Guido Culture and Italian American Youth

S T U D I E S A M E R I C A N I T A L I A N A N D I T A L I A N

GUIDO CULTURE AND ITALIAN AMERICAN YOUTH From Bensonhurst to Jersey Shore

Donald Tricarico

Italian and Italian American Studies Series Editor Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA

This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. Editorial Board Rebecca West, University of Chicago Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY Phillip V. Cannistraro (Deceased), Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza” William J. Connell, Seton Hall University More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14835

Donald Tricarico

Guido Culture and Italian American Youth From Bensonhurst to Jersey Shore

Donald Tricarico Queensborough Community College, CUNY Bayside, NY, USA

Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-030-03292-0 ISBN 978-3-030-03293-7  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962905 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: iStock/Getty Images Plus This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Nina, Marina, and Dominique

Preface

This book is a product of a career-long interest in Italian American culture in New York City. My doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 1984, was a community study of an Italian neighborhood in Greenwich Village where my mother’s side of the family had resided since the 1880s. Like the Italian neighborhood, Guido youth culture is an adaptation beyond the immigrant generation on the level of culture and social structure. It has held my scholarly interest since the late 1980s. The volume is an adaptation of five book chapters and two journal articles published from 1991 to 2017. I began to entertain the possibility of a book when Guido was named by MTV in 2009 for the commercially successful reality TV series “Jersey Shore”. Earlier material is incorporated in a narrative that aspires to be comprehensive and concise. New insights are included from a standpoint in the present. There is ample room to expand on topics crimped by other formats. I remain fundamentally concerned with enriching the discussion about Italian American ethnicity, both empirically and theoretically, in academic sociology and Italian American studies. The book is also submitted as having relevance for a youth culture field that has overlooked Italian Americans and other European ancestry groups.

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I would like to thank the following publishers for granting permissions to adapt my earlier work: Fairchild, Fordham University, Illinois University, McGraw Hill, and the Italian American Review.1 I would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for the opportunity to make my work accessible, in particular Megan Laddusaw who escorted me through the early stages and Christine Pardue who was diligent, patient, and expert throughout the production process. Stanislao Pugliese, the general editor of the Italian and Italian American Studies series, as well as an Italian American studies scholar, expressed confidence in my ability to write an important book. It is unlikely that this book would have been written without his commitment. I would like to thank Dan Pucciarelli, a gentleman from Bath Beach, who patiently escorted me down memory lane to reconstruct the feel of the disco movement in southern Brooklyn in the 1970s. I would like to acknowledge the support of The Calandra Institute for Italian American Studies at The City University of New York and affiliated scholars Joseph Sciorra, Laura Ruperto, Anthony Tamburri, and James Pasto. I am grateful to Amy Traver for her surgical edits and loyal friendship. There is the constant love of my wife, Nina and our daughters Marina and Dominique. Marina’s fiancé Dimitri Vastardis generously volunteered his word processing acumen and earnest sports talk. Bayside, USA

Donald Tricarico

1Portions of Chapters 4 and 10 were adapted from New Italian Migrations to the United States, copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois and used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. Portions of Chapter 5 were adapted from Making Italian America, publishing in 2014 by Fordham University Press. Chapter 5 was also adapted from The Men’s Fashion Reader, edited by Andrew Reilly and Sarah Crosbey and published in 2008 by Fairchild Books, an imprint of Bloomsbury. Material in Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 was drawn from the essay “Bellas and Fellas in Cyberspace: Mobilizing Italian Ethnicity for Online Youth Culture,” from the Italian American Review 1. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 1–34. Reprinted by permission by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, City University of New York. Finally, Chapter 8 was adapted from Sources: Notable Selections in Race and Ethnicity, edited by Adalberto Aguirre, Jr., and David V. Baker, copyright 2001 by McGraw-Hill Education.

Contents

1

Theorizing Italian American Youth Culture 1

2

A Local Italian American Youth Style Tradition: Anticipating Guido 31

3

The Turn to Disco and Other Subcultural Developments

4

Becoming Guido: Identifying a Youth Subculture 87

5

Performing Style 115

6

“It’s Cool Being Italian”: Fashioning an Ethnic Youth Style 143

7

The Local Struggle for Cool 173

8

GUIDOVILLE: Labeling Italian Americans Deviant 207

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A Party Culture Becomes a Media Spectacle 237

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Contents

10 Rethinking Italian American Ethnicity: A Middle Space 271 Bibliography 305 Index 327

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

John Travolta plays the lead greaser in a film that was a box office hit one year after SNF. His character demonstrates the makings of a free-floating style in the popular culture (e.g., black leather jacket, DA haircut). Like Happy Days, the musical comedy subdues the male greaser through contact with middle-class respectability (Source Grease—4 Movie Clips + Trailer, JoBlo Movie Clips, published on April 18, 2018, 3:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atZLEN7dEWw, accessed 9.5.2018) John Travolta as Tony Manero in opening sequence establishes the authenticity of Italian American Bensonhurst in the disco myth (Source Saturday Night Fever [Opening Credits], 3:57, YouTube, published on 1.26.2018, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=HVEqy6K18Yo, accessed 9.19.2018) Disco Dan in the DJ booth at Gatsby’s in southern Brooklyn, 1979 (Courtesy of Dan Pucciarelli) The 2001 Odyssey dance floor as it appears in SNF as the iconic ritual space for the Italian American turn to disco. The expensive lighting for the dance floor became a fixture at the club (Source “Saturday Night Fever [Disco Inferno The Trammps]”, 1:57, YouTube, published six years ago, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=BPV6kpNnr3c, accessed 9.5.2018)

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Matt Saladino performing at L’Amour, a Queens club circa 1987 (Source Guido Matt Saladino, Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/Bensonhurst 86th Street, 12:19, published on YouTube by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018) In this image, Causi makes a signature appearance at the most prominent Bensonhurst street festa, Santa Rosalia (Source Medugno, Vincent “Brooklyn’s Own Joe Causi Visits the Feast of 18th Avenue”, 6:04. Published on Sept. 5, 2009, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= O6wZOVx8xiU&t=14s, accessed 8.21.2018) Map of Bensonhurst and southern Brooklyn (Source Brooklyn Neighborhoods Map, Wikimedia Commons, July 18, 2009. Based on content from OpenStreet Map, author Peter Fitzgerald, accessed 8.21.2018) The “thick” ethnicity of Bensonhurst Italian Americans was performed collectively and in public when the Italian national team won the 2006 World Cup (Bensonhurst Home of the Italians, 2:29, published by BkLynGuiDo718 on Jan. 16, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN_6nRja-ZA, accessed 8.21.2018) Guido MC Matt the Horse in style (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/ Bensonhurst 86th Street”, 12:19, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018) Guidettes dressed for the club circa late 1980s (Source “Cruisin’ 86th Street [movie trailer]”, a documentary film by Willian DeMeo/West Street Productions, published on Nov. 9, 2015 by MrRobDale, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=CqeSBNuae_Y, accessed 8.21.2018) The new look of Italian American youth culture in a Queens club is reserved for 1987 (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/ Bensonhurst 86th Street”, 12:19, YouTube, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018) Mint Caddy Fleetwood with Red Ribbon tied to Rear-View Mirror at Astoria Park for the weekend cruisin’ scene (Source “Astoria Park 80s”, 13:41, published by cos1965 on Jan. 13, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wXyKpukNKy8&t=2s, accessed 8.21.2018)

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List of Figures   

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5

The Guido MCs called attention to being Italian in the context of American youth popular culture (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/Bensonhurst 86th Street”, YouTube, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018) Despite unvarnished challenges to Black youth culture, the Guido MCs cross an ethnic boundary with a Black DJ (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/Bensonhurst 86th Street”, 12:19, YouTube, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018) Growing Up Gotti disseminated Guido style in the mass media leading up to Jersey Shore (Source Growing Up Gotti: 10 Years Later: The Hair [Season 4, Episode 1], published by A + E 11.12.14, 1:51, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pAqEuGwPuk8, accessed 8.21.2018) Pauly D explaining the connection between Guido and being Italian (Source “Welcome to Jersey Shore”, recap season 1 episode 1 12/1/2009, 6:27, MTV, http://www.mtv.com/ video-clips/8go1h7/jersey-shore-welcome-to-jersey-shore, accessed 8.21.2018) JS meets Pygmalion as the taste makers at Harper’s Bazaar rehabilitate Guidette style (Source “The Jersey Shore Goes to Charm School by Harper’s BAZAAR US”, Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, 4.14.2010, 2:03, https://www.harpersbazaar. com/celebrity/red-carpet-dresses/a527/jersey-shoremakeover-0510/, accessed 8.18.2018) Jojo and his Staten Italy Homies (Source “Jojo Pellegrino – Where I’m From Part 2”, 5:43, published on YouTube by JojoPellegrinoVEVO on Jan. 9, 2012, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=BlNbAaqWtG0, accessed 8.21.2018) G Fella proclaims “I’m a Guido” in the suburbs (Source “Guido – G Fella (Members Only)”, published by Gfella on July 22, 2016, 4:16, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RA_KGprJv7k, accessed 8.21.2018)

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CHAPTER 1

Theorizing Italian American Youth Culture

The cat was out of the bag. A commercial on MTV in December 2009 announced the channel’s new reality show that would feature “Guidos”. The promise of a show immediately grabbed the attention of a national audience and the mainstream media. Jersey Shore represented Guido as a party culture revolving around a beach house and dance clubs in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, a resort with an amusement park and boardwalk that had become popular with summer “grouper” shares. It portrayed the “self-professed ‘guidos’” as a youth subculture identified with Italian American ethnicity as well as with hedonistic style (Roberts 2010; Brooks 2009). American audience response was robust with 4.8 million viewers for the Season 1 finale (Roberts 2010) and ballooning to 8.9 million viewers for an episode in January 2011 which was “more than most of the network shows on that night” (Denhart 2011). High audience ratings reverberated throughout the commercial media including national television talk shows and fashion magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and GQ (Alston 2010). This commercial synergy further hyped the series and Guido style was merchandised in myriad directions including workout videos, clothing lines, and hair gel (Roberts 2010). Meteoric ratings success turned JS into “an iconic franchise”, the blueprint for “character-driven reality series” that continues to inspire MTV’s search for other “subcultures” like white southerner youth on the Florida-Alabama gulf shore and justified a “reunion” show in April 2018 (Angelo 2017). © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_1

