Heart’s Delight – An Orchard Story: Remembering the Italian Orchards of Santa Clara Valley

Before it was known around the world as Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County was known by a very different and much more poetic name: the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

It was a land of orchards, blossoms, farms, canneries, immigrant families, and agricultural communities. Apricots, prunes, cherries, peaches, and other fruits once defined the landscape. Long before glass office towers, tech campuses, and freeways came to dominate the region, the valley was shaped by growers, pickers, packers, cannery workers, and family farms.

Many of those families were Italian.

On Sunday, August 2, 2026, the Museo Italo Americano in San Francisco will present Heart’s Delight – An Orchard Story, a documentary that brings this world back to life through the story of Sicilian immigrant Stefano Messina and the generations of orchard families who helped shape Santa Clara Valley before the rise of Silicon Valley.

The event will take place at 3:30 PM at the Museo Italo Americano, located at Fort Mason Center, Building C, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco, CA 94123. The film will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Marilyn Messina, who will discuss the making of the documentary. Light refreshments will be served.

The Valley Before Silicon Valley

For many Californians today, it is difficult to imagine San Jose and Santa Clara County as farmland. The name “Silicon Valley” has become so powerful that it often erases what came before it.

But for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, this region was one of the great agricultural centers of California. The valley was famous for its orchards and fruit production. In springtime, blossoms covered the landscape. In harvest season, families and workers labored in the orchards and canneries. The valley was not only a place of production, but a place of community, memory, and identity.

This was the world remembered in Heart’s Delight – An Orchard Story.

The documentary follows the journey of Stefano Messina, a Sicilian immigrant whose family became part of the agricultural life of Santa Clara Valley. Through rare stories, personal memories, and beautiful imagery, the film preserves the spirit of a landscape that has largely disappeared.

It tells a story of immigration, work, family, land, and change.

The Italian American Orchard Story

The Italian American story in California is often told through the lens of cities: North Beach in San Francisco, Little Italy in San Diego, San Pedro in Los Angeles, and Italian neighborhoods in places like San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, and Fresno.

But there is another Italian Californian story: the story of the land.

Italian immigrants and their descendants played an important role in California agriculture. Some became farmers, orchardists, vineyard workers, nursery owners, vegetable growers, fruit packers, and cannery workers. Others built businesses connected to food, produce, wine, fishing, and distribution.

In Santa Clara Valley, Italian families were part of the agricultural transformation of the region. They brought with them traditions of hard work, family labor, thrift, faith, and a deep connection to the land. Many came from rural villages in Italy and Sicily, where farming was not just an occupation but a way of life.

For families like the Messinas, the orchard was more than a business. It was home. It was memory. It was sacrifice. It was the American dream rooted in California soil.

From Sicily to Santa Clara County

The story of Stefano Messina is especially meaningful because it reflects the larger journey of so many Sicilian and southern Italian immigrants who came to America looking for opportunity.

They arrived in a country that did not always welcome them easily. Many faced poverty, prejudice, language barriers, and hard labor. Yet they built lives, raised families, bought land, opened businesses, joined parishes, created mutual aid networks, and contributed to the growth of California.

In the Santa Clara Valley, families like the Messinas helped cultivate the orchards that gave the region its beloved nickname. Their work was part of a larger agricultural civilization that existed before the tech boom changed the valley forever.

Today, when we hear the words “Silicon Valley,” we think of innovation, computers, venture capital, and global technology. But before that, there was another kind of innovation: irrigation, grafting, harvesting, preserving, packing, shipping, and sustaining a family through the rhythms of the land.

That older world deserves to be remembered.

Why This Film Matters

Events like this matter because they help preserve local Italian American history before it fades away.

Too often, the story of Italian Americans in California is reduced to restaurants, festivals, food, and nostalgia. Those things are important, but they are only part of the story. Italian Americans also helped build California’s farms, cities, churches, labor force, neighborhoods, civic institutions, and cultural life.

Heart’s Delight – An Orchard Story appears to be one of those documentaries that does something deeply important: it takes a family story and uses it to illuminate a regional history.

Through one family’s memories, we are invited to remember an entire valley.

We are reminded that California’s Italian American heritage is not only found in Little Italies or urban neighborhoods. It is also found in orchards, vineyards, ranches, farms, canneries, gardens, and old family homes. It is found in the hands of immigrants who worked the land and in the descendants who now preserve their stories.

The Museo Italo Americano’s Role

The Museo Italo Americano has long served as one of California’s most important institutions dedicated to Italian and Italian American art, history, and culture.

Located in San Francisco, the Museo provides a home for exhibits, lectures, films, community programs, and cultural events that connect Italian heritage with the broader American experience. By presenting Heart’s Delight – An Orchard Story, the Museo is helping bring attention to a vital part of Northern California’s Italian American past.

This event is also made possible through the support of Ken Borelli and the Italian American Heritage Foundation of San Jose, an important organization connected to the Italian American community in the very region where this story took place.

That connection matters. This is not distant history. It is local history, family history, and community memory.

Event Details

Event: Heart’s Delight – An Orchard Story
Date: Sunday, August 2, 2026
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: Museo Italo Americano
Address: Fort Mason Center, Building C, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco, CA 94123
Program: Documentary screening, Q&A with Marilyn Messina, and light refreshments

Reserve your spot here:
https://sfmuseo.org/event/hearts-delight/

Final Thoughts

The transformation of Santa Clara Valley into Silicon Valley is often presented as a story of progress. In many ways, it is. The region became one of the most influential centers of technology and innovation in the world.

