The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  Q: What are some of your childhood memories?

  Turturro: I worked with my father every summer of my life since I was ten years old. We never had money to send me to camp. It was always to clean his houses, but I loved being with him. It is how I got to know my father. I got up in the morning and would leave at six-thirty with Dad. He was very nice in the car; then when we got on the job, he was like, “Get the hell out of the way.” But I learned. I used to feed lumber; I used to clean. My father was very suspicious. He always said, “Never trust an Italian.” I said, “Well, who do you trust?” “I don’t trust anybody.” He was a very interesting guy.

  Q: Do you think Italian families have a generalized distrust of people outside the family?

  Turturro: I still have it. I don’t trust people immediately. I feel first of all, trust is earned. I don’t distrust them, but at the same time I don’t give away my trust easily. The more charming someone is, the more I’m suspicious, because you think, what do they want? What are they trying to get from me?

  Q: As an actor you are not known for taking roles in Mafia films. Is this a conscious choice?

  Turturro: I’m not averse to Mafia films. I loved the Godfather films. It is a genre like cowboys and Indians. I’ve played gangsters. I did Men of Respect. I did Miller’s Crossing. I was a Jewish gangster. What made The Godfather a film that people wanted to revisit was that it was more about a family than about the Mafia, and Coppola infused that into it. As a genre, I sometimes feel it is limited. I mean, playing a bad guy is always interesting, but there is more to life than that. When I see these guys and they play versions upon versions of versions of it, it is reductive.

  Q: So why are we stuck in this genre?

  Turturro: When I did Mac, it was very, very hard to get the money for that. Then Stanley Tucci did his movie Big Night. Those things are really the exceptions to the rule. You can’t just tell Italian-American stories.

  Q: Does it bother you when people equate television shows like Jersey Shore with being Italian-American?

  Turturro: Oh, I’ve hated it for years. I don’t want to come out and condemn stuff, because I would rather just try to do something and say, “Well, here’s what I like.” I wish Passione, the documentary I made, would get out to more people. Not because I made it, but because it is a part of a group of us, the Neapolitans, who gave a lot to the rest of the world. I guess we’ve been so disorganized, we’ve allowed people to do that [Jersey Shore]. We’ve never really said, “No more, we don’t want this anymore.”

  Mario Cuomo inverted the century-long knock on the insularity of the Italian family, describing it instead as a means of support and strength.

  A cover story for the New York Times Magazine declared in 1983 that Italian Americans finally were “coming into their own.” Spotlighting success stories in politics, business, the arts, and academia, the article signaled a long-eluded mainstream acceptance. It certainly was a far cry from the newspaper of record’s 1891 description of Italian immigrants in New Orleans as those “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut throat practices and the oathbound societies.” What a difference a century makes in America.

  The list of achievers included Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York; Eleanor Cutri Smeal, former president of the National Organization for Women; Lee A. Iacocca, then chairman of Chrysler; New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro; architect Robert Venturi; US senators Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Alfonse D’Amato of New York; and A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale.

  Focusing mainly on East Coast Italian Americans, the story didn’t mention another rising star in Democratic politics, San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi, daughter of Thomas J. D’Alesandro, a New Deal congressman and the first Italian American to be elected mayor of Baltimore. At the time, Pelosi had not yet run for office but served as chair of the California Democratic Party and the host committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Held in San Francisco, the convention catapulted two Italian Americans appearing on the New York Times Magazine’s cover the year before further into national spotlight.

  Presidential candidate Walter Mondale selected three-term congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro from the borough of Queens to be his running mate—the first time in US history that a major party named a woman to the ticket. Another Queens resident, Governor Mario Cuomo, delivered the keynote address at the nominating convention. Both Ferraro and Cuomo made historic speeches—the first for its progress toward female equality, the second for a dazzling rhetoric that captured the nation’s attention.

  Using the image of his father, Andrea, the New York governor called for a Democratic vision of government that combined compassion and capability: “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both his hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example. I learned about our kind of democracy from my father and I learned about our obligation to each other from him and my mother.”

  Presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s selection of Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate marked the first time in US history that a major party named a woman to the ticket.

  Cuomo inverted the century-long knock on the Italian family—that its insularity rendered the ethnic group incapable of civic participation and achievement—describing family instead as a means of support and strength. As governor, Cuomo consistently used the image of his mother’s southern Italian village, where the peasants lived in shacks with no heat and dirt floors and found consolation in “the sharing of benefits and burdens.” This communal lesson became the basis for Cuomo’s “family of New York” metaphor, an alternative to the nation’s individualistic, go-it-alone credo.

  The message of the “family of New York”—that mutually supportive communities matter not only to the health of the individual but to the state and the nation—could in some ways be seen as a public policy version of what doctors two decades earlier had dubbed the “Roseto Effect.” So popular was the governor’s convention speech that speculation began that he might run for president—a consolation perhaps for the resounding defeat of Mondale and Ferraro to incumbent Ronald Reagan and his running mate George Bush.