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An Italian American youth culture called Guido became the focus of my scholarly research in the late 1980s. It fit into my broader interest in Italian American culture in New York City beyond the immigrant generation, an ethnic agency aligned with urban institutions. An ethnography conducted in the southern Brooklyn community of Bensonhurst, its ritual and symbolic center, and other outer borough Italian American neighborhoods complemented by participant interviews led to a journal publication that described Guido as “an urban youth subculture, comparable to Hip Hop and Metal, primarily engaged in the spectacle of style” (Tricarico 1991: 43). I was especially interested in the significance of ethnicity which was “rooted in urban social structure” and “expressed in youth culture symbols and meanings” (44). I was fairly convinced that Guido would remain local and well off the pop culture radar in contrast to Hip Hop and Metal. I based this opinion on the low impact of Guido style to that point, a style that was without musical distinction, a point that left it unrepresented on MTV. Thus, I assumed that it would go quietly into the good night of assimilation with the decline in Italian ancestry population in outer borough areas like Bensonhurst and Howard Beach; in particular, I did not envision staying power comparable to Hip Hop and other racialized youth subcultures. Guido and the Bensonhurst Italian American community had also been framed by “images of moral panic in the mass media” in reference to a “racial killing” in 1989: “labelled as a moral problem, in the manner of Black youth defined by ‘wolfpack’ violence and ‘wilding’ episodes, it may be difficult to sustain the claim that it is ‘in’ to be Guido”. Guido was not neither fragile nor ephemeral and, thus, indicative of a more bounded subculture. Although preoccupied with dance club culture, it not only outlived the demise of the “disco movement” it was instrumental in the revival of a local dance music radio station, WKTU FM, in the late 1990s. It survived the damaging association with racist “wolfpack” violence in the mainstream press, even drawing on outsider enmity to strengthen insider cohesion (see Chapter 8). It colonized new scenes including a social media scene on the Internet (“chat rooms”) when service became available in the late 1990s. I did not expect the transplanting of Guido style to the suburbs, in effect a second-generation style of consumption that absorbed new pop culture trends like tanning and bodybuilding. Above all, I never anticipated the mainstream media showcase initiated by MTV which slighted dance music in the 1980s and 1990s in favor of rock and, then, Hip Hop. Jersey Shore accorded Guido

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a pop culture credential that it lacked. My miscalculation did not foresee the impact of a commercial project that married reality TV and youth culture. When its business model was exclusively based on music videos, there was no room for Guido on MTV and Guido did not seem to leave much room for MTV. We will see that there has historically been ample room for the representation of urban Italian American youth culture in the mass media. However, Guido awaited the right media vehicle. MTV brought the noise in more ways than one. JS immediately invited a bias complaint with the flagrant use of Guido. Before the first episode aired, Dominos Pizza pulled its advertisements when Italian American organizations complained that Guido was an ethnic slur (Brooks 2009). Although my research continued the conversation about Guido at low decibel levels in academic circles, it suddenly touched a political nerve. MTV defended itself from anti-defamation protests by arguing that Guido was a youth culture and, therefore, its métier. Ethnic identity politics remained a background noise that greatly subsided after the first season and failed to prevent Guido from becoming a category of popular American culture. This book is about Guido as an Italian American youth culture practice based in New York City. It tells a story about being Italian American in and through the engagement with popular American culture at a particular historical juncture, beginning with a turn to disco in the 1970s, including the appropriation of their own image in the film Saturday Night Fever which fueled a national trend. The “disco movement” is one of many critical transactions with the mass media, a dialogue or feedback loop of appropriations by youth agents on the one hand and commercial media texts and outlets on the other. SNF and JS are the textual bookends for the development of an Italian American youth subculture called Guido. SNF, which functions more as a blueprint for Italian American youth on the margins of contemporary youth culture, created the promise of enfranchisement in contemporary youth culture through media recognition despite being anti-disco and portraying a dysfunctional Italian American urban culture. JS documents a youth style that is largely unknown in the mainstream, affording a measure of recognition thirtytwo years after SNF marginalized Italian American youth culture in southern Brooklyn although still leaving the issue of respect or inclusion unresolved. Italian American youth continue to appropriate a popular American culture that is still appropriating them. This book situates this dialogic

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process in a local culture. Therefore, it is necessary to place these transactions within a system of urban social stratification—status hierarchies based on the intersections of class, race, and ethnicity. This entails the recognition of a minority ethnic group culture (Marger 2012), rooted in the mass immigration from Italy, and replenished by recent arrivals after 1945 which produced important nodes of internal differentiation. In New York City and other urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest, this ethnic culture was distilled in the Italian American neighborhood. Youth culture identity reflected this segmentation and stratification, negotiating differences with communities on their borders. Guido is not just an ethnic label imposed from the outside to stigmatize a youth category. It is, more importantly, a collective identity embraced by Italian American youth, not in an act of ethnic self-loathing but as a symbolic reversal mediated by popular American culture; here, Guido reevaluates being Italian American for being “in style”. Having Italian ethnicity was necessary but not sufficient in this equation, it had to be mediated and authenticated by youth popular culture. A new, collective Italian American subject not only surfaced in urban style markets but later in the mainstream culture and in global markets (Roberts 2010). The story of Guido has been branded by MTV so it is in the service of commercial power. It has appropriated a youth style based on the appropriation of popular American culture into a global commodity. As a gatekeeper to mainstream youth culture, Jersey Shore Guido is no match for the anti-defamation efforts of Italian American organizations that protested the MTV narrative that, in their view, gave Italian Americans a bad name. At the same time, these “official” views are, themselves predicated on certain positions inside the ethnic boundary. Because Guido is now in the popular culture, it has emerged as a dominant motif for constructing Italian American identity; it is the anti-defamation fear that JS promotes the perception, not just that Guidos are Italian Americans but that Italian Americans are Guidos. With this intervention, the story became bigger than youth culture. This book takes up these new questions about Guido. However, it is principally motivated by an old story, a theoretical concern with Italian American difference. Guido does not register in the conversation about Italian American ethnicity in academic sociology specifically in the field of racial and ethnic relations which has viewed European immigrant groups from the perspective of straight-line assimilation (Sandberg 1973; Marger 2012). The classic statement envisions a linear development in

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which ethnicity inversely declines for successive generations. In the case of European ancestry groups, there a reasonable expectation that the third generation has become “post-ethnic whites” (Doane 1998). Italian Americans have been slotted into this paradigm. Their assimilation timeline is adjusted to mass immigration which began around 1880 and ended in 1924, when legislative quotas drastically restricted the outflow from Italy. Almost 100 years removed from the imposition of immigrant quotas, Italian Americans have completely vanished from many of the newly published texts on ethnicity and ethnic groups (Iceland 2017; Fitzgerald 2017).

Italian American Difference in New York City This book presents Guido as an Italian American story that, when carefully unpacked, can be read as a narrative of roots and routes that define an urban Italian American culture in the outer boroughs of New York City at a particular historical juncture. It is a collective agency, an assimilation strategy oriented to popular youth culture which is a response that is typical for an age fraction in contemporary society but, at the same time, reflecting the position of Italian Americans in a system of ethnic stratification that dovetails with status hierarchies of class and race. The construction of ethnic identity is located in the process of assimilation not as “symbolic ethnicity”, but in response to status dilemmas associated with an ethnic minority group culture. Guido—the style of young Italian Americans—symbolizes the negotiation of a negatively privileged ethnicity with American society. This is a departure from straight-line assimilation theory which only allows “traditional” culture to decline. Guido, and Italian American youth culture more generally, is a break with tradition that is not a break with Italian ethnicity. This is not a scenario that resonates with establishment sociology in no small part because scant attention has been paid to Italian American culture beyond the immigrant generation. There are only a handful of empirical studies with two classic ethnographies conducted in the 1930s and 1950s enshrined as definitive statements. Whyte’s study of the North End of Boston during the Depression (1993) and Gans’ study of the West End of Boston in the 1950s (1984) have come to represent the urban Italian American experience by default although both are fundamentally slum social studies and, thus, apprehend Italian American culture through the prism of social class. They are also trained in specific

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slum social institutions although both studies recognize institutional change. Neither studied ethnic community culture from a historical perspective that registers social and cultural change. Whyte focused on male peer groups and Gans looked at family-centered peer group networks. Whyte shows male peer groups tilting to mainstream American culture. Gans shows age peer relationships as a generational divide within the kinship group although West Enders are depicted as too family-centered to form communal connections, even the streetcorner kind, resonating with Edward Banfield’s (1958) “amoral familism” thesis that southern Italians in the 1950s were culturally and perhaps congenitally incapable of wider solidarity. It is remarkable that Italian American culture in New York City is largely left out of the conversation in academic sociology even though it was the “golden door” for Italian immigrants in this country and the group has impacted the life of the city for over 100 years. When I entered the field in the 1970s as a graduate student, there were two major sociological studies of Italians in the city although neither had the stature accorded to the studies by Whyte of Gans in the ­literature. Leonard Covello’s The Social Background of the Italo American Schoolchild (1970) was an insider examination of the southern Italian family as the “central institution” of immigrant life in the period before World War Two. It was focused on Italian East Harlem, the largest Italian immigrant settlement in the city, but there is little on ethnic community culture and institutional adaptations beyond the immigrant generation. Another influential study was Caroline Ware’s book, Greenwich Village: 1920 to 1930 (1965) which provided a snapshot of “Italians” as the largest ethnic group in the area. Writing from a “social welfare” perspective, Ware argued that the Italian community was left “disorganized” by the end of mass immigration and the “Americanization” of the second generation. Whereas Covello was content to inhabit the immigrant experience and even underscored its durability, Ware portrayed first-generation traditions as the end of the line. My doctoral dissertation was a direct response to Ware. It set out to document that an Italian immigrant community organized along paesani ties was restructured in the years that followed. As in East Harlem, the central institution of Italian American life was the kinship group but I found that it promoted rather than inhibited community solidarity—a case of communal familism rather than the amoral familism depicted by Banfield and intimated by Gans. Italian family culture articulated with

