ABSTRACT
Though relatives are fighting the war against Fascism, against family and paisani in Italy, demonstrating loyalty to the new land, still Italians and Italian Americans are suspect. After the United States joined the war, they desperately wanted to know the fate of their people—parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins—but this concern was suspect. Renouncing their Italian citizenship was fraught with difficulty. For although they knew they had opportunities that would have been foreclosed to them in Italy, still it meant disavowing allegiance to their homeland, and though they were deeply suspicious of government, this constituted a betrayal of what they valued most highly: loyalty to their families. Becoming a naturalized citizen granted rights and privileges of a native-born American but neither the privilege of being completely accepted nor absorbed into the mainstream of North American life.
