Stop Bullying Italian Americans:

on diasporism, dialect, and millenial vs. gen-z food culture

I recently came back from Italy. Mostly I was up in Northern Italy, where the bigger and richer and more touristy cities are. One afternoon my boyfriend and I went to get some gelato. He picked a flavor called “cassata siciliana,” eye-catching with bright bits of candied fruit and marzipan, a southern Italian flavor at a northern Italian gelato shop. Instantly, before I had even tried a bite, I was it with a wave of nostalgia. My nostalgia was not for Sicily itself (though I’ve been to Sicily and enjoyed it), but for America. The glowing, multicolored scoop of gelato reminded me—an American living in England and visiting Tuscany and eating Sicilian-inspired food—of home. 

It reminded me of New Orleans. Of lining up for gelato and cannoli in the pastel interior of Angelo Brocato ice cream shop, my little eyes overwhelmed by the stripes of the spumoni, the glow of maraschino cherries. Of Saint Joseph’s Day altars, and of splitting a huge muffaletta four ways, unwrapping the oil-soaked, olive-scented paper on a bench near the Mississippi.

It reminded me of New York. Of tricolore streamers draped over the streets of little Italy. Of how my boyfriend and I used to take the train up to the Bronx and go to an Italian place on Arthur Avenue, filling up on free bread and then sharing a single pasta and a glass of wine and a cannoli from a bakery around the corner. 

How funny, I thought as I took a bite of the gelato. What a weird thing, to get emotional about. Firstly, I am not remotely Italian-American. But also, more to the point, this is precisely the reverse of how we typically think about diaspora and migration. Typically we understand a diaspora, whether Italian or any other, to be a kind of logical and temporal continuation of an original, rooted culture. That is, the diaspora is reminiscent of, reminds us of, the “authentic” thing. But at the gelato shop, I experienced Italy as a reminder of Italian America. The thing that is usually considered secondary became—for my very American self—primary.

There is a common view of diaspora as merely derivative of the real culture. In this view a diaspora can be, at best, faithful to the original. At worst it bastardizes or abandons it. I see this kind of thing all the time in a certain ongoing online sparring. People from some given country or region mock their distant American relatives. The accusations look something like this: why would you identify with this place if you’ve never set foot here, if you were born and raised in the U.S. (or Canada or wherever)? Why do you mispronounce our words and make incorrect versions of our food? Why do you care where your ancestors lived generations back? Why do Americans, who have everything except a culture of their own, want to claim our culture too?