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locality-based institutions including a Catholic parish, political clubs, a Mafia syndicate, and a social neighborhood that focused on age-based peer groups. The institutions of a neighborhood-based Italian American community were still discernible in the late 1970s when I conducted an ethnography. My study of Italian American neighborhood culture in Greenwich Village, subtitled “The Social Structure and Transformation of an Ethnic Community”, was too little and too late to register in establishment sociology. It was published in 1984 by a small press that specialized in immigration, The Center for Migration Studies, the same year that the Urban Villagers was reissued by a major publisher in a second edition. It has become the final word on the subject, the default citation for Italian Americans in the academic literature on race and ethnicity (Marger 2012: 304–305). There was a gathering storm on the horizon for Italian American studies. The following year, the publication of a book by Richard Alba (1985) announced that Italian Americans had entered a “twilight of ethnicity”. Aligning Italian Americans with straight-line assimilation theory as the accepted paradigm for European immigrant populations (Sandberg 1973), it sent the signal that there is little Italian ethnicity left and very likely nothing worth studying. The metaphor of “twilight” implies a steady decline until darkness descended; there is no room for meaningful change. Although Crispino (1980: 164) acknowledged “the changing face of ethnicity” in a study of Bridgeport Italian Americans in the 1970s it was “at most a detour on the road to complete assimilation” and thus warranting only passing interest. At best, assimilated “European Americans” are allowed a “symbolic ethnicity” based on “personal feelings” or “nostalgia” for selected “symbols” within a traditional heritage, and accessed as “individualized” lifestyle choices within mainstream “leisure” and “taste cultures” (e.g., ethnic cuisine or art) rather than as “cultural practices” and “group relationships” (Gans 1998). Since “symbolic ethnicity” is based on “individual psychology” and specifically “feelings” rather than social structure it is “unlikely to sustain ethnicgroup cohesion” and to prevent the individual from “mixing freely with others of different backgrounds” (Alba 1985: 173). The “twilight” perspective is impervious to mounting research evidence that supports objective ethnic change beyond the immigrant generation. The anthropologist Micaela Di Leonardo (1984) demonstrates that Italian American kinship in the suburbs of Northern California is evidenced in the reciprocal transfer of resources notably finances and

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services like childcare and handy work; notwithstanding greater individualization, suburban children derive material benefits by staying close to the family—benefits that articulate with distinctive affective ties. In a study of 301 Italian American women in Nassau County in the early 1980s, Capozzoli (1987) depicts an agenda to reconcile acculturation with traditional family norms which, for example, restricted educational and occupational choices in favor of kinship solidarity for males as well as females. Similar to Gans’ findings for the West End, Johnson (1982: 206–213) singles out the sibling relationship rather than “generational linkage” as key to Italian American kinship solidarity; cousins also become close as the children of adult siblings. Goode et al. (1984: 175) note the adaptation of Italian American foodways in an older suburb of Philadelphia. They characterize this change as “syncretization”, a blending of culture to produce a “new result”; thus, through “menu negotiation” mainstream food items are reconciled with “good maternal nurturance” and other traditional rules. There is also research that supports change at the level of Italian American community. Moreover, traditional food practices that persist because they are learned early and represent ethnic family bonds were reinforced “above the level of the household” when shared with fellow ethnics in informal placed-based networks—findings that point to capacity of Italian American family culture to germinate wider ethnic solidarity as in the city (Goode et al. 1984). A study by Susan Eckstein (2001) of an “inner suburb” in metropolitan Boston documents the emergence of a placed-based ethnic community that coalesced between 1920 and the mid-1960s. Eckstein discerns thriving communal solidarity manifest in formal groups organized around fund-raising and volunteer labor such as a local chapter of the Sons of Italy and immigrant mutual benefit societies, the Catholic parish, and national voluntary organizations like the American Legion and the Boys Club (834). Eckstein attributes the high level of communal solidarity to the distinctive demography of the suburb, in particular, ethnic and class homogeneity. The dense social networks characterized by strong rather than weak social ties supported an ethnic heritage of local family values that encouraged reciprocity and even a “generosity” that tended to “blur boundaries between kin (voluntary) group, and neighborhood” (844). Eckstein calls attention to changes in ethnicity in “successive generations” which engaged them in local group patterns “even though many residents by the 1990s had the human capital and economic resources to assimilate fully” (848). In

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marked contrast to the Banfield legacy of “amoral familism” Eckstein contends that the creation of “residential bonds conducive to groupbased community giving appear to be exceptionally strong among Italian Americans” relative to other white ethnics (848). M.P. Baumgartner’s (1988) ethnography of an “outlying suburb” of New York City with a population of 16,000 in 1980 focuses on a normative, or moral, order among blue-collar and lower-middle-class Italian Americans based on strong ties that imparted an intensity to both their consensus and their disputes. A system of social control that extends from the household into relations to neighbors, many of whom are kin (98), contrasted with the “distinctive pattern of interpersonal attachment” or “social morphology” of the suburbs characterized by weak ties and transiency (6). Italian Americans in New York City, in particular, have not slipped quietly into “twilight”. Despite ongoing out-migration and legislative restrictions on immigration in 1924, there were still over 600,000 persons of Italian ancestry in the city in 2000. Although first settlement enclaves like the south Village were in eclipse in the 1970s, there were large Italian communities, a subway ride from Manhattan in the outer boroughs. These communities were second settlements within city limits but their populations were buttressed by new immigration from Italy after 1945. Italian immigration to the United States dramatically fell off after quotas were enforced in 1924. However, a total of 466,545 Italian immigrants came to the United States between 1946 and 1973 and it is estimated that approximately one-third settled in New York City upon arrival (Tomasi 1977: 488). Bensonhurst Italian American youth culture was the epicenter of new Italian settlement and the arrival of new immigrants “transformed” it into the largest Italian community in the city in 1980 with about 100,000, with 54,923 persons foreign born (Infoshare 2014); it was also the densest with 80% of the local population in 1980 (Jackson 1998: 18). Although that population began to decline after 1980, there were still 78,402 persons reporting a single Italian ancestry in 1990 (Infoshare 2014). It became the unofficial “Little Italy” at the very moment that the city awarded that designation to the Mulberry Street neighborhood in lower Manhattan. The size and density of Bensonhurst at century’s end “stands out” in relation to other “white ethnic neighborhoods” in the city during this period (Alba et al. 1998: 894). Outer borough communities evidenced social class mobility pivoting on high rates of home ownership; one-third of households headed by a person born in Italy owned homes as early as 1930, overwhelmingly in

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the outer boroughs (Cinotto 2014: 9; see also Lizzi 2016). In 1998, the Community District dominated by Bensonhurst had 44% of its area allocated to 1 and 2 family residences, typically attached or semi-detached frame structures on narrow lots. Twenty-nine percent of the area held multifamily residences which included small apartment buildings and three-story/six family houses (Brooklyn Community District 11 1998: 213). While Bensonhurst presented an advance in housing class and residential amenities in relation to tenement districts, the relative shortcomings of the local housing market were thrown into relief by the post-1945 tract developments in the Long Island and New Jersey suburbs that were targeted by older cohorts. Actually, suburban living has been available inside city limits. Italian Americans have concentrated in outer borough locations with suburban amenities like one-family houses and tree-lined streets. The Verranzano Bridge which connected southern Brooklyn by car to Staten Island in the mid-1960s put pressure on Bensonhurst although it also facilitated a “greater Bensonhurst” that was socially and culturally connected to the center for shopping and family visits, religious feste—and youth culture. Staten Island had an Italian ancestry population of 133,337 in 1980 (Infoshare). Another notable example is Howard Beach in southeastern Queens, hard by the boundary with suburban Nassau County and across the Belt Parkway from East New York, with an Italian ancestry population of 4751 in 1980, by far the largest ethnic group in the area (Infoshare 2014). High rates of home ownership likely enhanced the investment in outer borough localities. This can explain racial strife with Blacks and new immigrants that persisted into the recent period. More working-class Italian American communities like Bensonhurst were especially tense in the 1970s and 1980s, focused on the Marlboro Houses in Gravesend, a complex of 28 buildings which went from 93% white in 1958 to 84% Black in 1988 (Lowenstein 1988). Grassroots interethnic conflict had city-wide political reverberations felt in Mayoral elections between 1989 and 1993; Italian Americans were 17% of Republican voters in the city in 1989 and one-third of white Roman Catholics (Roberts 1989). Under increasing pressure from the Federal government, there was ruthless competition through the 1990s among local Mafia syndicates embedded in the fabric of the city’s Italian American communities. Then, there was the gathering noise of a youth subculture, similarly resonating with outer borough Italian American culture and spreading to

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the suburbs, reaching a crescendo with a reality TV show that made the mainstream take notice. Italian Americans have been distinguished by their ethnicity in a city where whiteness intersected with a high social class status. Italian American communities were marginal to the process of gentrification that was transforming the city’s social and physical landscape. Not only were they not the gentrifiers, their neighborhoods were prime targets for gentrification including the south Village as an extension of SoHo (Tricarico 1984). Structural transformations related to gentrification made urban Italian American culture, including local youth styles, more susceptible to “moral panic” (see Chapter 8). Resulting identity crises in the closing decades of the twentieth century have likely increased the demand for ethnic closure. As an outcome of “new pluralism” identity politics, Italian Americans have been an affirmative action category at the City University of New York since 1976, complicating a determination of their racial status. The contradictions of this position were foregrounded when Rudy Giuliani ran for Mayor against David Dinkins in November 1989, with the result impacted by a racial killing of a Black teenager in Bensonhurst three months earlier. It is easy to read the Mayoral contest as a referendum on the city’s Italian American neighborhood culture although Giuliani infringed on some ethnic neighborhood institutions notably the Mafia which maintained a prominent profile into the twenty-first century. Although the current Mayor (de Blasio) does not have organic support in outer borough neighborhoods, Italian Americans occupy a category of privilege within the rank and file of the NYPD not to mention Sanitation. Not only is the current Commissioner Italian, it has been alleged in a complaint by Black detectives that “officers who had vowels at the end of their names, as Italian American detectives did, were more likely to get promotions” (Mueller 2017). Demography and social structure have continued to throw Italian American ethnicity into relief in New York City vis-à-vis race in contrast to Philadelphia where electoral politics occasioned the consolidation of whiteness in the 1960s through the 1980s (Luconi 2003). As a counterpoint to the blinders worn by establishment sociology, Italian American difference in the city is embellished in the popular culture imaginary. Italian American neighborhoods like Howard Beach and Bensonhurst Italian American youth culture have been made famous for infamous street crimes (see Chapter 8). The reality of an Italian American presence is exaggerated by fictional media narratives that

