Who Am You?

Michael Borrello
MHC Seminar 102
Professor Rosenblum
February 23, 2016
Our self identity and our personal history are constantly in an intricate dance describing who one is and where one came from. In today’s world, my family is successful and most definitely living the dream such that all of my family is employed making names for themselves and my generation is college bound, becoming professionals in our desired area of study. Looking back in my personal history, this was clearly not always the case which is why I identify closely which my Italian and Czechoslovakian ancestry and give homage to both sides of my family, each of which had broken traditional boundaries to come live in America.
I know less about my maternal immigration history most likely due to the circumstances in which the emigration took place. Stories were lost and relearn from second hand information and therefore skews the personal history and replaces it with documented history. Nevertheless, the Czechoslovakian stories told by my maternal grandpa still hold a majority of the family history. My maternal grandfather’s parents both came over from Czechoslovakia, not at the same time though. His mother came over when she was nearly an adult, whereas his father came over when he was twelve years old. Both of my great-grandparents came over for the same reason which was to escape the future spread of communistic views and leadership. A majority of the reason my Eastern European background came to America was solely to escape the impending issues that were to come in the near future.
As for the assimilation, my great-grandparents had very different stories. For my assimilating great-grandfather, he became more attuned to the “American” culture, finding identity in his neighborhood on the East side and learning American customs and games. My great-grandmother had a much different story of assimilation such that she had very little grasp of the English language yet had to find a way in her adult world. My great-grandparents met in living their day to day lives, finding happiness in the fact that they shared similar roots and practices similar traditions. They stayed on the East side, 66th and 2nd, and had a family where my maternal grandpa was the first born American citizen of the family.
My maternal grandmother’s story was unfortunately lost as a result of what happened in her life. She was born in America as a daughter of two Slovaks. Her father left the family early on in life and her mother passed away at an early age, leaving my grandmother to grow up all on her own. She had relatives in America already but they did not care for her much at all. So due to the unfortunate circumstances that aggregate to my grandmother’s childhood, we do not have much of her family’s immigration history. One could infer that this is one of the more extreme examples of how awful it can be to enter a new life in a new country, only to destroy the life of another life brought into the world.
Unlike my Czechoslovakian ancestry, my Italian background is very well known and very specific. In fact, I believe my grandmother is rolling in her grave right now that I called my paternal ancestry “Italian” and not Sicilian. Both grandparents were born in America which makes recalling their history easy but makes calling upon their parents history very challenging. For the most part, their immigration story is similar to one another’s except for where they emigrated from. That, as it turns out, made all the difference once beginning their lives here in America.
My paternal grandfather’s family was from Calabria, the southern-most tip of Italy (which is probably the only reason he even stood a chance to marry my grandmother). His family came to America because Italians work starting to get all of the jobs the Irish used to have. The family similarly came to New York and lived in East Harlem with the other Italians living there. He was born to family that did not pursue education in the slightest and only went into business. My grandfather always wanted to become a hard worker like his family, but also wanted to work at a higher level in life. What he wanted to be, though he did not know it, was an engineer. Unfortunately he was never given the opportunity to pursue higher education. However, he was still a genius and proved it by becoming a self taught mechanic, worked as a mechanic in Vietnam, and becoming a self taught saxophonist who played with great names such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie. His family’s immigration story proves that it is very possible to come to America looking for something great and finding it, be it business ownership or the pursuit of one’s own goals.
My grandmother’s side of the family was from the island of Sicily and also decided to come to America when they found out Italians were being hired to do the work of the Irish. Like good Sicilians, the family left to go the New York together and work and make money. When in New York, the family lived in East Harlem, like most other immigrants from Italy, and did not mingle much with any other part of society besides the Italian part. However, being Sicilian, my grandmother’s family did not get along well with other Italians in the neighborhood. This caused division within the neighborhood and overall provided unnecessary challenges for my grandmother’s family. By the time my grandmother was born, her father was not in the picture. He was an Italian who was slandered for marrying a Sicilian and left because the families feuded when they came together. Her mother, shockingly similar to my maternal grandmother’s mother, also became gravely ill leaving my grandmother to grow up with her relatives. For the most part, she grew up with her grandmother, speaking both Sicilian and English, attended school until she went to work in textiles like most women of lesser education would. She lived in a world where there was division not only between the immigrants and the natives but also division between Sicilians and Italians.
Though my immigration story is distant and vague, I still find immense pride in my ancestry. Some of them had hard lives in an attempt to make the lives of those to come easier and worthwhile. For that, I am eternally grateful. Their stories serve as a constant reminder to me that I may be constantly aware of the current hardships and trials being faced by people all around me. One thing in common between every story is that all of my families came into America to live in New York and make a new life for themselves. So many years later, my brother sister and I found ourselves coming back to where it all started to pursue chemical engineering degrees, masters in investigative journalism, and PhDs in biomedical science. It is humbling to realize that our not so distant ancestors walked the same streets either just making it by while we are the lineage making it big for ourselves. There is a selfless twist on immigration when one realizes their family, through trials and trepidation, put everything they had on the line so that one day a person like myself can have life in a great country and have that life to the fullest.