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expatwhisperer · 10 days ago

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Reverse Immigrant: Not Italian Enough For Italians, Not American Enough For Americans

Explores the challenges of reverse immigration and cultural belonging, detailing my experience as someone caught between two worlds at midlife. Reverse immigration is an increasingly common phenomenon, but the emotional and cultural complexities faced by individuals in this position often go unspoken. It blends personal storytelling with universal themes of cultural integration, alienation, and self-discovery in the context of Italian social structures, making it relatable for a wide audience.

My heart pattered softly as butterfly wings as I stepped off the train in Milan Centrale. I visited Italy many times, but now, I came to plant myself as an Italian American dual citizen. Not as a seedling, those years were gone and I was fully formed, but rather as a reverse immigrant to propagate myself like a stem cutting in the soil of my ancestors who were driven out of Italy at the turn of the century by grim hunger and desparation, for a better life in America, toward something sharp and brilliant, like the glitter of a sword. I can only imagine what they would say about this decision exactly a hundred years after they risked their lives, suffered stinging prejudices, and did the backbreaking labor that built America, only watch me undo it in a single six-hour plane flight, but I had good reasons. The United States was no longer the country I grew up in and I don’t think they would recognize it either. American felt stifling to me, like an old basement crammed with relics from my past I no longer found useful. In Italy, I was rebuilding myself, personally and professionally, which did not translate into the life of my country. Perhaps they will forgive me because I returned to the motherland for the same reasons they went America, for the promise of a better life.

On an ordinary Tuesday in Paris, I received the second email in two years to teach English Language and Literature at an international school in Beddizole, a small town in the Lombardy region of Italy, just outside Brescia. Since leaving the United States with only the clothes on my back, I had lived in Paris for four years, but found it increasingly exasperating. Paris was beautiful, but the honeymoon seemed to end where French cynicism began. It has been said that the French live paradise, but they think they are living in hell, and it started to feel that way for me. Like a job. My language skills were steadily improving, and my quality of life was quite good compared to the United States, but I could not locate the promise of a joie de vivre, living joyously. Paris is a private club, and I was not invited. I was suffering from a mutated strain of Paris Syndrome, the disappointment I felt that my experience was not what I expected.

Since my “gray divorce” my motto has been to say “yes” to everything and so, I said yes, to this repeated job offer, even though I had already accepted a university position at a private French university. Once more, I packed my bags (I felt like I had one more move left in me) and hopped on a train to Milan, and then another to Brescia. The teaching job turned out to be a disaster that ended abruptly on Christmas Eve when I was summarily fired without just cause, but I’ve faced bigger dragons than this before in New York. During those cold and dark January weeks, I picked myself up despite the horror of my predicament and found better teaching work and I am thriving. Italy may not be perfect, but the Italians make me feel welcome, unlike the French, and that has made all the difference.

I am an Italian dual citizen and strangely enough, Italian-Americans invariably identify as Italian but we aren’t, at least not in the way that Italians understand it. To them, I am American with Italian roots, and there’s a difference. It should have triggered an identity crisis, but it didn’t. Still, I don’t feel American enough for Americans and not Italian enough for Italians. On the other hand, I’ve heard some Italians say I’m more Italian than they are because I have retained and understand the Italian traditions of a hundred years ago that they have not. It seems the question of cultural identity cuts both ways. More than anything else I regret, yet had nothing to do with, is that I cannot speak Italian fluently (yet). Hunger drove my ancestors in a hurry like gathering clouds to America and with it came a clear sky of gratitude which they expressed by insisting my parents speak English. This gratitude, quickened by pride, resulted in a great language loss by me and a daily source of embarrassment. I was raised by Italians and I know many Italian ways, attitudes, behaviors and even a handful of Neapolitan words, but I do not speak the language very well (yet) and so, to Italians, I’m not really Italian. The ancient Greek word βάρβαρος (bárbaros) meant “babbler.” To the Greek ear, someone who did not speak the Greek language babbled, producing the onomatopoeic sound “bar bar bar” which became bárbaros, and later barbaria in Latin. They thought, if you do not speak my language, you are not one of us and you are a barbarian. This gaping deficiency places me squarely in that cultural netherworld where I am neither Italian enough for the Italians nor American enough for the Americans. At the moment, I try to cover my shame with humor and say that I speak advanced babytalk, but I am diligently taking Italian lessons to rid myself of that indignity. I try to be gentle with myself and remember that neuroplasticity decreases with age and I am learning as fast as I can. Italians think I am missing out on a lot, and maybe they’re right, but I’ve had enough deep conversations in my life to know there isn’t much that’s new in the way of everyday discussion. Secretly, I don’t mind these moments of my zen silence where I can observe the locals in their natural habitat. It’s my guilty pleasure of maturity and the torrent of transcript chatter, like prices are too high, can’t believe she did that, this weather is awful, I’m so tired, I hate my job, my boss is a ass, and so on, is often predictable. That’s not to say that my daily struggles as an expat immigrant can be compared to someone who is a political, climate, or war refugee immigrant. I cannot know what level of trauma or culture shock they have experienced, what unexpressed grief and loss they have endured, but I do feel the occasional waves of guilt for leaving my kids (who are now adults and have their own life and actually applaud my lifestyle). Today, I regret nothing and I am content with my choices.

