“The idea is to inspire people to stay home, but also get to know more about the community that they’re situated within, and also to provoke a response from people and invite them to share their own experiences,” said Desislava Stoeva, a BIAHI graduate project assistant who spearheaded the campaign. 

The Bronx Italian American History Initiative is an oral history research project that documents the lives of Italian and Italian American residents of the Bronx. Over the past four years, BIAHI project staff have pored over cataloged video and audio interviews throughout the 20th century and preserved their stories. They interviewed more than 40 members of the Bronx community and documented their stories in their digital archives, similar to what Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project has done for the Bronx’s black community. BIAHI staff, from faculty to undergraduate researchers, have presented their research in the U.S., Italy, and the United Kingdom. 

Now that people are spending most of their time at home, BIAHI is sharing more of its stories with participants and donors online. In late March, the initiative launched the new social media campaign, marked by the hashtags #stayathomewithBIAHI and #restaacasaconBIAHI (the latter is the Italian translation of the first hashtag). Through its weekly content on Facebook and Instagram, the campaign ties together people from two countries that bore the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic—Italy and the U.S., said Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., co-director of BIAHI. 

“We’re really trying, even in these difficult times, to engage with multiple publics as we do our outreach from home,” said Reich, who is also chair and professor of the department of communication and media studies. 

Full of personal and historical details, the social media campaign’s stories evoke nostalgia about the old Bronx and its residents. There’s Robert Menillo, born in 1923, who recalls when there were no cars on the street and Arthur Avenue vendors sold produce from streetside carts. There’s Joanna Bonaro, who remembers attending Easter Mass with her parents and “how big of a deal” it was to get the coveted chocolate egg. There’s a trio of cousins who reminisce over a restaurant meal that tasted just like their grandmother’s. 

“I was eating in a restaurant in Buffalo, my son lives in Buffalo, and it was an Italian restaurant, I tasted the sauce and it was my grandmother’s sauce, I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t had that taste and that feel in like 50 years … It’s funny the memories that food brings you,” Carl Calò said in a BIAHI social media post. 

 

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We greet the rainy Monday with a great storytelling trio. Carl Calò, his brother Frank Calò, and their cousin Salvatore Civitello recount their vivid memories from the rich food traditions in their family to their experiences with stereotypes about Italian-Americans from the Bronx. #stayhomewithBIAHI #restaacasaconBIAHI #BIAHI #BronxItalianAmericanHistoryInitiative #stayathome View the full interview on BIAHI’s website at: https://biahi.ace.fordham.edu/video-interviews/#section-group-gduJjZQUKTwzQrHZbEvGp6-5 The full video and transcript are also available at Fordham University Libraries Digital Collections at : https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/bronxitalian/id/4 Archive photos by our interviewees can be explored in our digital photo archive at: https://biahi.ace.fordham.edu/archive-images/

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In the full interview, Calò talks about growing up in the Edenwald Houses, a housing project in the Bronx, and what it was like to be the son of a Sicilian immigrant who was a sanitation worker. Eventually, his family left the projects and moved to Long Island. But one family member made his way back to where their American roots began. 

“There’s this story of return in that interview where the cousin talks about how he went back to Edenwald when he was a New York City firefighter in the ’80s or ’90s. He knocked on his old apartment door, and he got to go in and see the little hole where he used to keep his box of army men hidden in his bedroom floor,” said Kathleen LaPenta, Ph.D., co-director of BIAHI and a senior lecturer in the modern languages and literatures department. “This kind of attachment that they have … I remember being affected by that [while conducting]the interview.” 

In addition to posting on social media, BIAHI shares audio versions of its interviews on its SoundCloud podcast channel and the complete set of video interviews on its new digital archive website. In early May, BIAHI staff will talk about its initiative at a faculty webinar for Fordham’s development and university relations team. 

In the meantime, strangers across social media are responding to BIAHI’s new campaign. 

“It was nice to see people not just liking a post, but responding to it. One of our participants shared that his parents would talk to him in Italian, but he would always respond in English,” said Stoeva, a Fordham public media master’s student who plans on becoming a communications strategist. “It was interesting seeing people saying, ‘Yes, that was exactly my experience with that’ or ‘I resonate with that.’”

 

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For our first #stayhomewithBIAHI or #restaacasaconBIAHI video day, we are sharing the story of Anthony Rosco. He talks about his parents’ journey from Italy to America on the Cristoforo Colombo ship in the 1920s and his own childhood memories of growing up on Belmont Avenue and visiting the old Arthur Avenue Market as a child. Anthony recalls his favorite hangout spots, his first job and the different Italian regions that immigrants in the Belmont at the time came from. View the full interview on BIAHI’s website at: https://biahi.ace.fordham.edu/video-interviews/?customize_changeset_uuid=9b5305ec-2cd8-4292-97f6-124890eacec3#section-group-gduJjZQUKTwzQrHZbEvGp6-2 The full video and transcript are also available at Fordham University Libraries Digital Collections at : https://digital.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/bronxitalian/id/0/rec/2 And if you want to listen to it in the background while doing something at home, it is available in audio format on BIAHI’s podcast channel on SoundCloud here: https://soundcloud.com/biahipodcast/biahi-podcast-episode-1-anthony-rosco-march-27-2020 #BIAHI #BronxItalianAmericanHistoryInitiative #stayathome

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The Bronx Italian American History Initiative (BIAHI), the latest undertaking within the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), is conducting interviews with Italian Americans who have resided or presently reside in the borough. The initiative will include audio interviews with Italian Americans and Italians who migrated from different regions in Italy, as well as personal narratives from other ethnic groups in the area.