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saturate the popular culture; the fast food restaurant, Subway ran a TV commercial in 2017 for an “Italian Sub” that showcases Italian neighborhood street culture of yesteryear, taciturn Mafioso included, and A Bronx Tale has been adapted as a Broadway play. The mass media creates the perception that the Italian American presence in New York City via Hollywood productions like The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos (the latter has a New Jersey tilt) is more formidable than warranted. Indeed, Italian American identity in this society may be “overdetermined” by the experience of New York City Italian Americans—that is represented in the mass media. The flow of mass media images of New York City Italian Americans can be traced to locally based image producers in filmmaking and advertising, including those of Italian American ancestry (see Chapter 9). The blurring of media and urban culture was apparent in the 2002 Columbus Day parade that evoked the ire of Italian American civic leaders when Mayor Michael Bloomberg invited two Italian American actors playing Italian American characters on The Sopranos to march down Fifth Avenue at his side. At the very moment, that Italian ethnicity was relegated to a moribund state in academic sociology, a style-based youth culture identified with “being Italian” was coalescing in Bensonhurst. I first heard about Guido from students at a CUNY campus in Queens in 1985 although it had been brewing for some time, an outgrowth of a local youth style tradition (see Chapter 2). The students described a style of consumption oriented to electronic dance music (“disco”) and a related club scene. Against the backdrop of a traditional immigrant culture supporting mutual aid societies and public religious rituals like the Santa Rosalia festa, what caught my eye was the stylized performance of a new Italian identity in the city oriented to American youth culture. It became established in local style markets, notably the local club scene, and imprinted on the public discourse for the first time in 1989 in the middle of a racial killing in Bensonhurst that reverberated throughout the country. When Jersey Shore debuted on MTV in December 2009, Guido was well into a second generation as a youth style, foraying deeper into mainstream consumer markets for new commodity symbols like designer fashions, tanning, health clubs, tourism, and summer resorts. Guido is an anomaly in straight-line theory; there was no mention of it in the article on Bensonhurst by Alba et al. (1997) even though it was ground zero for a local youth style performed by Italian Americans since the 1970s. It engendered an effervescent feeling, reminiscent of the

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youth counterculture percolating in the streets of the West Village in the late 1960s and early 1970s; like the weekend hippies emptying out of the subway trains pulling onto the Fourth Street station from uptown or the suburbs, youth from throughout the city and the suburbs trekked to Bensonhurst where Guidomobiles cruised on the weekend, returning home to cultivate “a Brooklyn accent” and related performances that reflected the symbolic importance of Italian Bensonhurst. The driving energy was supplied by electronic dance music and a related club scene located in southern Brooklyn, which galvanized an Italian American style and a new Italian American subject. Alba et al. (1997) also failed to note the intense national press coverage of a racial killing in Bensonhurst in 1989 that placed Guido and the local Italian American community outside the moral pale. The straight-line model is a “grand theory” that assigns ­vernacular, micro-sociological outcomes the status of an accident. More than a decade after proclaiming an ethnic “twilight”, an article by Alba et al. (1997: 110–116) acknowledged the impressive size and density of Italian Bensonhurst but only as an accidental footnote in the grand theory of white European assimilation. Attributed to “renewed immigration”, Bensonhurst was depicted as “marked by foreign cultural practices like the use of Italian language at home”. Its larger significance was seen as merely creating another timeline, a new layer of “thick” Italian ethnicity juxtaposed to the “thin” ethnicity of later generations that are becoming more and more like WASPs (Alba 1985). In this theoretical scenario, vernacular Italian American culture can be disregarded for the whole, macro-sociological cloth, namely “movement toward more complete assimilation” and an ethnicity that is “fast disappearing” (Marger 2012: 306). Rather than ask about ethnic community and the new second generation in Bensonhurst, what matters to Alba et al. (1997) is the erosion of traditional culture (e.g., language loss) together along with the gratuitous assumption that suburbanization is just a marker of assimilation (Tricarico 2017b). A book about Guido presents another opportunity to shine a light on Italian American neighborhood culture in New York City. The neighborhood has historically been the focal point of Italian American life not just in New York City but throughout the northeast and in the Midwest; the Italian (American) neighborhood is to the second and third generation what the paese is to the immigrant—a reference for ethnic group identity and cultural difference (Tricarico 1984). However, the Italian

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American neighborhood continued to absorb social and cultural changes. The emergence of a youth subculture called Guido represents social and cultural change in a second generation rooted in Italian neighborhood culture. Further, a collective ethnic strategy did not primarily reference a traditional heritage, neither as a “return” or “revival” or as nostalgia (i.e., “symbolic ethnicity”). The appropriation of American popular culture was not corrosive of ethnicity (Ware 1965) but, instead, occasioned the construction of ethnicity in new youth spaces (e.g., the dance club) that transcend the ethnic neighborhood. Youth agency was the wellspring of a new ethnic agency and vice versa.

Theorizing Italian American Youth Culture In the Ninth Edition of his textbook, Race and Ethnic Relations, Martin Marger (2012) calls attention to “the reality series Jersey Shore, shown on MTV”, likely in a nod to a youthful demographic. This latest revision has retained a treatment of Italian Americans but it is only a small part of the chapter entitled “White Ethnic Americans”. It predictably relies on a small and trusty sample of the literature that validates the “twilight” paradigm. Marger briefly entertains the possibility of “Guido culture” as an “ethnic style” but he only cites an article in The New York Times (Cohen 2010) that covered an Italian American studies colloquium on the subject of Guido and ridiculed the entire idea of a serious study of Guido. Out on a limb theoretically, Marger (2012: 302) is left to attribute Jersey Shore Guido to “the obdurate nature of [ethnic] stereotypes”, a bump on the straight-line road to assimilation. While assimilation has undoubtedly been occurring for Italian Americans as individuals and in the aggregate, there is a gap in the treatment of a middle space between immigration and full absorption into the larger society further down the road. As noted, this is a space worth exploring in the case of Italian Americans in New York City. It holds the possibility for an ethnic culture, for social institutions that mobilize Italian ethnicity to meet instrumental as well as expressive needs within assimilation trajectories. Like the urban Italian American neighborhood, Guido happens in this space as a vernacular or “common culture” (Willis 1990). The straight-line model with its macro-sociological bias finds it methodologically difficult to comprehend this informal, vernacular space. Whereas the straight-line model prefers to deal in absolutes, ethnicity can be compelling when it is not as “thick” as it used to be, even when it is it “thin” and thinning (Cornell and Hartmann 2007).

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Straight-line theory effectively vacates the possibility of collective agency identified with Italian ethnicity beyond the immigrant generation. This is predicated on the assumption that ethnicity is in “decline”, making it impossible to mobilize collectively, a possibility that would also permit adaptation and change in ethnic social and cultural forms. The theoretical noose of straight-line assimilation is predicated on the narrow equivalence of ethnicity with a traditional culture, and specifically the heritage that immigrants brought with them to the United States between 1880 and 1924. In the case of Italian Americans, the baseline for having Italian ethnicity is measured by this world of mass Italian immigration. While immigrant ethnicity has declined, this does not preclude the reworking of ethnicity in subsequent generations. Unable to theorize ethnic change, the straight-line paradigm characterized 1970s political activism by white ethnics as a “resurgence of ethnicity” which was, then, dismissed as either a “dying gasp” of immigrant culture or an “inauthentic” pose, mere “image-making” (Steinberg 1981: 62). Without a structural basis, European immigrant groups were left with a “symbolic ethnicity” (Gans 1979), an individual “affectation”, characterized by “nostalgia” or “feelings” for an ethnic past and mediated by the “consumption” of ethnic symbols compatible with mainstream, middle-class lifestyles or taste cultures (e.g., ethnic art and cuisine). In this scenario, sociologists have moved from the study of ethnic collectivities to the study of individual ethnic identity and have adapted methodologically by relying on survey research rather than ethnography (Waters 1990: 12). However, a perspective that privileges individual identity is particularly inadequate for the study of Italians in New York City. It ignores real, “objective ethnicity” at the level of institutions (Henry and Bankston 1999). It also mutes the significance of historical events. In New York City, post-1945 Italian immigration not only replenished the population numbers, it complicated Italian American urban culture (Ruperto and Sciorra 2017). In contrast to “symbolic ethnicity”, Guido consumption style is localized in the city’s Italian neighborhoods. Because it reflects a minority ethnic culture in a system of ethnic stratification, Guido represents a position that is not “costless” and is ascribed as well as optional, and transcends leisure (Waters 1990: 1–15). In contrast to “symbolic ethnicity”, consumption is configured around popular American culture rather than “ethnic cultural goods” (Henry and Bankston 1999: 245). Because it is embedded in a minority group culture, it is enlisted in a collective “struggle for recognition

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and respect” (Lipsitz 1994: 121). An “objective” ethnicity is deployed to compete for access to scarce youth culture rewards like sexual partners. A youth culture position identified as Italian American is problematic for straight-line theory because it combines two discourses in ethnicity and style that are contradictory. On the one hand, ethnicity is a narrative grounded in primordial meanings specifically what is given or inherited in the form of cultural traditions and shared ancestry (Cornell and Hartmann 2007). On the other hand, style narrates meanings that are fabricated and ephemeral and always on the surface (Ewen 1988). Rather than dismiss ethnic youth culture as “mere image-making”, “preexisting cultural forms” can be put to “new uses” (Nagel 1998: 69), in this case stylized performances that are the signature of contemporary youth agency. The study of an ethnic youth subculture, then, requires a theoretical departure from straight-line assimilation. The “symbolic work” that is a defining marker of contemporary youth culture (Willis 1990) is not “symbolic ethnicity” but a reflection of ethnic cultural difference that has a structural basis. While the straight-line model rushes to a conclusion that precludes ethnic cultural and social change in that middle space, a social constructionist perspective on ethnicity allows groups to “construct” ethnicity in specific social sites under particular circumstances. A classic statement is found in Cornell and Hartmann (2007: 90): The constructionist approach, then, sees ethnic and racial identities as highly variable and contingent products of ongoing interaction between, on one hand, the circumstances groups encounter – including the conceptions and actions of outsiders – and, on the other, the actions and conceptions of group members – of insiders. It makes groups active agents in the making and remaking of their own identities, and it views construction not as a one-time event, but as continuous and historical. The construction of identity has no end point short of the disappearance of the identity altogether.

