by Charles Versaggi
Conceived in Sicily and born in the U.S. in 1946, four months after Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers, I began my life’s journey as the first-born son of a first-generation Italian American family, caught between two cultures, navigating from one to the other, feeling neither Italian nor American, a stranger in a strange land.
North Beach in the ’40s and ’50s was a veritable village of one big family to about 30,000 mostly first- and second-generation Italians. Saints Peter and Paul Church was its spiritual center and the preserver of Italian language and culture. I spoke Sicilian at home and learned to speak English at Ss. Peter & Paul Elementary School (“Salesian School”), adjacent to its namesake church. Sicilian was the language of local fishermen that included my maternal grandfather, who chased salmon from Alaska to southern California, and a large extended family, some who lived their lives speaking only a few English phrases.
Both sides of my family were from the village of Augusta on the eastern coast of Sicily. Though my mother was born in Detroit, her native-born Italian parents returned with her to Augusta before World War II where she met my father as teenage lovers and married in 1944. After the war ended, my mother and her parents returned to the U.S. and moved to North Beach, where they lived on Varennes Street on Telegraph Hill. A year after I was born, my father joined us to live in a small apartment on Lombard Street near Joe DiMaggio Playground.
My father, who served as a captain major with the Italian resistance to Mussolini’s fascists, returned from World War II a decorated Bersagliere commando for the Royal Italian Army after defeating the Nazis with the Allied forces at the Battle of Monte Casino. He was one of 200 in a battalion of 2,000 to survive the bloody carnage.
Prior to the war, my father earned a master’s degree in engineering as a merchant marine, but it wasn’t accredited because Italy was a former Axis power. To make ends meet, he was forced to work as an unskilled laborer at the California-Vulcan Macaroni factory in the Embarcadero, which was to become the Golden Grain Company known for its Rice-A-Roni brand of seasoned pasta and rice.
Although many Italian Americans had gone overseas to help fight Germany and Italy during the war, others were labelled enemy aliens and put in internment camps with Japanese Americans. Fisherman’s Wharf was closed off to local seamen, many of whom were Sicilian immigrants. Those arrested by the FBI for suspicious activity included Joe DiMaggio’s mother.
During the late ’50s, when I was 12, my family moved from North Beach across town to the Sunnyside district in south-central San Francisco, a quiet residential neighborhood where generations of immigrant families were now well assimilated into the American melting pot. My father left the pasta factory as vice president of manufacturing, became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and realized his dream of becoming a successful small-business entrepreneur—first as the owner of Sam’s Vienna Delicatessen and then as a restaurateur before early retirement in his late ‘50s. ‘Sam’ was more “American” and easier for customers to remember than ‘Saverio,’ a common Sicilian name. ‘Vienna Delicatessen’ was the shop’s original name, run continuously for nearly 75 years by a succession of mostly immigrant owners.
As the first-born son, eight-to-ten years older than my two brothers, I struggled to balance family obligations with individual aspirations. “Sam’s Deli” was where I spent my teenage years serving customers, making our famous potato and macaroni salads, preparing freshly made sandwiches, stocking shelves with canned goods—and cutting up the endless cardboard boxes. “Chally, you got’ta finish cutting up’a da boxes before you can play with your friends!”
Often local customers would greet my father with, “Hey, wassamatta you?” Although my highly educated father could speak English very well, he couldn’t hide his heavy Italian accent that was made fun of. Sometimes he’d laugh with them, but he usually smiled quietly as he registered a sale. On the inside, I felt humiliated for him. Although we never discussed it, I felt the prejudice of being from an immigrant Sicilian family—a Wop, a Dago, derided for our ethnicity.
(Note: Contrary to popular belief, ‘Wop’ does not stand for “without papers.” It likely originated from the Southern Italian dialectal term ‘guappo,’ meaning “dandy” or “swagger.” One interpretation of ‘Dago’ is “getting paid as the day goes”—getting paid under the table. The term ‘Guinea’ as a slur for Italians likely comes from “Guinea Negro,” used in the 1740s to refer to black people or those of mixed ancestry. It later became associated with Italians, possibly due to their darker complexion compared to other European immigrants.)
Although we still had close ties with our Sicilian friends and family in North Beach, our move to Sunnyside represented a stark divorce from my beloved Italianita as I tried to assimilate into a different neighborhood, one that was more “American.” As a teenager trying to find my identity, I found myself balancing two cultures, not fully belonging to either Sicilian or American. I encountered ethnic prejudices and stereotypes, feeling racially ambiguous and not fully accepted. When I wore stylish Italian clothing and shoes for formal occasions, I was made fun of because I looked and dressed differently. (Little did I know, I was ahead of my time, a fashion trendsetter!)
