Mount Allegro and Vendetta

Mount Allegro and Vendetta

The aim of this paper is to introduce the readers to the two different descriptions of the Italian-American immigrant experience in the film Vendetta and Jerre Mangione’s Mount Allegro- A Memoir of Italian American Life under a closer examination of the two distinctive Americanization processes.

The description of the struggles to reconcile their parents’ old world beliefs and the uncertainty about whether or not Gerlando, the narrator of Mount Allegro and the fictionalized figure of Jerre Mangione himself, and his siblings are Americans, is followed by an account of the struggles for acceptance of Italian-Americans arriving in 1890 at New Orleans in the film Vendetta.

Finally, a comparison between the book and the film is drawn and the values of both mediums are juxtaposed.

The book Mount Allegro describes very distinctly the different approaches to the American culture. While the first generation, immigrants, trying to preserve their Italian language, traditions and culture, the second generation, who was born in America, is torn between their family and their environment. The deep desire of Gerlando and his siblings to be accepted and integrated in America is clear from the very start. The book begins with the statement of his sister Guistina “‘When I grow up I want to be an American’” (p. 1).

The different approaches to American life between the two generations are also expressed by Gerlando’s statement about the use of the English language by saying “[a]nother unpopular rule [his mom] vigorously enforced was that we speak no other language at home but that of our parents” (p. 49f.). As much as the first generation of immigrants resists learning English properly, they expect their children to speak English. Although the majority of Gerlando’s relatives resist Americanization, they adopt themselves unconsciously at the language and the culture. This becomes clear, when the narrator explains for the reader at one point of the book that “if [his] relatives were under the impression that they were speaking the same dialect they brought with them from Sicily, they were mistaken” (p. 51). “After a few years of hearing American, Yiddish, Polish, and Italian dialects other than their own, their language gathered words which no one in Sicily could possibly understand. The most amazing of these were garbled American words dressed up with Sicilian suffixes” (p.51 f.), so Gerlando. The language spoken by the first generation of immigrants itself represents America’s Meltinpot, in which they constitute a part. Furthermore, Gerlando reports that his relatives, who left Mount Allegro to live on the outskirts of town, “developed strange habits and tastes. They took to drinking fruit juices at breakfast and tea with supper. They wore pyjamas to bed, drank whiskey with soda, and learned to play poker” (p.