Cornell and Hartmann (ibid.: xvii) emphasize that ethnicity is constructed by groups “trying to solve problems, defend or enhance their positions…establish meaning, achieve understanding, or otherwise negotiate the world in which they live”. They add that this includes the creation of “institutions” or “sets of relationships” committed to instrumental and expressive purposes (ibid.: xvii). A constructionist perspective is further elaborated in the work of Joanne Nagel (2017: 5). Nagel

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(ibid.: 6) addresses the possibility of ethnic change by adopting Frederik Barth’s emphasis on “boundaries” which is “closely associated” with the issue of ethnic “identity”, as “two of the basic building blocks of ethnicity” that are subject not only to construction but “reconstruction”. Nagel points out that ethnic boundaries are able to enclose “mutable” cultural content that is “borrowed, blended, rediscovered, and reinterpreted” (12). Nagel (10) underscores Cornell and Hartmann’s point that the social construction of ethnicity is not unilateral but “transacted” across boundaries that reflect rational choices and differences in social power in the competition for scarce rewards and the establishment of “resource niches”.1 In their classic statement on constructionism, Cornell and Hartman explicitly leave Italian Americans outside the realm of meaningful ethnic agency. They characterize Italian Americans as a group for whom “ethnic identity is a much less comprehensive organizer of social life” (2007: 76). Their movement into the “economic, political, and cultural mainstream of U.S. society” is an “outcome of intergroup relations” that reflects the absence of “systematic and sustained discrimination and violence” (76). Italian American ethnicity is described as “thin”, suggesting Gans’ characterization of “symbolic ethnicity” which is similarly pegged to the assimilated third generation. This overgeneralization is collateral damage that follows the uncritical acceptance of the “twilight” metaphor. Instead, Italian American ethnicity is seen here as “thick” enough for collective agency. The work of Cornell and Hartmann entertains the possibility of youth culture as a “construction site” for ethnic identity although they entirely overlook age as a determinant of “internal differentiation” or variation inside the ethnic boundary (2007: 211–236). The social anthropologist Jenkins (2008: 68) is alert to the construction of ethnicity within “life-course transitions, particularly before the assumption of social adulthood”, but discussion is limited to schooling and the labor market and specifically omits a youth space referenced to popular culture and consumption. However, a constructionist approach to youth culture is implicit in the field of youth studies (Maira and Soep 2004). Age is a broad principle of social stratification; youth is defined “socioculturally”, referring to “the social and cultural practices” that shape the lives of individuals chronologically positioned between adolescence and adulthood (Bucholtz 2002: 526–532). In particular, youth are marginal to roles and relationships in the family and to the occupational system that

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defines and validates adult identity. Frith (1981: 195) underscores the way age determines a “transitional” and “marginal” social position which predispose contemporary youth to seek a sense of autonomy and status and self-esteem to balance against their time of insignificance. Hence the role of peer groups (something between the family and society) and their symbols of pride and self-assertion, membership and exclusion.

In contemporary western societies, youth agency creates “meaning systems, modes of expression and lifestyles” in “response to dominant meaning systems” (Brake 1985: 8). Contemporary youth agency—the construction of age-based identity— is predicated on the expansion of mediated popular culture. Popular culture is characterized as “a free space for the imagination – an area liberated from old restraints and repressions, a place where desire did not have to be justified and explained” (Lipsitz 1994: 9). The cultural studies model is predicated on social and cultural changes in advanced capitalist societies, “new forms of globalization” and related structural changes, in the second half of the twentieth century (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997: 97–98). These changes have ushered in “postmodernity” which is characterized by the erosion and “disembedding” of stable social identities and, therefore, the opportunity to “invent” or construct new “provisional” identities in relation to “the pleasures of the media and consumer culture” (Kellner 1998: 3; Rattansi and Phoenix 1997: 112). Maira and Soep (2004: 246) conceptualize “youth agency” as the “meaning-making, narratives, cultural productions, and social engagements” of young people as they appropriate “popular culture” through leisured consumption (also see Eckert 1989: 18–20). The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies designated style as the focal point of an expressive youth culture that flowered in Britain in response to the “structural problems” of youth after World War Two (Brake 1985). British youth culture scholars like Dick Hebdige (1977) and Simon Frith (1981) characterize style as the manipulation of dress, argot, ritual, music as symbolic resistance to political and economic power. Class, race, ethnicity, and gender promote the social “isolation” necessary for “the development and maintenance of distinct subcultures” (Eckert 1989: 15). The Birmingham School interpreted the ­“spectacular styles” British youth cultures like Punks and Skinheads as a symbolic

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response to shifting class relationships in advanced capitalism (Brake 1985; Willis 1977; Hebdige 1979). Its central argument underscored the way that youth enact collective rituals that resist the values of the dominant society (Hebdige 1977). Cross (2007: 215–219), for example, maintains that the leisure styles of working-class Teddy Boys focused on “dressing up” and “dancing” were a “refusal of anonymity, of subordinate status”, designed to make “somebodies out of what society considered to be nobodies”, thereby setting them apart from their parents’ generation. Gender also leads to alternate youth culture narratives including variable readings of mass media texts (Thornton 1995: 9; Prettyman 1996). The anthropologist Mary Bucholtz (2002) reminds us that the “discursive” projects of young people are especially meaningful at the local level (also see Austin and Willard 1998: 4). Although youth agency can aspire to the universal like the Hippie or Rave movements, it also articulates with more provincial identities (Moloney and Hunt 2012). Influenced by expanded immigration to Europe as well as to the United States, youth studies scholars researchers have paid increasing attention to “the relationship between youth and ethnic identity” (Bennett 2000: 28). While earlier research in American sociology framed ethnic youth in terms of “deviance and assimilation”, more recent scholarship emphasizes the way youth use ethnicity to work for them as they “engage” popular culture (Maira and Soep 2004: 246). Mary Bucholtz (2002: 525) calls attention to “the blending of traditional cultural forms into new youth-based styles and practices” as a critical “avenue” of research into “the agency of young people” (525). Ethnic youth cultures are “hybrid” forms, the result of “bricolage” (Hebdige 1979). Erling Bjurstrom (1997: 50–52) calls attention to the “syncretism” of Swedish youth styles that “mix” ethnicity and global popular culture. Bjurstrom (ibid.: 50) maintains that ethnicity furnishes an element of “certainty” that “anchors” youth buffeted by “a modern world that tends to diffuse and mix at an accelerating rate”. Sunaina Maira (2002) regards “popular culture” as a “showcase” for ethnic “authenticity” which is primarily defined by a traditional heritage, although ethnic identification can establish an “authentic” relationship to styles that have been commercialized and diffused on a global scale (Rivera 2003). However, identities based on cultural blending (i.e., “syncretism”) are “not something fixed and coherent, but something constructed and always in the process of becoming” and often “incomplete” and “contradictory” (Storey 1999: 135). George Lipsitz (1994b: 90) maintains

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that youth manipulate discourses of ethnicity “to affirm more powerfully who they are so they can then move on to become something new”. This includes the possibility of “new ethnicities” in which “aspects of the popular are fused with an imagined traditional culture and the vernacular knowledges of local/regional settings” (Bennett 2000: 103). The empirical research on ethnic youth cultures in the United States has focused on the “structural problems” associated with racial minorities. Hip Hop has become the most widely studied ethnic youth subculture in the literature. Clay (2003: 1346) maintains that Black ethnicity is “mediated through” and “authenticated” by hip hop. The reverse is also true in the sense that Hip Hop is authenticated by Black ethnicity, becoming “an oppositional form of identity” that reflects the “collective struggle” against racial domination in the United States and is notable for its rise to global prominence and commercialization (Hagedorn 2011; see also Dimitriadis 2001; Rivera 2003). George Lipsitz’ research on Mexican American Pachucos in the Southwestern United States underscores the production of hybrid cultural symbols like the zoot suit and the “low rider” automobile; Pachuco youth culture is a “strategy designed to preserve the resources of the past by adapting them to the needs of the present” (1990: 134–174; also see Alvarez 2005). Maira (2002) similarly calls attention to “remix” youth culture with a study of South Asian “Desi” “party” subculture in New York City that mixes elements of an ethnic heritage in an attempt to reconcile with “parental ethnicity” and popular American culture. Guido can be inserted into the conversation about ethnic youth ­cultures, reconciling a minority group ethnicity with popular American culture, in particular, commodified leisure styles. It expands the discussion for a European immigrant ethnicity that is still framed by an inner city minority group status and racial ambiguity. Guido has roots in ethnic neighborhood culture in New York City which is positioned between immigrant culture and mainstream American culture. Vernacular ethnic culture is an artifact of local circumstances in particular demographic and structural circumstances. A “concern with the local” (Bucholtz 2002; also Back 1996) counterbalances the focus on diaspora ethnicity found in globalization perspectives (Maira 2002; Sansone 1995). This book calls attention to the role of ethnicity in positioning Italian American youth in relation to other local youth culture actors, on both sides of the ethnic boundary, as well as in mediated popular culture.

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I am primarily interested in using Guido to try, once again, to change the conversation in the scholarly literature about Italian American ethnicity. When ethnicity is viewed as “a highly variable and contingent phenomenon” (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 90; see also Royce 1982) the apparent contradiction of an Italian American youth style can be resolved. The possibility of an adaptive and variable ethnicity is highlighted in the segmented assimilation model, currently the dominant theory of immigrant group incorporation in the United States (Warikoo 2011: xi). Segmented assimilation specifies variable patterns as ethnic groups assimilate into different segments of a highly stratified society, for example, in regard to residence, education, employment, and consumption. In contrast to the straight-line model, ethnicity can be socially constructed in the course of “strategic assimilation” (Lacy 2004: 910). Variable assimilation strategies within a highly stratified society are delineated in place of the “single assimilation destination” (ibid.: 909) prescribed for European ancestry groups in the straight-line model. Ethnicity and assimilation overlap rather than either/or propositions. Further, whereas straight-line theory recognizes individuals, segmented assimilation identifies groups, social institutions and lived cultures beyond the immigrant generation. The segmented assimilation model calls attention to “structural problems” at particular historical junctures. It is specific to the experience of the post-1965 immigration in view of late capitalist economic dislocations and racial prejudice. It is focused on the “new second generation”, the children of post-1965 immigrants (Portes and Zhou 1993). Gans’ (1992) concept of “second-generation decline” which is a key building block for segmented assimilation theory raises questions about the relationship between ethnicity and economic conditions for the children of poor immigrants arriving after 1965. It posits that a significant number will experience difficulty entering the mainstream, especially when they are dark-skinned. This is attributed to a shortfall in educational credentials required for higher-paying jobs in a postindustrial economy but also an unwillingness to work in lower-wage “immigrant jobs” and to subscribe to a scarcity culture which marks them in contrast to the first generation. This leaves second-generation youth susceptible to “downward assimilation” owing to the powerful oppositional influence of urban Black youth culture (Alba and Nee 2017). Once again, the model has not been made available to older European immigrant groups based on the assumption of successful assimilation into

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the American mainstream (Portes and Zhou 1993). However, the broad outline of “segmented assimilation” has resonance for the Italian American experience (see also Pasto 2017). Trajectories of assimilation are similar in regard to economic hardships and social exclusion that have produced an urban minority group culture (Tricarico 1984). While post-1965 immigrants face racial barriers to assimilation, Italian ethnicity has historically been framed as racially ambiguous (Roediger 1994). The ripple of Italian immigration after 1945 refreshed a minority group culture in New York City that overlaps with the post-1965 immigration (Tricarico 2017a). A segmented assimilation perspective offers an opportunity to sidestep the limitations of straight-line chronology pegged to the period of mass immigration between 1880 and 1924. The new, post-1945 immigration that replenished the Italian population in the city also initiated a new cultural dynamic inside the ethnic boundary and in the city. In particular, new second-generation Italian American youth have been exposed to late twentieth-century socioeconomic dislocations. Like Black and Latino youth, their ethnicity has been referenced to inner city neighborhoods. Risking exposure to Black youth culture like the post-1965 “new second generation”, they are able to turn to their ethnic culture as a buffer (Lacy 2004: 909). At the same time, they have used Italian ethnicity to construct a racial boundary against post-1965 as well as Black youth. The model, thus, is instructive for the contrasts presented by the Italian American case.

