ORAL HISTORIES

Thanks, Audrey, for reminding me of these important perspectives about the difference between text-based and oral histories. I heard Portelli speak last November (at the AIHA conference in LA), where he elaborated on some of the ideas suggested in these quotes. Indeed, there’s no reason why I should be expecting any particular sort of story from the people I interview; in fact, it will be more interesting if no one tells me what I’m expecting or hoping to hear.

My father, also responding to my reaction to the interviews, recently made some insightful comments to me via email. I hope he doesn’t mind if I quote some of them here.

A returning emigrant of sorts himself he commented on my frustration with some of the returning emigrants’ stories of their experiences abroad. (He and my mother, both retired, now return annually from the U.S. to Italy.) He echoes their statements (referring to my terms, “exploited, discriminated, etc.”):

"If you had interviewed us, we would be among those who came here [to the US] 40+ years ago, and would probably give you the type of answers that you got. With very, very few exceptions, we were not exploited, discriminated or made to feel outsiders. It has not been a pleasant holiday, but we cannot complain. Actually, we feel that the American experience has been and is a plus for us. Yet, if you kids were not here, we would have gone back to Italy when we retired."

In commenting on the trend of the returning emigrants to speak unkindly about recent immigrants to Italy, he said something that I hadn’t thought of before:

"As for what they say about the emigrants to Italy, it simply means that they [the Italian emigrant] did not know what the Americans thought of them when they arrived in America. "

In fact, just yesterday, a woman who spent ten years in Venezuela told me that she and her family were not mistreated by native Venezuelans, but then she clarified, almost under her breath, that what she meant is if they did look down on her or treat her badly she didn’t realize it or recognize it as such.

Tomorrow: we’re off to Naples for a few days.

HELP FOR ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS?

Talking with different folks I learned about an immigrant advocacy group, Associazione Tolba, near Matera. I’m familiar with similar types of nonprofit groups from my graduate school days in Bologna in the mid-1990s, and I had looked around unsuccessfully for one of them in this area. The immigrants I’ve talked to never mentioned any such help but some had gotten a hand from CARITAS, a Catholic organization, when they first arrived in Avellino (the large city, the seat of the province, west of us).

Two weeks ago, at the weekly outdoor market in Cairano M and I started talking to one of the African street vendors. Sure enough, “A” (who has been in Italy for twenty years) pulls out a little photocopied flier for ANOLF (Associazione Nazionale Oltre Le Frontiere—National Association Beyond the Borders, or something like that)—an international organization supported by one of Italy’s largest unions. It just so happens, A told us, that he is a representative for the organization for the entire province of Avellino. The organization’s mission statement: “La diversità culturale è ricchezza, sconfiggere l’intolleranza ed il razzismo è civiltà” (Cultural diversity is wealth, defeating racism and intolerance is civilization). The flyer he gave me has contact information for him, but no one else.

A quick Google search and then a few conversations, both with immigrants and with Italian academics, has made me doubt the organization’s effectiveness. One academic told me “in many parts of Italy it’s just a sham. They receive tons of money and do nothing with it.” Then an immigrant from the former Soviet Union told me a disheartening story, the gist being that she was taken for 110 euro by this organization and didn’t even get the help she had gone looking for.

I hope these stories are either untrue or just anomalous, but I’ll have to see for my self.

A DIFFERENT STORY

It does not take a Fulbright grant to realize that in the towns of Alta Irpinia (and well beyond) there is little economic development, the towns are shrinking in population, and that there are few steady fulltime jobs.

At the same time, there are more and more foreign-born workers who live and work here. They work as in-home caregivers, construction workers, street vendors, farm workers, and factory workers. The work is often “al nero”—precarious and under the table. Laborers are often overworked and underpaid. A lot of this work is similar in kind to the kinds of labor that once commonly employed Italian emigrants, regardless of where they emigrated to.

Perhaps it will seem obvious, but when an Italian (of any age) tells me there’s no work in this part of the country, s/he’s talking about white-collar work, or at least pink-collar work. Of course there’s work here—it’s just not the kind of work that most young Italians want to do any longer.

While the overall population of the towns here is declining, the population of new immigrants is growing. Before leaving the U.S. I studied the latest Italian census figures, and they support this observation. A village like Cairano, where I’m living, has fewer than 500 residents today (down from about 1500 half a century ago ago), and that number keeps diminishing; yet, even while we’ve been here, the number of new immigrants in town has increased.

Yesterday a former emigrant told me a different story, one that confirmed my own conclusions. She’s in her early 50s, lived in the U.S. for 13 years in the 70s and 80s, and now makes a living as a housecleaner—making her one of few Italian-born domestic workers here. She told me: “The immigrants take the jobs that no young Italian will do, since the young Italians all live off the fruit of their parents’ labor. Or the young Italians have been to school, and when they go looking for a job in a bank and can’t find one, they don’t just go clean houses or work in a factory. They won’t do that.”

When I asked her what she thought would happen to these towns, she said, “One day these foreigners will populate the towns, because they still live as we lived before I left for America”.

You might think, Come on, she left in the 70s—how uncomfortable could her life have been here? This is Europe, after all! Well, life in much of rural Italy (especially the South) during the 70s was still such that most people had only fireplaces to warm their houses, and when this woman called her mother from the U.S., she had to call the town operator and make an appointment for her mother at the telephone station. But really, to understand, you need to have a better sense of what the towns of Alta Irpinia are and were like, a story best left for another post.

NON C'È LAVORO QUA - there is no work here

Everything that comes to mind when someone tells you “I’m spending six months in Italy” has kept me from blogging. Carnevale was memorable—dancing Montemarano’s version of the tarantella and walking around Cairano with everyone in town under 60, trick-or-treating for wine, sausage, and eggs. Daytrips to Naples and Salerno weren’t too bad, either.

I’ve conducted a few more interviews, some with recent immigrants, others with former emigrants back from the Americas. I’m intrigued by a common motif in the comments of many former emigrants.

Most of the people I talk to who went abroad for anywhere from 10 to 40 years speak about their time away in entirely positive terms. They had work, they had food, they had good company. They were not exploited, discriminated against, nor made to feel as outsiders. In fact, most of my interviewees have made emigration sound like a pleasant holiday.

This is not to say that everyone has been so upbeat about their emigration experience, but the majority have. What’s nagging me about these comments is, I don’t quite believe them. What are they leaving out? Am I not spending enough time with them? Could I be asking better questions?

After reviewing the interviews I’ve come to the conclusion that what I’m hearing is in part sentimental musings about youth, in part bella figura, and in part an articulation of the possibility that life abroad, however hard it may have been, was always better than life before emigrating. (Otherwise, one would have to admit regret in having left in the first place, no?)

Nevertheless, I remain a bit “delusa” by these interviews. And something else is bothering me: the same people who offer such starry-eyed pictures have all—without exception—commented disparagingly about contemporary immigrants to Italy. (“They come here not wanting to work; their women come here sick and pregnant; there are no jobs here for our children and they come to take our few jobs, etc.”)