Over the years, whenever I would mention my Sicilian heritage to someone, all too often they would respond in jest, “Oh, you’re a Mafioso—a gangster, a crook.” Although America’s attitudes toward Sicily have changed over the past 50 years, Sicily and the Mafia are still inextricably linked in popular culture. Despite their artistic merit, The Godfather movies and TV series like The Sopranos—both fictional works by Italian authors—reveal Hollywood still can’t quite move on from this stereotype. Paradoxically, these works gave Italian Americans a sense of ethnic pride as we saw ourselves in these portrayals the way our families lived.
Several years ago, I was chatting about Italy with a friend over lunch. Our conversation caught the attention of a well-dressed man at an adjacent table who joined our discourse. As we cordially chatted with him, he mentioned he was from a town in northern Italy. When I casually said my family was from Sicily, his warm demeanor went cold and he ceased speaking with us, turning away to finish his meal. Many Sicilians experience discrimination from mainstream society—and even other Italians.
Coming from a first-generation, working-class family, I felt the pressure of my parents’ immigrant aspirations. During my youth, my mother would plead melodramatically, “I want you to be somebody!” Like many of our Italian friends and family, she so much wanted and enjoyed having all the glamorous trappings of the upper class—fancy car, fashionable clothes, mink furs, expensive jewelry—and French provincial furniture with plastic-covered upholstery. The garage of our Sunnyside house had a makeshift kitchen and dining room table so we could keep the “formal” kitchen and dining room upstairs pristine for “company.”
Working at the deli 12-to-16 hours a day, seven days a week, my father had the immigrant dream of accumulating enough money so he could enjoy an early retirement in Sicily and show his family and friends he “had made it.” In the early ’60s, he sent my mother and two younger brothers to live in Augusta for the summer. But the experiment was short-lived, thanks to oppressive triple-digit temperatures and cultural shock my mother failed to overcome.
After my mother died in my late 20s from breast cancer, her ghost haunted me in my dreams: “Chally, I want you to be somebody! I want you to make me proud!” But the message I really got was, “You’re nobody.” If I wasn’t “somebody,” I was existentially nobody. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. It was a script for failure. When she died, my identity almost died with her.
High school and college were difficult times for me. I was stuck in a treadmill of trying to prove myself, perpetually distracted by my anxiety of inferiority rather than being focused on my passions for doing what I love. But her death was also the beginning of learning who I really was, dealing head-on with her ghost, finally putting her and her “somebody” mantra to rest to become the self-realized person I am today. I’m proud of my Sicilian heritage and deal with stereotypes as an educational moment.
As Italian Americans assimilated and moved from North Beach and other “Little Italys” across the nation, the discrimination they faced gradually passed as they became accepted into mainstream society. Between 1820 and 1990, more than five million Italians, the majority from Southern Italy and Sicily, immigrated to the U.S. and about 18 million persons of Italian descent presently live here.
Today, the U.S. is home to a record 46.1 million immigrants, accounting for nearly 14% of the population. Our immigrant population has grown significantly since the 1960s, with the largest shares coming from Mexico, India, China, the Philippines, and El Salvador. Immigration remains a contentious political issue. Partisan divide has made it difficult to achieve meaningful immigration reform.
As America continues to struggle with our immigration dilemma, balancing identity with policy, we need to be reminded that our nation was built by immigrants and their descendants. Finding an equitable approach to this challenge will require a commitment to the values of diversity and inclusion that have long defined America at its best.
My story ends with an auspicious beginning: Circa 1902, my maternal great-grandfather Giacomo Romeo and his wife Rosa Passanisi left Augusta, Sicily because he was to be called as a witness to a murder trial involving the local Mafia. Warned about his family being in mortal danger, rather than take any chances with their lives, he and his wife decided to emigrate to the U.S., joining the millions of Sicilians in the first Italian diaspora. Had they not made this timely move, I wouldn’t have been able to author this essay. “A chi è cchiù fortunato, l’ora è bona.”—”For the luckiest, the time is good.” —Sicilian proverb.
“And so you know the difficulty in becoming an American. It isn’t a sudden process. You get over it. But you don’t ever quite get over it. You carry it with you. That’s the great—and not so great—aspect of being or trying to be an assimilated American.” —Gay Talese, about his experience growing up the son of immigrants from Southern Italy in 1940s South Jersey.