Plan of the Book A number of overarching and interrelated inquiries are threaded throughout the book: What Is Guido? This book is interested in the youth subculture transacted in the name of Guido. Of interest, here, is the social and historical context for this development. While labeling by outsiders, notably the mainstream media and youth others, is a critical element in this transaction, the focus of the inquiry is the agency of Italian American youth in relation to ethnicity and popular American culture. Guido is a claim on a cool youth style in the name of an ethnic group marginalized by the consumer culture. Thus, it is an American youth subculture along the lines of Pachuco, Desi, and Hip Hop.

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What Is the Etymology of Guido as an Identity Symbol for Italian American Youth Agency? Guido names a collective Italian American subject in the city based on stylized performances of popular American culture. It is transacted in a narrative of prejudice framing a “dominated” ethnicity (Scott 1992). The book shows that Guido is framed in the context of ethnic deviance historically associated with the Italian American neighborhood, consummately represented by Bensonhurst. Motifs of an urban Italian American minority group culture are discerned in the formation of Guido as the dominant ethnic stereotype for Italian Americans as a group. Selfidentification as Guido challenges ethnic stigma through the manipulation of symbolic capital. The transaction of Guido as a youth culture identity represents a distinctive strategy in the “struggle for recognition and respect” at the center of assimilation into American society (Lipsitz 1994: 121). Why Did an Italian American Youth Subculture Emerge in New York City at a Particular Historical Juncture? This question opens a window on the structural position of Italian Americans in the city at the end of the twentieth century, with implications for class and race as well as ethnic stratification. Guido has an “objective”, structural basis in the city’s Italian American communities, above all, Bensonhurst, the largest and densest Italian American community in the city. Bensonhurst was not just a “pocket of intense ethnicity” (Alba et al. 1997), it was also a pocket of intense youth culture practice that rode the disco wave from the 1970s onward. This places Guido at the nexus of urban ethnic minority culture (Marger 2012) and the burgeoning late capitalist consumer culture (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). The moral panic in the mainstream media surrounding the 1989 racial killing in Bensonhurst throws into relief the complex class and racial positions of “minority” outer borough Italian American communities in the city. Following a transactional perspective, Italian American youth identity is viewed in the context of intergroup relations at the local level, notably with Black youth in the outer borough boundary crossings and Manhattan club culture elites.

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What Is the Role of Ethnicity in Stylized Youth Culture Performances? This question calls attention to the way ethnicity is put to new uses in the second generation and beyond in the course of assimilation and in ways that are not merely “symbolic”. These adaptations have hybrid outcomes culturally and socially. Ethnicity has imparted coherence to a style making it is possible to “look Italian”, even becoming a proxy for a style identity. As with other ethnic youth subcultures, ethnicity has been constructed as symbolic capital in its own right, alongside consumption style, reversing negative privilege and a reservoir of social power that transcends cool in the competition for scarce youth culture rewards. This considers the relevance of ethnicity for status concerns not just as something to be reconciled with popular American culture, to temper an identity crisis threatened by new consumption styles. While mainly invoked as a contrasting strategy across the ethnic boundary, I am also interested in the way Guido identity reflects differentiation inside the ethnic boundary on the level of class, immigrant cohort, and between inner city and suburbs. This is underscored in the anti-defamation response to JS. What Are the Main Outlines of Subcultural Development into the Recent Period? Guido is placed in a timeline of subcultural development, coalescing in the 1970s as a style waiting to be named, through the present. Its origins are found in a commitment to fun and pleasure within the popular culture from a position inside urban Italian American culture, in particular Bensonhurst. The narrative follows the trend toward an increasingly commodified consumption with a second-generation youth style based in the suburbs not to mention the commodification of an entire subculture with the commercial success of JS. With appropriation by the youth culture industries featuring branding by MTV, it can be asked what the further loosening of the style from its historic base in the outer borough Italian communities means for subcultural development. To the extent that the subcultural agenda is to buy into mainstream consumption, the book ruminates on the possibility of commodification as the ultimate form of inclusion.

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What Is the Role of the Mass Media and Popular American Culture in Transacting Guido Identity? Contemporary youth and the mass media are engaged in a “feedback loop”. Youth cultures appropriate mediated popular culture for identities and leisure rituals. A critical external boundary is found in the mass media which routinely have the capacity to “name” youth cultures and strengthen boundaries (Thornton 1995). Italian American youth in the city not only turned to mediated popular American culture disseminated by the mass media, the latter have habitually turned to them. SNF portrayed an already vibrant Italian American disco scene in southern Brooklyn. JS initiated a dialogue about local Italian American youth identity and ethnicity more generally, engaging the identity politics of formal Italian American organizations. What Is the Significance of Guido for the Study of Italian American Ethnicity? The sociological “career” of Guido both as an ethnic stereotype and as a youth subculture argues for an alternative to the straight-line assimilation model. Guido is an example of ethnic social and cultural change within an assimilation trajectory, warranting the consideration of the segmented assimilation model which recognizes assimilation strategies as variable, contingent on social factors like location, class, and time of arrival. The turn to popular American culture and commodity consumption inside outer borough Italian American communities was consequential for enhancing ethnicity along lines that departed from the traditional heritage. The book will ask if a style of consumption identified with Guido can be generalized as a “struggle for recognition and respect” to a segment of Italian Americans, in particular as a “rising class”, arriviste consumption style (Ogersby 1998). Finally, the distillation of Guido as an ethnic stereotype and slur suggests that a minority group culture remains a motif for a dubious Italian American identity. The identity politics swirling around Jersey Shore point to the fragility of a “symbolic ethnicity”.

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Chapter Organization Chapter 2 places Guido in relation to the remarkably spare scholarly research on Italian American youth especially as actors performing ethnicity in youth social and cultural spaces. Several patterns emerge in the literature for youth peer group relationships: (1) they are stunted by the family as the central institution of ethnic Italian life; (2) they have a deviant orientation; and (3) American popular culture has assimilation outcomes. There is little mention of a youth formation at the intersection of ethnicity and American popular culture and there is no sign of an Italian American subculture, a youth formation with clear defined boundaries. The second part of the chapter fills in the gaps historically, delineating a local youth style tradition in “greaser” that anticipates the coalescence of Guido in the 1970s. Youth studies scholarship underscores a collective youth agency oriented to late capitalist popular culture and specifically styles of consumption or commodified leisure (Frith 1981; Brake 1985). Chapter 3 narrates a turn to disco in the 1970s as a breakthrough in local Italian American youth culture practice on two fronts. Disco became the centerpiece of a qualitatively different engagement with popular American culture, laying the foundation for a bounded youth formation, or subculture, identified with Italian ethnicity that has since taken other “turns”. More specifically, it escalated the commitment to a style of consumption oriented to the media and entertainment culture. Stylized performances revolving around music and clubbing promoted the formation of a subculture as an umbrella for localized youth peer groups. Instrumental in this development was the pop culture significance of SNF which made it possible for Italian American youth in southern Brooklyn to claim an authentic place in the late 1970s “disco movement”, itself an example of consuming popular culture—in this case, consuming their own media images. This chapter also looks at the role of communications media as contexts of articulation for subcultural identity. One case is representation in local FM radio in the 1990s and early 2000s which provided validation of a pop credential specific to the local dance club scene. Another is a foray into online social media which constituted a new dimension in subcultural development at the turn of the new millennium. Chapter 4 locates the collective turn to popular culture on the part of Italian American youth in an ethnic space. Since Italian ethnicity

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was built into the social structure of the city, it should not be surprising that it structured youth culture practice. Above all, the turn to disco in the 1970s occurred among youth inside large and dense Italian American communities in the city, specifically outer borough areas like Bensonhurst which was replenished by post-1945 immigration; a critical agency is accorded to a “new second generation” possessing a “thicker” Italian ethnicity. In contrast to Doo Wop which was localized, disco promoted an appetite for leisured consumption throughout the city which threw an Italian identity into greater relief in a segmented and stratified youth style market. Guido announces a new Italian American performance in the city as a leisure/consumption activity. The chapter investigates the transaction of Guido as the meaningful symbolism of Italian American youth culture practice based in southern Brooklyn. A contested identity negotiates status differences inside as well as across the ethnic boundary on the level of style and ethnicity. Self-identification pushes back at the deviance label intended to marginalize Italian American youth culture “somebodies”. Guido is a hybrid or remix youth culture (Hebdige 1977; Maira 2002) characterized by the “blending of traditional cultural forms into new youth-based styles and practices” Bucholtz (2002: 544). Chapters 5 and 6 address the claims to “distinction” or “social power” staked in a hierarchical style market that Thornton (1995) conceptualizes as “subcultural ideology”. Ethnic youth subcultures like Guido stake claims on the basis of ethnicity as well as style. The separation of these chapters is largely for organizational purposes since ethnicity is constructed in youth culture practices and idioms and, at the same time, youth culture practice is embedded in ethnic meanings and relationships. Chapter 5 focuses on the sine qua non of late capitalist “taste cultures” (Thornton 1995: 10), a style of consumption fashioned out of the collective appropriation of popular American culture. Guido is fundamentally a project to engage popular American culture for a signature style of consumption. Style is a narrative of Italian American youth “becoming somebody else” (Calefato 2004) by negotiating a place in local youth style markets, although without relinquishing an ethnic profile. The chapter incorporates ethnographic research beginning in the late 1980s and follows a trajectory of style development that is increasingly oriented to hedonistic and commodified consumption especially with the shift from ethnic neighborhood culture toward more mainstream settings (e.g., the suburbs, summer resorts). Historically, consumption is grafted

