Italophobia E-Book

Catherine Dumont

• Herausgeber: BookThug
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 31

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to face all kinds of obstacles, but also prejudices, hostility and even violence from great part of the American society. The picture changed much later when figures like Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio or Fiorello LaGuardia became admired characters and contributed to defeating the stereotype of the Italian gangster. Nowadays there is a worrying wave of discrimination against the Italian-Americans. Will the United States admit a new outbreak of violence towards this group?

Leseprobe

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1. Introduction

A study carried out by the Italic Institute of America1 about the presence of Italians in Hollywood films reveals how entrenched the stereotypes of the Italian gangster are in the movies: from a total of 1512 films related to Italian, filmed between 1914 and 2014, 68 % (more than a thousand films) showed a negative image of Italian, being the figure of the Italian gangster by far the most widespread (528 films). Only 69 of these 528 films were based on real cases, while the remaining 469 films (almost 87%) alluded to invented characters. Since the release of The Godfather in 1972, almost three hundred films about Italian mafias were released in the United States, an average of 9 a year. The same seems to be replicated in TV serials, video games and commercials, and in recent years also in reality shows. The successful Jersey Shore, premiered on MTV in 2009, promised from its announcements to follow the lives of eight of the “hottest, most explosive and crazy guidos”, using a discriminatory word and appealing, since the casting, to the exploitation of all of the Italian-Americans stereotypes.

It seems that we are so used to seeing these stereotypes of Italians linked to frivolity, violence or organized crime, that many times we lose sight of a much broader and more complex situation. From the first waves of migration from Italy to the United States in the 19th century, when the demand for cheap labor was generated by the end of slavery and many impoverished Italians arrived to accept those jobs, going through lynchings, executions and discrimination, until the current presence of new neo-Nazi groups that revisit, between others, the contempt for the Italians as an inferior race, bigotry against Italians has undergone different stages.

In the pages that follow, we will review the history of Italian immigration in the United States, paying special attention to the lynching episodes and the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, we will refer to the “whitness studies”, to the figure of Christopher Columbus as a symbol of the Italian-American fraternity, and we will also review the resurgence of the contempt for the Italians in the hands of new ultra right or neo-Nazis groups.

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2. Italian immigration and legislation

The Naturalization Act of 1790 established that “free white persons of good character” who wanted or should emigrate to the United States could naturalize. In the promulgation of this Act, the Congress seems to have been based on an ideal of homogeneous population formed mainly by white Protestants. But the migratory waves from different countries of southern and eastern Europe that took place towards the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, led to a rethinking of migration policy.

The first wave of migration from Europe, mainly towards the middle of the 19th century, had brought to the United States more than four million Germans, more than three million Irish, two and a half million Britons and just under a million Swedes and Norwegians2. All of them were considered “free white persons” who could apply for US citizenship.

By 1870 there were only about 25,000 Italian immigrants in the United States3. Most of them came from Northern Italy, and they were refugees who had to leave their country after the Unification in 1861. The impoverishment in Italy in later years generated one of the greatest migratory waves in history: it is estimated that some 13 million Italians emigrated between 1880 and 1914, and more than 4 million of them arrived in the United States. These immigrants came mostly from southern Italy, and arrived with poor education and no knowledge of English. Once settled in the new continent, many of these Italians worked in mines, farms, railroad or construction. In different cities they formed areas that became known as Little Italys