But progress also comes with loss.

The orchards are mostly gone. The blossoms that once filled the valley have disappeared from much of the landscape. Family farms gave way to suburbs, office parks, and tech campuses. Many younger Californians have no memory of the agricultural world that came before.

That is why Heart’s Delight – An Orchard Story is so important.

It reminds us that before Silicon Valley, there was the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Before the tech giants, there were orchard families. Before the digital revolution, there were immigrants like Stefano Messina, who helped cultivate the land and build a future for their children.

For Italian Californians, this is our story too.

It is a story of Sicily and San Jose, of orchards and opportunity, of family and memory, of old California and new California. It is a reminder that our heritage is not only something we inherit. It is something we must preserve, share, and pass on.

 

The Italian Ideas Behind America’s Founding: NIAF to Host Virtual Discussion Ahead of America’s 250th Anniversary

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, Americans are being invited to look more deeply at the ideas, people, and traditions that helped shape the birth of our Republic. For Italian Americans, this anniversary is also an opportunity to remember something too often overlooked: Italian thought helped influence the American founding.

The National Italian American Foundation, known as NIAF, will host a special virtual discussion titled “The Italian Ideas Behind America’s Founding” on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, at 12 noon Eastern Time. The event is free and open to the public and will take place online via Zoom.

This timely program is part of NIAF’s Leandro P. Rizzuto, Sr. Capitol Hill Program and will explore the influence of Italian political and legal thinkers on the American Revolution, the Constitution, and the broader ideals of liberty, justice, and individual rights.

Italy and the American Founding

When most Americans think about the intellectual roots of the United States, they usually think of English, French, and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Names like John Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith are often mentioned in classrooms and history books.

But Italy’s contribution deserves a place in that conversation too.

Long before Italy became a unified nation in 1861, the Italian peninsula was home to scholars, jurists, philosophers, reformers, and political thinkers whose ideas traveled across Europe and the Atlantic world. Their writings helped shape debates about criminal justice, religious liberty, constitutional government, human dignity, and the limits of state power.

Among the figures NIAF will highlight are Cesare Beccaria, Gaetano Filangieri, and Filippo Mazzei.

Beccaria, one of the great figures of the Italian Enlightenment, is best known for his work on criminal justice reform. His arguments against torture and cruel punishment helped influence later ideas about due process, proportional punishment, and the rights of the accused. These principles remain deeply connected to the American legal tradition.

Filangieri, a Neapolitan legal and political thinker, wrote about constitutional government, law, commerce, education, and liberty. His work was known to important Americans of the founding era and reflected the kind of transatlantic exchange of ideas that shaped the modern democratic world.

Mazzei, a Tuscan physician, merchant, writer, and friend of Thomas Jefferson, is one of the most fascinating Italian figures connected to early American history. He supported the American cause and wrote passionately about equality and liberty. For Italian Americans, Mazzei stands as a powerful reminder that the Italian presence in America’s story did not begin only with the great immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Italians were connected to the American project from the beginning.

A Forgotten Chapter Worth Remembering

This is exactly the kind of history we need to recover and teach more often.

Italian Americans are sometimes told that our story in this country begins only with Ellis Island, Little Italies, hard labor, prejudice, and eventual assimilation. That story is real and important. Our ancestors built railroads, worked in factories, opened grocery stores, fished the coasts, farmed the valleys, laid bricks, started businesses, raised families, filled parishes, and fought in America’s wars.

But there is an older story too.

The Italian contribution to America is not only found in food, music, art, family life, Catholic parishes, and neighborhood traditions. It is also found in ideas. Italian thinkers helped shape the moral and legal vocabulary of the modern world. Their writings about freedom, justice, law, equality, and government helped influence the age of revolutions, including the American Revolution.

As an American of Italian descent, I find that deeply meaningful.

It reminds us that Italian heritage is not something separate from American patriotism. It is part of the larger American story. We do not have to choose between loving America and honoring Italy. There is room in our hearts for both. I am an American first, but I can also recognize that the land of my ancestors contributed something profound to the ideals of the country I love.

The NIAF Program

The discussion will be moderated by Viviana Mazza, U.S. Correspondent for Corriere della Sera.

The featured speakers will include:

Professor John Bessler, an internationally recognized scholar of Cesare Beccaria and the history of criminal justice reform.

Professor Amedeo Arena, a legal historian and expert on Gaetano Filangieri and the exchange of political ideas between Italy and the United States.

Together, they will explore how Italian Enlightenment thought helped shape the American Republic and why these connections still matter as the nation prepares for its semiquincentennial commemoration.

Event Details

Event: The Italian Ideas Behind America’s Founding
Host: The National Italian American Foundation
Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Time: 12 noon Eastern Time
Location: Online via Zoom
Cost: Free and open to the public

Register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UycC0HJqSXSzzvPUAMBeqw

NIAF is also an America250 Supporting Partner, making this event especially fitting as the country prepares to mark 250 years since the Declaration of Independence.

Why Italian Americans Should Attend

This program is more than a lecture. It is a chance to reclaim part of our history.

For Italian Americans in California and across the country, events like this help us understand the deeper meaning of our heritage. We are not merely descendants of immigrants who brought recipes, dialects, music, devotions, and family customs. We are also heirs to a civilization that helped shape law, government, art, science, religion, philosophy, and public life.

America’s founding was not created in isolation. It was part of a larger Atlantic conversation about liberty and human rights. Italy was part of that conversation.

