I grew up in the New York metropolitan area where it wasn’t uncommon for someone to call themselves Italian. It was usually shorthand for saying that your parents, grandparents, or maybe even great-grandparents had migrated from Italy, usually the southern half, places like Naples and Calabria and Apulia. People were proud to call themselves Italian even though they weren’t born there, had never stepped foot there, didn’t hold Italian citizenship, and often didn’t know more than a handful of Italian words (which half the time were actually dialect). But still, they were Italian, and the rest of us accepted that never thinking much of it.
Then, a few years back, I began hanging out watching soccer games at a bar tucked into an East Village side street that I would soon realize was a sort of unofficial club-house for Italian ex-pats in New York (Italy had already made its transition into the first world decades ago. Those who left the peninsula now had college degrees and professions. They stopped being immigrants and started being ex-pats).
These Italians were often amused by Americans calling themselves Italians. It never angered them or left them irritated. They seemed more just non-plussed by it. Even the quintessential “Italian” food, spaghetti and meatballs and chicken parmesan and garlic bread, they explained to me, were actually Italian-American, “completely unknown in Italy.”
I once witnessed one of the managers answer the phone while tending bar. The caller asked if they had baked ziti on the menu. “No,” he said. “We have real Italian food,” he then quietly hung up the phone, not waiting for a response.
One winter afternoon, as an Italian soccer game on TV deep into the second half trickled to its anti-climatic finish (Juve won), one of the Italian dudes, L., began telling a story (in English for my benefit) about his American girlfriend. Now, his girlfriend’s parents were from Italy, Italian was the girl's first language and she spoke it as a native does, and she spent many long childhood summers under the hot Italian sun, absorbing the air, traditions, and pop culture. “She says she’s Italian, but she’s not,” L. said, as an aside to his story. All the other Italians nodded their heads in agreement. “Not at all,” their nods said.
I was surprised but kept silent. I later left wondering, what exactly is an Italian? I knew it wasn’t like being American where your birth on American soil, no matter where your parents are from, no matter if they’re in the U.S. on vacation, makes you (at least in theory) as American as someone descended from the Minute Men. But these guys didn’t even think this girl, whose parents hailed from Italy and who knew the culture and spoke the language just as they did, was Italian? Not at all? Being Italian meant something different to them. It wasn’t just an ethnic group based on a shared (perhaps imaginary) past. It was also an experience. An experience in a certain place. But then there’s someone like Mario Balotelli, an Italian soccer player born in Sicily to Ghanian parents, who had that experience in that certain place, who many say isn’t “really” Italian, either.
No doubt I’m over-simplifying things here. But where do Black Italians, or Italians say, of Romanian or Chinese origin, fit in Italian society? This is something I’d really like to delve into when I make a reporting trip to Italy. The country, after all, has received the greatest influx of migrants in Europe, which has led, among other things, to the surge of the far-right, and Nigerian organized crime groups building a foothold in Sicily, home of the mafia. Now, as in much of western Europe, Black Lives Matter protesters are taking to the streets. On a related note, here is a sad story about a young Pakistani migrant who was stabbed to death in Sicily, allegedly by a Pakistani gang, for speaking out about wage-theft in the farming sector.
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Former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole has mined his long political career to become a major lobbyist, and he just signed on to represent a Chinese chemical company.
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this is a great short piece from Slate about the basics of el paquete, the thumb drives Cubans pass around that allow them to download what they want from the internet, even though they don’t actually have access to it. Harper’s published a great piece a few years ago about it too.
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Here is a narrative-driven story about the Sea-Watch 3, its rescue operations, and a case in front of the EU Court of Justice that alleges coordination between the Libyan coast guard and the E.U. to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. The story of migration is one of the biggest stories of our time and is tied to the other giant stories: climate change and surveillance.
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