So I am retired, from PUBLIC education, and yet I am having difficulty in understanding some things. I was born at the very end of 1945, after the war had ended. I consider myself a baby boomer though technically 1946 was the start. But hey what’s a few weeks when you are an infant. I was a child in the 1950s. It was a glorious time to be a child, even in neighborhoods like mine, where most of us were “latch-key” kids before the term existed. My mother, like many of the mothers in our row (of houses, 32 connected together) worked in factories, in her case a textile mill. She had been working since she was pulled out of school in the 6th grade. She was an immigrant, having been born in Sicily. She came to America as a child, English was not her first language. Nor was it my father’s though he had been born here about two years after his parents came from Calabria, in the toe of Italy.
Two things stirred up some memories this week. One was that an acquaintance of mine is taking a class about women workers from the industrial area. She gave me a book to read that had many photos of women of my mother’s era, working in the factories in an around Philadelphia where we lived in my childhood. The other thing was Tom Brokaw’s stupid remark about the Hispanics not doing enough to assimilate. Upon hearing his words, a surge of anger ran through me. “As if, “ I thought, “this jerk has any idea about how immigrants from any culture had lived.”
My parents have been long gone, but many little anecdotes of their lives linger in my memory. I was a curious kid. I wanted to know, what, where, why, for much of my childhood. For example, I did not learn to speak Italian though both of my parents spoke fluently, since English was NOT their first language. Why did they not teach us, I finally asked, when I was old enough to understand the value of being bilingual. What I ascertained over the years is how my parents had been shamed about their inability to speak English. I learned that for them coming of age in the before the 1920s then into the 1930s, being an Italian immigrant was not viewed in a positive light. When I was sixteen, I wanted to get my ears pierced. I did not know that my mother’s ears had been pierced as a baby. It was pretty common in southern Italian culture. My mother said no adamantly, with no explanation. It was my first rebellious act. I did it anyway. When I came home, wearing hoops, I expected a small yelling explosion (other than yell, my parents were not very strict, no hitting ever, no punishments I can recall…just a lot of Italian guilt). Instead I got a look of exasperation, and my mother said, “ You look like a greenie!” “What’s a greenie?” I queried, having never heard the term. “Someone right off the boat,” she said. Seeing my confused face, she tried to explain and this led to a series of discussions about so many things. These days, as I am in my senior citizen years, I think more and more about how lucky I was in the parent department, and that how hard my parents worked to move forward progressively.
I learned over the years how much my parents saw themselves as “the other” in the way many immigrants are labeled today by ignorant people. When I was little I recall my mom talking on the phone with her sisters, often in Italian (particularly when she did not want my sister or I to know the content). I would hear the word “m-i-t-a-gan”. That is what it sounded out to my young ears. Sometimes I would hear her referring to people they (parents) knew as “Mitigans”. I thought it was a group of people, like the “Pollacks from Poland, like the Irish, from Ireland”(the most predominant groups in our blue collar town). So one day when I was around nine years old, I asked, “Mom, what are Mitiagans? What country?” I asked because I could not figure out the country of their origin as I could the others.
After a few seconds of a perplexed look, my mother grinned and said, “Mitigan” means American. In other words, if they were not “immigrants”, they were “mitigans” and frankly, over the years, I learned my mother had a low trust of them, stemming from her childhood, how she and her sisters were treated when outside the Sicilian neigborhood. I wish I had more details but rarely did my mother complain. Some things were just very matter of fact. I am not sure I got it then but years later it all made sense.
Because my mother had only an elementary education, because English was not her first language, sometimes her grammar was “off”. In the privacy of our family, we all joked about her malapropisms, but with love. We knew my mom was a very smart, albeit deprived of a formal education, woman. Both her children went to college. When I was in college, I got all of one letter from my mom. It was my sophomore year. I was working in the cafeteria because I qualified to earn money on campus due to my parents’ income being so low. My parents sent me an extra few dollars whenever they could, but mostly my dad did the writing. He had gone to the 10th grade, was an avid reader and was more confidant. So getting a letter from my mom was a rare surprise. It had a few dollars inside accompanied by only a few lines and I remember it still.
“Dear Judy,
here are a few dollars just for fun. I miss you and love you very much.
love, Mom. And don’t show this to anybody.”
The only photo of my mother with all her siblings. It was her wedding day in 1939.
That day I had an awakening. My mother, usually funny and outgoing with my hometown friends, went silent around my college friends on their visits. She rarely said a word to any of them, and was especially quiet on parents’ day when we (my college friends and their parents) went to dinner together. None of my college friends were “ethnic”. Most of their parents had diplomas and several were college educated. I realized that my mother felt embarrassed and ashamed about her lack of education, her broken English. She and my father had decided early on to deprive my sister and I of the right to be bilingual because society DEMANDED they do so, in order to be seen as good immigrants. They convinced people like my mother to “Americanize” her children. They were made to be ashamed of who they were…and did not want to pass the shame on.
Sigh. So I say, “F*ck you Brokaw and all you righteous ignoramous “mitigans” who looked down their noses on immigrants back then and now. My parents and grandparents came for a better life for their children but were told for years they did not fit in, UNLESS they left their own culture behind. And many of them did. Other than NOT being taught a beautiful language, I am happy to say in my family we have proudly held on to and are passing on many cultural traditions.
One more anecdote to share. This was about my paternal grandmother. She had been born on Calabria. Came to America when she was twenty, and she and my grandfather had a dozen children, one who died shortly after birth. By the time the 1950s rolled around, she was a widow. All her children were grown, four of five boys had served honorably in WWII, and now she had many grandchildren. Around that time her children pooled their money for a birthday gift: a trip back to her hometown in Italy after close to fifty years in American. On her return, this was one of her stories as told to me by one of my Aunts.
Grandmom was walking through the streets of her childhood village and children were waving to her in excitement, screaming, “Mitigan! Mitigan! (the American, the American). Grandmom then turned and quipped to her children. “Imagine that. I have lived here (in our town in PA) for nearly fifty years and I had to go to Italy to be called an American.”
One of the rare photos of my paternal grandparents and their many children, probably in 1930.
I lived and taught in the southwest for many years before returning to PA. Many of my dearest and closest friends from there are Mexican Americans. We always noticed and took joy in how close and similar our cultures were, including the shaming about language and culture. Until I lived there, I did not know how large an Italian American community was in CO. Several of my Mexican American friends had relatives who married people who had been Italian immigrants. We sometimes talked about how “the other” was applied certain cultures. We also noted that some (people we knew) were still using derogatory terms like “wop” or “wetback”. We never imagined ignorance could last so long. Then again we never imagined our country would ever elect such a bigoted, xenophobic, racist, sexist dolt and that our media would become a tool for the oligarchs.
