While most of the description of the festa centers on Italian Harlem and its dwellers, Orsi makes a brief yet fascinating sojourn detour in which he describes how the festa fit into American history. Religious authority in Italian Harlem wanted recognition from the Vatican, and the immigrants themselves wanted recognition as part of New York’s longstanding fabric. Father Tofini’s appeal to the Pope stated that the Madonna deserved a crown because she was of “longstanding antiquity”—even though the festa was only two decades old at that point. According to Tofini, this was barely a generation by European standards but was an era by American ones.
This got me thinking about how we view our own history. Americans have the most abbreviated history of perhaps any country. We tend to disregard Native Americans and Spanish colonization and begin with the English settlers of Jamestown. This gives us barely five hundred years to work with, and is probably the reason why we tend to view very small periods of time as being entire epochs. More importantly, it is probably why we develop such a personal connection to our political figures. The reason we constantly reference the Founding Fathers in our political discourse is that they did not die all that long ago. In our language, in the way we constantly ask ourselves what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, we portray them not as founding legislators but as scarcely deceased grandparents. Tofini was right. The American conception of time is very zoomed in, affixed to details, able to extrapolate huge themes and epic struggles from short amounts of time.
The other thing which interested me was Orsi’s idea of a female spiritual hierarchy. The Italian immigrants were obsessed with the image of the suffering mother, and they sought to live that image whenever possible. To be a woman, married or unmarried, was then to experience constant pressure and to be expected to endure it for the sake of the domus and the community. This, more than anything else, was the ideal trait of a woman in Italian Harlem: the ability to suffer unceasingly without complaint. It is strange that the Madonna, who provided the template by which the community subjected women to such pressure, also served as a spiritual friend to those same women.
