THE FAULT OF MEMORY: "Southern Italy" in the Imagination of Immigrants and the Lives of Their Children in Italian Harlem,1920-1945

Abstract

Conflict in immigrant communities between parents and children over the right way to live is cast in the idioms of geography. Immigrants tell their children stories about the place they left as a display of their deepest values and understanding of the world. This article explores the nature of this interaction in New York's largest Italian community, Italian Harlem, during a period of significant intergenerational tension. Most scholars of Italian America have suggested that the younger generation turned away from the traditions of their parents in favor of American styles and values. The article challenges this notion of tradition, maintaining instead that the articulation of a "tradition" is a complex cultural process which does not discover, but creates, the past in response to the needs and dilemmas of the present. "Southern Italy" was presented to younger Italian-Americans in such a way as to exclude them. An understanding of this often bitter intergenerational tension must be integrated into histories of the Italian-American family.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Baily, Samuel. 1983. "The Adjustment of Italian Immigrants in Buenos Aires and New York, 1870-1914." American Historical Review 88:281-305.

Barton, Josef. 1975. Peasants and Strangers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Bianco, Carla. 1974. The Two Rosetos. Bloomington : Indiana University Press.

Bodnar, John. 1982. Workers' World: Kinship, Community, and Protest in an Industrial Society, 1900-1940. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press .

_______. 1985. The Transplanted. A History of Immigrants in Urban America Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cinel, Dino. 1982. From Italy to San Francisco : The Immigrant Experience. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Clifford, James , and George Marcus , eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berlceley: University of California Press.

Cohen, Miriam. 1978. "From Workshop to Office: Italian Women and Family Strategies in New York City, 1900-1950." (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan).

Covello, Leonard. 1958. The Heart is the Teacher. New York : McGraw-Hill Book Company.

10.

_______. 1967. The Social Backgrounds of the Italian-American School Child. Leiden: E. J. Brill .

11.

Eula, Michael James. 1987. "Between Contadino and Urban Villager: Italian Americans of New Jersey and New York, 1880-1980. A Comparative Exploration into the Limits of Bourgeois Hegemony." (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine.)

12.

Gabaccia, Donna. 1984. From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930. Albany: State University of New York Press.

13.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

14.

Gordon, Linda. 1988. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960. New York: Viking.

15.

Hareven, Tamara. 1974. "The Family as Process: The Historical Study of the Family Cycle." Journal of Social History 7:322-329.

16.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. , and Terence Ranger , eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

17.

Krause, Corinne Azen. 1978. "Urbanization Withought Breakdown: Italian, Jewish, and Slavic Immigrant Women in Pittsburgh, 1900-1945." Journal of Urban History 4:291-306.

18.

Lapolla, Garibaldi. 1931. The Grand Gennaro. New York : The Vanguard Press.

19.

Levi, Carlo. 1977. Christ Stopped at Eboli. Translated by Frances Frenaye . New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

20.

Mariano, John Howard. 1921. The Second Generation of Italians in New York City . Boston: The Christopher Publishing House.

21.

Mormino, Gary. 1986. Immigrants on the Hill: Italian Americans in St. Louis, 1882-1982: Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

22.

Nelli, Humbert. 1970. Italians in Chicago, 1880-1930: A Study in Ethnic Mobility . Oxford: Oxford University Press .

23.

Orsi, Robert. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press.

24.

Rapp, Rayna , Ellen Ross , and Renate Bridenthal. 1979. "Examining Family History." Feminist Studies 7:174-200.

25.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited and translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26.

Rischin, Moses. 1962. The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press .

27.

Smith, Judith. 1985. Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940. Albany: State University of New York Press.

28.

Therborn, Göran. 1980. The Power of Ideology and the Ideology of Power . London: Verso.

29.

Thomas, Piri. 1974. Down These Mean Streets. New York: Vintage.

30.

Tilly, Louise , and Miriam Cohen. 1982. "Does the Family Have a History? A Review of Theory and Practice in Family History." Social Science History 6:131-179.

31.

Webster: Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. 1988.

32.

Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. 1971. Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930 . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.