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on to a local “greaser” youth style tradition notably a stylized masculine performance referenced to the inner city “defended neighborhood” and “street code”. Chapter 6 focuses on the use of ethnicity in assembling a style-based youth subculture. Whereas the straight-line assimilation model regard assimilation and ethnicity as inversely related, Guido youth embrace ethnicity although using, and abusing, it for their own purposes. Italian ethnicity is resignified by the idioms of urban dance clubs, or discos, and pop culture values of “hedonistic consumption” (Lipsitz 1994b). Being Italian is performed in style repertoires—enlisted for appropriation, including poaching, and to give coherence to a style. An online ethnography exposes the stylized construction of primordial ethnic discourses and the active conversion of ethnic capital into youth culture capital featuring a symbolic reversal of ethnic stigma associated with minority group status as a badge of insider honor. Chapter 7 explores the relational, contrastive character of ethnic youth identity specifically in the context of a struggle for scarce local resources. Formative boundary interactions expose status competition and conflict with youth others reflecting the major social divisions in the city notably ethnicity, race class. In relation to affluent and hip Manhattan elites, Guido is transacted as ethnic stigma to exclude outer borough Italian American youth in a stratified urban clubbing scene. On the other hand, self-identifying as Guido is an ethnic strategy for Italian American youth as they “jockey for power” (Thornton 1995) within local style markets. While the competition for status can be disguised or “natural” (Bjurstrom 1997: 50), subcultural distinction is openly contested in the style markets that Guido has entered. The chapter draws heavily on the ethnography of a “discursive” online scene where scarce material and nonmaterial rewards are grounded in offline urban “formations”. The ordered segmentation of local urban space is thrown into relief in a relationship with Black youth that is complicated by a coveted youth style. Mass media representations are a key external boundary in the transaction group as well as individual identity. Urban Italian American youth, especially in New York City, have elicited attention, even demanding it, for their style; this explains Doo Wop and especially Guido which capitalizes ethnicity as well as more ample consumption resources. Historically, Italian American youth are prominently represented in the mass media as unruly, specifically around themes of deviance that marginalize Italian ethnicity as a minority group culture. Chapter 8 focuses on the

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circumstances in which Guido was first named in the mainstream culture, framed as a category of deviance in the press narrative of a notorious “racial killing” in Bensonhurst in 1989. Journalistic accounts that muted a style-based youth subculture also pathologized local Italian American community, and the chapter underscores the narrative connection between Guido and urban ethnic minority culture. Mass media discourses that problematized ethnic Italian culture reflect shifting agendas in the city’s social, political, and economic landscape. Chapter 9 looks at the trajectory of subcultural development with the shift from ethnic neighborhood culture toward new contexts of articulation (Storey 1999), two related developments are considered. One is the diffusion of Guido to the periphery—the suburbs and beach resorts on the Jersey shore and the Hamptons. The other is the absorption of Guido within the popular culture as a commodity to be merchandised. The key event is the MTV reality TV show, Jersey Shore which showcased in the public discourse a hedonistic party culture centered on sexual promiscuity. The commercial success of JS makes it plain that Guido has turned heads in the mainstream for a style of consumption that could be unruly if not a threat to the civic order. If SNF offered the promise of inclusion, JS offered Guido, a marginalized youth subculture, the status of a commodity in “the new symbolic economy of fashion, entertainment, and the media” (Zukin 2004: 173). Ironically, the closing of the feedback loop that provided validation for a project rooted in ethnic minority group culture elicited public disrespect inside the ethnic boundary from organizations representing Italian American political and cultural elites. JS activated a prejudice narrative by organizations like the National Italian American Foundation, armed with anti-defamation sensitivity to “media bias”. Rubbing salt in a historically wounded ethnicity, JS was at odds with their identity politics—a construct that emphasizes traditional values centered on the hardworking and virtuous immigrant family and notable contributions to American life. Chapter 10 concludes by arguing that a reformulation of the assimilation model is necessary to account for social and cultural changes beyond the immigrant generation like Guido and the Italian American neighborhood (Tricarico 1984). In particular, it is necessary to recognize the emergence of new and reworked ethnic social and cultural forms positioned between Italian immigrant culture and post-ethnic “white privilege”. The segmented assimilation model is especially relevant for New York City and its metropolitan area with large and dense

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population settlements during the period of mass immigration, but also a renewed immigration after 1945 that fortified outer borough areas like Bensonhurst at the end of the twentieth century. The emergence of a youth subculture underscores the importance of popular culture, leisure, and consumption as a construction site for ethnic identity. Guido is a variable response to the “struggle for recognition and respect” that is at the core of assimilation for minority immigrant groups (Lipsitz 1994), following a trajectory of consumption and class culture. A youth subculture called Guido imprints on an ethnic stereotype that broadly disparages Italian American ethnicity in the mainstream. These developments call attention to Italian American difference into the present that is sharply at odds with the concept of “symbolic ethnicity”.

Note 1. A constructionist perspective is also cogently delineated in the work of Anya Royce (1982: 1–3) and Eugenio Matute-Bianchi (1986: 235).

CHAPTER 2

A Local Italian American Youth Style Tradition: Anticipating Guido

Contemporary youth cultures are predicated on a “turn to popular ­culture” (Maira 2002). Urban Italian American youth made a significant turn to popular American culture after World War II; Doo Wop mobilized a discernible youth culture practice in the 1950s and 1960s inside urban Italian American neighborhoods. This chapter establishes a historical connection to popular American youth culture in New York City’s Italian American neighborhoods, parsing the literature that is by turns indifferent and off the mark. A local youth style tradition is established as a baseline for gauging the emergence of Guido in the 1970s and, then, shapes its development. Chronological age is a determinant of social status. It positions individuals in the social structure with attendant role expectations (i.e., to act one’s age). Post-industrial society is marked by profound changes in age status and roles (Eisenstadt 1964). The notion of “youth” is a sociocultural construct, a category wedged between adolescence and adulthood which are likewise age-based social constructs. As an identity category, youth is a recent emergent dependent on delayed entry into the labor force and, therefore, marriage. Austin and Willard (1998) maintain that youth is predicated on the creation of a cultural space outside “adult surveillance”. Proliferating among “preppie” middle-class high school and college students in the 1950 and 1960s in the United States and in Great Britain, a youth culture oriented to leisure and consumption was more slowly disseminated to the working class (Frith 1981). It is noteworthy that while middle-class youth culture was historically seen as focused on © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_2

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“having fun”, working-class youth styles were framed by deviance and “opposition” (Cross 2007: 215–219; Cohen 1987). The space for a distinctive “youth” identity is seen as increasingly elaborated by age-graded leisure styles referenced to “late capitalist” culture industries (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997: 112). To this extent, youth are subject to a very different kind of surveillance by youth culture industries that merchandise “cool” (The Merchants of Cool 2001). Italian American youth culture is a neglected topic in the scholarly literature, virtually an oxymoron. This is partly a function of the traditional peasant cultural backgrounds of Italian immigrants. “Youth” is not clearly delineated as a social category and identity in the Italian immigrant culture transplanted to the United States before 1924. Youth peer groups receive no mention in the study of the East Harlem Italian immigrant community conducted by Leonard Covello (1967) in the 1930s. Covello maintained that the southern Italian peasant family was an inclusive social world. He calls attention to the fact that the concept of friendship did not exist in southern Italian peasant culture (171), nor was there a word for “classmate” in the peasant dialects (260). The immigrant family was the central institution of Italian East Harlem and it can be inferred that a family group with adults in authority positions effectively precluded the formation of a youth space. Second-generation children in their teens and twenties in urban Italian neighborhoods before World War Two were expected to contribute to an economically fragile household economy during the Great Depression and World War Two. My parents and their siblings, born between 1916 and 1927 and raised in the lower Manhattan South Village Italian neighborhood, were all working outside the home at age sixteen; over in Hell’s Kitchen, my father delivered ice and coal from his father’s truck at age twelve, leading to truancy from school until age fourteen which was the age that lower-class immigrant children could legally vacate the student role and be in compliance with rural southern Italian family traditions. My maternal aunt succeeded in graduating from high school in 1932 only by skipping two grades, meeting the expectation of paid labor at the age of sixteen. While military commitment during World War Two delayed marriage compared to their parents’ generation, “youth” was preempted by more pressing grown-up responsibilities. The sparse sociological research on urban working-class Italian American communities provides little insight into a distinctive youth space oriented to popular American culture. Instead, these studies

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emphasize alternative motifs. One is the weak articulation of a youth space in relation to ethnic institutions especially the Italian family. Two is that when age-based solidarity does occur it is primarily marked by deviance rather than consumption. Third, American popular culture is seen as a force for assimilation and not for the (re)construction of ethnicity. Although an opening for a youth social space is suggested in Herbert Gans’ concept of “peer group society”, it is entirely co-opted by Italian family culture. His study of the Italian West End of Boston in the late 1950s, The Urban Villagers (1984), documents generational solidarity within the traditional Italian family system as an adaptation to the new American culture. Gans is describing age peer sociability among siblings and cousins not strangers or persons outside the kinship group and it is noteworthy that “peer group” interactions are not confined to youth but applies across age cohorts, so there is no aging out. In any case, the possibility of a youth culture or, for that matter, any other wider solidarity (e.g., ethnic group, youth subculture) is inhibited or precluded as long as age peer relationships are confined to kin. The connection of young male peer groups and lower-class deviance is a dominant frame in the literature on immigrant and second-generation youth (Maira and Soep 2005: 246). A deviance trajectory fits into a vein of slum social research by sociologists. Whyte’s (1993) classic ethnography of Boston’s North End Italian American community during the Great Depression, Streetcorner Society is written as a slum social study and, although highly localized, the work does not convey a full picture of local ethnic community. Whyte had no trouble finding clearly defined peer groups among lower-class young males; the study is focused on two interlocking slum social institutions, “cornerboys” stuck in local routines and “the rackets”. Whyte contrasted the North End’s “cornerboys” with a smaller number of “college boys” who were framed by an academic tract taking them out of the neighborhood. Whyte’s lead is solidified in subsequent research on urban Italian American life. Gans interprets “peer group society” as a lower-class social formation and without seeming to recognize it, offers an exception for youth peer relationships in the case of deviance. Gans’ identified “the teenage way of life” as an “episodic search for action” that “bordered on delinquency”, although most adolescents aged out and into “the family-centered peer group” by “the end of their teens”. Schneider (1999) describes an Italian American “gang” subculture in New York City organized around status “honor” legitimated by turf protection in

