Where identities merge
By: Joanna Arcieri
Issue date: 12/3/09 Section: Perspectives
When I think of immigration, I often think of my family’s Italian-American identity. I am a third-generation Italian-American and named after my great-grandmothers. My family has been known to travel to Ellis Island, where my great-grandparents’ names are etched on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor. Then I think about how, since I was a teenager, I have been experiencing my own identity crisis related to my Italian-American identity. For me, that hyphen between Italian and American can be the most confusing hyphen used to define myself. My question has been: how am I Italian, and how am I American?
I am not 100 percent Italian. Often, when people ask me about my Italian Catholic upbringing, I surprise them with the information that I was raised Protestant. Because of this, my Italian-American identity has not evolved solely from my relationship with my paternal grandparents (although they play a pivotal role) but often from my own creations and, sometimes, exaggerations. Upon entering college, I took Italian; this was my attempt to connect to my heritage in a way I had never been able to. I have come to cherish moments like Thanksgiving when we eat some of my great-grandmother’s famous recipes (straciatella, anyone?), in addition to traditional American foods. I strive to know these things about my heritage and my identity because, more than anything, I am afraid of losing them.
Since Sept. 11, America has been experiencing what Samuel Huntington calls a crisis of national identity in the book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. America was founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by predominantly white, British and Protestant settlers. From the Anglo-Protestant values, culture and institutions derived the American Creed, which are the governing political principles of liberty, equality and democracy, said to unify disparate immigrant ethnicities. The repression of blacks and natives and limits placed on new immigrants maintained America’s apparent homogeneity until World War II, when the idea of America as a multiethnic society (seen through images of men of various ethnicities fighting and dying together) emerged. Since then and most significantly since 1965, America’s homogeneous culture has been scrutinized. The end of the Cold War left America without an enemy to define itself against—that is until Sept. 11. Waves of new immigrants from Third World countries have reopened—or perhaps awakened—questions of the American identity and questions of who we are becoming.
I am not 100 percent Italian. Often, when people ask me about my Italian Catholic upbringing, I surprise them with the information that I was raised Protestant. Because of this, my Italian-American identity has not evolved solely from my relationship with my paternal grandparents (although they play a pivotal role) but often from my own creations and, sometimes, exaggerations. Upon entering college, I took Italian; this was my attempt to connect to my heritage in a way I had never been able to. I have come to cherish moments like Thanksgiving when we eat some of my great-grandmother’s famous recipes (straciatella, anyone?), in addition to traditional American foods. I strive to know these things about my heritage and my identity because, more than anything, I am afraid of losing them.
Since Sept. 11, America has been experiencing what Samuel Huntington calls a crisis of national identity in the book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. America was founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by predominantly white, British and Protestant settlers. From the Anglo-Protestant values, culture and institutions derived the American Creed, which are the governing political principles of liberty, equality and democracy, said to unify disparate immigrant ethnicities. The repression of blacks and natives and limits placed on new immigrants maintained America’s apparent homogeneity until World War II, when the idea of America as a multiethnic society (seen through images of men of various ethnicities fighting and dying together) emerged. Since then and most significantly since 1965, America’s homogeneous culture has been scrutinized. The end of the Cold War left America without an enemy to define itself against—that is until Sept. 11. Waves of new immigrants from Third World countries have reopened—or perhaps awakened—questions of the American identity and questions of who we are becoming.