The Italians of New York by Maurizio Molinari

Author:Maurizio Molinari [Molinari, Maurizio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780985569808
Google: lAWcMQEACAAJ
Publisher: Vellum
Published: 2012-01-15T01:42:34+00:00

Referendum on identity

For the Italians of New York, Election Day 2010 proved to be a referendum on their own identity. For the first time, the candidates for new State Governor, Democratic Andrew Cuomo and Republican Carl Paladino, set a clear choice before them between two opposing ways of embodying the values and the ideals of Italian Americans. It was an unforeseen situation that came about by surprise when Paladino, the businessman from Buffalo, backed by the Tea Party, won the Republican primaries instead of the favorite Rick Lazio, also Italian but minus the ethnic slant. Paladino presented himself as the synthesis of all of the most common stereotypes of Italian immigrants: his election meetings took place in Buffalo, in Upstate New York, in a restaurant named Sinatra’s whose regular customers wear gold chains around their necks, have tattoos and whose mannerisms evoke the style of the Sopranos, and the social club that he frequented is called Big Tymers where the customers are mostly factory workers of southern Italian descent who “are all really loud, they all speak at the same time and nobody listens,” as Guy Molinari, former Borough President of Staten Island, wrote in the New York Times (11 October 2010). Paladino comes from a family of immigrants from Molise that arrived at Ellis Island in 1926. Every year he returns at least once to Santa Croce di Magliano, he speaks dialect with ease and he is a proud consumer of the local cuisine that he loves to describe when he talks about himself. It’s a way of being Italian that he flaunted during the Columbus Day parade on Fifth Avenue, when his younger supporters marched wearing Jersey Shore t-shirts. To all of this we can add that Paladino, who was born in 1946, is married to a woman who is well aware of all of his infidelities (even the secret child he has fathered with one of his mistresses) and so it isn’t hard to understand why the Republican businessman embodies a way of life that many Italian Americans consider excessive, vulgar and essentially harmful to integration in America.

Andrew Cuomo, born in 1958, is the polar opposite of all of this. Though he is the son of ex-Governor Mario (the protagonist of many battles against anti-Italian racism) and of Matilda (the sponsor of countless associations and events of Italian interest), Andrew leaves those origins in the background. His first wife was Kerry Kennedy (daughter of Robert and Ethel Skakel) and his current partner is Sandra Lee the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant with blond hair and light-colored eyes who is the host of cooking programs on the Food Network. As New York Attorney General, he avoided behaving in a way that could be construed as too ethnic. He commissioned a survey in 2002 that revealed how stereotypes about Italians as Mafiosi and thugs were still so ingrained that they could damage his political career. When the race for Governor, in the fall of 2010, turned into an all-Italian challenge (with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.