America is Also Italian

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Who We Are

There is a moment, if you have Italian blood in you, when you realize that the country you live in and the country that lives in you are not two separate things. They never were. Somewhere between the docks of Palermo and the tenements of lower Manhattan, between the vineyards of Calabria and the fishing boats of Gloucester, Massachusetts, between a grandmother's kitchen in Naples and a kitchen in Providence or Pittsburgh or San Francisco, something happened that America has never fully accounted for. A civilization crossed an ocean. And it never left.

My name is Walter Potenza, and this is America is also Italian.

This is not a nostalgia project. I want to be clear about that from the beginning, because Italian Americans have been served enough nostalgia. We have been fed the sepia-toned version of ourselves — the pushed cart, the tenement stoop, the red sauce Sunday, the accordion in the background — and while there is beauty in all of that, there is also a danger. Nostalgia softens the edges of history. It makes suffering picturesque. It turns a complex, living civilization into a costume, and it lets the harder truths go unexamined.

The harder truths matter. The Italian immigrants who came to this country in the great waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not arrive as guests. They arrived as laborers, as outsiders, as people who were not always welcomed, not always trusted, not always considered fully white by a society still sorting itself out along the sharpest of racial and ethnic lines. They were exploited in the mines and on the railroads. They were lynched in Louisiana. They were interned during the Second World War alongside Japanese Americans, a fact that almost no one talks about. They built this country with their hands and were, for decades, repaid with contempt.

And yet they stayed. And yet they built. And yet they cooked.

That last word is not a diminished. Food, for Italians, has never been a minor matter. It is theology. It is memory. It is the most direct line between who you are and where you come from. When an Italian grandmother makes Sunday ragù, she is not simply making lunch. She is performing an act of cultural transmission that goes back centuries, that carries within it the soil of a specific region, the dialect of a specific village, the accumulated knowledge of women whose names we will never know but whose hands shaped everything. That knowledge crossed the ocean. It adapted. It found new ingredients and new neighbors and new contexts. And in doing so, it became part of what Americans eat, what Americans taste, what Americans reach for when they want comfort or celebration or the feeling of being home.

Italian food in America is not Italian food. I say that not as a criticism but as a fact of cultural history. What Italian immigrants created in this country was something new — a cuisine born of necessity and memory and improvisation, shaped by what was available and affordable, by the mixing of regional traditions that would never have met back in Italy, by the particular hunger of people trying to hold onto something while building something else entirely. That cuisine — the pizza, the pasta, the meatball, the hero sandwich, the feast of the seven fishes — became American food. It became so American that most people have forgotten it was ever anything else.

That forgetting is part of what we are here to address.

America is also Italian exists because the full story of Italian immigration has not been told. Not completely. Not honestly. Not in a way that does justice to the civilization that crossed the ocean and the people who carried it. We exist because Italian culture — its art, its philosophy, its agricultural traditions, its regional complexity, its food, its language, its architecture, its music — deserves to be understood in its depth, not just sampled at the surface. We exist because stereotypes cost something. They cost individuals their dignity and communities their history, and they cost a country the chance to understand itself more fully.

The Italian American story is not the Mafia. I will say that plainly and I will not say it again after tonight, because I refuse to spend time in conversation with a fiction. The Mafia is a criminal organization that represents a fraction of a fraction of the Italian American population and has been used, for decades, by film and television and popular culture to define an entire people. It is a slander dressed up as entertainment, and it has done real damage — to how Italian Americans see themselves, to how others see them, and to the public record of who these people actually were and what they actually built.

What they actually built is extraordinary.

They built neighborhoods that became the cultural hearts of American cities. They brought with them a relationship to craft — to stone and wood and cloth and food — that shaped American manufacturing and agriculture and design. They brought a sensibility about beauty that runs through American art and architecture in ways that have been absorbed so completely that the Italian source is invisible. They brought a model of community life, centered on the table and the feast and the piazza, that softened the harder edges of American individualism. They brought, in short, a way of being human that this country needed and absorbed and benefited from enormously, and has not always had the grace to acknowledge.

We are here to acknowledge it.