STRING OF DECAYING RUINS: A TRANSNATIONAL ITALIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Cale James LaSalata, MA A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages (Italian). Chapel Hill 2012 © 2012 Cale James LaSalata ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT CALE JAMES LASALATA: String of Decaying Ruins: A Transnational Italian American Experience. (Under the direction of Dr. Ennio Rao) This dissertation examines the ethnography and historiography of the Italian American community and their southern Italian counterpart. It examines the phenomenon of Italian Unification, the socio-economics of organized crime, and the role women played in the social life of rural southern Italy. This project also examines the history of Italian immigration to the United States, the ethnic integration of Italian people into American society, and the state of Italian American ethnic identity and material culture. Through an analysis of the literary production of these two specific groups, this project underlines the existent parallels between southern Italy and the Italian American community and demonstrates that historically and culturally these two groups have shared a common experience of racial prejudice and systematized degradation; that because of nineteenth-century ideologies of race and progress, southern Italians in both Italy and North America were painted with the same brush of innate inferiority and alterity. To this end, this dissertation explores the history of the Italian south and its material culture and how these were reinterpreted within the American context. The aim of this dissertation is to provide Italian Americans with a more historically accurate and culturally sensitive analysis of their ethnic patrimony. iii DEDICATION To my parents, without whom none of this would have been possible. I will be forever grateful. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To ERC, Grandma and Le Steinberg, RAS and EBS and family, and especially to my MDD, whose friendship and love have meant the world to me. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. Introduction………………….…………………………………………………….1 II. IL RISORGIMENTO: NAPLES, NAPOLEON, AND THE RISE OF THE LIBERAL LEFT……..…………………………………………………………..18 The Bourbons………………………………………………………………….....22 . Piedmont, Cavour, Unification, and the Annexation of the South….…………………….................................................................................33 Emigration, Arrival, Assimilation, and New Nation Building......…....................53 III. LA RIVOLUZIONE PASSIVA: 19TH-CENTURY SICILY AND THE RISE OF THE VIOLENT MIDDLE CLASS………………………….…………………..70 The Origins: Sicily, Unification, and 19th-Century Economic Development..………………………………………………………....................79 Private Property and the Italian Risorgimento………………………...................86 Italy: Garibaldi, Rural Banditry, and the Rise of the Men of Order..………………………………………………………....................92 The Genesis of the Italian American: Immigration and the Rise of Italian Difference..……………………………………….................122 Prohibition and the Rise of Organized Crime in America..………………………………………………………………………..128 IV. I’M NOT ITALIAN BUT MY LAST NAME IS: IDENTITY AND MEMORY IN ITALIAN AMERICA……………………………………………………….154 La Signora Taranta e A’ Marònna: Southern Italian Tarantism and New World Religious Devotion..…………………………………………..160 The Metaphysics of Italian American Identity vi and Ethnicity..…………………………………………………………………..191 V. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………...............206 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….216 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “We speak the ‘real’ Italian,” my grandmother always used to tell me. I never quite understood why she would say that, as if there were a fake Italian language that some percentage of the Italian population had been tricked into speaking. It wasn’t until I got to high school and college that I fully appreciated what my grandmother was driving at: our dialect is Italian. As a child growing up in an Italian American community, the traditions and way of life seem to be as normal as any others, but as most Italian American writers will tell you, that all changes once you leave the neighborhood. The neighborhood becomes the image of the Old World: the homes, the dress, the gardens, and the interconnectedness. This became my vision of Italy. Our church bore the name of the southern Italian, Syracusan St. Lucy and we had feasts in her honor. My aunts would cook things like dandelions and zucchini flowers and my uncles played “fingers” and bocce. Growing up, I never imagined that there was a perceived sense of cultural difference on the part of Italians and it wasn’t until I began travelling to Italy that I was made fully aware that I was not an Italian. I was still considered by Americans to be Italian but, to those in the know, I was a different entity. Italian American ethnicity and identity have therefore become the focal point of my research. Why do Italian Americans consider themselves Italian and Italians consider them American? If we are not Italian, what are we? These questions form the foundation of this project and have become my most important points of examination. Italian American conceptions of culture and ethnicity are based on two distinct ideas: tradition and perception, that of the Italian American community by the dominant culture. These conceptions form the body of many Italian American experiences, fragmented and skewed though they may be. This investigation is a response to the fundamental misunderstanding that has plagued Italian Americans since their arrival in the Americas beginning in the late nineteenth century to the present day. The regeneration of cultural stereotypes with regard to Italian America is an anachronism in the American experience: the perception that Italian Americans are inherently violent, the notion that Italian Americans participate in the inner workings of the mafia, and that Italian American males are dominated by an influential female figure, are all examples of the lasting impact that Italian immigration has had on the American appreciation of Italian culture. This project will try to understand why the presence of these peoples from the Italian south was so unsettling to the dominant culture and how our conception of what it means to be an Italian American has been heavily influenced by those within the dominant culture. This influence from without has done much to further the confusion and misunderstandings about Italian American cultural and historical patrimony as an ethnic group in America. One of the prime examples of such cultural/ethnic distortion comes from American sociologist Edward Banfield’s assertion that people from the Meridione participate in what he termed “amoral familism,” a term which is defined:“… largely (but not entirely) by the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate material interest of the nuclear family” (10). This evaluation of southern Italian culture has had lasting influence but was by no means the first of such analyses that categorized the Italian south and its people as incompatible with notions of social advancement and economic progress. This assessment also has roots in the historical phenomenon of the Italian Risorgimento during which the two halves of the Italian 2 peninsula were united under one flag and one king for the first time. Tommaso Astarita, in his history of southern Italy, highlights a quote from Luigi Carlo Farini, an agent of Cavour’s new Italian government, in which he describes the new Italians from the south. “What lands are these Molise and the South! What barbarism! This is not Italy! This is Africa: compared to these peasants the Bedouins are the pinnacle of civilization” (qtd. on 286). By 1880, the attitude towards those from the south had not changed and, in fact, served as one of the motors that drove Italian emigration during the greatest period of southern Italian migration. This project argues that, as a byproduct of the journalistic and propagandistic buildup to Italian Unification in 1861, southern Italy’s perception as inherently backward was solidified in an attempt to rally support for the Risorgimento and the political unity of the Italian peninsula. The vitriol that was generated from 1848 to 1860, predominantly in the Italian north, was directed primarily at the Bourbon crown, symbol of the absolutism of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the face of the progress and industrialization taking place all over northern Europe. By linking the agrarian south with theories of socio-economic and cultural stagnation, the forces of Unification began to construct a narrative of the Risorgimento: Italy shall be made one and Italy shall liberate the languishing southern populations from the oppressive Bourbon regime. With the arrival of Garibaldi and the Spedizione dei mille in 1860, the rapid collapse of the Bourbon kingdom, and the defeat of Francesco II in 1861, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was rapidly annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy. It is to this end that this project will seek to underline and expand the socio-economic and historical anomalies that plagued the post-Unification period; the uneven process of political unity and the lasting effects of the anti-Bourbon narratives of the pre- Unification period. 3 Was the south as backward and mismanaged as the agents of the Piedmontese-dominated transitional government described