ABSTRACT
As the oldest of five children born to Francesco (Cheech/Frank) Pedalino and Maria Lucia (Lucy) Luciano, the burden of remembrance is mine. I am the repository of the family chronicles, the secret-sharer, my mothers confidant from earliest childhood once we were removed from Avella, Italy, and settled in the new world. Our family history, though similar to that of many immigrants in superficial ways, followed an unusual trajectory for my own generation. In the early twentieth century, along with millions of other southern Europeans, Pedalinos and Lucianos emigrated to the eastern United States at the height of the heaviest wave of immigration in our country’s history, not to be exceeded until the last decade of the twentieth century.