At the same time, choices often come with a price and the promise of a better life has cost me my old one. Losses add up incalculably, like attempting to number the waves on the shore of a limitless sea. In the six years I’ve lived abroad, in Paris and now Brescia, I have crossed one ocean and six time zones. I have lived in two different countries and six different apartments. Missed three weddings, four funerals, and two christenings I could not attend, and dozens of birthdays. Lived through a global pandemic. Received four COVID vaccines. Been scammed twice. One, which required me to file a law suit. Filled out one serious police report and one minor. I’ve been in the hospital twice. Locked myself out once. I’ve cried in the shower hundreds of times. Missed four Christmases and Thanksgivings, and five Mother’s Days. I also missed attending my daughter’s college graduation in person but that was because of the pandemic. Heard about three divorces. Acquired two national health care cards and lost my American driver’s license because it expired. Been told it was not possible when it was, too many times to count. Experienced countless days feeling lost and lonely. Felt confused and anxious, not always, but often enough. I have been treated many, many times like I am less intelligent than I am because I’m American until I was able to prove differently. I’ve made lots of new friends, good, fiercely loyal friends, and then they moved away or I did. Every day I can’t express myself the way I want to and I feel like I am much smarter in English, so much funnier but those around me will have no idea. For one year, I thought I knew how to ask where the toilet was in Italian, only to discover I had been saying it incorrectly all along. Every day I have had to relearn how life works. I’ve had some of the most intense relationships, sexual experiences, and emotional feelings of my life. I have had four teaching jobs and been fired from one without just cause which is really scary as a woman, alone and broke in a foreign country. I have had a complete change of career from Intercultural Trainer and Expat Career Coach to English Language and Literature professor. I’ve gone to uncountable resturants, bars, café, concerts, clubs, and dance events along the Seine. Drank hundreds of bottles of wine. Traveled as far as Norway and as far south as the Greek Islands. I’ve done dozens of things I thought I would never do but, to take a line from Fight Club, “It is only when you lose everything that we are free to do anything.” I cannot tell you when is the right time to take action to change your life, or leave the country, but as Dorris Lessing said, “ Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now, the conditions are always impossible.”

I am American by birth, Italian by blood and residency, but at sixty-two and divorced with two grown children, I am comfortable enough in my own skin to accept these, and many other scratchy certainties. Eventually, I will become more proficient and perhaps the Italians will feel more comfortable with me because at the moment, they don’t know what to do with me. There is no model for a modern, middle-aged woman who knows she has another another life in her, especially in a country like Italy where ageism and sexism are prevalent, where women often have a less power and agency despite the veneer of education, occupation, or income.

Old ways are fossilized in stoney tradition. A Sicilian friend of mine whose family immigrated with their four kids from Sicily to the States when he was about ten, told me, nothing ever changes in Italy, especially not Italian ways. I didn’t quite fully grasp what he meant at the time, perhaps because I was young and couldn’t comprehend the idea that nothing could change because I was raised in the newest, new world, Southern California, a place synonymous with change. To him, Italy was the “old country” while I perceived it as a dazzling completeness of beauty, but the example he gave was simple: that Italian farmer has been drawing water from a well for the last hundred years, and that’s the way he will continue to get his water for the next hundred. Maybe it was a bit of an exaggeration, but he wasn’t wrong. For example, when I told him I received my Italian citizenship ID card, he cracked, ha! And it’s still issued on flimsy paper I bet, and then I began to understand what he was trying to tell me about the well. The Italian ID card has been in paper form for the last eighty seven years and was one of the last to go modern in the EU. The project of an electronic identity card began in 1997 and is finally a plastic card with an electronic chip. Getting things done here can feel as slow as waves rolling in, long and lazy, like sea-worn travelers.