  Throughout this breakthrough decade, the ethnic group’s achievements continued to soar. In 1986, President Reagan nominated the first Italian American to the Supreme Court: Antonin Scalia, a man whose conservative legal philosophy matched the president’s own. The Senate unanimously confirmed Scalia. Today, looking back on his appointment, the associate justice wondered whether part of the Senate’s overwhelming support came from understanding the meaningful symbolism of naming an Italian American to the court.

  “Many of the Senators who might otherwise have voted against me, who came from states with a large Italian-American population, I’m sure they were aware of it,” said Scalia. “I think, for Italian Americans, given what they most abhor, which is their identification with crime and the Mafia, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would be more proud to have an Italian-American justice than to have an Italian-American president.”

  The bedrock values of the Italian family helped shape Mario Cuomo’s political message.

  Yet if one man continued to fuel the idea of an Italian-American president, it was Mario Cuomo. Memories of his convention speech lingered in the minds of Democrats looking for a strong candidate. Italian Americans took particular delight in this speculation because the governor was defined, and in many ways defined himself, by his “Italianness”—the rolling vowels in his name, the broad southern Italian face. Cuomo had established himself as a principled governor, an intellectual Italian-American politician, and an astute observer of the effects of ethnic prejudice on one’s identity. He spoke of graduating tied for first place in his law school class, only to b
e urged by the dean to change his last name in order to find a job on Wall Street.

  Nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, Justice Antonin Scalia became the first Italian American to serve on the US Supreme Court.

  The notion that the Mafia stereotype continued to taint the careers of successful Italian Americans of his generation also infuriated Cuomo. He recounted how, when John Lindsay tried to persuade him to join his administration, he invited Cuomo and his wife, Matilda, to the mayor’s mansion to see The Godfather. “How can you invite me to see The Godfather?” Cuomo responded. “This is the guy who kills people, murders them, plucks their eyes out, drugs them, and he’s treated as a great guy, the whole community loves him. What are you saying with this movie?” He recalled that Lindsay replied, “Oh, it’s only a movie, you’re too sensitive.” (Cuomo finally saw The Godfather for the first time in 2013 and, according to the New York Times, “somewhat grudgingly” offered “maybe this thing was a masterpiece.”)

  In the 1980s, Cuomo watched how Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy was severely damaged by the business practices of her husband, John Zaccaro, along with the rumors of his association with organized crime figures. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Cuomo endured then-candidate Bill Clinton’s remark that the New York governor acted like a “Mafioso.” Cuomo supporters wondered whether the albatross of the Mafia had added to his indecision about seeking the presidency, a persistent wavering that earned him the sobriquet “Hamlet on the Hudson.”

  Cuomo decided not to run—a choice that dismayed admirers across the country. He never revealed his reasons, other than an unconvincing declaration that he needed to fulfill his obligations in the state capital. Did he fear the ugliness of the Mafia stereotype in a national campaign? Or was his decision made, in part, by an apprehension and cautiousness common to the southern Italian temperament? Cuomo once admitted, “The idea that I could come from behind my mother and father’s grocery store in South Jamaica, that we could come, in one generation, to this: the highest seat in the state of New York. That’s enough for a lifetime.”

  If, in the 1990s, a Mafia stereotype could still dissuade talented public servants from seeking national office, by the new millennium its mythic power, like the real-life mob, was fading. When former US attorney and mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani ran for president in 2007, his name recognition created an early buzz among fellow Republicans, even if his candidacy ultimately never sparked. But the specter of the Mafia in the presidential campaign didn’t make Giuliani flinch—a rather amazing achievement, considering that seven years earlier an investigative journalist had reported that Giuliani’s father, who grew up in East Harlem, had been arrested as a young man and sentenced to prison for robbing someone at gunpoint. His father had also worked in a bar as the designated loan collector for a family member tied to the mob. Despite the sins of the father, the public accepted the son for his achievements as mayor and remembered his earlier work as a tough prosecutor who put mobsters behind bars.

  In the same year that Giuliani ran for president, an Italian-American woman and mother of five children ascended to the third highest elected office in the nation. San Francisco congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who served as House minority whip and leader, became Speaker of the House. After the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in 2011, Pelosi stepped down as Speaker but resumed her former post as minority leader, the only woman to hold either position in US history.

  Ultimately, Mario Cuomo, the fifty-second governor of New York, placed his faith for a Cuomo political future in his eldest son, Andrew, who on January 1, 2011, was sworn in as the state’s fifty-sixth governor. Hoping to build on his father’s progressive legacy, the son passed marriage equality legislation during his first year in office and tougher gun control the following year. Today, two Italian Americans lead the state: Andrew Cuomo as governor, and Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York City.

