What Makes You Still Italian or Whichever Ethnicity You Carry
A love letter for those who have felt the heartache of cultural loss
I would like to offer you my answer to a question that floats around and about the Italian-American community because the implications touch the experiences of diasporic peoples in general. And because my community deserves a life-affirming answer.
Feel free to replace the words Italian and/or American with your own cultural mix and take what fits.
The question is: What makes you still Italian?
Sometimes an Italian-American is asking this of themself. Other times, community members ask it of each other.
Still other times folks outside our culture ask it of us. Sometimes respectfully. Other times, not so much.
That question has a haunting quality. Something ghostly pervades it because what it’s really wondering is: Is there a living quality about you that is still Italian? I don’t know if I see that in you. Aren’t you just American by now?
This question prompts us to inventory our lives to see if we find something “still Italian” in them:
Speak the language? No, so no Italian there.
How many generations in America? Four, ufff, that feels like a lot…
Talk with your hands? Yes, very Italian there...
Cook a mean red sauce? Decent; does that count?
Look Italian? Ugh, loaded question. Yes, but most people don’t realize it.
Raised Catholic? Nope. Not Jewtalian either, so really not Italian there…can we count the sauce thing?
Like a performance review or a school test, we either fail or succeed to check off enough boxes on an imaginary cultural feature list that assesses if our identity does, in fact, still exist.
This pressure to prove our Italianness is a great irony considering how recently we were pressured to prove our Americanness.
Our Boomers and earliest Gen Xers were, after all, born under the 40-year immigration ban on Southern Italians, but that is a subject for a different post….
When we succeed at proving our Italianness this way, we run the risk of clinging too hard, which can show up in a myriad of ways.
Maybe we exaggerate or exhaust those cultural features in an effort to fill in the missing gaps…
Or we defend them without considering if we ought to because we don’t know what would be left of our culture without them…
Or we use them as a measuring stick to see who else lives up to being a “real Italian” because doing that seems to meet our own very legitimate need to feel our ethnicity.
I say these things because I have done these things, not because I think myself above them.
On the other hand, when we fail at proving our Italianness this way….do I need to explain that feeling to any diasporic person?
The heartbreak that has no solution and no end.
If others could feel for a moment the gaping hole in our hearts, it would serve as sufficient proof of our Italianness.
Could the absence of a previously existing ethnic way of being cause such pain for any reason other than because it is supposed to still be there?
This phantom pain from our missing cultural limb is also a subject for a different post…
Our problem here is the type of thing that Jesus and Buddha were really good at pointing out. We are looking for the answer on the outside.
Cultural attributes like language and continued traditions are wonderful expressions of Italianness.
Ultimately though, they are just that. Expressions. External conveyances of things that start on the inside of people, not on the outside.
And there, my dear friends, lies our answer. Within.
What makes you still Italian, or whichever ethnicity you carry, is on the inside. And it goes by many names.
Your soul.
Your essence.
Your psyche.
Your being.
Your spirit.
Your gorgeous, diasporic, hyphenated, culturally remixed spirit.
The irremovable part of you that desires to express those cultural attributes, delights when it accomplishes this, and aches when it cannot.
You do not need external markers of your ancestral culture to prove that your ethnicity still exists alongside or intertwined with your Americanness.
You do not need to grip onto the homeland. Not onto your immigrant generation, the old tongue, that precious tradition, or the sparse recognition from others. Not anything.
Not even the food.
Which is a big thing to say in Italian America.
The reason you are still Italian, or whichever ethnicity you carry, is because your ancestry is a part of your spirit.
Understanding this is a game changer that brings with it a much better question we can use to examine the state of our ethnic being:
Does your Italian-American soul have what it needs to express itself?
Framed this way, we can see that we are not facing a challenge of preventing cultural death. (That already happened, y’all. )
Rather we face a call to engage in the life-affirming labor of creation. Of Rinascimento. Renaissance. Rebirth.
I like that problem better because it’s solvable.
In case the difference between the two questions is not clear, let me give you an example from my own life.
One of the cultural sorrows I carry is an ache to sing over the table with others after a good meal. Digestivi in our hands to settle the stomach.
This is a very ancestral Italian thing to do, although it was not a tradition passed on to me. When I see our cultural cousins engaged in this, the lack in my own life is almost too much to bear.
Let’s examine this sorrow through the frame that each question provides.
Frame 1: What makes you still Italian?
Well, certainly not this missing behavior.
My failure to check the song-and-digestivi box is a deep contributor to the proof that…well, maybe I’m not really Italian anymore after all.
Maybe I’m just an American with an irrational soul-ache for a foreign culture that I need to let go of.
My Italianness is dead and I need to move on. Except that I emotionally can’t because of that inexplicable soul-ache…
Let’s try again with a question that does not set us up to fail.
Frame 2: Does my Italian-American soul have what it needs to express itself?”
No.
But this is much better news than the implications of the first answer because…the problem is not in my being, the problem is in 3D reality.
What would I need to correct this lack? Knowledge of a few songs in the old language, a few interested folks, and a dash of organization. All of which have been made profoundly easier in the Age of the Internet.
If I had this song-and-digestivi tradition revivified, would my Italian-American soul have what it needs to express itself?
Yes…and btw, I would want to sing in English and any language others want to bring in as well, which makes this cultural desire distinctly and beautifully Italian-American.
Does your gorgeous, diasporic, hyphenated, culturally remixed soul have what it needs to express itself?
If not, what would it need in order to do so?
I hope this writing reframes something important for you in the way it did for me. In a life-affirming way.
The grand irony in finding my answer is that so much of the time I spent with this unsolvable soul-ache was inside of cultural and spiritual circles.
The very places where soul is a center-stage concept.
A classic life irony. A search for the obvious. The answer right under my nose.
What makes you still Italian or whichever ethnicity you carry?
Soul, that’s what.
And here, my dear friends, is the very best news about that.
No one can ever take away your spirit.
I've had this in my inbox waiting til I had some time to really read it, and I'm so glad I held onto it. It is wonderful. xoxox
Thank you for this, I could cry. <3