My fortune in arriving at this relationship through DNA testing is to walk into research which has already been completed. It didn't take much work to find my great grandfather, my 2x great grandparents, and even some of my 3x great grandparents. The specific regions of Italy they came from, the alternate spellings of their last names, newspaper articles, photos, and naturalization dates and documents. All of it lovingly gathered by those who came before me. Never had I linked myself into another family line where as much love and care had been given to stories and documentation alike.
Part of the reason for this is because immigration narratives have to be carefully maintained by the families who inherit them. Voices and forces throughout history have tried to manipulate and replace immigrant narratives with myths and suspicion to suit their own political purposes. My Italian family is no exception to this. I want to discuss these myths today: how they persist in our current climate, and what genealogists can do to prevent them from supplanting the work we do as family historians.
The Myths of "Legal" Immigration
Before the turn of the century, immigration was an unregulated process. Anyone who could obtain passage to the United States, by whatever means was necessary or forced upon them, could come here without any expectation to become a citizen. There was no legal process by which a person entered and assimilated into the United States.The first laws limiting admission into the U.S. weren't passed until the 1880s, and applied to Chinese/Asian nationals, targeting migrants tied to the Gold Rush. In short, anyone else whose heritage in the United States predates the early 1900s cannot claim to descend from a "legal" immigrant, because legal immigration as we currently understand it did not exist until decades later. And for more than a century, descendants of those early immigrants to the United States reaped the benefits and suffered the consequences of that unregulated system.
Obtaining citizenship, however, has been a formal process since 1790. Performed usually (but not always) at a county level, this process involved maintaining residency in the same location for a period of 5 years. It required filing two sets of papers: a declaration of intent and a petition for naturalization. Because these were filed on a local level and were non-transferable, moving during that 5 year window would start the process over again. While the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship automatically upon birth on American soil, this has not prevented many violations of constitutional law against immigrants and their descendants in the decades that have followed.
The greatest myth of American citizenship is that it will never be unjustly challenged or rescinded by the government. No promise has been broken more often than guaranteeing constitutional rights to American citizens who also happen to be immigrants, or are related to them.
Mary Marrone Annibali: Why was she naturalized twice?
After 1906, immigration policy in the United States takes a left turn into uncharted territory. Rather than a county or state-level process, granting citizenship becomes a federal function, subject to federal standards and approval. This also means that legislators and presidents both begin exercising new control over the process of immigration. One of these was the Expatriation Act of 1907, through which American women, whether they were born or naturalized in the United States, had their legal citizenship revoked.As part of their disenfranchisement before the 19th Amendment, women could not apply for legal citizenship in the United States. This directly affected one of my Italian ancestors, whose citizenship was conditional upon her father before marriage, and her husband afterward. No matter where I look for naturalization papers for her, I will never find them for that reason.
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| 1900 U.S. census, Bergen County, New Jersey, population schedule, Garfield borough, p. 18 B, dwelling 270, family 336, family of Louis and Rosie Marrone (spelled Marone), digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 16 June 2018); citing FHL microfilm 1240955, roll 955. |
She gained her naturalization and citizenship as a child through her father, Luigi Marrone, in 1889.
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| 1920 U.S. census, Bergen County, New Jersey population schedule, Garfield, p. 1A, dwelling 5, family 6, family of Alfred and Mary Annibal (spelled Annibell); digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 16 June 2018); citing NARA microfilm publication T625, roll 2076. |
She then lost that citizenship when she married Goffredo "Alfred" Annibali, an Italian non-citizen, in 1908. She wouldn't be considered a citizen again until 1919, when her husband finished his naturalization.
The Cable Act of 1922, which challenged the legality of revoking women's citizenship, didn't fix the problem fully even after it was passed. Any woman who lost her citizenship because of the Expatriation Act would have to apply to reobtain it, even if she had been born in the United States. It didn't fully extricate a woman's citizenship from her husband's, disqualifying her if he couldn't qualify. And as the legal classification of "enemy aliens" enters the equation, it becomes impossible for many women to reclaim what was taken from them, in violation of their constitutional rights.
What many people mean by insisting that immigrants should be "legal," is the expectation for those who enter the United States do so with the formal permission of the government, with the intention to assimilate into our society, learn English, and become a naturalized citizen. And in no uncertain terms, many of the loudest advocates for "legal" immigrants are unrepentant hypocrites--having personally benefited from the unregulated system, when their own families failed to meet the standards they now enforce upon others. What's more, legal entry and citizenship are promises waiting to be broken when the government has the ability to revoke a citizen's legal status without just cause.
Time and again, this has been the reality for those who find themselves classified as "aliens" or "enemy aliens" by the United States.
Who are "Enemy Aliens"?
How is someone's status as an "enemy alien" determined? Is it by their past criminal history? By their associations with known terrorists or organizations that commit violence?
