Lindsay Marie Morris

While researching my first novel, The Last Letter from Sicily, I stumbled on the book Una Storia Segreta by Lawrence DiStasi, from which I learned about government restrictions and actions during World War II that targeted some 600,000 Italians, so-called enemy aliens who were not yet American citizens. Many were placed under curfew, and some were banned from their workplaces. But what I found most jarring was the fact that about 10,000 Italian people were evacuated from their homes in California alone, and hundreds of Italian men were rounded up nationwide and placed in internment camps.

 

Those stark statistics inspired my second novel, Beneath the Sicilian Stars. I fell down a research rabbit hole, where I discovered the documentary film Potentially Dangerous, produced by Noah Readhead, Zach Baliva, and Naomi Baliva, which sheds light on this hidden history through interviews with historians and individuals with families directly affected by evacuation and internment experiences. 

I spoke with Zach, who also served as the director, about the film. He shared how the documentary started with an entry to the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum, an annual fellowship opportunity sponsored by The Italian Sons and Daughters of America, AGBO, and The National Italian American Foundation, which supports projects that tell original Italian American stories. 

The film would win the 2021 award, among other prizes and distinctions. And actor John Turturro signed on as executive producer. You can catch Potentially Dangerous on PBS. (Check your local listings for PBS member stations.) It's also available on DVD and streaming. 

 

 

What inspired the making of Potentially Dangerous?

I learned about the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum shortly before the deadline in 2020. I wanted to enter something because I've worked mainly in narrative filmmaking, but I've also worked as a journalist and a freelance writer. So, documentary is kind of a natural space for that combination. The problem was I didn't have a topic, and the deadline for the film forum was approaching. I thought, "I'll fill out an application, and through the process, I'll get to know the people involved. They'll reject my application this year, but next year, I'll be prepared."

I needed a story, so I Googled "unknown Italian American story" or something. When you do that, the first search results are Larry DiStasi's work on this topic because one of his books (Una Storia Segreta) translates to an unknown story or a secret history.

 

I went through dual citizenship, and my family is Italian American. I had never heard of any of this before. And so, really quickly, I got interested in it. 

Oftentimes, you find a story, and it's already been done, or there's already a novel, or there's already a documentary, or whatever. So, usually, when I contact people, they're like, "Oh, somebody tried to do this already, and it didn't work." And with this, it was the opposite.

 

When I contacted Larry, he said, "This has been my life's work, and I would kill for somebody to make a documentary about this. Please do; I'll turn over all my research and connect you with all the people."

I would have had nothing if Larry had not been involved or receptive or hadn't primed the pump by doing all his research. But I just contacted him at the right time. And so he was very, very receptive. 

As I was going through the research with him, I started to realize this was something I had to be involved in. And primarily when I realized that there were people detained and held within Ellis Island, that was kind of the clincher for me because I remember going to New York as a young child, and you hear, "This is where our family came through." And just to realize that not many years later, these same people who saw this as a beacon of hope and freedom were held against their will in the same facility, to me was just this fascinating juxtaposition.

As I started doing more work, people were super receptive to being involved, and it took on a life of its own. We ended up winning the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum and got funded.

It was just being in the right place at the right time. And lots of credit to Larry, who is really the champion of this cause. And if it wasn't for him doing a lot of the work over the years… He put people in a position where they were more receptive to speaking to me.

 

I know that when he first started interviewing people, many didn't want to participate. And so 15 years later, when I came along, they were like, "Alright, we've started to tell this story, and now we want to see how far we can take it."

 

Zach interviewed several individuals about their family's experiences during World War II.

How did you approach the sensitivities of the story?

Larry had done a lot of hard work on that, but it was a weird combination of dynamics. I had to move quickly because we had a deadline. And if you didn't hit that deadline, which was five months during COVID with an $8,000 grant, you had to pay that money back. So I was moving very quickly, but one of the most important things to do was to build trust and get to know these people, so they want to tell you these very traumatic things that happened to them 80 years ago. You can't just fly in there and say, "Alright, the camera's on. Talk."

 

There was one very elderly woman whom I spoke to first. She was, I think, in her upper nineties, and she's the only person who refused to participate. She said she didn't want to appear on camera because she was insecure about her appearance. That was a little bit of an excuse. She had this really compelling story. I think she lived in a house near Pittsburg, California, with all these other people and was the one to help teach them English.

 

I worked with her two or three different times to try to convince her, saying, "We won't even put you on camera; it'll just be audio-only for research purposes." She was the only person who wouldn't do it, and it was very discouraging because she was the first person I approached, and I feared her reaction might be a sign of what was to come. 

For everyone else, it was just moving as slowly as we could to make sure they were comfortable. And then it was also word of mouth. That helped because when I contacted people, I would say, "So-and-so sent me to you," or "Your cousin told me that you had an amazing story, and it would be sad if we missed it." 

A lot of the work that I do as a journalist is interview-based, so I've done, in my freelance career, two or three thousand interview-based articles. You develop this natural ability to sit with people and learn how to make them feel comfortable and how to elicit the best responses. I didn't just set up the camera and right away say, "So what was it like when your father was ripped from your home?"

 

A lot of these people are elderly and have kids and grandkids who are a little protective of them, so there were some small hurdles, but overall, most people really wanted to get the story out there, especially because they realized—not to be morbid—this is their last chance. 

 

Still from Potentially Dangerous, dramatizing an FBI raid of an Italian family's home.

Why do you think this aspect of history has remained hidden?

I think part of it is that they were so ashamed, but also afraid of speaking out. We featured Tony Rosati from the other Pittsburgh, whose father was detained twice. He shared that his mother was paranoid for the rest of her life. For decades later, every time the phone rang, she would worry about who was on the other end, like, "Are they listening to our conversations? Can I trust law enforcement?" 

When you think of all those dynamics, you realize these are the reasons why this story hasn't been told. These people are so reluctant to tell their stories because they're worried about what might happen to them and that something like this could happen again.

 

Your executive producer is John Turturro. How did that come to be?

My main goal with the project after it was done was to just get it to the widest possible audience. In the world of film, especially today when it comes to distribution, it's sort of like a used car salesman or loan shark world where everybody wants a piece of the money, and everybody gets it except for the person who creates the content. So you get all these offers from people. But unless you are a really big name, usually what happens is you get a very little amount of money. They put it on the shelf, and it'll be available for five bucks on iTunes or whatever, but nobody's really going to rent it because there's no marketing or whatever.

 

The trade-off for me was that if we could get it to public television, there might still be little money involved, but millions of people would see it. That quickly became the goal, and then I realized I would have a greater chance of reaching that goal if somebody like John was involved. 

John comes from a military family. His family is from the parts of Italy from which several of the story's families came. And I had seen that he had worked with some notable Italian directors, and I just felt like, "OK. Out of all the people I could approach, he has to be at the top of the list." And he was super receptive. He said, "I'm really busy, but anything I can do, even if it's just lending my name to this project, anything I can do to help, I would love to."

 

Without him, I don't think we would've gotten to PBS, for example. He really helped us open those doors.

 

What other projects do you have in the pipeline?

Funding is always the wild card, and it's heartbreaking to me because, even within the Italian community, there are many causes and initiatives that these organizations already support. They all want to screen Potentially Dangerous, but there's no money to fund another project.

 

I was working on one for a while that ended up going away. It was going to be called The Last Goldbeater in Venice. I found this guy who's like 75 years old, and he's literally the last artisan in Europe who makes gold foil and gold leaf by hand.

 

Every day of his life for the last 50 years, he's gone into this closet-sized studio and beat a bar of gold—I forget the exact number—like 30,000 times with a 13-pound hammer to make one leaf of gold foil. They use this on the most important monuments in the world, and if they use machine-made materials, it's not the same as all this stuff. 

So the story was that if he doesn't find an apprentice by the time he retires, this very important cultural art form will go extinct, like mask-making, glass blowing, lace, and other Italian traditions. It mirrors the plight of the city of Venice, which is over-tourism and climate change. 

We had a major hospitality brand on board to fund half of the budget, and then, at the last minute, they withdrew their support because they had other priorities for their marketing dollars in 2024. I couldn't ever replace them. Then the guy retired, and the story went away. In the documentary space, this happens a lot.

 

Now, I have another story. I found a group of West African refugees who have all fled terrorism and war and ended up in Italy, and they've formed a soccer team to sort of assimilate and give them hope and purpose as they rebuild their lives in this new country.

 

The cool part about it is that the Italian government sponsors them as an anti-racism movement. They placed them in the lowest tier of the official Italian soccer league, and against all odds (as this underdog story), they won the Cup in their first year and moved up from the ninth to the eighth level of the Italian soccer league.

 

One of their players signed a contract with a Serie-A team and scored a game-winning goal in his first game, and it kind of put them on the map. And so now, a lot of Italians know that this team exists. 

Unless we find a sports brand, team, or somebody to co-fund this with us and produce it, then I'm afraid the same thing will happen. But that's the project now: to figure out if there's a way to fund this story before it also goes away. 

There are lots of stories to tell, but limited time, resources, and money to do it. And for me, it's heartbreaking when a story that one really believes in just vanishes because of money.

 

Hundreds of Italian "enemy aliens" were imprisoned in internment camps across the nation.

How do you hope Potentially Dangerous will contribute to a greater understanding of Italian American history?

It's something I think about a lot, and not everyone agrees with me. I really do believe that because these events happened, they stopped publishing Italian-language newspapers in some places, and people started hiding that part of their personalities and that part of their identities. And that sort of contributed to my own experience in the Midwest of how my family is like, "OK. We're Italian, we're Italian American." But it doesn't really mean a whole lot to us, unfortunately. And these events had a big role to play in that. My argument is that because of what happened, we've been left with this caricature of what it means to be an Italian or an Italian American.

We have the mafia stereotype, and we have this very shallow understanding of the Italian American expression in the United States. My argument is that if this hadn't happened, there would be a more robust and deep expression of Italian Americanism because they wouldn't have had to hide certain parts of their culture to be accepted. Therefore, that expression would've been fuller and more complete for generations. And now you have all these organizations like the Italian American Future Leaders of America, and people of my age and younger who are trying to recapture that. But these events really played a part in that. 

 

 

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December 7 is a date which will live in infamy. It was the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, but that night, the Federal Bureau of Investigation also began arresting "potentially dangerous" Japanese, Germans, and Italians. And they did so before the United States was officially at war.

 

This response was far from last-minute. Since 1939, the FBI had been compiling lists of suspicious and allegedly subversive persons they decided required surveillance and, in the event of war, internment. Among the hundreds targeted and later interned were journalists, Italian Consulate employees, and veterans of World War I (when Italy and America were allies). Opera star Ezio Pinzo was arrested for allegedly altering his singing tempo to send coded messages to Benito Mussolini.

 

Internees were sent to military camps in states including Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Maryland, and Texas, where many spent years imprisoned. How could the government do this? Title 50 of the U.S. Code, based on the 1798 Alien & Sedition Acts, gave them the power to detain "enemy aliens" in emergencies.

 

The government effectively declared war on much of its immigrant population, imposing restrictions on about 600,000 Italian residents without U.S. citizenship who, on Dec. 8, had been designated enemy aliens by presidential proclamation. These "enemy aliens" were required to re-register as such; FBI agents raided homes and confiscated weapons, radios, cameras, and even flashlights. Non-citizens on the West Coast were placed under a strict curfew, required to carry "alien enemy" ID booklets, and told they would need a permit to travel more than five miles. Those who did not comply were subject to arrest and detention.

