Maria Laurino > Quotes

“At the heart of being a second-generation American meant feeling the shame of your heritage and the sting of family betrayal, creating an inner turmoil from which one never fully escaped.”
― Maria Laurino, The Italian Americans: A History

“It seems a lost opportunity that Capra didn’t give George Bailey, or the Giannini-inspired idealistic bank president in his film American Madness, an Italian surname. The next time a great Italian-American filmmaker, one who established his career in San Francisco, would portray a member of the community, the character would be the fictional antihero Vito Corleone, whose name would penetrate the nation’s collective memory far deeper than that of A. P. Giannini.”
― Maria Laurino, The Italian Americans: A History

“Becoming American meant rejecting one of the two worlds. It meant trying to hide the grease stains saturating the paper in which your school lunch of a fried potato and egg sandwich on crusty bread was wrapped, while the rest of your classmates ate ham on white bread with mayonnaise.”
― Maria Laurino, The Italian Americans: A History

“Becoming American meant hearing slurs that now defined you and your people: dago, wop, guinea, spaghetti bender.”
― Maria Laurino, The Italian Americans: A History

“We soon got the idea that ‘Italian’ meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization,” Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. “We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents.”
― Maria Laurino, The Italian Americans: A History

“some households needing to produce each month for their mothers the bloody sanitary napkin as proof of their purity.”
― Maria Laurino, The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice