When Italians Became White: The Exodus Across the Verrazzano
Originally published in Cracks in Postmodernity
I grew up in a non-place.
In my sprawling suburban hometown, my peers enacted a simulation of urban toughness while living in McMansions that were physically a simulation of rural tranquility. And so I came of age with the vague, uneasy suspicion that nothing around me was real, and that everything around me was a crude mockery of something else. This gnawing sensation was only assuaged by narcissistic delusions.
The suburb I speak of is Manalapan, New Jersey, but the United States is filled with non-places that tell a similar story, albeit with different flavors. Mine had an Italian flavor.
Manalapan is known for its Italian community (if “community” is understood in the vague and abstract sense). Most Manalapan kids, like me, had Italian-American Brooklyn-bred parents that fled southward from the big city to offer their children the American dream of placid domesticity. (Manalapan is one of the last stops on the NYC Italian Trail from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, though this Trail is now extending further down to Florida).
On some subconscious level, Manalapan kids rejected this move.
Read the rest of this post on Cracks in Postmodernity.