"27. You know Christmas Eve as "fish night". This means at least 5 different courses of fish."
I've been granted "honorary Italian status" by my wife's family by virtue of our soon to be 36 years of marriage.
Both her sides come from the Bari region, and Christmas Eve fish is STILL followed.
They came from Bari directly to California (northern and southern). Anyone named DeMarzo out west is likely related, this being a rare surname, mainly from Bari.
Three years ago we had a reunion, numbering over one hundred (four generations), spanning three days. The host and hostess fed those people twice a day.
Big Pine, California was the site. Later this month a smaller group will gather in the East Bay suburbs.
The norm is in-tact families (few exceptions). Probably half have substituted protestant faiths, for their Catholic upbringing.
One nun; no mafiosa. Anybody had those nasty, sour marinated olives? Don't know a name for them.
Italian in California is very different than Italian on the East Coast. Except for some very exclusive WASP circles (the ones that still don't have many jews), there has not been much, if any, discrimination against Italians since before WWII. And, even in those circles, there are Italian, although most of them were connected with the Bank of America families, the old aristocracy, came in the Gold Rush, or some combination thereof. (I know of one Italian gentelman who was a member of the exclusive Pacific Union Club in the first quarter of the 20th century, and several who were in the old, very exclusive, separate San Francisco social register)
And, for the most part, at least according to the information displays at Ellis Islan, the Italians who went to California came from Piedmont, Lombardy, Venetia and Genoa. On the East Coast, most of the Italians were from Southern Italy: Sicily, Naples, Calabria, etc. It is interesting to note that the immigration people classified the Northern Italians differently 'racially' than the Southern Italians.
At any rate, the Italians in California, by and large didn't look so "different" than the other whites who flowed into California in its youth and were more accepted. Many were educated, many were professionals: oenologists, teachers, lawyers, doctors, accountants. Poorer Italians were active in fishing (mostly Genovese) and truck farming, where they prospered, and often became respectable proprietors. There was never much of an urban Italian uneducated working class out West, as their as in the East.