 

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to designate areas of vulnerability and relocate individuals deemed a threat to national security. More than 120,000 Japanese people, including American citizens, were forcibly displaced. What's lesser-known: By the month's end, the government ordered the evacuation of at least 10,000 Italian Americans from their homes in California alone. People had just days to relocate. 

Why isn't this in most history books? The question bothered San Francisco Bay Area historian and author Lawrence DiStasi, whose father came to the U.S. from Italy. He began digging through records and archives, collecting testimonials, and eventually created a traveling exhibition called Una Storia Segreta, Italian for secret story and hidden history.

 

His efforts and compiled testimonies induced President Bill Clinton to pass the "Wartime Violations of Italian American Civil Liberties Act," which was signed into Public Law 106-451 in November 2000. While no reparations were distributed, the act acknowledged injustices suffered by Italian Americans during the war.

 

DiStasi compiled a collection of essays and accounts about Italian wartime restrictions and internment in Una Storia Segreta in 2001. He wrote a deeper analysis in Branded: How Italian Immigrants Became 'Enemies,' published in 2016.

 

I discovered these works in June 2020 while researching my World War II-era historical novels. Later, I encountered the original Una Storia Segreta exhibit at the Pittsburg Historical Museum in Pittsburg, California, where the federal government evacuated about a third of the population in 1942. The website, unastoriasegreta.com, reproduces the exhibit.

 

I was delighted to have the chance to speak with DeStasi about his important work and its legacy.

Share the story behind Una Storia Segreta with us.

I had never heard a thing about these events when I was growing up in Connecticut. When I came to California in the late 1960s, I started to hear about this real turmoil in the Italian American community, specifically in San Francisco and Pittsburg, up on the Delta. I thought this was really an important story, but everybody said no one would talk about it because they were embarrassed and ashamed. There was also animosity in the community because some people had informed on others.

Eventually, we in the American-Italian Historical Association's Western Chapter decided to hold a conference in 1993 at the University of San Francisco. And it was a sensation. Somebody at that conference said, "Why not do an exhibit?"

 

We had never done an exhibit before, but four of us decided that we could, in fact, do this. So, with Rose Scherini as our chief researcher, and I as the project director, and with Adele Negro then president of the AIHA Western Chapter, and a designer we found named Elahe Shahideh, who had done a previous exhibit at the Museo Americano in San Francisco, we set out to make it happen. We had panels nailed to the wall, and we managed to gather some artifacts. A friend of ours, an Italian teacher, suggested the title Una Storia Segreta, which means both "a secret story" and "a secret history."

 

Opening night was an absolute smash sensation. People from all over the Bay Area wept in front of the panels. We got more publicity for that than any other effort we had ever made. It was featured on the front page of the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

That started us off, and Bill Cerruti from Sacramento, with the help of Connie Ilacqua Foran, whose father had been interned and whose husband was a senator, got approval for the exhibit to come to the Capitol in Sacramento, and that was huge. The governor signed a proclamation. We had a banner in front of the Capitol that said "Italian American Exhibit." Bill spent about seven thousand dollars to make our panels, which were displayed around the rotunda of the Capitol.

 

It was a beautiful exhibit, and that gave us more publicity. We started getting requests from all over California from Italian-American organizations who wanted to host the exhibit. When it went down to Monterey, where many fishermen were affected, our friend Hugo Bianchini, an architect, decided to make frames for each panel. We got the exhibit framed and put it in two traveling crates.

Hugo said, "This exhibit will be traveling for five years." We thought he was crazy. It turns out that Una Storia Segreta ended up traveling for more than twenty years.

 

Una Storia Segreta panels on display at the Rayburn House Office Building

 

How did the exhibit inspire the passage of legislation?

People would request that I come with the exhibit to give a talk, so I went all around the country. We had it at several state houses as well, all without soliciting any organizations. It just traveled by word of mouth.

