Toward a complex identity

Early emigrants well fit the definition coined by Oscar Handlin of "uprooted": in most cases they, while coping with the diversity that surrounded them, defended themselves from it by refusing to learn the language of the host country, beyond the bare minimum, and maintaining the customs and habits of their country of origin as long as possible.

The second generation, often born in the new country, struggled indecisively with the choice between the "before" and the "after," between a past that at least could offer some certain points of reference and a future that was perhaps attractive but still had imprecise connotations on which epochal events (think of World War II and those who, secure in the knowledge that they were now part of a new and stable reality, found themselves in their various adopted countries to be considered "enemies").

The third and fourth generations turn out to be well embedded in the society in which they operate and emerge in a wide variety of fields: from research to entrepreneurship, from politics to the arts, from finance to film.

As the generations integrate, they begin to feel the need to rediscover their roots and try to reclaim them because without memory there is no identity, and identity must be like a "push engine" that brings together purely ethnic aspects (religion, festivals, eating habits) and new lifestyles (work, family, friendships).

It is not an easy, linear path; rather, it is characterized by tortuosity, regressions, and conspicuous interruptions in the process of processing the "old" and acquiring the "new."

As an extreme summary of this process anyone who has gone through it might ask the question "where my home?" which is the title of a collection of poems by Gregory Corso, an important exponent of the Beat Generation, from Calabria, as he called himself.