I recently had the honor of interviewing my friend Frances, a woman in her late sixties who immigrated to the United States from Italy as a young girl. She is a former neighbor of mine whom I have known for more than eight years. We became especially close when I was trying to get pregnant, and more so during the pregnancy. Since then she has become more like a surrogate mother to me, and is a surrogate grandma to my daughter. In a weird twist of fate, she and I share both the same birthday, and the same wedding anniversary. Through the course of my interview I had the opportunity to learn more about the culture and subculture to which Frances Sofia belongs, determine what issues she encountered in terms of intercultural communications, and relate her personal experiences to concepts I have studied.
Frances was
born November 29, 1944. She grew up on a farm in a small town called Calabria,
in southern Italy. They had indoor plumbing and electricity but not much more
in terms of modern appliances. She remembers her childhood as a pleasant one.
She enjoyed working the farm, and taking care of the animals. Her mother grew
vegetables, and they raised chickens, for eggs and to eat. She remembered they
would raise a pig the whole year and slaughter it for food at the end of the
year. They had rabbits, goats, a lamb and some horses. They lived in an
attached house (row house?) and the farm was behind it. They had neighbors that
lived beside them in the attached houses but the neighbors did not have land
behind theirs. Her aunt still lives in that house today. The land is still
there but it is no longer a working farm.
In the
1950s in Italy the government was Socialist and Frances remembers everything
being stifled with restrictions. She attended public school, but it was
extraordinarily strict, especially compared to schools in America, and she has
memories of children being beaten with rulers. There were no more than ten
children to a class and the classes were separated by grade.
Frances’
father was a talented tailor. However, work was scarce in Calabria and times
became difficult. She does not know how they came to know of him, but in 1958,
Frances’ father was courted by the department store Korvette’s, founded in New
York City in 1948, to work in their Chicago store. It was a big deal because at
that time, between the fact that the Italian government was Socialist, and the rigid immigration laws of the United States, one could not travel freely. In order to
come to the United States, one had to have a sponsor, and as such, Korvette’s
paid $10,000 to sponsor her father’s entre into the country. He paid his own
transport and traveled by boat to New York City. She is not certain how he got
from New York to Chicago.
It took one
full year after that for Frances, her mother, and two younger brothers to
complete the necessary paperwork and procedures to allow them to follow to
America. They had to travel to Rome and pass a special physical. When they were
finally allowed to leave Italy, Frances was fourteen, and her brothers were nine
and six years of age. Frances recalls the whole thing as being very scary. They
were not allowed to bring more than one steamer trunk of clothes, which was
shipped on ahead of their arrival. They were not allowed any personal effects,
even books, and the children had no toys. I thought perhaps she might have kept
a diary but that was not the case.
None of them spoke a word of
English and as they made their passage from Italy to New York City she said
they were terrified. She remembers flying TWA and she had the window seat. Her
brothers were next to her and her mother was across the aisle. I asked if she
was excited at all flying for the first time but she said that she and her
brothers were too frightened to enjoy the experience. It was January, it was
cold and snowing and they thought the clouds that they saw from the plane
looking down were huge drifts of snow piled up from the ground. Upon reaching New
York, they were processed at Ellis Island, and put up overnight in a hotel.
They continued on to Chicago by plane the next day.
Frances’
first experiences in Chicago were very unpleasant. Her impression of Chicago
was that it was too congested and there was not enough room for all the people
and automobiles and buildings. On her second day there, she and her two little
brothers got lost returning home from school. There was a terrible snowstorm
and the snow was piled very high. All of the homes looked alike and they lost
their bearings. Her mother called the police. They were located just a block
and a half from their new home, however they had walked in circles for nearly four hours. Since they
didn’t speak English they were afraid to ask anyone for help.
Frances’ father had been
successful in the year before they arrived. He arrived in Chicago with just a
suitcase with one suit of clothes besides that which he wore. In just one year
had he had managed to buy a home, and completely furnish it for his family. One memorable improvement in their Chicago home was the addition of a television, which they
had not had in Italy. It was mainly through television that the family began to
learn English. While Frances and her brothers took English as a Second Language
in school, television was the only means available to their mother to learn the
new language. When they joined their father in Chicago, her mother was
thirty-eight and her father was forty.
Frances
started high school in America, and her first year was miserable. She didn’t
know any English. She had a special language class daily with a translator, but
then had to suffer through all of her other classes without one. The children
were mean, and made fun of her. She did not have any friends that whole first
year. She had no relatives her age either. The only relatives were her father’s
uncle and aunt, and his first cousins.
The only thing in their lives that was the same as the life they left behind was the Catholic Church.
In 1959, the
services were conducted in Latin, in both the United States and Italy, so going
to church provided
and sense of comfort and continuity. There were also Catholic Comic books, called the Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, which provided another way for Frances and her brothers to learn English and a bit about their new home. “Treasure Chest Comics provide an insight into popular culture in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
The comic books were undertaken at the behest of the
Commission on American Citizenship, which in turn had been urged on the U.S.
