusted.
Who were these others? Well … basically everybody. Mostly it meant people who weren’t Italians or who just weren’t from your part of Italy. But it could also mean people who were not from Brooklyn, not Catholic, not working class—not of any familiar qualities.
I don’t want to perpetuate a stereotype that all Italians from Brooklyn were (or are) thick-witted bigots. We’re not. And most people I knew growing up were nothing like that. But Brooklyn in those days was a very parochial world—literally. (Upon meeting someone new, lots of people asked what parish they were from. And this was in the 1980s, not the 1880s.) In my neighborhood, maybe eighty percent of the people I knew as a kid were Italian, most of the rest Irish or Latino, all Catholic. I didn’t become friends with someone Jewish or Protestant until I was a teenager.
But I also didn’t grow up in a family that perpetuated stereotypes. My maternal grandmother’s favorite expression—“there’s good and bad in all”—summed up the fact that she knew not all Italians were all they were cracked up to be and that many other people (those dreaded others) were much more than what some of our brethren feared they were. My mother always had a place at her table for whomever we brought into her house: my brother’s Latino friends, my best friend in elementary school who was born in Africa, a Filipino girlfriend. There was love there at that table, not always perfect and sometimes conditional, but there nonetheless and supported by a Catholic Church that tried as best it could to preach the universal brotherhood of man to some pretty flawed parishioners.
All this said, I was clearly conscious of being Italian and took pride in the successes of famous Italian-Americans, everyone from Al Pacino to Mario Cuomo to Antonin Scalia to (of course) Frank Sinatra. Didn’t matter their occupations or their beliefs. They had made it and they were ours.
I was also very keenly aware of the fact that Italians, not so long before, had been “the other.” We had not been considered white. We had been lynched. And that, even when I was growing up, we weren’t quite part of the mainstream. We all laughed when Mario Cuomo toyed with the idea of running for president. No one in my family could ever imagine an Italian-American president. We didn’t come from the right part of Europe or worship in the right Christian church. And then there was that Mafia thing, which true or not always seems to taint every success.
I became more aware of my otherness in college. I wasn’t an outcast by any means and had friends from many backgrounds. But I was regarded as a bit of a curiosity and as something of a stereotype. None of my friends’ commentary came from any well of hatred or prejudice. It simply was a parochial viewpoint—and I knew that well enough. People everywhere live in their own enclaves, whether we realize it or not. So what was unfamiliar sometimes provoked what seemed like impolite questions:
“You’re from Brooklyn? Do they still have a lot of Mafia there?”
“You’re Italian. What jarred Italian sauce do you think is most like your mama’s?” (A friend’s mother asked this one.)
“You’re an Italian from Brooklyn? Did you all carry guns growing up?”
“You’re Italian? Oh I thought you were Jewish.”
College was the gateway out of my ethnicity and my parochialism. Most guys in my high school went straight into the carpenters’ union or the police academy or the fire department, all honest good-paying jobs with a future. But my mother believed in education, even if she sometimes feared it would change me. (Again, the latent Italian fear of the other.) College exposed me to literature and art and history. It made me understand something I felt intuitively, that part of the Americanization of many ethnic groups was suffering abuse at the hands of those who had come a generation before: the Germans abused the Irish who abused the Italians who abused the Hispanics and on and on. (Naturally, I refrain from putting African Americans on this list, due to their unique place in our country’s history.) But after a point many members of these ethnic groups assimilated as they intermarried and became less “other.”
The assimilation process had begun in my family generations before me and was being completed in me without my realizing it. By the time my parents—both the youngest children of large families—were growing up, they had no interest in learning their families’ dialects or many of their traditions. They wanted blue jeans and pop music and opportunities. During my own teen years, being an Italian from Brooklyn was too negatively associated with the early roles of John Travolta, racism (thanks to the 1989 murder of Yusef Hawkins in the mostly Italian-American Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst) and the “guido” style and materialism of many classmates, obsessed as they were with club music, big hair, flashy jewelry and tinted windows on cars. If all this was being Italian—man, I wanted no part of it. So I stepped away, becoming friends with all those others I was supposed to distrust.
Yet there were parts of being Italian that I did want to keep with me. Most of them had to do with family. The importance of family is probably a cultural universal, but I was raised to believe it meant everything. Loyalty to the family was paramount and betrayal of a family member was the greatest sin. Reading Dante’s Inferno for the first time in high school, it came as no surprise to me that the lowest circle of Hell was reserved for betrayers. Very Italian.
These were the lessons I learned at our kitchen table, drinking coffee and listening to my grandmother tell stories of the family’s struggles during the Depression as she made struffoli and zeppoles by hand. There was honor in doing the right thing by those you loved. You’d be remembered for it after you died. And there was purpose in carrying from the past the things that mattered, not just the foods and traditions and the funny stories but the lessons learned, so you could teach them to the next generation.
The next generation. I suppose the whole point of this piece is about them. My children are still young. But my parents are dead, as are most of the other members of my once very large family. There’s no large familial group left to carry on traditions together. I have only the stories I remember, some letters and cards, old recipes and a hundred years of photographs, some of people I do not recognize in the slightest.
What do I carry into the future for these children? Without an extended family who can share stories and knowing glances, how do I relate to them all of what I was and what their people were, both good and bad? Can I still be an Italian kid from Brooklyn without having around me many of those who know firsthand what that meant? Can I alone perpetuate tradition?
The answer is probably no. In the end I have one choice left to me: to attempt to keep the past alive with fragments and dust or to accept that with my parents’ deaths came an end to my ethnic identity as a real and continuing thing. Yet whatever I choose, it doesn’t matter; in the eyes of many, I’m now just some white guy. I’m now a merigan—a term used by old timers to describe with some contempt someone too white bread.
My kids won’t notice anyway. It doesn’t matter to them very much that half their family came from a place called Italy or that their friends and classmates hail from a hundred different backgrounds. On multicultural days in school, they call themselves Americans. And in the end, that’s okay. I suppose it means that after four generations, we’ve finally arrived.
Christopher Mari is a freelance writer and novelist. He is the author of The Beachhead and coauthor of Ocean of Storms. Visit him at christophermari.com.
