ABSTRACT
Through several generations, Italian American identity has endured many conflicts, ambivalence and losses; and Italians in America have regularly renegotiated the relationship between local cultures and their origins. 1 This relationship has been reconstructed and reinvented by each generation and it has been marked by fragmentations and divergence among them because—over the course of time—values have changed just as much as the very myths and metaphorical interpretations that have constituted the foundations for entry of first-generation immigrants into American society. 2 Over the years, many of the interpretations of Italian American identity that have been advanced fall within the context of the dominant theoretical views in the debate on American ethnicity—that is, assimilation and pluralism.