As America turns 250, it is worth remembering that the story of the United States includes Italian voices too. Not only in the neighborhoods of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles, but also in the intellectual foundations of the Republic itself.

That is a chapter of American history worth learning, sharing, and celebrating.

 

Saint Anthony of Padua: A Feast of Faith, Bread, Lilies, and Italian Devotion in San Diego’s Little Italy

By Chris M. Forte

Every June, Catholics around the world celebrate one of the Church’s most beloved saints: Saint Anthony of Padua. His feast day falls on June 13, but in many parishes, especially Italian parishes and communities, the celebration is often moved to the nearest Sunday so more people can participate.

That was the case last Sunday at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church in San Diego’s Little Italy, where the Feast of Saint Anthony was celebrated during the noon Mass. Since the noon Mass at Our Lady of the Rosary is the parish’s Italian Mass, the festa carried a special cultural and spiritual meaning. It was not only a Catholic devotion. It was also a living expression of Italian faith, memory, and community.

For a parish founded by and for Italian immigrants, the Feast of Saint Anthony is more than a date on the liturgical calendar. It is a reminder of how faith traveled with our ancestors across oceans, how saints became companions in hardship, and how Catholic traditions helped hold immigrant communities together in a new land.

Who Was Saint Anthony of Padua?

Saint Anthony of Padua was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1195. His baptismal name was Fernando Martins de Bulhões. Though he came from a noble family and received a strong education, he chose religious life at a young age. He first entered the Augustinian Canons, but after being inspired by the martyrdom of Franciscan missionaries, he joined the Order of Friars Minor, the community founded by Saint Francis of Assisi.

Taking the name Anthony, he became known as a brilliant preacher, teacher, theologian, and defender of the faith. He preached with clarity, courage, and deep love for the poor. His knowledge of Scripture was so profound that Pope Gregory IX reportedly called him a “living ark of the Testament,” a man whose mind and heart were filled with the Word of God.

Saint Anthony died near Padua, Italy, on June 13, 1231, at only 35 or 36 years old. He was canonized less than a year later, one of the fastest canonizations in Church history. In 1946, Pope Pius XII declared him a Doctor of the Church, honoring him as one of the great teachers of Catholic doctrine.

Yet for ordinary Catholics, Saint Anthony is not remembered only as a scholar. He is remembered as a saint close to the people.

He is the saint we ask for help when something is lost. He is the saint whose image often shows him holding the Child Jesus, a lily, or a book. He is the saint many families turn to in moments of worry, need, gratitude, and hope.

The familiar prayer says it simply:

“Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and must be found.”

That little rhyme may sound simple, but behind it is a serious Catholic instinct: the belief that the saints are alive in Christ, that they pray for us, and that God’s grace reaches into the ordinary details of human life.

The Customs of Saint Anthony’s Feast

The Feast of Saint Anthony has many customs, especially in Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian, and other Catholic cultures. These traditions vary by region, but several are especially common.

One of the best-known customs is Saint Anthony’s Bread. The tradition is connected to stories of miracles and charity, especially the idea of giving bread or alms to the poor in thanksgiving for favors received through Saint Anthony’s intercession. In many churches, loaves of bread are blessed and distributed on or near his feast day.

This custom reflects something central to Saint Anthony’s life. He was not only a preacher of beautiful sermons. He was a preacher of charity. His devotion was not separated from the poor, the hungry, the suffering, or those who had been forgotten.

Another custom is the blessing or use of lilies, a symbol often associated with Saint Anthony. The lily represents purity, holiness, and the beauty of a life given to God. Many statues and holy cards show Saint Anthony holding a lily along with the Child Jesus.

There are also novenas and special prayers to Saint Anthony. In some places, Catholics pray a thirteen-day devotion leading up to his feast, while others observe the “Thirteen Tuesdays” in his honor. Tuesday became associated with Saint Anthony because of early traditions surrounding miracles at his tomb.

In Italian communities, the feast often became a full festa: Mass, prayers, processions, music, food, family gatherings, and a public expression of faith. These celebrations were not merely ethnic festivals. They were acts of Catholic memory. They brought together the altar, the street, the family table, and the neighborhood.

That is why saints’ feasts mattered so much to Italian immigrants in America. They were a way of saying: We are in a new country, but we have not forgotten who we are. We have not forgotten our faith. We have not forgotten the saints who walked with our parents and grandparents.

Saint Anthony and Italian Catholic Identity

Although Saint Anthony was born in Portugal, he is deeply loved in Italy, especially because of his life, ministry, death, and burial in Padua. To many Italians and Italian Americans, he is simply “Sant’Antonio.”

For generations of Italian families, devotion to Saint Anthony was part of everyday Catholic life. His statue might be found in a parish church, on a family prayer table, or in a grandmother’s home. His name was invoked for lost keys, lost documents, lost opportunities, lost loved ones, and sometimes even lost faith.

This is one of the beautiful things about Catholicism. The Church is universal, but devotion is often local, personal, and familial. A saint born in Portugal becomes beloved in Italy. Italian immigrants bring that devotion to America. Their children and grandchildren continue it in places like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.

In that sense, Saint Anthony belongs to the whole Church, but he also belongs to the story of Italian America.

His feast reminds us that Italian Catholic identity was never only about food, language, music, or ancestry. Those things matter, but at the heart of the old Italian neighborhoods was the Church. The parish was where people were baptized, married, mourned, educated, organized, and remembered. The saints gave the calendar its rhythm. The festas gave the community its soul.

