ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1981, I regarded my enrollment in the UC Riverside master’s program as a temporary journey. As an Italian girl whose relatives had moved to Rome from the Apennines and Naples, I had ancestral memories of trips to America made by people who never returned and had disappeared even from their loved ones’ memories. They were the mostly illiterate peasants and unskilled laborers who formed the body of the mass exodus from the Southern Italian region of Meridione that took place between the unification of 1870 and the World War I years. In American popular culture they would be known as the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie Titanic. They had all of the rough charm, the illusions, and energy that made him feel prepared to leave everything behind and start over. But popular mythology presented them as persons who would disappear, or at least whose names and souls would change so radically that they would no longer remember the vocalic ending of their original last names, nor would they know which Southern hometown their family was from. Of the many songs in the Italian popular tradition, the one that most occurred to me in this period went, “Mama, gimme one hundred lira for to America I wanna go. Here’s to you, here’s to you, but to America no no no!” “Mamma mia dammi cento lire che in America voglio andar, cento lire io te le do, ma in America no no no!” As if to confirm the mother’s dire prediction, the song went on, “When they came to the open sea the ship started to fall below, and the waves and the waves washed away that head of curls.” “Quando furono in mezzo al mare il bastimento s’inabissò, e i capelli ricciuti e belli l’acqua del mare se li portò.” There was a sense of doom in this song that made me feel as if a part of me would be dead forever once I left for the New World.
