Articles by: George De stefano

I recently wrote about Finding the Mother Lode, the first-rate new documentary about Italian immigration to California by filmmakers Gianfranco Norelli and Suma Kurien.  Under the new – albeit less evocative – title, Italian Americans in California, the film will be made available as a three-part miniseries to Public Broadcasting System (PBS) stations nationwide on Friday, January 16, 2015, via satellite feed from the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA). 

Preview the three, thirty-minute episodes at the following links using the password “CaliforniaItalians”: 

Episode 1: Finding the Mother Lode 

Episode 2: The Making of Italian San Francisco 

Episode 3: Little Italys and Beyond 

Italian Americans in California had its Public Broadcasting System (PBS) premiere December 24, on KVIE-Sacramento. Other PBS stations, however, will decide to broadcast it based on audience interest. So if you would like to see this important film get the exposure it deserves, contact your local PBS affiliate and voice your support.

To find your local PBS affiliate, visit the PBS website.

The first documentary to recount the story of the Italian Americans of California, the film focuses on seven communities where Italian immigrants settled and built communities: San Francisco, Sonoma County, Amador County, Stockton, Monterey, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Italian American history in California began with the Gold Rush of 1849-50. Italian Americans in California starts there, and goes on to depict important milestones through the first-person accounts of individuals, woven together with comments from scholars who provide historical and social context. The film not only shows the challenges the immigrants to California faced and their achievement of remarkable social and economic success. It also examines how ethnic identity is both maintained and transformed with the passage of time. 

Pane Amaro, an earlier documentary by Norelli and Kurien, focused on the experiences of southern Italian immigrants to the East Coast of the United States. Italian Americans in California tells a strikingly different story, one that is indispensable for a fuller understanding of the epic, and ongoing history of Italian immigration to America. 

“California is not what people generally think of when they think about the Italian immigrant experience,” remarked Suma Kurien after a screening of Finding the Mother Lode, the new documentary she produced and wrote with her husband, Gianfranco Norelli, who also directed. 

The filmmakers presented and discussed their latest work, which will be aired as a three-part miniseries on the Public Broadcasting System in February, at a December 15 event at New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò.

The documentary is a companion piece to their acclaimed 2007 film, Pane Amaro, which portrayed the Italian immigrant experience on the East Coast.

Kurien said that when they showed Pane Amaro to Italian American Californians, they said, “Great film. But it’s not our story." 

Intrigued, the filmmakers decided that their next work would tell that lesser-known story of Italian immigrant experience in California, which markedly differs from the more familiar East Coast narrative. The result of three years’ research – and sixty hours of filming – is an engrossing, revealing, and beautifully made work. Finding the Mother Lode eschews the clichés of ethnic documentaries (the triumphalist narrative of immigrants achieving the “American Dream” and the focus on outstanding individuals, usually men) to provide a more complex account of the California immigrant experience.

Prominenti do appear in the film. They include Amadeo Giannini, the California-born son of immigrants who founded the Bank of Italy, later the Bank of America; Andrea Sbarbaro and Pietro Carlo Rossi, the founder and director of the Italian Swiss Colony winery; and newspaper publisher Ettore Patrizi, who paid dearly for his ardent support of Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship. Joe di Maggio also makes a brief appearance.

But the filmmakers wisely concentrate on how the immigrants achieved remarkable economic and social mobility in the Golden State, using the skills and experience they brought with them from Italy, and how their status as white Europeans fostered their assimilation. The film’s exploration of the Italian experience in California moves from Sutter Creek to San Francisco, to Stockton, Monterey, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

Italians first came to California in large numbers during the Gold Rush of 1849-1850. Most who tried to find gold did not succeed, and they instead became farmers, fishermen, bankers, lumberjacks, winemakers, construction workers, merchants, and entrepreneurs.