The Feast at Our Lady of the Rosary in San Diego

Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church has long been the spiritual heart of San Diego’s Little Italy. Founded to serve the Italian Catholic community, the parish remains one of the most visible signs of Italian faith in Southern California.

Last Sunday, the parish celebrated the Feast of Saint Anthony during the noon Italian Mass. That detail matters.

In many places, ethnic Catholic traditions have faded or become purely cultural. But at Our Lady of the Rosary, the Italian language still has a place in the life of the parish. The Mass itself becomes a bridge between generations: between the immigrants who built the parish, the children and grandchildren who inherited it, and the newer parishioners and visitors who come to experience its beauty.

To celebrate Saint Anthony at the Italian Mass is to remember that this devotion came to San Diego through real families, real immigrants, real fishermen, real workers, real mothers and fathers, and real Catholics who wanted a church where their language, culture, and faith could live together.

The festa during Mass also keeps the focus where it belongs: on God. Saint Anthony is honored not as an isolated figure, but as a witness to Christ. The Mass is the center. The Eucharist is the center. The saint points beyond himself to Jesus.

That is the Catholic meaning of a feast day. We honor the saint because the saint reveals what God’s grace can do in a human life.

A Tradition Celebrated Every Year

Every year, the Feast of Saint Anthony at Our Lady of the Rosary continues this old pattern of Catholic life. It brings together devotion and heritage, prayer and memory, the Italian language and the universal Church.

For San Diego’s Little Italy, this annual celebration is one of those traditions that quietly preserves the neighborhood’s deeper identity. Little Italy today is known for restaurants, piazzas, apartments, nightlife, tourists, and the famous neighborhood sign. All of that is part of the modern community. But beneath the visible neighborhood is a much older story.

Before Little Italy was a dining destination, it was a working immigrant neighborhood. Before it was a brand, it was a community. Before the patios, wine bars, and condo towers, there were families, fishing boats, processions, parish societies, novenas, baptisms, funerals, and Sunday Mass.

Our Lady of the Rosary keeps that memory alive.

The Feast of Saint Anthony is part of that living memory. It reminds us that Italian American culture is not only something we inherit through blood. It is something we practice. It is something we show up for. It is something we teach, pray, sing, cook, bless, and hand on.

Why Saint Anthony Still Matters

Saint Anthony remains popular because his intercession feels close to ordinary life. People lose things. People lose direction. People lose hope. People lose faith. People lose loved ones. People lose their sense of belonging.

Saint Anthony’s life answers those losses with the Gospel. He tells us that what is truly lost can be found in Christ. He reminds us that faith is not an abstract idea, but a lived relationship with God. He shows us that preaching, charity, humility, and devotion belong together.

For Italian Americans, especially Catholics, his feast is also a reminder that our heritage is not dead. It does not have to be reduced to nostalgia. It can still be lived in the present.

When the Feast of Saint Anthony is celebrated at Our Lady of the Rosary, in Italian, during Mass, in the heart of San Diego’s Little Italy, something beautiful happens. The past and present meet. The old immigrant parish speaks again. The saints are honored. The Eucharist is celebrated. The community remembers who it is.

And Saint Anthony, the humble friar of Padua, continues to do what he has done for centuries: point lost souls back to Christ.

Sant’Antonio di Padova, prega per noi.

Saint Anthony of Padua, pray for us.

Italy Republic Day June 2nd, 2026

 

Two Flags, One Heart: Why Italy’s Republic Day Matters to an Italian American in California

Every June 2, Italy celebrates Festa della Repubblica, Republic Day. It marks the 1946 referendum when Italians, emerging from war and fascism, voted to end the monarchy and become a republic. It was also a defining democratic moment because Italian women voted nationally for the first time.

For Italians in Italy, the day carries the weight of history. In Rome, it is marked with official ceremonies, military honors, and national remembrance. But the meaning of the day does not stop at Italy’s borders. It reaches across oceans, including to Italian Americans here in California.

As an American of Italian descent, I believe I can be proud of Italy’s Republic Day too.

That does not make me less American. It does not divide my loyalty. It does not require me to choose one country over the other. There is room in the heart for both gratitude and ancestry, for both citizenship and heritage, for both the Stars and Stripes and the Tricolore.

I will always be an American first. The United States is my country, my home, and the place where my civic loyalty belongs. But being American does not mean pretending my ancestors came from nowhere. It does not mean closing my eyes to the beauty, sacrifice, art, faith, language, food, music, and democratic rebirth of Italy. A confident American patriot can recognize the good in other nations, especially the nation that shaped the family story before it crossed the Atlantic.

For earlier generations of Italian Americans, that balance was not always easy. During World War II, many Italians in the United States were treated with suspicion as “enemy aliens,” and some faced surveillance, restrictions, or detention. That history matters because it reminds us why today’s freedom to celebrate our roots openly should not be taken for granted.

Today, our patriotism is not under suspicion. We can serve the United States, vote here, raise families here, honor American veterans, celebrate the Fourth of July, and still feel something when we hear the Italian anthem or see the green, white, and red flag raised over a California city hall. That is not divided loyalty. It is the American story itself.

Italy’s Republic Day is worth honoring because it celebrates a people choosing democracy after dictatorship and devastation. It is not simply a celebration of Italy as a place on a map. It is a celebration of renewal, civic courage, and the belief that a nation can choose a better future. Those are values Americans understand deeply.

Here in California, that meaning is not abstract. In 2026, the Consulate General of Italy in Los Angeles scheduled its official National Day event for June 2, 2026. More information is available through the consulate’s announcement here: Consulate General of Italy in Los Angeles, Call for Sponsors 2026.