Perhaps what I represent to Italians, and my students in particular, is uniquely made of Italian American DNA; a photo negative of their unmet dreams spirited by Italian Americans like Fiorello La Guardia, Mario Cuomo, and Giannini who rebuilt San Francisco and created the Bank of America; Geraldine Ferraro, Madonna, and Nancy Pelosi, sons and daughters of immigrants who built their dreams in the United States for the sake of others. There are second acts in America and this is an example of how mine is playing out in Italy. Maybe it’s my third.

Hemingway said there are all kinds of hunger. Memory is a hunger. Perhaps I was headstrong and foolish to return to my ancestral home, but I was driven for as long as I can remember to Italy because I had an insatiable appetite to satisfy the strong memory of family experiences that accompanied me all my life like an unwavering, loyal friend; driven by a malnourished soul few Americans can comprehend. On the other hand, I inherited the nourishing quality of Neapolitan resourcefulness: Arrangiarsi meaning to “make do” and figure it out yourself, and this character trait, whether born of personality or genetics or both, has served me well as an expatriate immigrant. Americans would call it as self-reliance, but whenever I am suffering from the mental, emotional, or physical exhaustion that comes from the stress and frustration of a life in significant transition, I lean on these attributes and the samsonite strength of my ancestors, rather than scattering it in agitation, from people who courageously crossed an ocean when it was unlikely they strayed far from their own villages, like Margliano or Sciscianno. Relatives who suffered from the tyranny of poverty and hunger; a desperate force that hurled them on to ships, leaving everyone and everything they once knew, behind. Once, when I was much younger, I asked my maternal grandfather, Saverio Mascia, why he left Italy and he tilted his head down a little mournfully at the imaginary dirt of his youth, swiping his shoe back and forth like a weary windshield wiper and told me, because there was nothing to eat. In the silence between us, I sensed there was trauma in that reply and I’ve probably recieved some part of that unwelcome inheritance. He moved back and forth frequently between Chicago and California duirng my childhood, like an indecisive waiter, unable to commit to either place for very long. Perhaps he was searching for a “geographic solution” in the expectation that moving would cure the profound melancholy that haunted him.

I come from a long line of Italian farmers. Saverio or “Sam” was a farmer and his father was a farmer, and so on, as far back as I could document in the geneological descriptions. As a landless, post-unification Mezzogiorno peasant, life offered up a chronic plate of hardship, exploitation, and violence, particularly around the “triangle of death” outside Naples of Acerra, Nola, and Marigliano, the latter where my grandmother, Pasqualina was born. The soil was barren, yielding little; malnutrition and disease were prevalent during the Great Wave of Immigration between 1880 – 1924 when nearly a million Italians came to the United States, half of them between 1900 – 1010 when my ancestors came[1] which now makes up the nation’s fifth largest ethnic group in America. The reasons people immigrate are ususally this dire, or worse, but in my case although I was not starving, it felt that way, emotionally. Most migrants and refugees leave because they are desperate or live in fear, or both; forcably displaced because of persecution, conflict, violence, and unspeakable human rights violations. People who are desperate do desperate things because death is like a predator, chasing them from behind, and instead of fighting, they flee from it, too terrified to fight back. I left because I was tired of the quarreling at home, with the fallen ideals of my country, and a dozen other reasons strewn on the floor but my exodus was a choice and I believed I could, as a divorced, middle-aged woman on a fixed income, make a lateral move that would stabilize, if not improve, the standard of living I was accustomed to, but I could not explain this concept adequately enough to my American friends and family. I suffered from exulansis, the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness. And, I refused to be buried in New Jersey.