  More than a century since Italy’s mass migration, as the immigrant experience becomes more and more diluted, many Italian Americans wonder about the future of Italian-American identity. Will the culture’s memorable characteristics—the fragrant scents and tastes, family stories, and lessons imparted from ancestors—soon be at risk of disappearing through assimilation? De Blasio’s story offers some clues about the new forms Italian-American identity might take.

  Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and her father, Thomas J. D’Alesandro, former mayor of Baltimore, at the swearing-in ceremony when she was first elected, in 1987.

  Born Warren Wilhelm Jr. to a German-American father and Italian-American mother, and called Bill from an early age, de Blasio is an example of an American who made his ethnic identification a conscious choice rather than a passive inheritance. Warren Wilhelm Sr.’s struggles with alcoholism caused his wife, Maria, to divorce him and raise their three sons by herself. The father’s decline ultimately led to suicide, and an adolescent Bill found solace in his mother’s family and their Old World values. He officially changed his last name from Wilhelm to de Blasio, his maternal surname, and has described the “strength, warmth, and coherence” of his mother’s family as an “antidote” to the difficulties he faced in his teenage years. He cherished the family’s ties to Italy and encouraged his mother to write The Other Italy, about the partisan resistance to Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

  New York governor Andrew Cuomo with daughters (left to right) Cara, Mariah, and Michaela.

  De Blasio continues to express his passion for the culture by speaking conversational Italian, returning to his grandfather’s ancestral village of Sant’Agata de’ Goti near Naples, and naming his children Chiara and Dante. During his election night victory, de Blasio mentioned the Neapolitan town and offered a “Grazie a tutti!” to its residents, who stayed up all night to watch the televised speech.

  De Blasio’s identity as an Italian American took on broader political significance as he campaigned with his biracial family. De Blasio is married to Chirlane McCray, a Caribbean American and former coworker in the administration of David Dinkins, the city’s first African-American mayor. Dinkins’s election in 1989 affirmed the desire of New Yorkers to ease racial tensions that had been fulminating during the eighties, which included several highly publicized murders of African-American men by Italian-American youths angry about the presence of “outsiders” in their dwindling ethnic enclaves.

  A poster in the ancestral southern Italian town of Bill de Blasio’s mother declares its support for New York’s mayor.

  The breakthrough decade of the 1980s signaled the long-awaited emergence of Italian Americans from the shadow of the past to achieve positions of prominence in every major profession—a success that has grown stronger with each passing year. That so many prominent Italian Americans would continue to point to the strength of the family to offer lessons, comfort, and a sense of identity also seemed a minor miracle in an increasingly atomized society. But who could have imagined that this once-maligned ethnic group would be able to maintain a cultural cohesion that many Americans turn to today for influence and inspiration.

  I NOSTRI PAESANI

  Nancy Pelosi

  Nancy Pelosi was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the city’s Little Italy section. She is the daughter of former Baltimore mayor Thomas D’Alesandro and Annunciata Lombardi. Her father’s family came from Genoa and the region of Abruzzo, and her mother’s side was from the region of Molise and Sicily. Pelosi, the mother of five children, made US political history in 2007 when she became both the first woman and the first Italian American to hold the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives.

  Q: Your father was a very prominent politician. How did he get into politics?

  Pelosi: My father had in his DNA a feel for people, an obligation to help one another, and a sense of public service. The way I’ve heard the story is that when he was a little boy, his mother took him to the convention that was held in Baltimore and nominated Woodrow Wilson for president of the United Stat
es. She carried him on her shoulders, and he felt the spark and then it just continued. When he was twenty-one, when he voted the first time, he voted for himself for House of Delegates. My father had it in his blood that that was what he would do, and my brother [Thomas D’Alesandro III] followed in his footsteps. He, too, was mayor of Baltimore.

  Q: Your father became mayor in 1947. Did he have the opportunity to know Fiorello La Guardia?

  Pelosi: He did know La Guardia. La Guardia served in Congress, and my father served in Congress later. I remember him telling me that La Guardia said: if you want to go statewide stay in the Congress, don’t run for mayor. When you’re mayor you are identified with the city. Which he did—he ran for mayor of Baltimore. When he ran statewide he didn’t win, but as he said, “I won every election that was important.” He loved being mayor of Baltimore.

  Q: Growing up in a household full of men, what was your model for Italian-American female life? Can you talk about your mother? Did she feel tethered to the home?

  Pelosi: If my mother were in this generation, she would be president of the United States. She was very, very talented, and she was mom. My mother and father were a team. I don’t think he would ever have been as successful as he was without her strong support. She had seven children, six boys and one girl. I was the youngest. She didn’t spend a whole lot of time cooking. We all managed to eat very well, but it wasn’t as if she was stirring a pot of stew. She cooked, but she was more a person of the community. My brother Tommy used to tell the story that during the Depression people would knock on our door all the time needing a job or a place to live. Sometimes they were just hungry. And he said that with mamma you never knew who was going to be sitting at the dinner table because if you were hungry she took you in.