In Northern California, the Consulate General of Italy in San Francisco announced its 2026 Festa della Repubblica, Italy’s National Day, for June 3, 2026. The official notice can be found here: Consulate General of Italy in San Francisco, Festa della Repubblica 2026.

There are also community celebrations. The Italian Cultural Center of Menlo Park listed La Festa Della Repubblica for Tuesday, June 2, 2026, at 585 Glenwood Avenue, Menlo Park, California. Event details and tickets are available here: La Festa Della Repubblica, Menlo Park.

The weekend after Republic Day, San Francisco’s North Beach will host Festa Italiana on Saturday, June 6, and Sunday, June 7, 2026, at and around the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club, 1630 Stockton Street, San Francisco, CA 94133. The event is described as a free, family-friendly celebration of Italian food, wine, music, culture, and the 105th Statuto Race. More information is available here: Festa Italiana, San Francisco and here: San Francisco Italian Heritage Festival Events.

These events show what Italian American identity looks like at its best. Not nostalgia alone. Not politics alone. Not a costume or a plate of pasta alone. They are public expressions of memory, gratitude, and connection. They say that we know where we live, and we know where our people came from.

For me, Republic Day is a chance to say: I am American, fully and proudly. And because I am American, I am free to honor the Italian roots that helped make me who I am.

I do not need to choose between the two. I can love America as my country and respect Italy as the land of my ancestors. I can celebrate the Fourth of July with my neighbors and Festa della Repubblica with my family and community. One loyalty does not cancel the other.

In fact, the two can strengthen each other. America taught generations of immigrants and their descendants that heritage could survive in freedom. Italy’s Republic Day reminds us that democracy is never automatic. It has to be chosen, protected, and renewed.

So on June 2, I celebrate Italy’s Republic Day not as a foreigner pretending to be Italian, and not as an American looking away from home, but as an Italian American in California with two flags in view and one clear heart.

America first, always.

But Italy remembered, honored, and loved.

What It Means to be "Italian American"

 

Italian Americans, Race, and Becoming American

Introduction: Why I Write This Now

Growing up, especially in racially diverse areas like Los Angeles and Orange County, and later spending part of my life in a small rural town shaped by Native American and Latino influences, I became aware of race and ethnicity very early.

I was always seen as White. Sometimes I was called “White boy.” Sometimes I was treated as “the enemy,” “the Man,” or “the oppressor,” even when I was just a kid trying to figure out where I fit. Even some of my minority friends admitted that this was how I was often seen. I could be liked, included, joked with, and accepted up to a point, but there was still a line there. I was still marked as White.

And yet that label never told the whole truth.

Being called “White,” and especially being lumped in with “Anglo,” often erased the ethnic and cultural heritage I came from on my father’s side. It erased the Italian American story in my family. It erased the regional identities, the immigrant struggle, the Catholic culture, the food, the language, the family memory, the shame, the pride, and the long process by which Italians in America had to fight their way into acceptance.

I was White in America, yes. I understand that. But I was not simply “Anglo.” I was not descended only from the people who defined America’s old Protestant mainstream. Part of me came from people who were once viewed as foreign, suspicious, dark, poor, Catholic, criminal, unassimilable, and not quite White enough. My Italian ancestors and their descendants had to cross a social and racial boundary in America. They had to become accepted. They had to become “White” in a country where that status carried safety, opportunity, and belonging.

That history matters.

It does not mean Italian Americans experienced the same history as Black Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, or other minority groups. We did not. Our paths were different. Our legal status was different. Our eventual access to Whiteness was different. But there are still points of contact: prejudice, stereotypes, poverty, exclusion, ethnic shame, pressure to assimilate, and the struggle to preserve culture while trying to survive in America.

I often wonder what might have changed if I had understood that earlier.

Maybe I would have felt less rootless. Maybe I would have been prouder of my Italian and Italian American heritage sooner. Maybe I would have had better words for who I was. And maybe, if more Italian Americans and minority communities—especially Latino Americans, with whom we share so much Mediterranean, Catholic, family-centered, immigrant, and working-class cultural overlap—understood these commonalities, some of the racial tension that still exists between our communities might soften.

Not disappear. Not be magically solved. But soften.

Because history can divide people, but it can also create recognition.

That is why I write this now.

I write this to reclaim something that was too often flattened or ignored. I write this because Italian American identity is not just about food, flags, festivals, and nostalgia. It is also about race, class, immigration, assimilation, shame, survival, and the complicated road into American Whiteness. I write this because we can honor our ancestors without pretending their story was simple. And I write this because understanding where we came from may help us better understand one another now.

Italian American Identity and the Complicated Road Into Whiteness

When our ancestors left Italy for America, many of them did not think of themselves as “Italian” in the way we use the word today.

That surprises people now, because from this side of history, Italian feels obvious. But Italy had only become a unified country in 1861. For many families who arrived in the United States between the 1880s and 1920s, national identity was still new, distant, and often less meaningful than the village, region, language, parish, or family they came from.

They were Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrese, Venetian, Ligurian, Tuscan, Friulian, Piedmontese.

They spoke regional languages that were often called “dialects,” though many were different enough that people from opposite ends of the peninsula might have struggled to understand one another. They carried different foods, customs, gestures, saints, songs, and ideas about what home meant.

In other words, the “Italian” identity many of us inherited was not simply brought across the ocean fully formed.

It was shaped here.