Sam arrived, first at Ellis Island. I know that because I saw his name commemorated on the immigrant wall. He continued on to Chicago, presumably because he had friends and distant relatives there, not unlike me when I first moved to Paris before coming to Italy, but we American expats don’t congeal into the jellied “little” enclaves like other relationship-oriented people. We are more individualistic and less likely to form tribes into a coherent diaspora abroad because that’s how we’re wired. He was unskilled, illiterate, and did not speak English. I am educated, skilled, and don’t speak much Italian (yet), but my advantages don’t make the foreign feel more any more familiar, they are only less worse, and cultural adaptation takes time. The difference is, he could become American and I am unsure if I will, or want, to become Italian. Perhaps I will be Italian-ish. He dug ditches and laid labyrinthian pipes at the feet of Chicago’s big shoulders. I reinvented my career as an English Language and Literature teacher, however we both felt the need to escape; for him, from a semi-feudal society that increasingy held little in the way of opportunity; for me, from a country that has veered off the rails into casino capitalism and gone mad politically. (Under Italian law, I have the right to asylum from an undemocratic country!) According to Freedom House, the America has experienced a 16-year decline in global freedom. The US score in Freedom in the World fell by 11 points on a 100-point scale in the decade from 2010 to 2020, with an accelerated deterioration of 6 points during the presidency of Donald Trump. In Freedom in the World 2022, which covers the events of 2021, gains in the US score were counterbalanced by declines and the total remained at 83. That put the country on par with Panama, Romania, and South Korea, and about 10 points below historical peers like Germany and the United Kingdom.[2] His thickly calloused hands built Chicago’s infrastructure and I unveil a new world perspective to my gregarious Italian students who are unintentionally ensnared in the old world. At the end of the immgration wave, he was one of five million Italians who came to America and I am one of five million American expatriates who live scattered around the world, one of the sixteen-thousand living in Italy.

Back and forth, Italians and their descendents have left Italy, settled elsewhere, and some, like me, have returned to the motherland, by a zionian pull so strong that some of us must go back, but it is not a paradise, and it is my impression that one day, this gorgeous and beloved country may become one of the least ethnicnally identifiable, culturally in the world[3]. It is rowing upstream against a strong downward current towards an epic demographic crisis; a perfect storm of an aging population, declining birth rates, and a brain drain. The aging population is called the “Silver Tsunami” with over half the population over 45 and one of the world’s longest lifespans. The low “fertility trap” or negative birth rate is twelve deaths for every 7 births. The fuga di cervelli or “brain drain” is the working age population leaving to be employed in other countries, however 30-50 percent of them returned (called the ritornati) so the trend is positive. The millenial exodus could be caused by many factors, but perhaps the most obvious is the lack of opportunity, employment, and chronic bureaucracy; a slow justice system and cumbersome tax regulations. However, like many other countries thanks to the pandemic, Italy has attempted to “trampoline” to become more modern and competitive. As a teacher, I hope I am part of this effort by exposing students to as many new ideas and perspectives as possible; to prevent them from becoming part of the fossilized Italy trifecta. That, and phrasal verbs.

Italy is breathtaking, but this mozzafiato is a double-edged sword, preserved, or petrified, across landscapes, architecture, monuments, and basilicas, yet at the same time, it reflects the paralysis to change social systems, especially around income inequality and deep-seated sexism[4]. For Italians who are reluctant to change, it took, and will probably only take again sadly, another authoritarian figure like Mussolini (who built roads, bridges, and buildings) to retool the nation's economy. One look at the architecture of those fascist style buildings he built during his dictatorship, large and symmetric with sharp non-rounded edges, will tell you that this was revolutiony. One day, as I stood in the middle of the grand Piazza Dell’Loggia in Brescia where I live, an Italian from Udine told me, look at the difference between this post office he built and the old palazzo architecture beside it. To Italians at that time, this was New York City. It represented both innovation and a reverential nod to their Roman roots, and it was way ahead of its time compared to the medieval architecture that had stood like vigilant centurions for centuries. He was the future. They succumed to his authority not because they liked his politics so much as they needed someone like him to get things done. I never thought of it that way. Perspective is always about who’s telling the story.

