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(Above: Columbus, his feet in fetters, is sent back to Spain)

Columbus Day has come to symbolize the celebration of the Italian presence in the United States of America. This presence has not always been welcomed, but it has been a positive presence, and one that is rarely celebrated in mainstream U.S. culture. It is no wonder that more than 100 years ago Italians latched on to Columbus as a symbol for their own experiences. However, Columbus, like many figures of history, has outlived his usefulness for all Americans, but for Italian Americans he continues to represent the struggle their immigrant forbearers overcame in becoming Americans. I am here to tell you that we do not need to depend on Columbus’ story if we 1) tell our stories, and 2) incorporate those stories into the history of the United States.

A lack of access to our own histories, whether through the family or social institutions, is forcing us to depend on a sense of ethnic identity portrayed by others and outdated symbols such as Columbus. Outside celebrations such as religious feste and Columbus Day parades became the most important public presentation of Italian/American culture, but these annual events were never frequent enough to protect Italian/American culture from the regular mass media bombardment of negative stereotypes.

I could choose any number of examples, but one which helps us understand them all came through an Editorial that appeared in the October 7, 2002h issue of the St. Augustine Record in which Hansen Alexander wrote: “Tomorrow’s Columbus Day Celebration will go forth undeterred by the fact that the Genoese mariner helped Spain, not Italy stake a claim to the Americas.” Then begins his lament, “The holiday has come to celebrate that which is Italian, or more specifically, that which is southern Italian.” Having made this distinction is interesting, but why is another story. Alexander characterizes southern Italy as an area more impoverished than the rest of Italy, and the birthplace of “tomato based foods like thin pizza, the notorious Mafia, and poor fishermen like Joe DiMaggio’s father” (1). He complains that we do not celebrate northern Italian traditions like “the industrial might of Milan, the intellectual heritage of its great universities at Bologna and Padua,” or the genius of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante and Bocaccio. “No,” he continues, “tomorrow will be about cheap wine and stereotypical visions of Italians as a congregation of vigilantes.”

I continued reading the editorial hoping that this was someone’s idea of a joke. But it only got worse from there. While the publisher of the paper later apologized for the publication of this editorial and it has been pulled from its online archives it represents more than the ignorance of one man. Alexander suffers from an affliction which is traceable to the difficulty in interpreting the various metaphors that have come to be associated with the United States of America.

To Italian Americans, America as a metaphor often communicated denial. It wasn't a problem of knowing what being American was, rather the problem came in trying to avoid everything that common knowledge said being American wasn't. Early twentieth-century immigrants from Italy to the United States did not at once refer to themselves as Americans, just as they didn’t see themselves as Italians. Most of the early immigrants were sojourners or “birds of passage,” primarily men who crossed the ocean to find work, make money, and return home. This experience is well presented in books such as Michael La Sorte’s La Merica: Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (1985). In addition to language barriers, these immigrants often faced difficult living conditions and often encountered racism. In Wop! A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination (1999), Salvatore La Gumina gathers evidence of this racism from late 19th and 20th century American journalism appearing in the New York Times and other major publications.

In response to this treatment, many of the Italians referred to Americans as “Merdicani” short for “Merde di cane” (dog shit). The word was also used as a derogatory reference by Italians to those who assimilated too quickly and readily into American culture. Most novels published prior to World War II depicted this vexed immigrant experience of adjustment in America; simply the titles of Louis Forgione’s The River Between (1924) and Guido D’Agostino’s Olives on the Apple Tree (1940), tell that story.