October 8, 2003

opinion

AS A SOUTHERN -Italian American from a working-class Little Italy in South Philly, I have serious problems with celebrating Columbus Day. Not only is his legacy a fraud – that is, he "discovered" a land that was already occupied for thousands of years – but also he sailed for Spain, not southern Italy (or the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, as it was then sometimes called).

It's time for Italian Americans to dump this conquistador and honor instead the legacy of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two radicals from southern Italy who fought for the working people and who were executed in the electric chair in Massachusetts Aug. 23, 1927, falsely accused of a murder they did not commit.

During the trial, Judge Webster Thayer referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as "dagos," a derogatory term for Italians. After the pair's execution, Italian Americans took to the streets in protest, resulting in many arrests. Now, more than 80 years later, these two radicals are all but forgotten by the Italian American community and also by many leftists. Why is that?

I understand why Italians in this country would embrace Columbus. When we arrived here, we were the dark barbarians, considered members of a separate race from the Anglo majority (in fact, at that time our government classified humans into nine races). No Italians Need Apply signs greeted us when we looked for work. In the South, we were lynched. In 1924, southern Italian immigration was cut off, in part out of fear that southern Italian influence would bring down Anglo-Saxon culture. It makes sense Columbus would be a status symbol to a group that needed a way to prove its worth in this country.

What more powerful symbol than the very man who "discovered" the country?

I have nothing against ethnic pride. I am proud to be southern Italian. I think all ethnic groups should have their moments in the limelight. But for Italian Americans, it's best to forget the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

There's nothing heroic or inspiring about Columbus's exploits in the "New World" – unless you like murder and subjugation. What followed from Columbus's "discovery" was hundreds of years of forced Christianization of native cultures, the slaughter of the buffalo, and the destruction of many of the land's natural resources, not to mention the enslavement of African Americans and the sequestering of Native Americans to reservations.

Sacco and Vanzetti, on the other hand, believed in the kind of revolutionary changes many of us do. They fought for decent wages and working conditions for workers. They wanted to redistribute the wealth. They were, in our modern sense, working-class heroes. And they died for it. Can there be any doubt that, had they not been "Guineas" from the wrong part of Italy, they would not have been found guilty of anything? They were victims of the kind of ethnic profiling that is still a popular sport in America: whether it's African Americans being stopped along the highways or Arab and South Asian men being rounded up on suspicion of being "terrorists."

I want Sacco and Vanzetti to inspire young Italian Americans, and young people in general, to fight for economic and social justice (as Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez do). I want their stories to be known throughout the streets of America, especially in the Little Italys. I want a day on which we remember their legacy, perhaps Aug. 23, the day they died. I want them to be the first names people think of when they think of Italian American pride in this country.

Not Christopher Columbus.