Unlike the majority of Italian immigrants to the East Coast, who came from Italy’s south, the earliest immigrants to California came from northern regions, mainly Tuscany and Liguria. (One of the film’s interviewees jokes that a “mixed marriage” meant one between a Tuscan and a Ligurian.) They generally had higher rates of literacy and were more skilled. Many of them – more than forty percent – chose to settle in rural areas, whereas only about eight percent of East Coast immigrants did so. They hastened to become naturalized citizens so that they could own land in northern California, where the climate was similar to that of the places they had left.  

In Pane Amaro, Norelli and Kurien depicted the discrimination southern Italian immigrants faced when they arrived. But the northern Italians who constituted the majority of the early arrivals to California generally were welcomed by the native, Anglo-Saxon population. They enjoyed white privilege – unlike Chinese or Mexicans, they could own land. Moreover, some practiced discrimination against other immigrants – the Italian Swiss Colony winery refused to hire Chinese workers.

But Finding the Mother Lode highlights two historical incidents that demonstrated that the snake of anti-Italian prejudice lurked even in sunny California, the state that folksinger Woody Guthrie described as a “garden of Eden.”

In 1909, Italian immigrant workers at the McCloud River Lumber Company went on strike to protest wage cuts and discriminatory practices by the company’s mangers, including segregated housing in the lumber camps and higher prices in the company store. Although they made up two-thirds of the McCloud workforce, the Italians were subjected to repeated slights, insults, and abuses from other workers. The two-week strike ended when Governor J.N. Gillet sent in the California National Guard to break it – the first such occurrence in the United States.

Norelli, during the discussion after the Casa Italia screening, noted that the McCloud strikers were immigrants from northern and southern Italy (Calabria and Sicily). He said the company tried to exacerbate divisions between the two groups, even offering “white” status to the northerners if they would end the strike and return to work. Instead, as Norelli noted, “The northern and southern workers stuck together, as they did in other strikes,” such as the 1913 strike by textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey.

During the World War II era, Italians in California came under scrutiny as potential “enemy aliens” – even San Francisco’s American-born mayor Angelo Rossi was considered suspect. In 1942, some 1,800 Italian-born Californians were taken into custody and detained under wartime restrictions; others were relocated outside California. Their fate, however, was far less harsh than that of Japanese Americans. Unlike the Italians, who were deemed “enemy aliens” for only nine months and who were mostly non-naturalized California residents, the Japanese – some 120,000, most of them U.S. citizens – were forcibly relocated to internment camps for the duration of the war, losing their homes and livelihoods.

Finding the Mother Lode presents two types of ethnic consciousness, one epitomized by those immigrants (and their descendants) who, seeking to preserve and transmit their culture, married only their paesani/paesane. Another, more expansive ethnicity is embodied in the figure of Sabato “Simon” Rodia, an immigrant laborer from Campania who, working for more than thirty years, built the Watts Towers – seventeen interconnected sculpture-like structures, the tallest reaching nearly 100 feet, in the eponymous, working class Los Angeles neighborhood populated mainly by African Americans, Latinos and Asians. Rodia called his masterwork – which has been designated a National Historical Landmark – “Nuestro Pueblo” (“Our Town”). His Spanish-named installation is decorated with found objects and designs reflecting various cultures; one of the towers, the "ship of Marco Polo,” has a twenty-eight-foot spire.

Suma Kurien remarked that while planning Finding the Mother Lode, she and Gianfranco Norelli wanted to “explore how one lives in a multiethnic, multicultural society and maintains one’s culture.” Some, Kurien said, did this by marrying only other Italians. Sabato Rodia, she said, “was able to hold on to his Italian identity and heritage in the midst of a very multiethnic community, to be a part of that community, and build a ‘nuestro pueblo’ with a place for everyone.”

Kurien – born in India, raised in Africa, and a New Yorker for decades, the partner and collaborator of an Italian immigrant, and a fluent speaker of Italian – said that Rodia’s way “certainly speaks to me.” 

PBS will broadcast Finding the Mother Lode in three, thirty-minute segments in February 2015. Check local station listings for details.