Bishops by Pope Pius XI, whose friendliness toward American democratic ways
increased as he witnessed the growth of fascism and communism in Europe”
(Winters, 2012).
The only thing in their lives that was the same as the life they left behind was the Catholic Church.
In 1959, the
services were conducted in Latin, in both the United States and Italy, so going
to church provided and sense of comfort and continuity. There were also Catholic Comic books, called the Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, which provided another way for Frances and her brothers to learn English and a bit about their new home. “Treasure Chest Comics provide an insight into popular culture in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Asked if her family’s practice of Catholicism changed any by virtue of their
move, Frances did not believe so. The Church itself has been through several
reforms, including the reform that resulted in Mass being said in English as
opposed to Latin. Back in Italy though, Frances has noticed a more of an
interest in spirituality, when speaking with cousins still living there. This
trend is discussed in a study done in Italy in 2006, which reads, “At the start
of the twenty-first century Catholicism is still the prevailing belief system
of most Italians, but a recent project on Italian religion and spirituality,
carried out in 2006, has found that Italians are now more interested in
spirituality, that they might describe themselves as 'spiritual, but not
religious', and that they privilege the 'God within' rather than the
transcendent God of traditional Catholic belief” (Palmisano, 2010).
Otherwise,
their lives had changed drastically. Her mother, who had left her entire family
back in Italy, was very unhappy and felt isolated. Used to growing her own
food, and picking it for that day’s meal, urban America proved a bitter pill to
swallow. She ultimately grew a small garden in their tiny back yard, but it
wasn’t the same. Hamburgers and hotdogs began to creep into their diets. With
her father working long hours and each of them developing new American busy
schedules, Frances says that where once it was expected that the family would
eat dinner together every night, in America that soon fell by the wayside. In
Italy, every Sunday meant huge meals shared with huge extended families and
many cousins. In America, Sundays were quiet and lonely.
Another
difference that was apparent to Frances was the work ethic and the lack of time
dedicated to recreation in America. In Italy, people worked from earlier in the
morning but broke for a long break/nap after lunch. They would return to work
in the afternoon refreshed and ready to continue. In America there was no rest.
In Italy, people get company-paid month-long vacations every year, even today. In
America you were/are lucky if you could/can go somewhere for a week.
Her
mother’s sadness embittered her, and Frances recalls much fighting between her
parents. There were constant arguments and her mother wished desperately to
return to Italy but never did. Opportunities for her children outweighed her
personal happiness and so she stayed. Two short years after they moved to
Chicago to be with him, Frances’ father died abruptly of a heart attack at the
age of forty-two. Their home fortunately was paid for, possibly by insurance,
and her mother was able to sell it and purchase a “three-flat home” in which
she rented out apartments for income. Their mother never had to work, and the
children worked to support her all of her days.
In my recent studies, I
learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which studies and compares the
differences in languages in different cultures. “Thus, the world as each of us
knows it is, to a large extent, predetermined by the language of our culture.
And the differences between languages represent basic differences in the
worldview of these diverse cultures” (Jandt, 2010, Page 131).
There were many differences
linguistically, some that posed a real challenge for Frances and her family.
The Italian alphabet, for instance, has fewer letters; there is no “W” or “Y”.
Also, Italian is written phonetically, exactly the way it sounds. English,
which has its origins in many different languages, is much more difficult to
learn and is decidedly not written phonetically. Also, the syntax of sentences
was reversed from that which she was used to.
Vocabulary is one of the
levels of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the text explains that one can
surmise the importance of something within a culture if there exists in that
culture a rich vocabulary for describing it. The examples reference the many
Eskimo words for the word snow, and the Hanunov tribe in Asia that has many
words for rice. Frances said there are many more words for describing food in
Italian than there are in English.
Lack of vocabulary
equivalence is listed as an area that leads to translation problems. “Languages
that are different often lack words that are directly translatable” (Jandt,
2010, Page 135). Frances explained that in Italy, when she was a girl, each
state had its own dialect. The main, larger cities spoke proper Italian,
however each smaller offshoot town had its own dialect. As such, she remembers
differences in language just by traveling forty miles one way or another. She
says that now they require all schools to teach proper Italian uniformly,
regardless of location, and the dialects are becoming lost as the older
generations die out.
Another impediment to
successful translation, and in Frances’ learning of English as a second
language was idiomatic equivalence. Italian has no idioms and the concept was
problematic for Frances. It was an area that frequently tripped her up in
school and would result in the other students making fun of her. She said it
definitely made it far more difficult to understand what people meant, as she
had to decode what was actually being said.
Interviewing Frances, and
hearing her stories of immigrating to the United States from Italy as a young
girl, was a dream assignment for me. I loved her before, but having the
opportunity to realize the enormous challenges she overcame, has grown my
respect and admiration for her exponentially. Through the course of my interview I have
learned more about the culture and subculture to which Frances belongs. I have determined
what issues she encountered in terms of intercultural communications, and successfully
related her personal experiences to concepts I have studied. I am inspired
by her story.
