Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, December 5, 1993                   TAG: 9402110007
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ITALIAN AMERICANS

There's more money to be made in the new location, but nothing like what the newcomers were led to expect. They can't find the kind of agrarian work with which they're familiar. Instead, they must settle for menial jobs in industrial cities.

Objects of prejudice in their old homes, they must also cope with discrimination against them in their new homes: in the work place, in housing, in the courts, in the schools.

Culture shock puts their traditional family structure under severe stress. So do the attitudes of Anglo-Saxons, the established and dominant ethnic group, who tend to view the newcomers as inferior, lazy, crime-ridden. That's partly because the newcomers are different, partly because they're labor-market threats. Occasionally, mob fury against them erupts in violence.

A description of the great migration of black people from the American South to the American North in the decades just before and after World War II? Could be.

But it also fits the great migration of people from the southern regions of Italy to the United States in the decades just before and after the turn of the century.

The description (though not the comparison with the later massive migration of black people from the American South to the American North) is based on "La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience" by Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, a 1992 book recently re-released in paperback. The authors are professors (emeritus, in Mangione's case) at, respectively, Penn and the State University of New York-Plattsburgh.

The subtitle may have helped sell a few books during the 500th anniversary last year of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the New World, but it's misleading. Not until the late 1800s did Italians emigrate to America in large numbers; indeed, not until the latter half of the 1800s did there exist a nation of Italy to emigrate from.

Columbus, of course, sailed under the flag of Spain. If emigrants to America were from the wealthier, northern part of the peninsula (as were most of the early, relatively few and quickly accepted "Italian" ones), they might be Genovese or Tuscan or Venetian. If from the poorer south, the "Mezzogiorno," (as were the bulk of the later, numerous and oft-resented "Italian" immigrants in America), they might be Calabrese or Neopolitan or Sicilian.

As part of the last great wave of immigrants (along with other Eastern and Southern Europeans) before America enacted severe immigration restrictions, most of the Italians arrived too late to take advantage of the homestead laws that had enabled incoming groups earlier in the 1800s, particularly Germans and Scandinavians, to establish farms. The break from a rural life added to the difficulties of adjusting to a new land and language, of assimilation into another culture. Even today, there are pockets of self-imposed ethnic segregation.

The search for parallels between the experience of the Italian-Americans and of the African-Americans can be overdone. There are a great many differences as well.

Both experiences, however, are important tiles in the American mosaic. It's hard for me to see how the plasticized portrayals of the proposed Disney's America can possibly capture much if any of the texture of those tiles. As a non-Italian garlic-lover, I find it hard to imagine theme-park food's doing justice to the taste of the Italian American experience.

A better bet would be a stroll through the real thing - South Philly, maybe, or the North Side of Boston - or just leafing through a book like "La Storia."