I’m crossing a threshold next week I never expected to face: I’m going to be on a float in a parade going up New York City’s Fifth Avenue. No kidding.
This year’s Columbus Day parade in Manhattan is being headed by Len Riggio, founder and head of Barnes and Noble Inc., who made it his mission to highlight the accomplishments of Italian-American authors. This is a cause near to my heart as the editor of “Don’t Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing.”
The parade’s goal is to take what’s best of Italian-American culture – the appetites, passions, affections, humor, connections and everyday pleasures – while leaving behind the bitterness, alienation, grudges and stereotypes.
Anyone have a problem with that?
Actually, many people do – and for good reason. Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, South Dakota and Vermont don’t recognize Columbus Day. Vermont has celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. “Nobody discovered Seattle, Washington,” declared Quinault Nation President Fawn Sharp in 2014.
Even other Italian Americans want me to address my role in the parade. We’re good at arguing among ourselves. My friend Brandon Benevento from New Haven challenged my enthusiasm for Columbus Day: “How do you justify being the poster girl for a holiday based on the concept of ethnic white heritage?”
It’s a good question – which doesn’t mean I wasn’t irritated with him for asking it – and it forced me to think about my answer.
Why am I delighted to be in the Columbus Day parade this year? Because I genuinely was too often the only poster child available, paraded out as “The Italian Girl” when there were no other people whose last names ended in a vowel. I was Miss Ethnic and Economic Diversity for a while there.
At the Ivy League college from which I graduated, “Godfather”-themed parties were hosted at fraternity houses. Young women at the parties were dressed up like my cousins – and let’s be honest, like me – in tight black skirts, low-cut blouses and stiletto heels. The guys were dressed like the men in my family, in either tight white T-shirts or pin-striped suits. It was supposed to be all in good fun, but I saw it for what it was: ethnic drag.
I remember the WASPy senator in “The Godfather II” who says, “I don’t like your kind of people. I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country in oily hair, and dressed up in those silk suits, and try to pass yourselves off as decent Americans.”
That’s what I heard underneath the “Can’t you take a joke?” from the frat boys. That’s why I didn’t laugh.
But as friend Kristen Mongillo argues, “The fact of the matter is, this is not a clean country. We are a country founded with a messy history. This narrative of hatred against newcomers is one we still see too often nowadays.”
As a decent American, I’m prepared to deal with the opposition. If anybody throws tomatoes, I’ll catch them and make a nice sauce.
Other Italian-American writers inspire me. Don DeLillo, perhaps America’s greatest contemporary novelist, explains, “We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside.”
Part of the fun of parading up Fifth Avenue will be precisely because it’s not “outside” or the other side of the tracks. It’s Main Street. That’s why any group that’s been historically marginalized – union workers on Labor Day, the Irish on St. Patrick’s, the Puerto Rican community for the Puerto Rican Day parade, the LGBT community celebrating Gay Pride in June – claim Fifth Avenue when they can.
So yes, I’m celebrating Italian heritage, which does not mean I’m hugging statues of the actual Genoese explorer who sailed east under a Spanish flag.
Although it’s easy to lose sight of what’s worth celebrating when a holiday has such a complicated history, because there is no such thing as uncomplicated history, I’ll embrace the best parts of the heritage that brought my grandparents here from Sicily in steerage.
And I’ll do it heading up Fifth Avenue, wearing a tight black skirt and very high heels. It’s fine – I’ll be on a float.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
