Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America - Hardcover

Laurino, Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393049302 ISBN 13: 9780393049305

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2000

Synopsis

A thoughtful, penetrating, and hilarious examination of third-generation ethnic identity. "Were you always an Italian?" was the question with which then-Governor Mario Cuomo greeted journalist Maria Laurino. The question struck home. Laurino was exploring the governor's ethnic roots, yet only a few years earlier she had contemplated chopping the vowels off the end of her name. Mixing memoir, social and cultural history, and reporting, Laurino sifts through the stereotypes bedeviling Italian-Americans. With a sympathetic but clear eye, she writes about guidos, bimbettes, and mammoni (mama's boys in Italy). She examines the clashing aesthetics of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace, and unravels the etymology of southern Italian dialect words like gavone or bubidabetz. And, careful to avoid the perils of nostalgia, she explores the pungent influence on her life of ancestral Italian attitudes towards family, work, and faith. Warmly personal and cleverly objective, Laurino's work is surprising on every page. It is both a celebration of a group often overlooked in literature and a long-overdue critique of romanticized ideas of "ethnicity"--a book that should appeal to the children and grandchildren of every immigrant to America.

About this title

About the Author:

Maria Laurino is a journalist and essayist living in New York City. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times and the Village Voice.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Three generations in America doesn't necessarily take the sting out of being an immigrant, as described in this appealing and sometimes thought-provoking memoir that moves from suburban New Jersey to Italy's southern provinces. The title question was posed by former New York governor Mario Cuomo as journalist Laurino was interviewing him on his own roots. Laurino's honest answer was no, as she recalls her adolescent efforts to distance herself from her Italian heritage. They began in earnest when a classmate characterized her as the smelly Italian girl: assured by friends that she did not have an odor, Laurino nevertheless began to understand that, despite her wardrobe from Saks, her darker skin and the vowels at the end of her name put her on a lower rung of the social ladder than the WASPs or JAPs who were the popular cliques at her high school. Broadening her perspective, Laurino examines the stereotyping of Italian-Americans via Mafia movies and a visit to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst (where gold-chained guidos and big-haired guidettes mark one very visible end of Italian-American rankings). Laurino blends personal experience and academic research in examining class bigotries not only in America, but also in Rome and Milan (where she found the northern Italian contempt for southern Italians as powerful as the prejudice against African-Americans in the US). When she and her husband finally visit what is left of the family in southern Italy (on the ankle of the boot), she finds them poor, hardworking, and closely knit, as they were when her grandparents sailed for America. Their habits and concerns resemble those of Laurino's mother (in her work rituals, for example, or in her inclination to hoard any luxury), leading the author to speculate that her own tendency to hoard may have been born in the fields of abject poverty. Other hyphenated Americans who have experienced discrimination and confusion about their heritage will find this often funny and graceful book simpatico. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0393049302
• ISBN 13: 9780393049305
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192