To underscore this notion that change happens slowly in Italy, it was only recently in 1861 that it became a country. It is second only to the United States (1776) as one of the newest old countries to be formed which could not, and would not have thought to, unify itself. It is a combination of nearly 20 nations states that shared neither language (for the most part) customs, nor tradition. Italians were accustomed to living next to, but not in harmony or unity with, other Italians. They could, however, rely on two things: family and di arrangiarsi, and barring that, particularly in the South, below Naples including Sicily, the mafia stepped in to fill the void of law and order to provide “protection” where the state did not. The forgotton South took matters, for better or for worse, into their own hands when it came to law and order or economic prosperity until recently. Change happens at a gacial pace, a testiment to the often obdurate and defiant Italian mentality. It’s fitting to note that I live in the heart and soul of old Brescia, next to a Roman temple dating back to the first century AD during the Roman Empire. What’s important is that there are pre-Romanesque ruins below that site from the Bronze and Iron Age. Italian ways seem as old as their layered history. That’s not to say they’re not spontaneous which is a contradiction to what I’ve observed, and they are, but I think their spontenaity is born as a reaction to this rigidity, rather than an anomaly and they can be surprisingly flexible when it comes to la dolce vita or living life in the moment, enjoying the sweetness of doing nothing, which I’ve become spectacularly good at. If Italians, or other cultures, contain contraditions, then they contain the multitudes of humanity, of both the ideal cultural values and the possible negative perceptions.

What will happen to Italian culture and identity as a result of their history and current transition into the 21st century is anyone’s guess during this demographic winter. Who is Italian, what makes an Italian, or Italian American? What will Italy or Italians look like in the future given the current immigration dilemmas and short-termed solutions, like the 1 Euro housing scheme desgined to attract people, foreigners mostly, to revive abandoned hilltop villages, who can tell, but I suspect they will not be solved by selling off real estate which implies a doubt in the country’s ability to get at the root of the problem, systemically. When there is a vacuum of decision-making power, what takes the place may not be in the country’s best interest and it can be vulnerable to a cultural, socio-political malware that has nothing to do with the ideals, identity, or interests of Italians. Like the dinosaurs, Italy may look like it’s about to become extinct but perhaps the glimmer of hope may lay in their fossilization, in the amber of the ritornati; the returning millenials and Italian Americans who embody the ideals and work ethic they were able to demonstrate and execute successfully elsewhere, without the deterrant nuissance of tradition.

The contradiction that struck me most with remarkable surprise, was what I saw so clearly in myself for the first time; how Italian I was and was not. The Southen Italian I am is a dutiful mix of compliance to food, music, and the dialect of my immigrant ancestors from a hundred years ago. A time capsule preserved by sheer force of my memory’s carabiners to things which no longer exist particularly in the modern, dynamic, energetic North. A southern persona that is grossly mythologized by superstition (like the corna, cornetto, and malocchio) and of course crime, an idea that author and former Minister of Finance of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis has corrected because while the South is corrupt, it is low-level corruption, cheap corruption, whereas the north practices industrial scale, systematic, beautifully designed, high-tech corruption[5]. It was a staggering surprise for me during the entry phase that began with shock and ended with forelornness. I was not who I thought I was, ethnically. On the other hand, there is also a smugness I feel because I know, just as the arhictecture and Italian ways are set in stone, so is my Italian-ness. To return to my roots and to embrace its traditions. Italians may feel a sharp pang of regretful wonder at my particular species of Italian American, but I’d like to think I might be that minuscule grain of sand to an unsuspecting oyster, one that could contribute a slight pearl of knowledge and experience to my Italian students who might think differently about their world because I exposed them to the new one. Perhaps to prevent it from becoming “Like white sepulchers, beautiful on the outside but filled with dead men’s bones on the inside.”

Notes:

1. https://www.pbs.org/destinationamerica/usim_wn_noflash_5.html#:~:text=Italian%20emigration%20was%20fueled%20by,malnutrition%20and%20disease%20were%20widespread.

2. https://italicsmag.com/2020/12/01/why-millennials-are-moving-back-to-italy/

3. https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-italy-fde87cd63c7c388f2684cd0450b882f4

[1]https://www.pbs.org/destinationamerica/usim_wn_noflash_5.html#:~:text=Italian%20emigration%20was%20fueled%20by,malnutrition%20and%20disease%20were%20widespread

[2] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2022/global-expansion-authoritarian-rule/reversing-decline-democracy-united-states

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/07/italy-births-far-right-demographic-winter?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jul/16/any-victim-is-a-liar-sexual-violence-scandals-in-italy-expose-deep-seated-sexism

[5] https://fb.watch/nhbdwB9tQq/

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