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.

I am an American....of Italian descent.