Italian-hyphen-American

A colleague of mine gave a presentation today in which he discussed the nature of the hyphen in the label given to his ethnicity, Greek-American. I've never thought of myself as Italian-American, but at different times in my life, I have been.

I was born and raised in Ohio, so I've always thought of myself as simply American. My father, though, was born in Italy. My Uncle Nick, also Italian-born, taught me the lyrics to La Donna Mobile when I was far too young to think that calling a woman fickle was a problem. We did some things in my family -- ate biscotti, played Scopa, sang opera songs...loud -- that just seemed like normal family things to me. I never really thought of them as Italian.

If you were to see a picture of me as a little girl, you would think I looked Italian: brown eyes, dark brown hair. In "Articulating authentic Chineseness: The politics of reading race and ethnicity aesthetically," Sue Hum explains that such an aesthetic reading of someone's race is highly problematic: When we label someone as a certain race or ethnicity based on the way he or she looks, we perpetuate stereotypes of race and ethnicity and ignore whether a person chooses to enact the roles of a certain culture. While I agree that such aesthetic readings of ethnicity are problematic, they can also contribute in a positive way to a person's self-image. As a little girl, looking Italian was a good thing.

My looks weren't the only part of my childhood that could have linked me to another culture, though. As a little girl, I used to pronounce the word both as "bolth." Not until I was a teenager and someone pointed it out to me did I hear the "l" sound in my pronunciation. I hadn't realized anything was strange about the way I said the word -- my father said it that way, as did my younger sister. Once I realized my pronounciation was wrong -- or, shall we say, not traditional -- I practiced saying "both, both, both" until I trained the "l" out of my speech. Years later, it occurred to me that I had likely learned to pronounce the word from my father who, because Italian does not have a "th" sound, does not enunciate words with "th" sounds in the same way that I do. (I still haven't figured out why my dad and my sister say "sangwich" for "sandwich." If anyone has a theory, I'd love to hear it.)

But back to being aesthetically Italian...as I grew older, I began to dye blond streaks in my hair and stopped singing opera with my father. My uncle was around less, so we played less Scopa. I wasn't consciously moving away from being Italian, but I was noticeably becoming more "American."

The most drastic shift away from my Italian heritage came when I traded my Italian last name for an American one. The American last name was easier to pronounce, and I have to admit that in the time I had it, it was wonderful to not have to repeat my name, or to spell it out, or to explain that my name is "Ann...Amicucci," not "Ann...Micucci." But I missed being Italian.

I'm now happy to have the name Amicucci as a label of my Italian heritage. As an Amicucci, I have an immediate connection with any other (aesthetically labeled) Italian that I meet. With an American last name, I felt like a no-culture individual. I blended in, but not in a good way. Claiming an aesthetic identity gives me a connection to a culture that -- even if I'm actually American, not actually (authentically?) Italian -- I'm proud to be connected with.