Part 2: Never Felt Italian-American Enough

Or Croatian-American or Irish-American either.

This post is part of a series called The Portal about the ways that my life and practice of herbal medicine has gotten more culturally grounded since traveling to Italy in 2024.

Prequel: Where Bones Belong to the Earth

Prologue: Everything Makes Sense Now

Part 1: The Portal: An Introduction

• Plantcestor: My Friend Fennel

• Plantcestor: Queen Anne’s Lace

Part 2: Never Felt Italian-American Enough (below)

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When I was growing up, I never really felt Italian-American, Croatian-American or Irish-American. I more often felt an absence of culture.

We spoke English at home. My dad is a second generation American, whose ancestors come from modern day Croatia and Italy. My mom is second and third generation, who’s ancestors come from Ireland. They both moved to San Francisco in the early 1970’s to study at UC Law. 

The most Italian thing about my family was that we ate a lot of pasta with marinara sauce. Most nights my mom mostly made dinner, but on PTA meeting nights my mom was out of the house and Dad would always fix up his famous “Chicken and Spaghetti” which was one of my absolute least favorite dinners, mostly because it was so predictable. 

The most interesting thing to tell you about chicken and spaghetti is that the chicken is cooked in the marinara sauce. So you have one pot boiling water and making spaghetti and then a very large saucepan that has tomatoes simmering for a long while, with chicken pieces, including legs, thighs and wings scattered about the sauce. My dad would probably say that this makes the sauce and the chicken taste better. 

As for my mom’s side, on Saint Patrick’s Day we ate corned-beef and cabbage. On cultural heritage day at school, I brought in soda bread to share with my friends. This was the extent of how I connected to my ancestral lineages. 

Growing up in California in the 90’s I also grew up speaking Spanish. When my siblings and I entered kindergarten, we attended a public school where most of our instruction was in Spanish. I don’t remember a lot from being five, but I do remember being confused about what my teacher was saying a lot of the time!

Language immersion also came with being immersed in cultural practices of Central America. Vivid memories include celebrating Día de los Muertos; we painted sugar skulls and brought in photos of our beloved dead in early November. In December we made tamales and sang door to door during Las Posadas. Every spring we danced in Carnaval with elaborate colorful costumes down the streets of San Francisco’s Latin American Cultural District, La Misión.

When I was in 5th and 7th grade we took international trips to Mexico. Some of my most vivid, pre 9-11 memories of Mexico include hiking up Chichén Itza at the Mayan Ruins of The Yucatán and being moved by the conveyer belts that were installed in front of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for me to speak to a shop clerk, the parent of my student, my student, or a stranger in Spanish for a few minutes before they notice my blue eyes and stop me mid-sentence to say, in Spanish, something to the effect, “how is it that you speak Spanish?” (often in Spanish).

People have guessed from my accent and vocabulary that I’m from a handful of different Spanish speaking countries (while other people pin my pronunciation and pale skin for a gringo right away). My canned reply, which often earns a soft smile is, “Estoy de aquí, en San Francisco hablamos español.” (I’m from here, in San Francisco we speak Spanish).

And then, as I practiced Italian on my phone app on the eve of my trip to Southern Italy in 2024, I realized: Spain is in Europe. 

A California Framework

I realized that for three decades, I had lived in a framework in California where Spanish speakers are primarily from Central and South America, not realizing that, just like the words on this webpage, Spanish is the colonizer's tongue.

Living in the dominant culture, which suffers from a serious cultural and historical amnesia, it has always felt odd that I have been a white person who grew up speaking Spanish. 

From a young age, I had been steeped in Central-American culture, and as a teen and young adult found this well-intentioned immersion (intended to offer more cultural competency, and later job opportunities to students) to be laced with cultural appropriation, so I distanced myself. I stopped speaking Spanish unless absolutely necessary to communicate, because it felt like the language and culture didn’t belong to me. 

Traveling to Italy, I have begun to understand how not-so-far from my family lineage parts of my Spanish-immersion upbringing really was. Both Spain and Italy’s languages are rooted in the parent language of Latin. Both countries sit along the Mediterranean Sea, which I now understand is a body of water famous for travel and trade for a few thousand years, between Europe, SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) and the Mediterranean.

I realized upon my trip to Southern Italy that many of the seasonal festivals, like celebrations of the beloved dead in early November, or winter celebrations with prayer and food are a part of the fabric of Italian culture too. There is a long legacy of herbal medicine that has been woven into these cultures, sharing a bioregion and centuries of trade, thus a plethora of common plants. Additionally, the influence from contact with the Americas for a few hundred years ties these two regions of the world together in many aspects.

What I’ve come to better understand is that as a young Italian-American** in San Francisco at a Spanish-immersion school, I was a lot closer to my own cultural origin story than I realized. Unlike some of the friends I met on my trip to Southern Italy, I didn't grow up going to Catholic mass, in an Italian-American enclave or have many connections to the culture outside of food. It’s unfortunate that for 80 years, from the 1930’s to the present day, my own family had largely stepped away from our cultural connections.

As a practicing herbalist looking to deepen my connection to plants and un-do whiteness by reclaiming my cultural identity, I’ve realized my upbringing may not have been as appropriative or void of culture as I had thought. In fact, it may have been a glimmer of connection.

It took me about 30 years and a trip across the world for me to fit the pieces together. That’s what this series, The Portal is all about. 

Thanks for reading.

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A few anti-racist resources for White people

• Seeing White (Podcast)

• Undoing Whiteness (Academic article)

• Are Italians White (Book)

• White Fragility (Book)

• My Grandmother’s Hands (Book)

** I’m also Irish and Croatian American, but those are stories for another time.