 

The highlight was when we displayed it in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. John Calvelli, the chief of staff to Elliot Engel at that time, saw the exhibit in the Rayburn and said, "We can pass legislation about this." So, he took the lead in getting the legislation drawn up and got us Judiciary Committee hearings, at which I and several community leaders spoke. We managed to get Ezio Pinza's wife to come and testify at our hearings. She gave a very moving testimony. We also persuaded baseball great Dom DiMaggio to testify.

 

We also had several people from the Bay Area testify in Washington, D.C. Afterward, John Calvelli said, "We hit a home run. We're going to get this legislation passed."

 

After two tries, the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act was passed and signed into law by President Clinton in 2000. That was a real success.

 

Attending Judiciary Committee hearings in Washington, D.C.

 

Was your own Italian family affected by these wartime events?

I would go around the country saying, "Can you imagine there are people whose own families were affected and didn't even know about it?"

 

Well, I turned out to be one of those people. Because my father and my uncle were both classified "enemy aliens" during the war, and nobody ever talked about it until our exhibit went back east.

 

My sister asked my cousin, "Did you know about any of this? Can you imagine?" And my cousin Rosemary said, "Well, yes, my father was an 'enemy alien.' They came and took our radio."

 

Then my daughter was looking into Italian citizenship, and I asked a friend in Washington if she could send me my father's records. That's when I learned that my father was actually an "enemy alien" himself. He never said a word about it. We have none of his papers or anything like that, but that was the story. That just knocked me off my feet; I couldn't believe that that was the case, but that was why we called it Una Storia Segreta. Secret story, secret history.

 

A young Costanza Ilacqua Foran stands between her parents.

 

Which stories featured in Una Storia Segreta and Branded stand out most?

Connie Ilacqua Foran's father in San Francisco was interned. They interned him because he worked with the Italian Consulate a little bit.

 

Rose Scudero became one of our star informants because her family was evacuated and had to move out of Pittsburg. Her father could stay, but she left Pittsburg with her mother. When the restrictions were lifted, she said she was a little bit like Paul Revere, running back to Pittsburg through the streets, shouting, "You can go home now; you can go home now!" That was really moving. 

 

 
Notice to evacuate from U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle

 

What message or lesson do you hope to share with your work?

During wartime, anything can be justified. You never know what the powers that be can make the case for.

I just want readers to know that this happened despite all the denials and attempts to hide it. History is never quite complete, and you can always find out something new.

 

I'm very proud of the work we did. We put this thing on the map, and it'll never again be forgotten or hidden because over 600,000 Italian Americans were affected by this one event. It's one of the biggest things that's ever happened in the Italian American community.

 

 

 

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It was a sunny afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, and my mother, sister, niece, husband, and I stumbled on a building called the Italian Hall. There, we saw a sign for the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA). As we are all Italian Americans, we found this fortuitous. So, we popped in and toured the museum's collection, an eclectic mix of fun facts and fascinating exhibits connected to Italian heritage.

 

As a Los Angeles transplant from Milwaukee, I don't often encounter such connections. Sure, there are some fabulous Italian restaurants, and Venice has canals. But I rarely have the opportunity to celebrate my Italian roots in the City of Angels.

Thanks to places like the IAMLA, I now know that Los Angeles is home to the fifth-largest Italian American population in the United States. 

Awareness of such lesser-known facts and her interest in her own Italian-American identity led the IAMLA Executive Director and historian Marianna Gatto to co-found the museum, which opened its doors in 2016.

 

"When I started working on this project twenty years ago, people would say things like, 'There are Italians in Los Angeles? Los Angeles had a Little Italy?'" Marianna says. "Now, I hear people saying, 'Italians helped shape Los Angeles.'"

 

Marianna, author of the recently published The Italian Americans of Los Angeles: A History, shared with me what inspired the founding of the IAMLA, her approach to curation and research, challenges she's faced, where she sees the museum headed, and advice for those who wish to pursue a museum career. 

What is your connection to Sicily?