According to Kathleen LaPenta, Ph.D., director of the new initiative and an lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the BIAHI seeks to honor the cultural diversity of the Bronx— which was also home to a significant number of Irish, Latinos, Jews, and blacks during the mid-20th century. 

“While [it will] very much celebrate the rich Italian-American heritage in the Bronx, it is also about putting that heritage in contact with the heritage of others who were living in the Bronx at the same time, as well as calling to mind the notion that we are all in some way very transitory,” she said.

Gabelli School senior Bentley Brown, a research assistant on the BAAHP and BIAHI teams, said the new initiative is a microcosm of immigrant contributions to American society.

“We’re helping to build a narrative that includes everybody,” said Brown. “Everybody has had a part. Everybody has had a hand in building this country, and the Bronx happens to be a great example of the necessity of multiculturalism in building a country like ours.”

In January, the initiative’s staff interviewed a first subject, Fordham’s own Joseph Cammarosano, Ph.D., FCRH ’47, GSAS ’56, professor emeritus of economics and the University’s first president of the Fordham Faculty Senate. Cammarosano, 93, whose parents emigrated from Sorrento, Italy, has been a part of the Fordham community for more than 70 years. He spoke about growing up in an Italian and Jewish neighborhood north of the Bronx in Mount Vernon, and shared his recollections of Fordham’s involvement in the local community from the time he enrolled at the University in 1941.

“[The interview] gave us a starting point in terms of where to dive deeper and who to talk to next,” said Brown.

Most recently, the team interviewed Riverdale resident Fred Ponterotto, who spoke about his experiences growing up in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx during the 1950s. Among the topics that Ponterotto discussed with LaPenta and BIAHI co-director Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African-American studies and principal investigator of the BAAHP, was his upbringing, racial tensions in the community, and the political climate at the time.  

“I like to tell stories of those times,” said Ponterotto. “I revel in it.”

“Philosophically, you can’t understand the present if you don’t understand the past, and therefore you can’t affect the future.”

Changing demographic

LaPenta said the BIAHI has become imperative, especially since Italian-American neighborhoods that were first established in the 1920s have been declining over the years.

According to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006-2010 American Community Survey, there are approximately 57,527 Italian Americans living in Bronx County. In 2000, there were about 69,289 Italian Americans in the borough, bureau records show.

“We’re open to whoever wants to be interviewed and has an experience to share,” said LaPenta. “But the urgency of the project is for those people who are elderly, who might not have their stories to offer [because]they are getting up there in age.”

One of the goals of the BIAHI is to bring to light lost narratives from Italian-American immigrants, some of whom were marginalized, when they emigrated to Bronx neighborhoods such as Pelham Bay, Morris Park, Williamsbridge, City Island, Castle Hill, Melrose, and Belmont (“Little Italy”) decades ago.

“What we want to do is try to recapture what was there 50 years ago,” said Naison.

Race relations in the Bronx

Since the Bronx is often regarded as a cultural melting pot, LaPenta, Naison, and their student researchers have been exploring the BAAHP’s vast digital archive to gain a deeper understanding of how Italian Americans in the Bronx might have gotten along with other ethnicities in their communities during that time.

“People from different backgrounds and cultures were converging in a really concentrated way onto one geographic area of New York City and living on top of each other,” said LaPenta. “There was a unique intermixing of languages and cultures that took place [in the Bronx]that did not take place in other areas of the country.”

When the BAAHP first began, Naison and his team interviewed a small number of Latino, Italian, and Jewish residents who lived in the same communities and housing projects as African Americans. These interviews not only provided a more comprehensive look at what life might have been like for blacks in these culturally diverse neighborhoods, but also helped to jumpstart the BIAHI.

Naison and LaPenta said collectively the projects have provided new perspectives on racial tensions in various neighborhoods in the borough.

“There were these informal boundaries even at the public beaches and if you went into the wrong area, you could get into a fight,” said Naison.

While there were moments in which the Bronx’s dominant black, Irish, Latino, and Italian populations diverged, there were points when they came together too, particularly when it came to music, he said.

“The unparalleled musical creativity of the Bronx is in large part because of the mixing of cultures that took place in Bronx neighborhoods and Bronx schools,” said Naison. “This was true in the era of doo wop, mambo, and jazz. It was true during the rise of salsa and it was also true during the formative years of hip hop.”

Through the testimonies of Italian Americans and other ethnic groups that have helped to transform the Bronx, the BIAHI is capturing a part of the borough’s history that is often overlooked.

“Some of the experiences that we’re trying to uncover has to do with the ways in which the change in the neighborhood affected the individual with whom we’re speaking,” said LaPenta. “While the history [or]the public sphere note this market change in the demographic of the region, the individual processes that very differently.”