The full-length, 104-minute version of Finding the Mother Lode is available on DVD from Amazon.

Cosimo Matassa, who died September 11 at age 88, was a son of Sicilian immigrants to New Orleans who, like so many of their connazionali, settled in a working-class, multiethnic French Quarter neighborhood. Matassa became a pivotal figure in American vernacular music through his role in creating “the New Orleans sound” in his recording studios. According to music historian Jeff Hannusch, “Virtually every rhythm and blues record made in New Orleans between the late 1940s and early 1970s was engineered by Cosimo Matassa, and recorded in one of his four studios.” Matassa made hit records with many renowned African American artists, including Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, Big Joe Turner, Roy Brown, Little Richard, Irma Thomas, Lee Dorsey, Aaron Neville, Smiley Lewis, Guitar Slim, Ernie K. Doe, Lloyd Price, Clarence “Frogman” Henry and Roy “Professor Longhair” Byrd. 

Matassa collaborated with some of New Orleans’ best musical minds, including the bandleaderand arranger Dave Bartholomew, whom Matassa called his best friend; pianist, songwriter, and arranger Allen Toussaint; the drummer Earl Palmer, who invented the rock ‘n roll backbeat; pianists Huey “Piano” Smith, James Booker, and Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack, and the saxophonists Lee Allen, Herb Hardesty and Alvin “Red” Taylor.  

The night before Matassa died in a New Orleans hospital after a long illness, Toussaint and Bartholomew were at his bedside to say their farewells to "Cos," their longtime friend and collaborator. "Cosimo was the doorway and window to the world for us musicians in New Orleans," Allen Toussaint told the New Orleans Picayune. "An expert, with a lot of heart and soul. When the Beatles heard Fats Domino, they heard him via Cosimo Matassa. He touched the whole world." 

Matassa wasn't a musician, and he always was modest about his role in the creation and development of the New Orleans sound. He told interviewers that he was a “facilitator” who strove to “get the performance and the performer on the tape with the least interference and the least resistance.” But his contributions far exceeded that. “Cosimo built the institution where we musicians all had to go through. It was our university. We all came through Cosimo,” said Toussaint. In his biography, Backbeat, Earl Palmer, recalling the early days of his work with Matassa, said, “I think Cosimo was a genius. I’ve seen engineers use two dozen mikes to get the sound he got with three. He knew how to position mikes and he knew each mike like it was a person.” 

Challenging Racial Barriers

But Matassa wasn’t only a recording engineer, studio owner, and producer. He also was a cultural broker who introduced African American artists, marginalized by music industry and societal racism, to a broader audience. Matassa didn’t consciously aim to challenge racial barriers. “We didn’t intentionally seek out black artists in those days,” he said. “I grew up in the French Quarter where blacks and whites lived side by side. We didn’t have black neighbors or white neighbors; they were just neighbors. We were integrated -- we just didn't know it.” 

According to jazz scholar Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Matassa was “among those who grew up in New Orleans and responded to the cultural opportunities that the environment provided. In his case, as in so many others, the process of attraction to black culture was a result of his daily experiences in the neighborhood where he grew up.”

In other American cities where African Americans and Italian Americans were in close proximity, there have been conflicts, sometimes violent, between the two communities. But Cosimo Matassa remembers the French Quarter as a neighborhood where blacks and Italians (the latter predominantly Sicilians) lived “cheek by jowl” and even shared traditions, such as St. Joseph’s Day celebrations.  

Matassa was aware that his association with African American recording artists did not endear him to “respectable” white society. “The uptown folks thought of me as the ‘nigger studio,’” he recalled. “Even though I did people like Pete Fountain and Al Hirt, what stuck was that I worked with blacks. The studio was never in the newspapers, there were no tea dansants for me. An Italian was kind of an outcast down there, too.”  