My Sicilian family came to the United States in 1897. They were from Lucca Sicula in the Province of Agrigento. Like many Sicilians, they came following Italy's unification as the economic situation in the Mezzogiorno (Italy's south) worsened. Following the American Civil War, there was a labor shortage in the southern United States, and Sicilians were recruited to work in the fields and fisheries. My great-grandfather, his son, and scores of others from Lucca Sicula were among them. 

 

What inspired you to co-found the IAMLA?

There were two key events that served as a catalyst for my work with the museum. My earliest inspiration can be traced to my childhood. From a very young age, I was aware that I was Italian American, but growing up in an exceptionally diverse part of Los Angeles where Italian Americans were a small minority, I had to search far and wide for a mirror. The opportunities to explore my italianità were few. I began to question, what is my place in Los Angeles and what is my place among Italian Americans? Do I have one?  

To answer that question, I began devouring any book I could find on Italian American history. There were none about Italians in Los Angeles. I remember going through the indexes of volumes on Italian American history in search of 'Los Angeles' and in books about Los Angeles in search of 'Italians.' I sought answers from my father, but the information he shared often left me with more questions. Unlike most of the Italian Americans I read about, our family did not enter the U.S. through Ellis Island. My Sicilian side came through New Orleans and worked as agricultural laborers before continuing west to Colorado. At my grandmother's urging, they moved to Los Angeles, which was then still a suburban Eden, in 1948. I was thoroughly confused. What kind of Italians were we? 

When I was an undergraduate in college I learned about the Italian Hall, a building on the edge of downtown Los Angeles that had been constructed in 1908 and had served as a gathering place for Italian Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. I was floored. Italian Hall demonstrated that Los Angeles did indeed have an Italian American history with roots that stretched deep into its soil. A group known as the Historic Italian Hall Foundation was raising funds to rehabilitate the building, portions of which had languished after being vacant for decades, with the goal of resurrecting it as an Italian American community center. When I visited the building for the first time, my heart skipped a beat. I said aloud to the building's ghosts, to the pigeons nesting in the rafters, "This needs to be a museum, and I want to be the director." Well, years would pass before that dream materialized, but it did.

So, you could say that my second inspiration was the building itself, Italian Hall, and the history it speaks to, that of the two-hundred-year history of Italian Americans in Southern California. The building was my muse, the impetus for my research. After visiting it that day, I set out to discover and document the Italian Americans of Los Angeles, a group whose influence and contributions are felt throughout the region yet, until recently, received little recognition. The idea that a community so integral to the Los Angeles metropolis could be forgotten absolutely baffled me.

 

What are some highlights from your involvement with the museum?

Next year marks my twentieth working on the museum project, and there have been many high points, low points, and in-between points. Opening our doors was a huge milestone. Witnessing how our work has brought people together and enriched so many lives has been really rewarding, as has meeting some truly special people. Last year, the IAMLA won a prestigious award for Woven Lives, one of the temporary exhibitions I wrote and curated that explores the experiences of Italian American women told through needlework. This exhibition is slated to travel to the East Coast.

The IAMLA has also dramatically expanded its free public programming, and seeing how the arts and educational experiences we offer enrich resource-starved communities is also incredibly rewarding. Many of our youth visitors have never been to a museum or attended a live theatrical performance before. There have been other times when we have rejoiced after receiving an important grant or donation. 

 

How do you approach curating exhibitions representing the Italian American experience in Los Angeles and the West?

Our visitors are incredibly diverse; over 80 percent are not of Italian extraction. Our goal is to make history engaging, relatable, and relevant to all who step through our doors or access content online. We are cognizant of how we present information in order to appeal to different learning styles, educational levels, and age groups, and heavily utilize technology, interactive experiences, and storytelling. On any given day, you will see K-12 field trips, families, and senior and special needs groups visiting, and we want all of them to walk away having learned something. We emphasize universal themes, attempt to make connections with current events, and encourage visitors to draw upon their personal experiences. 

