value of worthless lives: Italian immigrant autobiographies by "ordinary people"

"Immigrants left tears and sweat, but no memories." This dissertation tries to prove this assertion by the Italian critic Giuseppe Prezzolini wrong. Italian immigrants have sweated and cried, but many of them also left a trace of their "heroic" voyage between two continents, and two worlds, that took place in waves during the entire XX Century. With an oxymoron, I will speak about the value of worthless lives. These authors are no conquerors, saints or celebrities, but they believe that their life stories are worth being written and remembered. There are many direct ties between the experience of migration and the need to write an autobiography. Autobiography is a response to the trauma of immigration and provides a kind of sutura for a wounded subject. Besides, immigration creates the "individual." Immigration is a kind of Copernican revolution which destabilizes the sense of human self; the immigrant feels the ground shifting under his feet and loses the center of his life, his home. Autobiography thus becomes the tool to build his/her own centrality, his/her own identity as a particle of this chaotic universe. Furthermore, by migrating, the Italian contadino (the majority of them came from the countryside) leaves a land that kept his family tied down for centuries, but most of all leaves the soil of the amorphous "mass" of suffering farmers, and creates a new individual. But the individuality of Italian immigrant autobiographies is somehow different from the individuality of American autobiographies. Our "unorthodox" authors demand a new critical terminology inviting concepts such as "Quiet Individualism" and "Ethos of the Survivor." The dissertation presents a gallery of immigrant self-portraits: nine immigrant workers; five the immigrant workers with a political conscience; ten immigrant workers with a poet's soul (including a farmer and a stonecutter who wrote two remarkable chivalric poems); five immigrants with religious interests; seven immigrant artists; nine immigrant women; eight graduated immigrants; and finally five successful immigrants, perfectly integrated into American society. In all, fifty-eight portraits that tell life stories and provide us with a lived slice of immigration history.