Thursday,
July 06, 2006
The Pain of No Ethnic
Connection
The ANNOTICO Report
This young lady bemoans the absence of "connection" with a rich Ethnic Cultural Identity. She apparently grew up as a non Italian in an Italian neighborhood. Let Not your children suffer this inner void.
Hyphenated Americans
Cleaning My Closet:
by Meredith Elizabeth Reiniger
From :The Empty Closet
Wednesday, 05 July 2006
I am Mongrel-American. I have
no real ethnic identity. No events celebrated like the ancestors of yore. No
grandmother bent over an ethnic pot of food. No be-aproned
auntie leaning down to the oven door, lifting the sweet aroma of breads just
like in the old country. I never danced to tunes played on foreign fiddles or
flutes, never twirled in a frilly ethnic dress. I never marched in a handmade, wool, old world plaid. All this never-ness was quite a loss for me as a child.
My friends had such joyous connections to distant lands. They were linked to a
magical away-ness where babies and elders looked like
Kodak subjects, where indigenous people lived in National Geographic abodes,
wore colorful native costumes, and dined on exotic foods whose ingredients were
fresh from the farmer's hands into the baskets of mythical matriarchs.
Alas, I was fed with mundane, multi-disguised ground beef while wearing saddle
shoes. I was anguished.
I was a g! irl with no
interesting background. Origin unknown. Some
fore-persons must have immigrated many eons ago, but there are no pictures from
the mother country. No
When I was young, I was rather jealous of my grammar school friends who all had
clear and obvious connections to the mysterious old country. My neighbor friend
was a Marino, and his grandfather had a grape arbor in his yard... in fact, it
was his yard, and he made wine and grew garlic. "Grandpa" to all of
us, he had an interesting ethnic beard and interesting old country pants that
had suspenders to hold them up. In his back pocket, he had a large, red, cotton
handkerchief that he would use to wipe the perspiration from his brow as he
lifted his fascinating ethnic straw hat from his head. I so wanted such a
relative.
My friend Geraldine had a gran! dmother who spoke Italian and made pasta from scratch
which she hung to dry on special pasta clothes-rack-thingies. Very ethnically charming. Another friend lived with her
parents and her single uncle, and a little, bent over grandfather who lived in
a room off their kitchen, and, upstairs, her aunt
Antoinette and husband who had dark, dark black hair.
I believed that the shared housing was part of being a good, foreign family, a
sign of special attachment. Furthermore, those girlfriends were Catholic. So
they both got to wear very pretty, dainty, frilly, lacy, net-y white dresses
for their first holy communion ceremonies. With veils.
But even better, they had a party with a huge sheet cake covered in pink and
yellow frosting roses. Best yet, we could have as many pieces as we wanted.
"Go ahead, eat. Enjoy." That's what all the ethnic-specific mothers
said.
Another deprivation I suffered: my ethnic groups never had a nationally
acknowledged cultural holiday. Only! the Irish have
one.
[RAA Note: Italians Celebrate Columbus Day, AND St Pat was a Roman!!!!!]
In March, people everywhere
seem to want to have temporary Irish citizenship which allows them to wear all
manner of green items, to decorate their bodies, desks, and homes with
shamrocks, and to accompany leprechauns to bars where great quantities of green
beer can be consumed with impunity.
Even if I were German-American, I wouldn't get a
holiday, a day with the whole country wanting to wear leather pants while
eating sauerbraten. Even if I were English-American, there is no nostalgia for
Recently, I have felt the urge for a word to attach to my nationality. I'm not
quite sure how to select a meaningful amendment. It makes sense that persons
with two citizenships would identify themselves with two words, like my
Canadian-American friend! . It makes sense to use two
nationalities in order to connect to relatives who still live Over There, who
invite you to their villa, and who converse with you in their language which
you learned at your immigrant-relative's knee, like my Italian-American friend.
I believe that Americans (should) celebrate the strength of their
ancestors and honor the dignity of their long-ago families born on that
continent by using the hyphenated identifier...
(But) I never met a Swiss-American. I never considered calling myself a
Dutch-American. I could, I suppose, be a German-Dutch-English-American. Never
met a French-American, too adversarial to admit, but (in
this strong feeling to be connected with some degree of ethnicity, I might
consider being a Three-Years-of-High-School-French-American....
MeredithElizabethReiniger@frontiernet.net
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