Intercultural Communications According to Frances

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     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).

            

     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.