Sicilian Culture: The News & Views: Emeritus Professor of Psychology Jim Mancuso Returns from Poland

Sicilian Culture

The People, The History, The Culture

The News & Views
Emeritus Professor of Psychology Jim Mancuso Returns from Poland
Emeritus Prof. of Psychology Jim Mancuso, just returned from a 2 week vacation to Poland, with his wife of Polish Heritage.
Jim relates three experiences to show how people are effected by how Italian Americans are represented on TV, and that the public gets "brainwashed" by the constant depictions, and that fiction and reality "morph."
SCENARIO ONE: On the first evening, attending a dinner arranged by the tour company, I sat next to a man (not from an Italian-American background) who introduced himself to me.
"I'm Vito XVXVXXX. That makes me 'Vito the Criminal."
I replied, "What do you mean by 'Vito the Criminal."
He responded, "Vito Genovese, and all that."
I replied, "Oh, I didn't know that people named their children Vito
in order to name them after people like Vito Genovese - whoever he is.
I had assumed that the people in my family who were named Vito were named after Saint Vitus (of Saint Vitus Dance fame - Vito being the Italian version of his Latin name). According to tradition, he was martyed in the region of Italy from which my grandparents had emigrated. That, I believe, is the chain that explains why my grandmother, who had a brother named for the saint, named one of her sons Vito."
SCENARIO TWO:
I was at the lunch table with a man from a Polish background. The man, throughout the tour, had been doing his best to let us know that he knew a great deal - especially about Poland, his country of birth -- which he was visiting the first time since he had left that country as a young child.
I said, "I do wish that when these tour guides know that they have a group of people who descended from the emigration from the country that they would do more to tell about the immigration - the number to people who left, the conditions that they left, etc."
We went into the conversation further, and at one point, I said "After all, the emigration must have meant a great deal to the people who were left behind." I then gave a quick example, taken from Paul Paolicelli's book (DANCES WITH LUIGI, reviewed in the essay found at www.capital.net/~soialban/venturfr.html
"In a book I recently read, the author describes his grandfather's family and their immigration to The USA from Italy. Three brother's and a sister immigrated. Within ten years, the three brothers were dead - two killed and a third died in an epidemic. Imagine how the family members who were left behind were affected!!"
To which the gentleman responded, "Oh yes, a lot of the Italian immigrants were killed in the gang wars. They were into the rackets and bootlegging." (Being totally ignorant of the fact that the overwhelming number of immigrants died of desease, starvation, job related (coal mines, and other dangerous jobs, indentured servants,etc).
SCENARIO 3, ETC.
My wife, speaking Polish, engaged in frequent conversations with people we met along the route of our tour - including cousins (offspring of her father 's brothers) she had never met. Inevitably they asked, "And your husband?Does he come from a Polish background?" "No, he's comes from an Italian immigrant family." You all can guess the next line from many, many of the people with whom she was conversing.
Can I really just say"Oh, those are stupid people who can't tell the difference between a media portrayal and the facts of history. And, besides, it was just a joke." Right????
NO!

HOME