Two weeks ago, PBS broadcast a new episode of Finding Your Roots with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. hosting. The show traces the roots and DNA of celebrities. Italian Americans Joy Behar (born Josephine Occhiuto) and Michael Imperioli were the guest celebrities. Behar is a comedian by trade; Imperioli a mob-star who made his bones in The Sopranos.
(I’ll not dwell on my opinion of these two guests as paesani, as my purpose is of a different sort. However, I was taken aback when Imperioli told host Louis Gates that The Sopranos was a “positive” series that “made Italian Americans proud” because of its Italian American “cultural” backdrop. This is self-delusion at its worst and insulting beyond the pale.)
During the show, Prof. Gates presented Imperioli a ship’s manifest listing an ancestor who arrived at Ellis Island at the turn of the century, Imperioli observed that the form described his ancestor as Italian in nationality but “south” under the category of “race or people.” Gates explained that southern Italians were considered a different “race” than northern Italians. This is a very common interpretation of that Ellis Island manifest category, which has bothered me no end.
The next day, I verified this classification with my great uncle’s manifest of 1912. An immigrant from metropolitan Naples, his “race” was also noted as “south.” However, the manifest had an asterisk on that column referring the ship’s notary to the back of the manifest sheet for a list of “races and peoples.” I immediately emailed Ellis Island and asked for an image of that list. Sure enough, Italians were considered different north vs. south. But so were British immigrants who were divided by “race/people” as English, Welch, and Scotch. What kind of “racial” differences did they have?
When I contacted our Institute’s expert on genealogy, Ellen Maresca, she found within minutes the original guide for completing a manifest of immigrants. Surprisingly, the old race-conscious officials at Ellis Island had devised an interesting way to divide Italy. Italy’s south didn’t begin at Rome, where we normally believe, but at the Po Valley. Amazingly, Liguria, Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches were designated as “south Italy” along with those regions we describe as the Mezzogiorno: Campania, Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria, Molise, Puglia, Basilicata, Abruzzo, Lazio.
American eugenicists at the time of mass immigration utilized words like ‘race’, ‘people’, and ‘stock’ to actually mean ethnicity or cultural groups. In the case of Italians, they believed that the numerous invasions of Roman Italy infused six northern regions of Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Savoy, Val d’Aosta, and Emilia-Romagna, with Germanic DNA and French language traits. The rest of the peninsula was invaded by other foreigners (eg., Spaniards, Arabs) who diluted the culture and genes of those Italians to create “southern” traits. Never mind that every part of “Italy” spoke Italian dialects and acknowledged Italic popes.
Mezzogiorno Italians have suffered disdain by both northern Italians and Americans for their poverty and the scourge of organized crime. Yet, this newly revealed revelation extending Italy’s south to the Po Valley is a game-changer. Think of it this way: Christopher Columbus was now a southerner (his birthplace Liguria), as was Amerigo Vespucci (Tuscany) and John Cabot (Campania). Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo were southerners (Tuscany). Enrico Fermi was a southerner (Lazio). You can say the Renaissance began in the south, certainly the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. The north can claim Garibaldi (Savoy) and Benito Mussolini (Emilia-Romagna).
Despite the eugenics favoring Italian stock from six northern regions, by 1924 America had enough of any kind of Italian. An immigration act that year put the lid on immigrants from Italy. Their numbers dropped from an average of 216,000 per year in the period from 1905 to 1914, to just over 6,000 in 1924.
I plan to write Prof. Gates to report our finding on Ellis Island manifests. Even the folks I communicated with at Ellis Island went silent when I forwarded Ellen Maresca’s century-old instructions for the manifests. I suspect that too many ‘experts’ still believe southern and northern Italians are separate races.
Worse, I suspect many Italian Americans believe that old canard. -JLM
Fabulous column –
Please inform your readers if Gates responds.
I’m beyond curious.
Many thanks for this.
P
In many ways this is a fascinating piece of Italian-Americana, since it becomes part of American lore, warts and all…….This map was certainly not a part of Italy or other regions the Italian diaspora occurred, so just adds to the disjointed tapestry of US immigration history….and of course immigration is once more in the news now too (world wide).
…….As the French say, albeit my poor spelling , “plus ca change’, plus la meme”, the more things change the more they remain the same, ironically with some of the biggest anti-immigrants being (However you cut the noted map above) Southern Italians! But I guess we are now officially assimilated.
The map also helps me to understand, a friend a while back complaining about his in laws calling him a meridionale…..he was from Assisi,(Umbria) and his girlfriend at the time was from Lombardia somewhere. These would be funny tales, if the consequences were not so destructive.
This column deals with a can of worms. First of all “race,” “ethnicity,” “people” are elastic terms. They mean whatever their user wants them to mean. Second, Italy’s northerners ARE different from its southerners. But so are New Yorkers from Texans. The geographies, climates, economies, histories, accents, etc., are different; so are the people. But so what? Third, bigotry is ugly wherever it is found, including Ellis Island (and Italy … north and south).