Cosimo Matassa’s life and career represent an aspect of New Orleans history that has yet to receive its full due: the role of Sicilian immigrants and their descendants in shaping the Crescent City’s unique and celebrated culture. Like the popular entertainer Louis Prima, Cosimo Matassa was born in New Orleans to Sicilian immigrants and grew up in the French Quarter. Matassa’s father, Giovanni Cosimo Matassa, emigrated from Cefalu, Sicily in 1910; his mother, Domenica Leto, had arrived earlier, from Palermo.  

When Matassa was growing up, the French Quarter was full of music. His uncle, Vincent Matassa, was a clarinetist who played in New Orleans Italian brass bands. His mother’s family was even more musically inclined; her sister Cicetta played piano in what Cosimo calls their family band; Cicetta’s husband, Joseph Di Guardi, was the band’s clarinetist. “I came up hearing the mazurkas, polkas and schottisches and marches," he recalled in a 1993 interview. "And of course I also heard them because in those days the jazz bands on the streets played them a lot more than they do now.”  

In 1924, Matassa’s father bought a grocery store at the corner of Dauphine and St. Phillip streets. The senior Matassa, by then known as John, also owned a saloon. There young Cosimo first heard commercial music on his father’s jukeboxes. He also was exposed to racial segregation, since his father’s saloon actually was two establishments, one for whites, and one for blacks. 

“His arrangement was unique,” Cosimo recalled. “The wall between them had an arch big enough for a wide door and they built a phone booth in that. So the telephone was accessible to either one. There was a door on each side of the phone booth. Imagine a phone booth with a door on each side. That’s the way it was. And it was a jukebox in the white bar and it was a jukebox in the black bar. So I got to hear country tunes, blues tunes, the whole thing. I was hearing what black people listened to and what working class white people listened to at the same time.”  

After graduating from high school, Matassa went to Tulane University to study chemistry. But after two years, he decided that field wasn’t for him. He went to work for a jukebox company, J&M Amusement Service, which his father co-owned. He also enrolled in the Gulf Radio School for several months, where he learned “basic electronic circuitry,” enabling him to repair jukeboxes. In 1945, the company, renamed the J&M Music Shop, and the building that housed it extensively renovated, began selling new and used records, home phonographs and radios.  

Making Musical History

A small backroom in the J&M Music Shop became Cosimo’s first recording studio. Earl Palmer recalled that the studio “was hardly bigger than a bedroom. Everyone faced Cos, who was in the little bitty booth. Cos never had an assistant; he came in and out and set them mikes himself.”

One of Matassa’s first recordings was “Pizza Pie Boogie,” a novelty tune by New Orleans jazz trumpeter Joseph “Sharkey” Bonano and his Kings of Dixieland.  

In 1947, singer Roy Brown recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight," the song that popularized the term "rockin,'" at J&M Studios. Two years later, on December 10, 1949, a twenty-one-year-old Antoine "Fats" Domino cut eight songs in J&M's tiny back room, including his first single, "The Fat Man." The record reached number one on the Rhythm and Blues charts, launching both Domino’s career and what has come to be called “the golden age” of New Orleans R&B. In 1956, Matassa relocated his studio to 523 Governor Nicholls Street; two years later, he moved the studio to 525 Governor Nicholls when a building at that address, formerly a cold-storage warehouse, became available.  

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the hits just kept rolling out of Matassa’s studio – “Tutti Frutti,” “Lucille,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’” by Little Richard; “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price; “Ain’t Got No Home” and “I’m a Country Boy” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry; “I Hear You Knocking” by Smiley Lewis; “My Blue Heaven” and “I’m in Love Again” by Fats Domino; “The Things That I Used to Do” by Guitar Slim; “Tipitina” by Professor Longhair; “It’s Raining’ by Irma Thomas; “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” by Huey “Piano” Smith;  “Ya Ya” and “Working in the Coal Mine” by Lee Dorsey; “Sea Cruise” by Frankie Ford; “Tell it Like it Is” by Aaron Neville, and many more. 