And in America, that shaping happened inside a society where race mattered deeply.

Becoming Italian in America

In the United States, all those regional identities were flattened into one word: Italian.

But this was not exactly a warm welcome. Americans did not gather Sicilians, Neapolitans, Calabresi, and Venetians under one name because they admired their shared culture. They did it because immigrants from Italy were often seen as foreign, suspicious, Catholic, poor, and racially uncertain.

They were described as “swarthy,” “Mediterranean,” “not quite White,” and “unassimilable.” Newspapers, politicians, employers, and popular culture often portrayed them as violent, lazy, criminal, clannish, or politically dangerous. These stereotypes did not care whether someone came from Palermo or Genoa, Naples or Lucca. In America, they were all Italian.

That prejudice had real consequences.

Italian immigrants and their descendants faced employment discrimination, housing exclusion, school prejudice, union hostility, violence, and suspicion in public life. The 1891 New Orleans lynching, in which a mob killed 11 Italian immigrants, remains one of the largest mass lynchings of Italian Americans in United States history. Britannica describes it as a mass lynching that caused a major diplomatic crisis between Italy and the United States.

During World War II, some Italian immigrants who had lived in the United States for decades were classified as “enemy aliens.” That wartime suspicion reminds us that legal residence, labor, and even long-term settlement did not always translate into full trust or acceptance.

Here in California, Italians built lives in fishing, farming, wine, food, construction, produce markets, and trade, but they were not always welcomed into unions, neighborhoods, or positions of influence. Many had to work their way in from the margins.

That pressure changed them.

People who might never have thought of themselves as one people back in Italy began to band together in America. They formed mutual aid societies, churches, clubs, newspapers, businesses, labor networks, and neighborhoods. Out of necessity, they became Italian together.

But they were also learning how to become American.

And in the United States, becoming American often meant learning where one fit within the country’s racial order.

A Complicated Place on the Color Line

The racial history of Italian Americans is complicated, and it should not be reduced to a simple slogan.

Italian immigrants were often legally classified as White, especially when it came to naturalization and citizenship. But social acceptance was another matter. Many Americans did not see southern and eastern Europeans as fully equal to northern and western Europeans. Southern Italians and Sicilians, in particular, were sometimes described as racially suspect because of their darker complexions, Catholic faith, poverty, Mediterranean origins, and perceived closeness to Africa or the Middle East.

This is where scholars make an important distinction between legal classification and social status.

Historian Thomas A. Guglielmo’s White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 argues that Italian immigrants were often legally White, but that “race, color, and power” still shaped their opportunities in daily life. A summary of Guglielmo’s work explains that he “carefully draw[s] the distinction between race and color” and argues that “whiteness proved Italians’ most valuable asset for making it in America.”

That is the key tension.

Italian immigrants were often legally White, but they were not always socially accepted as fully White, fully respectable, or fully American.

Scholar Stefano Luconi explains this complexity by noting that Italians experienced real racial prejudice while also gaining access to privileges that were unavailable to many nonwhite groups. In his article “Italian Immigrants, Whiteness, and Race,” Luconi writes that Italian Americans’ “accomplishment of whiteness was initially unstable” and that they “repeatedly moved back and forth across the color line” in some regions and periods.

So the question is not simply, “Were Italians White?”

The better question is: How did Italians move from being viewed as questionable outsiders to being accepted as part of White ethnic America?

That process was uneven. It depended on class, region, religion, skin tone, language, neighborhood, politics, military service, and generation. But over time, Italian Americans crossed an important social boundary. They became accepted as White in the broader American imagination.

That acceptance brought safety and opportunity.

It also came with costs.

The Price of Becoming Accepted

By the middle of the 20th century, many Italian Americans had begun to move into the American mainstream. They changed names. They softened accents. They stopped speaking regional languages to their children. They emphasized patriotism, respectability, church, family, work, and military service. They became homeowners, small-business owners, public servants, union members, professionals, and college graduates.

This was not fake progress. It was real progress, often earned through sacrifice.

But assimilation in America has never been neutral.

To become accepted, Italian Americans often had to give things up.

Languages disappeared. Regional identities blurred. Family stories became shorter with each generation. The shame attached to being too ethnic, too loud, too poor, too foreign, or too different pushed many families to soften the edges of who they were.

Sometimes, survival looked like silence.

Grandparents stopped speaking Sicilian, Calabrese, Neapolitan, Venetian, or other regional languages to their children. Parents shortened or Americanized surnames. Children were told not to sound too foreign. Recipes survived better than language did. Saints’ days faded, but Sunday sauce remained.

The culture did not vanish exactly.

It went underground.

It hid in kitchens, weddings, funerals, nicknames, hand gestures, family photographs, old prayer cards, and the way people fed anyone who came through the door.

Italian Americans became more accepted.

But acceptance came with a price.

The edited collection Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, directly addresses this question. Its publisher describes the book as asking “Are Italians White?” and examining “how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans.”

That question matters because Italian American assimilation was never only about learning English or moving to the suburbs. It was also about entering a society where Whiteness carried power, protection, and legitimacy.

Whiteness, Opportunity, and Memory

One of the hardest parts of this history is that Italian Americans were both outsiders and, eventually, insiders.

They knew prejudice. They knew humiliation. They knew what it meant to be mocked for their names, their accents, their religion, their poverty, their neighborhoods, and their food.

But over time, many also gained access to the benefits of Whiteness in America.

That included access to neighborhoods, schools, jobs, mortgages, unions, police and fire departments, political machines, and public institutions that were often much harder for Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others to enter.