No. It was determined only by a person's place of birth. It was the legal designation during WWI for non-naturalized immigrants from "enemy" nations. It was later applied to non-naturalized German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants during WWII. Regardless of whether they had fled the unrest in their own countries and risked their safety in rejecting those governments. Regardless of whether they had filed their declaration of intention before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in which they swore to disavow the nations of their birth. Being an immigrant from an "enemy nation" who hadn't yet become a citizen of the US, legally made someone an "enemy alien."
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| "Regarding the Italian Population," The (New Orleans) Mascot, 7 September 1888, p. 8; digital images, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ItalianPopulationMascott1888.jpg : 16 June 2018); citing the microfilm collection of the New Orleans Public Library. |
In 1942, non-naturalized immigrants from Germany, Japan, and Italy were required to register at their post office. They were required to be fingerprinted, photographed, and carry identification on them at all times, labeling them as "enemy aliens." They were restricted from owning firearms and radios, and were restricted in where they could travel. While these laws were not enforced the same way in every state, proximity to military installations could result in curfews and other restrictions.
The punishment for failure to register as an "enemy alien" in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Montana, Utah and Idaho was to be forcibly removed to a concentration camp.
(To view records related to "enemy alien" registration, view the catalog from the National Archives and the collections listings/card catalog of your databases of choice. Note: Similar restrictions also existed in the United Kingdom and Canada.)
But what about "legal" citizens? Did their "legal" status protect them from harm and suspicion?
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| The dry goods store of Luigi "Louis" Marrone Garfield, New Jersey |
Frank DiCara grew up in an Italian suburb of Baltimore called Highlandtown. He dropped out of school after his three brothers left to fight in the war, and was eventually drafted to fight for the country that had rejected him. Being a "legal" citizen was no more a shield from hatred, bigotry, and the violation of Constitutional rights than it is for immigrants today. Arrests by federal agents began almost immediately.
In other cities across the United States, Italians citizens were arrested and detained for years, without a trial, representation, or conviction. Their houses were ransacked, and their businesses, assets, and property were seized by the government. Some were even stripped of their citizenship, having broken no law. Others had illnesses exacerbated by the stresses of moving or incarceration and died during their internment. Their only crime was having once been born in what was now considered an enemy country, or having parents and relatives who were. Fortunately for my family, they lived in the densely-populated Italian communities on the east coast, whose financial livelihoods were minimally affected in comparison to those who lived in the western United States. But the compulsion and erasure that affected so many Italian families also affected mine, beginning with the outbreak of World War II.
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| From Wikimedia Commons |
The biggest impact this period had on my family is cultural erasure. It's at about this time that my family Americanized the spelling of their surname, turning Annibali into Annibal. And from talking to my great grandfather's descendants, I know now that one of the greatest personal losses to them was the ability to speak Italian. Like many Italian Americans, the children and grandchildren born in the U.S. were not allowed to speak Italian. "You're in America now, and you will speak English" was the sentiment instilled in them by the older generation. Far from being the full embrace of American identity, that insistence was born of fear and oppression from the United States government. It was a natural consequence of propaganda posters that mandated: "Don't speak the enemy's language. Speak American." The older generation, who had seen oppression and tyranny in Italy and could recognize it on its face, understood legal and social consequences that would follow for anyone who failed to comply with that forced assimilation.
The identity and narrative that many Americans want to construct for themselves out of our role in World War II is that of a people who resists against tyranny, fascism, and despotism. We lift ourselves up as saviors to the oppressed in other nations, the occupants of the moral high ground. We associate totalitarian control with the Axis powers. What gets lost in that retelling, however, are the atrocities committed by the United States government against its own people on the home front. The history and ongoing impact of mass incarceration, cultural erasure, and disenfranchisement is one we must reckon with as a nation because it was part of our response during that time. And in many ways, it's up to genealogists to unearth and reassemble the fragments of those stories, which have gone unspoken and forgotten for far too long. It's up to us to share them and make them known by those who wish to bury them, and replace them with their own narratives about who we've been as a country.
There is no better time to be sharing immigrant narratives like these on social media, with the hashtag #ResistanceGenealogy. The soil in which the seeds of oppression and dehumanization are sown is always historical revisionism. Making the lives and experiences of our immigrant ancestors visible is how we confront and correct revisionism, ignorance, and prejudice where it still exists in our communities.
Discovering these parts of the Italian American experience is difficult, and seeing how it also affected members of my family is uncomfortable. But that discovery motivates me to call this collective shrugging off of human rights by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration exactly what it is. It's a repetition of painful history no one should ever have to live through. It's a new twist on the old refrain as "unaccompanied alien children" becomes a legal designation for innocent, incarcerated Hispanic and Latino children.
I've heard many politicians and opinion leaders respond to these revelations by saying, "This is not America. This is not who we are." But anyone with an honest understanding of the history of this country would never say that, because it isn't true. This is exactly who and what American has been for so many immigrants who have come here seeking new lives. These are the actions of an oppressive government, having learned nothing from its past. And we cannot allow it to continue if we're to have any hope for a different future.
For ways you can help, check out this list of charitable organizations who are on the front lines across the southern border, helping immigrants and refugees to be reunited with their children.