The British label Proper Records has released two, four-disk boxed sets of Matassa’s recordings, The Cosimo Matassa Story, (2007), and The Cosimo Matassa Story Vol. 2 (2012). The two compilations total 229 recordings, and although not every track is first-rate, even the lesser ones are full of the exuberant spirit and rhythmic excitement that characterized “classic” New Orleans rhythm and blues and rock ‘n roll.  Not only that – The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other British rock groups covered songs recorded in Matassa’s studios, so, as Allen Tousssaint observed, his work also influenced the 1960's British Invasion. 

Matassa relocated his studio once again in the mid-60's, to Camp Street. But by this time, popular tastes were changing. The last major national hits to come from Matassa’s studio all were recorded in 1966 – Lee Dorsey’s “Workin’ in the Coal Mine,” Robert Parker’s “Barefootin’” and Aaron Neville’s “Tell it Like it Is.”  Several independent record labels that had recorded at Matassa’s studios went bankrupt and couldn’t pay for their sessions, and New Orleans banks refused to make loans to Matassa. The IRS eventually confiscated his studio for nonpayment of taxes and auctioned off the equipment. 

As that unfortunate outcome makes evident, Cosimo Matassa did not get rich from his work as a studio owner and recording engineer. He estimated, in fact, that he lost more than $200,000 over the years. Bruce Boyd Raeburn observes, “Cosimo never got the backing he needed locally to capitalize on the hits he produced, so they had to be licensed elsewhere for distribution, which meant the big money also went elsewhere. Local bankers were not about to invest in collaborations between Sicilians and blacks.” 

Retirement and Recognition

Matassa continued to work as a recording engineer at Sea Saint Studio, owned and operated by his friend Allen Toussaint and Marshall Sehorn. He retired from music and, in the 1980s, returned to the grocery business. In 1999, fifty years after Fats Domino recorded “The Fat Man,” Matassa’s studio at Rampart and Dumaine streets was declared a historic landmark. Today, it is a laundromat, but photographs lining the walls commemorate the building’s storied history as the foundry from which emerged so many hits that would change the course of American popular music. 

In recent years, Matassa received more of the recognition his accomplishments merited. In 2007, he was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame and received a Grammy Trustees Award from The Recording Academy. The following year, the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award, in a ceremony held in New Orleans's Piazza d’Italia. In 2012, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received its Award for Musical Excellence. 

Bruce Boyd Raeburn agrees with Matassa’s description of himself as a “facilitator.” “He wasn’t musical himself,” says Raeburn. “But he loved to fiddle with gadgets and he was attracted to black music. He ‘produced’ by creating a place where black musicians like Professor Longhair and Earl Palmer and Little Richard could do their thing, and he was willing to put in the time, money and ingenuity to experiment until they found the sound they were all looking for." 

"Without him, the history of American popular music would look very different.”

"The past is never dead. It's not even past," wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. The author’s famous observation fits one of the most ignominious events in recent Italian history – the decision to honor a Fascist war criminal with a mausoleum and park, built with taxpayers’ money.

In 2012, the right-wing administration of Affile, a village east of Rome, dedicated the memorial
to Rodolfo Graziani, a general who was known as the “Butcher of Ethiopia” for the war crimes he committed while leading the military campaigns of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

In 1935, Mussolini sent Graziani to invade Ethiopia. The Italian troops, with their superior weaponry and use of mustard gas, defeated Ethiopia’s army in less than a year. Italy’s dictator made Graziani the Viceroy of Italian East Africa, which comprised conquered territories in Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia. After Ethiopian resistance fighters tried to assassinate Graziani in 1937, the general ordered a swift and ferocious reprisal against civilian populations. Thousands of Ethiopians subsequently were massacred or imprisoned.

But Graziani’s Ethiopian atrocities weren’t the first he committed on the continent. In the 1920s, while leading Italian forces in Libya, he brutally suppressed an anti-colonial uprising, imprisoning and killing thousands of Libyans, earning him the nickname “the Butcher of Fezzan.”