Guglielmo’s work on Italians in Chicago argues that racial classification affected immigrants’ ability to “acquire homes and jobs, start families, and gain opportunities in America.”

That does not mean every Italian American family became wealthy or powerful.

Many remained working class. Many struggled. Many faced discrimination for generations. Many lived modest lives built on hard labor and sacrifice.

But race still mattered.

Italian Americans could often move into spaces that were closed to others. Their children and grandchildren could gradually be absorbed into White America in ways that Black Americans, Native Americans, and many Asian and Mexican Americans could not. That was not always the result of personal prejudice. Sometimes it was simply the structure of American life.

A family could benefit from Whiteness without thinking of itself in racial terms.

That is part of what makes the story complicated.

Pride, Symbols, and Belonging

Like many immigrant groups, Italian Americans looked for symbols that could defend their dignity in a country that often questioned their worth.

They celebrated saints, regional societies, parish feasts, mutual aid organizations, military service, family businesses, and successful public figures. They built churches, clubs, newspapers, and neighborhoods. They held on to food, faith, family, work, and memory as proof that they had something valuable to contribute.

Christopher Columbus became one of those public symbols, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For many Italian Americans, he represented a way to answer prejudice by saying that Italians had been part of the American story from the beginning. Columbus Day, as a national observance, grew in part from efforts to assert Italian American dignity at a time when Italians were often mocked, attacked, and excluded.

But Columbus is also a complicated symbol because his story is tied to European expansion, conquest, and the suffering of Indigenous peoples. That does not erase why earlier Italian Americans embraced him, but it does require honesty about why the symbol means different things to different communities.

Sociologist Matthew Delsesto puts this challenge in broader terms. Writing about Columbus, memory, and Italian American identity, he argues that Columbus can be “an invitation to imagine new, more inclusive narratives” that recognize how Italian American heritage is connected to the history of race and colonialism in the United States.

For some Italian Americans, Columbus represented dignity and belonging.

For many Native people and others, he represents conquest and loss.

Both realities exist.

That is why Italian American identity today does not need to depend on one symbol alone. Our history is bigger than that. It includes fishermen, farmers, mothers, laborers, priests, nuns, merchants, winemakers, grocers, builders, artists, veterans, teachers, and families who survived hardship and built lives across generations.

We can honor Italian American history without reducing it to one figure.

Italian Americans and Other Communities

A more honest Italian American history also has to examine how Italians related to other groups.

Italian immigrants did not enter a neutral society. They entered a country already shaped by slavery, segregation, Native dispossession, anti-Asian exclusion, anti-Mexican discrimination, and a powerful Black/White color line. They had to find a place within that structure.

Sometimes Italians lived near, worked with, or intermarried with other marginalized communities. In fishing, agriculture, railroads, mining, construction, and urban labor, Italians often worked alongside Mexican, Black, Irish, Jewish, Portuguese, Croatian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and other immigrant and minority workers.

In California especially, Italian identity developed in a multicultural setting shaped by Mexican California, Native history, Asian immigration, agriculture, the Pacific, and migration from across the world.

But there were also tensions.

As Italians became more accepted as White, many Italian Americans absorbed the racial attitudes of the broader society. Some neighborhoods resisted integration. Some unions, businesses, and social clubs excluded others. Some families remembered anti-Italian prejudice while still repeating prejudice toward Black, Mexican, Asian, Native, or newer immigrant communities.

That contradiction is not unique to Italian Americans.

It is part of the larger American story.

Fred L. Gardaphé, in his essay “We Weren’t Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian/American Literature,” argues that the similarities between Italian American and African American experiences should be used for connection rather than division. He writes, “Parallels between the African American and Italian American experiences are numerous” and should become “the source of cooperation rather than conflict.”

That is a useful way to approach this history.

The point is not to rank suffering.

The point is to understand how groups experienced America differently, how some eventually moved into Whiteness, and how memory can create either resentment or solidarity.

Groups that were once marginalized could, over time, gain acceptance by moving closer to Whiteness. That process could bring security and dignity, but it could also create distance from communities still excluded from full equality.

This is not about blaming every Italian American family.

It is about understanding the structure they lived in.

A California Kind of Italian American

For those of us in California, the story has its own flavor.

Italian America here does not always look like the East Coast version. It is not only red sauce restaurants, crowded tenements, and big-city neighborhoods, though those histories matter too.

In California, Italian immigrants became fishermen in San Diego, San Francisco, and Monterey. They became winemakers in Napa and Sonoma. They farmed in the Central Valley. They sold produce in San Francisco. They opened groceries, bakeries, delis, restaurants, and family businesses. They helped shape neighborhoods in San Pedro, San Jose, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and beyond.

Their Italian identity mixed with Mexican California, with the West, with agriculture, with Catholic parish life, with the Pacific Ocean, with migration from everywhere else, and with the complicated racial history of California itself.

California was never a blank slate. It was shaped by Native peoples, Spanish and Mexican history, U.S. conquest, Chinese exclusion, Japanese incarceration, Mexican American labor, Black migration, immigrant neighborhoods, Catholic parishes, agricultural work, and the constant movement of people.

Italian Californians entered that world, adapted to it, benefited from it, and helped build it.

That is why The Italian Californian story matters.

It is not just about preserving Italy.

It is about understanding what Italian identity became here, under this sun, in this landscape, through these families, inside this American racial and cultural history.

What Italian American Means Now

Italian American identity today is not the same thing as Italian identity.

