The story starts several generations ago in Avellino, Italy, with the account of a marriage and an immigration to America. After three pages the story jumps to 1973 -- Maria Laurino is in junior high gym class in Short Hills, New Jersey, and she is uncomfortably aware that the other girls are staring at her because she has hairy legs. This ironic transition invites us into the personal thoughts of an adolescent embarking on "the elusive search for the past, the journey to understand the self" [30] while she remains resolute not to forget "the dangers of selective nostalgia." [31] 
The Laurino family lived literally on the "wrong" side of the tracks in a town where the socioeconomic classes happened to be separated where the railroad passes through. When Maria wandered to the other side, she would soon overhear conversations about "those smelly Italians", after which she would rush home and splash lemon-scented perfume all over herself. She resorted defensively to trying to take some comfort in the fact that the nearby town of Millburn had an Italian-American ghetto where there lived people who were even worse off. It was years later, when Laurino took as job as a reporter and political speech writer, that she had the opportunity to meet New York Governor Mario Cuomo . Contributing the title for the book, Cuomo asked her, "Were you always an Italian?" -- "With childlike guilt, I shook my head no." [37] The Governor lectured her about ethnic self-hate, helping her to make the leap toward reconnecting proudly with her family's heritage. Maria Laurino began vacationing in Italy every year and imbuing herself with Italian culture. She had a one-year "silly youthful romance" [88] with a lawyer she met there. Her mother would say, "I'm embassassed to tell my friends that my daughter is dating someone named Fabrizio." [77] The daughter became wiser, however -- not only in finally recognizing her gentleman as an egocentric mama's boy who complained about her cooking, but also wiser in completely embracing her other national heritage with deep sincerity as well as intellectual comprehension.
Now Laurino is able to enlighten us about the tactics of bigotry and how it takes root. She criticizes certain sociologists who generalize that Italian-Americans are "amoral familists", invoking the word family as "a euphemism for the Mafia." [40] Laurino tears apart the claims of Edward Banfield , chairman of a government committee on urban affairs during the Nixon administration, whose books promoted the stereotype of Anglo-Saxon morality versus the "amorality" of other population groups, and which blamed the problems of black communities on the residents' personality characteristics rather than poverty and discrimination. [42-43] She exposes the damage done by the entertainment business, such as the idiotic role of Vinnie Barbarino played by John Travolta in the 1970s TV show, Welcome Back, Kotter. [153] The author quotes and confirms the observations made by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb in their book The Hidden Injuries of Class , that people disadvantaged by an unjust system of class division often fail to blame the system itself, but instead attempt to achieve relative status by judging or blaming one another. [145]
Most other sections of Were You Always an Italian? are less polemic, and humor lightens the matters of serious weight. By the time you finish the book, you will know, when you want to insult someone in Italian, whether the word stunod or gabbadotz is more appropriate to the situation, and you will know whether you are pronouncing the word with the northern or southern dialect. One of the funny anecdotes relates the story of an Italian citizen who used a regional derogatory term for black people while visiting another province, causing a confused police officer to take a written complaint against an eggplant. [113]
The book is as candid as a personal journal, occasionally as sharp as an investigative reporter's exposé, and always warm towards the humanity in us which we should always cherish. |