After Mussolini’s dictatorship fell in 1943, Graziani, still loyal to il Duce, became the minister of war of the Italian Social Republic, the rump Fascist government set up by the Germans in Salò, and, along with Nazi troops, fought the Allied forces in Italy. After the war an Italian court sentenced Graziani to 19 years in prison for collaborating with the Nazis, but he received a suspended sentence that was later commuted because his attorneys convinced a court that Graziani had “acted under orders.” His crimes in Africa went entirely unpunished.

Unpunished, but not forgotten. Valerio Ciriaci, a young filmmaker from Rome now living in New York, is making a documentary, If Only I Were That Warrior, which focuses on Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia. Ciriaci, and producer Isaak Liptzin of the independent production company Awen Films, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to complete the film. Donations will help cover expenses such as airfare, equipment rental, and interpretation. The campaign, which began in February, ends March 21.

I recently interviewed Ciriaci about If Only I Were That Warrior. The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Why did you decide to make this film? I know that the monument to Graziani in Italy inspired it. But why was it important for you to address this issue, in a documentary?

I felt it was important to make a film that could take an unprecedented look at the brutality of the Fascist invasion in Ethiopia. Though Italy’s uncomfortable relationship with its colonial past has been challenged by some historians and intellectuals, the events that took place during Mussolini’s campaigns in Africa never became part of a widespread public consciousness. The lack of coverage in the media, in conjunction with the nostalgic sentiments of those who took part in the invasion, led to imprecise and mythologized representations of the occupation of Ethiopia. And the monument to Graziani proved that the issue is very urgent.

The film is set in Ethiopia, Italy, New York and Dallas. Can you talk a bit about what each place represents in the film, and what can viewers expect to see in those geographic segments? 

The four places correspond to the four main characters we follow in this journey. They represent four different communities: Italians in Ethiopia, Ethiopians in Italy, and Italians and Ethiopians in the United States. Each of these communities helped us tell a part of this history: the propaganda that led Italians to support the invasion, the war crimes committed during the occupation in Ethiopia, the subsequent attempts of revisionism in Italy, and the events surrounding the construction of the monument to Graziani. Our viewers will see different landscapes and hear different languages, but they will also recognize a common narrative: these communities abroad formed as people left their native countries in search of better lives. We find stories of integration and stories of isolation, the result of different cultures brought together by the currents of history. 
 

What kinds of reactions have you gotten to this project, from both Ethiopians and Italians? I would imagine Ethiopians are more aware of this history than Italians. 

Yes. Especially the Ethiopian community in the U.S., which has been incredibly supportive of our work since the beginning. In fact they were the most active in opposing the monument to Graziani, and organized protests all around the world. In Italy the issue of the Ethiopian occupation is not discussed much, but we have received support from members of anti-Fascist organizations such as ANPI (National Association of the Italian Partisans). In Affile itself there were mixed reactions — some people were suspicious of yet another film crew coming to the town attracted by the monument, but others welcomed our presence and appreciated our desire to learn more about their side of the story.

What is the contemporary relevance of this story? Why is it important for people to know about what Italy did in Ethiopia?

The Italian-Ethiopian conflict still has repercussions today. It became evident when the monument to Graziani provoked such strong reactions all around the world. And, unexpectedly perhaps for those who chose to build it, the monument has brought the subject of Italian colonialism back into the press and into a wider public conversation. Our film aims to become a part of this conversation, seizing this unique opportunity to clarify the facts of the past and dispel the myths accumulated over decades of revisionism. We believe that this film can help keep alive the memory of Fascist war crimes, and in so doing be an important reminder that we have to work to defend our democratic values from the existential threat posed by xenophobic and militaristic ideals. 

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Visit Awen Films’ Kickstarter page to learn about the fundraising campaign and to make donations. For more information: If Only I Were That Warrior