Green, White, and Red: The Italian-American Success Story by Dominic J. Pulera. L’Italo-Americano: San Marino, 2009.
In 1955 Dominic Pulera graduated a magna cum laude from Beloit College, Wisconsin, in history. Pulera is a speaker and international business consultant. His other works include Visible Differences: Why Race Will Matter to Americans in the Twenty-First Century and Sharing the Dream: White Males in Multicultural America. In fifteen chapters, Green, White, and Red covers familiar ground, the success of Italians in America, from the Great Migration, marriage, and language to Italian neighborhoods and religion.
In the process he touches on Italian American history, Italians in the arts, and Italian Americans and race. For his information on Italian American success, Pulera has interviewed hundreds of Italian Americans throughout the United States. As a result Green, White, and Red is filled chapter after chapter with anecdotal information about Italian American life and history.
The voices of the people who speak throughout are authentic and offer information about the state and location of Italian American life that should prove interesting to the general reader. As background to his interviews, Pulera cites figures from the 2000 census published by Order of the Suns of Italy, U.S. Census Records, and the extensive research published in The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, edited by Salvatore LaGumina.
His extensive note pages also cite well-known regional studies on Italian Americans throughout the United States. He interviewed California and Italian immigrant historian Prof. Gloria Ricci Lothrop and does cite, remarkable for most popular commentators on Italian American culture, Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II, ed. By Lawrence DiStasi.
He addresses in passing the discourse over Italian Americans’ ambiguous, historical racial status covered in recent publications, such as Are Italians White? ed. by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno and White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 by Thomas Guglielmo. Pulera documents not just Italians’ success across the social spectrum, but also their wide-spread disbursement in nearly every state in the union. This is always an interesting subject.
The American public in general, and surprisingly Italian Americans as well, associate Italian Americans only with Brooklyn, and perhaps a few other urban centers, such as San Francisco or Chicago. For example, Pulera points out, as any historian of twentieth-century immigration is aware, that Italian immigrants were a central feature of Mormon Utah, a subject documented extensively by Prof. Philip Notarianni in dozens of articles on Italian immigrants in Utah’s mining district and surrounding towns and cities.
My grandparents settled in Provo, Utah, where my grandfather, at the age of forty-one, died of black lung disease. My widowed grandmother at age thirty-nine was left with four daughters, ages six months to twelve years, to raise on her own. With her four daughters, my grandmother, Rosa, followed relatives to Fresno’s Italian immigrant community, the West Side, where she settled and worked, along with my mother and her sisters, as an itinerate cannery worker and farm laborer for over thirty years.
Never marrying and before she died, at the age of fifty-four, Rosa saved enough money from her cannery and farm labor work to build a two-bedroom, seven- room home for the last of her two unmarried daughters, my mother and her younger sister. These are the types of tales that Pulera tells. They are as inexplicable as they are inspiring. The early immigrants accomplished much against great odds, without education or English-language skills, while shouldering family responsibilities.
Otherwise, Pulera locates Italian American success in the usual places, from San Francisco’s North Beach to New York’s Brooklyn. He also interviews residents of dozens of small hamlets in between. He interviews Robert Barbera, publisher of L’Italo-Americano, and publisher of Green, White, and Red. He covers Barbera’s considerable success in commercial real estate in Southern California and the numerous Italian American causes he has championed and funded over the years, from Italian programs at California State University at Northridge and Pepperdine University to his ownership of I’talo-Americano.
Worth mentioning among other successful Southern California Italian Americans is George Graziadio, who funded both the George Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University and the George Graziadio Center for Italian Studies at California State University at Long Beach. Graziadio has also contributed to the Italian program at Pepperdine. The Graziadio Chair at CSULB is among the most important Italian programs in the country.
It is the brainchild of Professor Irene Marchegiani, who initiated the chair in order to build the Italian language program. After the chair was established, Prof. Marchegiani, now professor of Italian at SUNY, Stony Brook, built the program from fifty students to more than one-hundred and twenty- five. Graziadio provided the majority of the funding while many Southern California Italian Americans contributed funds as well. Unfortunately, Graziadio is not listed in the index of the book.
However, Coppola’s gangland characters from the Godfather films do get a listing. It is difficult for even Italian Americans to avoid the subject, given its popularity in American culture. Also worth mentioning is the Orange County Sons of Italy Renaissance Lodge and Renaissance Foundation, which contributes scholarships each year for the CSLB Center for Italian Studies. The Renaissance Foundation has made a tremendous contribution to Southern California, especially to Orange County.
In 1992 The O.C. Renaissance Foundation contributed over $250,000 to the Bowers Museum for Italian cultural programs. Frank De Santis, past president of the Renaissance Foundation, was also instrumental in raising the large sums of money for the Graziadio Center for Italian Studies. Green, White, and Red is an entertaining read and contains a great deal of information not otherwise available in the general media.
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Kenneth Scambray is the author of A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (U. of Pittsburgh P., 1987), and The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Guernica, 2000), and Surface Roots: Stories (Guernica, 2004). His most recent book is entitled Queen Calafía’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). He has been book critic for L’Italo-Americano since 1978. In 2007 he won the Editor’s Choice Award for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize for his poem “Piece Work” awarded each year by the Paterson Literary Review. He is currently at work on a project on Italians in the West.