We follow the same approach with our temporary exhibitions. The IAMLA presents two new and original temporary exhibitions each year. They cover a variety of topics, from Italian American inventors to Pinocchio as a cultural icon. Each exhibition is accompanied by a variety of free educational programming, and it's through these events that we create a dynamic space that keeps people coming back. 

 

You recently published The Italian Americans of Los Angeles: A History. Tell us about the research that went into that book.

The research for the book brought me to archives and to cemeteries, to people's homes and businesses; I poured over volumes of documents, scrutinized endnotes, and hunted down unpublished manuscripts. The book is a survey of Italian Americans in Greater Los Angeles from the time of the first Italian settler's arrival in 1827, before there was an Italy and before California was a state.

This is the first comprehensive auto-history of Italian Americans in the City of Angels. It looks at subjects ranging from Italian pioneers and foodways to faith, entertainment history, anti-Italianism, and the arts. It includes many rare images, and like the museum's exhibitions, it is designed to be accessible and relatable, whether or not you are of Italian extraction or hail from Southern California.  

 

What challenges have you faced in preserving and promoting Italian American history, and how have you overcome them?

In the early days of the museum project, there was a crisis in awareness. Italian American history is often conceived as primarily an East Coast phenomenon, and numerically speaking, the majority of Italians did indeed settle in New York and Northeastern and Midwestern urban areas, but there are a number of other Italian American communities that are also worth studying and understanding. Los Angeles has an Italian American history that dates back nearly two centuries, but it has seldom been examined by Los Angeles historians or Italian American historians.

Many Italian Americans were struggling to achieve upward mobility during a time when the emphasis in America was on consensus and assimilation. The decades during which laws passed to prohibit Italians from coming to the United States and when Italians were portrayed as radicals and anarchists were followed by World War II years when the United States was at war with Italy. Italian Americans—Italo Angelenos—stopped speaking Italian and deemphasized their Italian-ness. The older generation was often reluctant to speak about their experiences, and if history and culture are not transmitted, what happens? It is often lost. My work as a historian has centered around unearthing this history.

There have been a number of challenges over the past two decades, but we have kept going. Perseverance has been an essential part of overcoming. 

 

How do you see the museum evolving, and what projects or exhibitions are you most excited about?

In the years that follow, I see the IAMLA continuing to expand in our physical location and our reach. Long before the pandemic, before virtual offerings became more commonplace, we presented considerable content online. We are also collaborating with other institutions to bring exhibitions and programs to various parts of the country. I see the IAMLA expanding its direct services to the public. Many of the people who visit the IAMLA come from resource-starved communities. Admission to the museum is free, and the overwhelming majority of museum programs—concerts, workshops, and other events—are also free. Serving as a resource for communities that often lack access to arts and cultural experiences gives me tremendous pride. The IAMLA is a museum and it is also a vehicle for bringing together communities and helping narrow the opportunity gap. 

On the heels of the IAMLA's very successful exhibition about Italian American jazzman Louis Prima, we will be opening a new and original exhibition on Italian American inventors and innovators that I'm particularly excited about. The exhibition examines the work of nearly one hundred inventors, from Enrico Fermi's work on the nuclear reactor and Robert Gallo, who discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS, to Teressa Bellissimo, who created the Buffalo chicken wing and Bernard Castro, who devised the convertible sofa. We will be presenting some great programming in conjunction with the exhibition.

 

What advice would you give someone pursuing a career like yours?

Prepare yourself for a lot of ups and downs, and try not to get discouraged during the downs. It's all part of the process. Strive to be a lifelong learner. The world changes more quickly than ever, it seems, and adaptability is key.

 

What do you hope people will take away from a visit to the museum?

In recent years, some of our leaders have determined that history—as well as the arts and other subjects—are "non-essential." The results are frightening. I hope people will take with them a greater understanding of the many people that make up the American mosaic and that these little blocks of knowledge will foster the development of a more informed and compassionate nation.

 

 

 

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