In all of our American archetypes, from the pioneer to the slave holder, to the union man and the capitalist, there is always an insecurity that perhaps we do not belong. Are we heroes or impostors recreating ourselves in this New World?
Even among what J.D. Vance calls “the Heritage Americans” — those who can trace their ancestry in North America back to the Civil War, the Revolution, or beyond — there is a sense of having a family line somewhere else. And if that is so, how did we come to be here?
You can see the popularity of these obsessions in the spread of online searches like Ancestry.com, or DNA tests that reveal surprising things about one’s bloodline. In churches, social clubs, and online chats there is a never-ending quest for the original Adam and Eve of our collective nationality.
I was born as a direct product of the World War II experience where an Army doctor, the son of Italian immigrants, came into the lovely presence of an Army nurse whose family dates back to the earliest decades of English settlement in New England. My story intersects on both side of the nativist versus immigrant divide.
As an Italian American growing up in the fifties, under my mother’s influence we assimilated as quickly as possible, abandoning any historical links to the language and the Catholic Church in favor of prep school and the Episcopal Church. We visited the family farm where my mother grew up, given under charter by King Charles I. We bravely bore the scars of the mosquitoes that feasted on us in the marshes of Essex County.
And yet even among these “real Americans,” questions lingered about their place in the world. My maternal grandmother died after birthing 15 children, the farm lost after her death, the children farmed out to institutions. Some children wound up with a Native American family who lived nearby, rumored to be somehow related. All the prestige and property of settled immigrants was lost, just as it was for a generation of Okies and hoboes during the Great Depression. That included the knowledge handed down about who their ancestors were. The insecurity of our changeling population has been a product of economic booms and busts since the founding of our very capitalist country.
Now we turn to time when efforts at mass deportation have rallied at least some of our citizens to cheer on the roundup of people who live in the shadows of immigration status, much like their grandparents or great grandparents sheltered in centuries past.
Fundamentally the insecurity that shapes a nation of immigrants causes that same population to fear the next wave. Politicians on both sides bear the blame for not providing a secure sense of who and what we are and how we want to live, free from want and despair. Opportunity, yes. But in a land without losers.
Solve that one, and the madness will cease.
David Parrella
Buckland