Convos with Pro-Colombos: Insight #2: Our Symbol is Our Ancestors.

About This Series

Coming out of 2020, what struck me was the deep need to ​try to build understanding and bridges among people who are on differing sides of the culture war because if we’re not sincerely trying to understand why people on the other side aren’t budging and seeing how we can resolve issues amongst ourselves, I worry that we might wind up in serious long-term trouble here in the States.

This is part 2 of a 3-part series. In this part, we take a look at changes in the Italian-American community as we try to protect and pass down our culture for future generations. In their time, our immigrant ancestors needed a symbol and it was Colombus.

Our times and our needs are different though. The symbol we need is our immigrant ancestors.

This is a good faith conversation. Any nastiness in feedback including hate speech or cancel culture puritanism is just going to get you blocked.

The original video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TizDbPa2CU4

Transcript

Hi, my name is Rebecca Ginamarie, pronouns she/her. I am a Contro-Columbo Italian, and I spent some time this year listening to Pro-Columbo Italian community members. I had three insights that I gained from this. Insight #1, if you want to see it in the previous post, is available.

And in this photo here is one of our Italian immigrant ancestors, Camilla Teoli. I’m going to get into her story in this video.

As a reminder, this is a good faith conversation. Take it like I’m a human being doing my best, I’ll take it like you’re doing the same. Any nastiness in the comments including hate speech or cancel culture puritanism is just to get you blocked.

Okay, so the first insight I gained when listening to Pro-Columbo Italians was that you guys have a point. You’re right, Columbus is a symbol. The second that I want to talk about here is that Columbus isn’t really working for the Italian-American community anymore anyway.

And Pro-Columbos, let me explain myself.

Let’s put aside the whole conflict over Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day for a moment. Let’s imagine it didn’t exist.

It’s still 2021.

In our community, Italians are all having these conversations about how to set up future generations. We’ve been out of the homeland for quite some time now. We don’t have immigrant and first-generation Italians to rely on, en masse, to keep our culture going. And one thing I hear across the spectrum of worldview and political opinions in Italian-American Land is all of us who love our culture are looking for ways to preserve it, to keep it alive, pass it on, make sure it continues into the future.

And I think we know we’re at a point where if we’re not careful about doing that, it could die out. So it’s really up to us right now to practice the culture, to decide what changes and what stays the same — every generation does that — and whatever we do, we got to make sure we pass it on in a way that’s going to keep it strong.

So with that in mind — and for just that reason alone — this time makes it a good time to think about who or what should be the symbol of our heritage and on our heritage day. We’re at a crossroads, and we need to figure out what are the symbols, what are the practices, what are the holidays that are going to take our culture through the 21st century.

What I noticed is when I think about it through that lens, Columbus is becoming an outdated symbol for us anyway. What do I mean by that?

Okay, let me ask you a question: What big-name Italian-American immigrant heroes can you name? Can you name five Italian-American heroes? Historical ones for the purposes of this — not actors, not sports, not mafia members — not for the purposes of this question. Do you know any of the names of the Sicilian 11 who were lynched in New Orleans? I don’t.

Up until a couple of years ago, when I started doing my own readings, I couldn’t name any Italian-American heroes, not historical ones. Most of us in the community can’t, but shouldn’t we be able to rattle off five or six Italian-American heroes off the top of our heads?

Shouldn’t America, the rest of America, the other communities know a couple as well? But does anybody? No. And one of the reasons none of us know this is because we’re pointing to Columbus on our heritage day as a symbol of our history instead of directly pointing to someone from our history.

Italian-American immigrant history is not taught in school. There’s Columbus and there’s the history around the stuff that happened in that era way before the large, large majority of our ancestors got here.

People outside of the Italian enclaves do not get up on Columbus day and think Italian-American culture. They think Spanish expedition, the history, whatever they think about the history. Our day isn’t functioning like St. Patrick’s day where people get up and — for better and worse — they are celebrating Irish and Irish-American culture directly. I think on a heritage day for us people should wake up and be thinking about us, our culture directly, and how many weekday meals our ancestors recipes have saved.

One of the things that jumped out at me when I was reading Pro-Columbo perspectives was a lot of your conversations go the same way. You start with: “Well, you don’t understand our history. There’s a whole history behind this.” And then whoever is speaking has to launch into the lynching of the Sicilian 11, the discrimination, the immigration bans over and over and over again because nobody knows about it.

And I’ve had to do this too with people in and out of the community. I don’t know about you, but I find that tiring. And why is it like that for us?

Because nobody knows our history, not even a lot of us paesan*s. And on our current heritage day, which is probably the biggest opportunity we have all year long to tell our history, our heritage story, our immigrant stories, we’re talking about Columbus instead. But Columbus doesn’t have historical connection to our immigrant ancestors who came over on the boats in the late 19th century, in the 20th century, went through the hell they did, and came out strong anyway.

So Columbus isn’t doing any work for us. He’s not telling anybody about our history. He’s talking about a totally different era, so it’s not actually an accurate symbol of us. Columbus was the symbol that our ancestors and some of our living elders came to because it was a different era.

At that time for them, it was about being Italian in an American culture that did not respect them, and Columbus was the one Italian dude American culture did respect. He was a big name, he took a lot of risk, he crossed an ocean, he started a new era — whatever you think of that era.

Back then, he was the symbol our immigrant ancestors came to in order to have somebody historical that white Americans respected at a time when white Americans didn’t respect them.

That is not the situation today.

Today our immigrant ancestors are the symbol we need so that we can go forward in time as a culture and stay intact. The other thing that we can do by making them our symbol is give them the respect they should have had back then.

We have a lot of heroes whose stories deserve to be told. Camilla Teoli here is one of mine. When she was 13- or 14 -years old, the conditions in the factories she worked in were so bad that a machine caught her hair and scalped her. She spent seven months in the hospital and then wound up testifying in Congress, which helped trigger huge investigations into the abuses that working people of all sorts of cultural backgrounds were experiencing in factories and in coal mines at the time.

It was a huge deal. It wound up catalyzing a lot of positive changes in this country around respect and protection for working people. There was also so much shame for her and her generation around being Italian, and poor, and sticking up for yourself that, as an adult, she never even told her children about this. Her children found out from historians after she passed.

Is Columbus’s story more important than hers?

Which one of those stories actually represents our history, our culture, our heritage. I think it’s her. Because that story tells it like it was for our ancestors. They did not have financial backing from Spanish royalty. There was no startup cash coming over here. They had nothing but their courage, they took the risk, they went through the discrimination, they came out resilient anyway.

Why not free stories like hers from the shame they never deserved?

Why not give our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents the respect that they never got back then?

Our immigrant ancestors needed a symbol. Columbus was it at the time. Today is a different era. The symbol that we need is our immigrant ancestors.

If you still feel that Columbus is a better representation of our community than someone like Camilla or the thousands upon thousands of stories like hers — and this is a sincere question-

Why?

-end transcript

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The original video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TizDbPa2CU4

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