And that is okay.

Modern Italians may sometimes see Italian Americans as nostalgic, sentimental, or attached to old versions of Italy that no longer exist. They may see us as too focused on food, saints, surnames, festivals, and family stories.

But diaspora does that.

When people leave a place, they do not carry the whole country with them. They carry fragments. A dialect. A tomato seed. A prayer card. A way of making bread. A story about a village road. A memory of hunger. A family name. A song. A superstition. A grief.

Then those fragments meet a new landscape.

In America, those fragments also met race.

That is why Italian American identity is not only ethnic. It is also historical. It was formed through migration, poverty, prejudice, labor, Catholicism, family, regional memory, assimilation, and the long process of becoming accepted within White America.

Italian Americans are not fake Italians.

We are real Italian Americans.

That distinction matters.

Why the Younger Generations Are Looking Back

Something interesting is happening now, especially among third, fourth, and even fifth generation Italian Americans.

People are reaching back.

They are searching family names, ordering birth certificates, taking DNA tests, visiting ancestral towns, learning Italian, studying regional languages, saving recipes, interviewing elders, and walking through old neighborhoods with new eyes.

Part of it is distance. The old shame has faded. The pressure to assimilate is not the same as it was for our grandparents and great-grandparents. Many of us grew up with enough distance from discrimination to feel curiosity instead of fear.

Part of it is access. Digital archives, genealogy websites, immigration records, ship manifests, local history collections, and family history groups have made it easier to find what once seemed lost.

And part of it is hunger.

Not physical hunger, like many of our ancestors knew, but a hunger for belonging. In a fast, fragmented, hyper-digital world, heritage offers something grounding. It gives us a story longer than our own lifetime. It reminds us that we came from people who crossed oceans, worked with their hands, endured humiliation, built businesses, buried children, planted gardens, cooked from scarcity, and kept going.

But if we are going to reclaim the past, we should reclaim it honestly.

That means remembering the beauty and the hardship.

It means honoring our ancestors without pretending their story was simple.

It means recognizing that Italian Americans were shaped by prejudice, but also by the privileges that came with eventual acceptance into Whiteness.

A Diaspora, Not a Replica

Italian Americans are not Italians.

We are not supposed to be.

We are a diaspora, a people shaped by distance, adaptation, memory, loss, reinvention, race, and place. Our culture is not a lesser version of Italy. It is a parallel tradition, born from immigration and survival, changed by America, and in California, changed again by the West.

There is beauty in that.

There is also responsibility.

We can celebrate the food, the music, the language, the saints, the wine, the Sunday tables, the fishing boats, the vineyards, the old neighborhoods, and the family stories. But we can also tell the harder truths about racism, assimilation, shame, exclusion, and the cost of becoming accepted.

Italian American identity is not frozen in the past.

It is alive.

It keeps changing with every generation that asks where they came from, what was lost, what was kept, and what can still be reclaimed.

The goal is not to reject our heritage.

The goal is to understand it fully.

Italian Americans became American through work, faith, family, sacrifice, and persistence. But they also became American inside a racial system that rewarded Whiteness and excluded others. That complicated inheritance is ours.

We do not need to hide from it.

We can tell the truth, honor our people, and build a better understanding of what Italian American identity means now.

Conclusion: No Longer Lost

I have spent much of my life trying to understand where I fit inside America’s complicated categories of race, ethnicity, nationality, and belonging.

For years, other people tried to define me before I could define myself. I was called White. I was called Anglo. I was sometimes treated as if those words explained everything about me: my history, my culture, my family, my place in America, even my relationship to other people. But those labels never told the whole truth.

I am not simply “Anglo.” I am not only “White.” And even the phrase “Italian American,” though meaningful, does not fully capture how I now understand myself.

Today, I think of myself as a proud, patriotic American of Italian descent. An American of Italian ancestry.

That distinction matters to me.

I love Italian culture. I love the food, the history, the language, the saints, the churches, the villages, the music, the neighborhoods, the family stories, and the beauty of what my ancestors carried with them. I love learning about Italy and about the Italian diaspora. I love discovering what was kept, what was lost, and what can still be reclaimed.

But my first identity is American.

I was raised by America. I was shaped by the American pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s, by American schools, American cities, American small towns, American movies, American music, American politics, American contradictions, and American dreams. I see the world through American eyes. If I travel to Europe, I am not seen as Italian. I am seen as American. And that is true. That is what I am.

But I am an American with roots.

I am an American whose family story includes Italy, immigration, Catholicism, regional identity, assimilation, shame, pride, loss, work, survival, and reinvention. I am an American whose ancestors had to cross into acceptance in a country where being fully American has too often meant being seen as White.

I recognize that I am now part of that American racial hierarchy. I recognize that other groups still struggle to be seen as fully American, especially in a country where “American” is still too often imagined through Whiteness.

That does not make me ashamed of who I am.

It makes me more aware.

It makes me more honest.

It helps me see that identity is not only about what we inherit. It is also about what we choose to understand.

I am no longer searching in the same way. I am no longer wondering what box I belong in. I am no longer waiting for other people to tell me who I am, even though many will still try.

I know who I am now.

I am a proud, patriotic American.

An American of Italian ancestry.

An American shaped by this country, but connected to another story across the ocean.

An American who loves his heritage, but loves his country first.

An American who understands that belonging is complicated, but no longer feels lost inside that complexity.

I am no longer lost.

I am found.

Call me "White" if you must, but I label myself an American....of Italian descent.