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October 8, 2007
Caroline Ranzini Stelzer represents embodies the ideal of the transformation that has occurred to our migrants during their new life process in ten various parts of the world. She grew up in the mostly Lombard neighborhood of the Hill, the so called Montagna in St. Louis, Missouri and she has managed to balance her existence by amalgamating the Italians and American culture. She is the niece of migrants from Castelletto di Cuggiono and she has never searched for her roots because she has never felt the urge to hide them. She has realized to be strong by being an American of Italian descent and the symbiosis of the two belongings has proved positive. No loss of identity but rather transformation. Jack her American husband has enhanced her Italianness since her Italian heritage has not been erased and Jack’s American ones has been a personal choice. Her children and grand-children have grown up in America, once so far away from Italy, are American. It was inevitable. It’s no use asking why they don’t speak Italian, why they don’t understand the value of Italy. Questions. Many questions. The same we ask perhaps the Veneti or the Sicilians born in Milano who ignore the language and the land of their fathers. Again, inevitable. People study and at the end, culture and knowledge are what remains after this process. However, Americans of Italian descent, yea, they are. And it’s not only a surname, a particular dish or a trip to the village where the grandparents were born as some claim. The same grandparents they never met and who had no chance to tell the story of their life to their grandchildren. Thought about migration. Learning how to survive. And then what is worth loosing the language of a country that has forced you to flee. Some cling to the past but sometimes the present and the future are easier when one adapts to the new situation. Functionality. The, one day, all this reasoning reaches cross-roads. Some people just let go, other trigger the mechanism of introspection and search of identity. American have fully embraced them, otherwise the numberless genealogy website would be meaningless, all the documentation you can find about almost everything and everybody. This desire to put one’s hands over a past that is running away but which is a part of life. This anxiety to answer the fact of living in St. Louis rather than Cuggiono. On the hill the rite of passage has been less painful and tragic than others. The group turned community around the church, the Italian churches has hold up. Maybe it didn’t easily attained the economic American dream but it has maintained a balance which has remained intact in their children and grandchildren, who continue to observe life with different values most of all in relation to the family, upbringing and work. And the new American of Italian descent are continually transforming because many neighborhoods have broken up or as in the case of the Hill more newcomers settle there with a will to adopt its way of life. Cuggiono tries to understand these Americans, the descendants of the hundreds who left to build another social environment in America. We have seen them in part, we have known them in part, and we have studied them in part. In Cuggiono, an exhibit in Cuggiono in the new premises of the Ecoistituto della valle del Ticino attempt to throw a bridge. A historical and sturdy one like the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi in St. Louis. Caroline tells me that her grandfather Gerolamo Rossi was there in 1873 working at its construction. An exhibit in Cuggiono with the remnants of a history in transit. Explicative frames, newspapers, magazines, photographs, badges of various fraternal orders, marriage certificates, naturalization records, mines. Fragment of nearly untold lives. Caroline Ranzini Stelzer and Gloria Griffero. Witnesses of an era, makers of a seldom narrated history. Women of valiance. Women who have handed down their heritage. Roses. Thick crowd, ready to understand. Ties to be re-established. Dollars with the blue mark. Understanding and not comprehending. Mayor this time without the band, but inside recalling St. Louis. The words of Renato in Il Ballo in Maschera. by Verdi. Caroline and her broken voice overwhelmed by her emotion while addressing who is waiting for a fluid. Agonizing farewells. Final farewells. Long farewells. Gare St. Lazare. Le Havre. Illinois Central. Endless transfers. Crying before joy. Dawn. Dawn. Everything flowing in dissolution in front of the eyes. Then Caroline’s’ syncopated words scatter along the nave and propagate all over Cuggiono: You are my splendid homeland and here lie the souls of our migrants and also our souls._ |