Becoming American
Beginning with antique family photo albums I inherited, I started tracing the lives behind the faces in those photographs. What began as casual genealogy quickly expanded into a much larger investigation using immigration records, newspapers, social histories, government files, and archival research.
The story that emerged stretches from immigrant villages in southern Italy to Prohibition-era Chicago and into the deeper archives of American history.
It is a story about assimilation — but also about omission.
Families do not only pass down memories. They also pass down silences.
Post #1: Research notes for a narrative nonfiction project about immigration, family history, and the hidden architecture of assimilation.
I inherited a mystery.
1929, Little Italy, Chicago. A social moment on the back porch. They lived in a now-landmarked mixed-use building on the major market thoroughfare of Racine Ave. The Arrigo brothers owned it and lived upstairs with their families. My family rented an apartment on the second floor for decades.
Who was Boss Arrigo? Why Boss? Boss of what? I often wondered when I looked at this photo as a child.
This is one of the first photographs I examined in the albums I inherited from my Chicago-born grandmother. Her handwritten caption identifies the people pictured as “Father Mother + Boss Arrigo.”
Beginning with antique family photo albums my grandmother passed down to me, I started tracing the lives behind the faces in those photographs.
That was two years ago. What began as casual family history quickly expanded into a much larger investigation using geneaology records, immigration records, newspapers, academic and social histories, government files, and archival research.
The story that emerged stretches from immigrant villages in southern Italy to Prohibition-era Chicago and into deep archives of American history, and beyond.
There are so many angles to this project and so many sources* to explore that don’t usually appear together! *From hard-nosed FBI files to bittersweet American social gate crashing stories. I’m slicing and dicing my research for paths to consider. “Excavating how America became respectable” touches on the many layers it took for this one family to assimilate into American culture.
It is a story about assimilation — but also about omission.
Families do not only pass down memories. They also pass down silences.
This is not a story passed down. It’s assembled after the fact.
Census reports are presented as definitive. What if they only recorded half-truths? What if families deliberately buried the very survival mechanisms (and illicit realities) that built their American foundation?
You know me as the co-editor of Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, an anthology exploring expatriate life and identity in contemporary Turkey.
That book - released 20 years ago this month, can you believe it - brought together voices of foreign women navigating another culture, and asked a question that has stayed with me ever since:
How do we become who we are inside a culture with hidden rules we only see when we trip over them?
My own essay in the Expat Harem anthology described my wedding in an Ottoman palace on the Bosphorus — an experience that made visible to me many of the invisible systems that shape belonging, identity, and social life. Years later I wrote an essay that explored in particular what it was like helping my Berkeley mother prepare for that day.
I finally looked.
Recently I turned that same cultural curiosity I displayed twenty years ago in Istanbul toward a subject that should be better known to me. I looked at my own family. Mostly the whole Chicago family tree behind my mother. Now I know she’s not just “my Berkeley mother”. She’s my Chicago mother. That’s where and who and what she comes from…where we come from…where I come from even if I don’t know the place.
When I turned my attention to the Chicagoans in the family — and explored our Calabrian roots, and roots in Chicagoland, and the MidWest, and the Rust Belt -- I discovered a hidden inheritance.
This research blog will be a working notebook for a narrative nonfiction project (I can see a blog, a book, a documentary) exploring how my Southern Italian immigrant family became American.
Here I’ll share early discoveries, historical fragments, photographs, documents, and questions as they appear, to show the research process itself — how family history unfolds when private memory meets the public record.
The larger project asks a simple question:
What does it actually take for a family to become American?
What parts of the past had to disappear? And, how did that process of assimilation build the America that we know?
About This Research Blog : Exploratory posts collect early research notes, archival discoveries, and historical fragments related to a narrative nonfiction project currently in development. Draws on family photographs, genealogical records, newspaper archives, immigration documents, FBI files, and more as it reconstructs the hidden social history behind one immigrant family’s path into American life.