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the 1940s and 1950s in lower-class tenement slums neighborhoods like “Hell’s Kitchen”; at the time, their counterparts were mainly Black and Puerto Rican gangs. Suttles (1968) prominently identified young Italian American males in Chicago’s Addams Area slum in the 1960s with an urban “defended neighborhood”, a moral order based on the use of intimidation and violence within a bounded turf. Pinderhughes (1997) updates this deviant youth pattern for heavily Italian American southern Brooklyn in the aftermath of a 1989 racial killing in Bensonhurst and specifically in regard to racist street violence directed at Blacks and immigrant minorities. It is noteworthy that youth popular culture receives no mention in these stories. Suttles (1968) goes as far to say that Italian American youth in the Addams Area were “indifferent to style” and that this was in marked contrast to youth in the adjacent Black slum. While Whyte can be given a pass for overlooking youth culture during the Great Depression, urban Italian neighborhoods were not sealed off to popular youth culture by the 1950s and it is hard to fathom that youth were “indifferent” to mainstream styles. Suttles may have been blinded by a concern with deviance and the “moral order of the slum”. The same can be said for Pinderhughes who is oblivious to the style-based Guido subculture being performed in southern Brooklyn at the time he was collecting data and which was infamously implicated in an episode of racial violence in Bensonhurst in 1989 (see Chapter 8). An article published by the Italian American anthropologist Francis Ianni (1961) in The Annals of the American Academy in 1961 called attention to the “Italo-American Teenager” as a distinct social category within an ethnic population. For Ianni, this was not only because generational status has implications for their “acculturative experience”, but because they were part of an age-based popular culture that distinguished teenagers in mid-century America (ibid.: 71). However, Ianni capitulates to a narrow understanding of Italian American “teenage culture”, visibly leaning toward the delinquency of the urban lower-class along the lines of Whyte’s turf-based “streetcorner gang”. Writing at mid-century, he does not envision a style of consumption referenced to ethnicity and predicts that Italo-Americans “will soon be indistinguishable from other teenagers” (ibid.: 78). While Ianni had 1950s Doo Wop to ponder, he was not in a position to appreciate the impact of an age peer culture among second generation in burgeoning Italian settlements in the outer boroughs of New York City fueled by new

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immigration from Italy after 1945. In particular, his work comes before the 1970s turn to disco. Paula Fass (1998) offers an interesting historical take on Italian American peer group relationships among high school students in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in the 1940s. It is notable because it acknowledges a youth space that is not defined by deviance or co-opted by the family. It is also not embedded in the Italian neighborhood, yet it is organized around ethnicity. These Italian American teenagers explicitly used ethnicity to organize participation in “student culture that is inclusive of both sexes”. Significantly for the purposes of this book, “youth society shaped ethnicity” into “new American identities” in “a strategic interaction between inherited traditions” and “patterns of adaptation” within the larger society, including peer pressure specifically “forces of imitation” (114). However, a “student culture” informed by adult values, both academic and ethnic, lacked the degree of “youth agency” characteristic of contemporary youth subcultures stoked by the media and entertainment culture. The latter influences were stunted in the 1940s and it is likely that researchers, including Fass, would have found it if they were open, or knew where, to look for it. A student culture was also likely an artifact of a strivers culture of upwardly mobile and especially professional Italian American parents. Italian American students singled out by Fass were the children of a rising middle-class living in the southern Brooklyn community of Bay Ridge, which supported large Irish and Norwegian communities at the time and was solidly middle- and upper-middle-class and bordered blue-collar Italian Bensonhurst. Fass’ findings that reconcile Italian ethnicity with middle-class status are notable given the tendency to link being Italian American with “low prestige associations”, and therefore an identity that had to be jettisoned for upward mobility (Child 1970). My study of Italian American community in Greenwich Village (Tricarico 1984: 33–45) considered the formation of age peer groups across the age spectrum as a structural breakthrough that promoted solidarity outside the family within the ethnic neighborhood. The book disputes Caroline Ware’s (1965) contention that the Greenwich Village Italian community had become “disorganized” in the 1930s and specifically the claim that second-generation youth had separated from their parents owing in part to exposure to American popular culture especially the new movie industry. The study was guided by an interest in ethnic communal solidarity, a theoretical project that countered the lingering

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influence of Banfield’s “amoral familism” thesis which forcefully echoes in Gans’ portrayal. I argued that the ethnic family was the centerpiece of a moral community with friends (age peers) brought into its orbit. At the same time, age peer groups colonized space in the neighborhood, a wider fraternization necessary for community building. Although males of every age group were more likely to socialize outside the home and especially on the street, sociability extended to females as well. Peer group sociability was conducted by both sexes formally in parish organizations although males formed social and athletic clubs chartered by the city that were more free from “adult surveillance”. Male streetcorner groups articulated with the Mafia syndicate on several levels. In particular, adult Mafiosi exercised control over youthful deviance with a view to managing interference with official authority and also in the interest of monopolizing violence and predation which included the recruitment of youth prospects into the syndicate. Cornerboys were also consumers of goods and services provided by the Mafia-like “swag” merchandise (“It fell off the back of a truck”) and gambling. The Mafia club was a place for men to play cards or just buy a pal a drink; local bars were just as likely to be a place where the syndicate conducted business under a veil of neighborhood sociability. There was also fraternization by higher status males in formal organization like Tiro A Segno, a target shooting club that was a hub for networking by Italian American professionals and businessmen. In the late 1970s, its membership mostly lived outside the local Italian American neighborhood.1 My community study of the Italian Village did not pay close attention to youth culture. I have no doubt that youth in the Village engaged the mainstream media and entertainment culture especially after World War Two. However, this was circumscribed by structural limitations which I explain in the next section of this chapter. The Greenwich Village Italian community in the 1970s was not a hotbed of youth popular culture in contrast to Bensonhurst. This is largely a result of demographic shifts that witnessed the exodus of families with children to the suburbs and outer borough communities.

Signs of Life Despite the lacuna in the sociological literature, there is scattered historical evidence that second- and third-generation Italian youth meaningfully engaged popular American culture in the latter half of the twentieth

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century, in particular in Northeastern cities with a large Italian immigrant concentration after World War Two. As part of the post-war expansion of domestic consumption (Cohen 2000), urban Italian American youth in the 1950s were eager to consume the popular American culture, notably early rock and roll or Doo Wop. The historian Matthew Delmont’ s (2012) study of the live after-school TV program from Philadelphia, American Bandstand, identifies a contingent of local working- and lower-middle-class Italian American high school students at the core of the show’s regular dancers. The study focuses on the manipulation of a national racial “imaginary” by a veritable media institution, so it has little to say about local youth culture practices which were airbrushed clean for national TV. Although ethnicity could be read into names and facial features, Italian American teens living in ethnic neighborhoods in metropolitan Philadelphia checked their ethnicity at the stage door for the live shows and they effectively disappear into whiteness when American Bandstand restricted access to Black teens from West Philadelphia. Although not a study of Italian American youth subculture, Delmont’s narrative is noteworthy because, with Jersey Shore well down the road, it stages the assimilation of Italian American youth in the context of commodified leisure. It also raises the strong possibility that there was a youth culture embedded in Philadelphia’s Italian American communities. Where American Bandstand muted or effaced Italian ethnicity and urban working-class styles to appeal to a burgeoning white youth culture, Jersey Shore promoted a youth style set apart and even marginalized by Italian ethnicity. American Bandstand’s portrayal of urban Italian American youth as “nice white kids” was at odds with the deviant profile of the “greaser”. It is possible that this initiated a countertrend in the popular culture that softened the threat of the racialized urban tough that has continued to assume an Italian American form in mass media narratives into the present. This sanitized version of the 1950s Italian American teenager was further promulgated in the movie and theater versions of the musicals “Grease” and the character of “Fonzie” in “Happy Days”. “Grease” situates Italian American youth in middle-class high school leisure styles of fun and pleasure minus gang proclivities. Meanwhile, “the Fonz” (Arthur Fonzarelli) and his urban Italian American edginess were adopted as an exotic greaser (with a good heart) by small-town middle-class Midwestern WASPs. The recent adaptation of Jersey Boys and A Bronx Tale as Broadway musicals provide further uplift. The disposition

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to sanitize “greaser” in the mainstream popular culture is predicated on the eclipse of urban lower-class ethnic communities by the 1970s. However, the fundamental narrative of urban danger has remained in place with films like “Mean Streets” and “A Bronx Tale”. It managed to ascend to the forefront of the public discourse in 1989 following an episode of street violence in Brooklyn. There is more than a hint of this in Jersey Shore and in the evolution of the Guido stereotype. Recent work by the historian Simone CInotto (2014) locates 1950s and 1960s Doo Wop style in the Italian neighborhoods of New York City. He draws a clear line between the stylish performances of Italian Americans and the urban youth culture that American Bandstand was whitewashing. Cinotto affirms the engagement of Italian American youth with American pop culture in the case of Doo Wop. However, he points to an organic connection to 1950s/1960s urban Italian neighborhood culture, in particular its streetcorner boys. And, where American Bandstand facilely submerged Italian American youth within whiteness, Cinotto emphasizes the embrace of the Black musical genre of Doo Wop by Italian American youth who were racially ambiguous enough to perform a safer version of Blackness and otherwise mediate a relationship to the Black artists prominent in the new rock and roll youth culture (this was masked on American Bandstand). It is noteworthy that Dion and the Belmonts were the first (ambiguously) white musical group to appear at the Apollo Theater in Harlem (ibid.: 175). Notwithstanding the portrayal of Philadelphia’s Italian American youth as “normal”, white and middle class, American teenagers on American Bandstand, in New York City they were potentially dangerous. Here, Cinotto calls attention to the “gang attitude” (ibid.: 167) displayed by major Italian American Doo Wop artists like Dion [DiMucci] and The Belmonts. This Doo Wop group assumed the proprietary name of the members’ Italian neighborhood in the Bronx that signifies Doo Wop as a historically specific working-class ethnic style rooted in a defended neighborhood (i.e., a neighborhood defended, in part, by local youth gangs). Folklorist Joseph Sciorra (2011) has delineated a present-day Italian American position in the African American dominated musical form of Hip Hop known as “Hip Wop” also known as “Italian Rap”. Sciorra’s work calls attention to the musical imprint of Italian American youth in the city two generations after Doo Wop groups like Dion and the Belmonts. Like Cinotto, Sciorra portrays a “mediascape”, a concept formulated by Arjun Appurdai, in which Italian American artists construct

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images and narratives of “imagined lives” (ibid.: 36). Echoing Cinotto’s insights into the dialogue with urban Black music, Sciorra makes plain the fusion of rap musical forms and idioms, especially gangsta, with an imaginary rooted in or referenced to the Italian neighborhood, specifically in New York City, and Mafia street culture. As discussed below, Guido invokes Italian ethnicity to articulate a harder boundary against Black culture, staying truer to dance music as well as constructing racial difference where Hip Wop blurs whiteness and jettisons or at least sublimates the racial animosities that mobilized turf defenses against Blackness, although this varies for individual artists; thus, JoJo Pellegrino comes down more on the side of blurring race while GFella unabashedly proclaims “I’m a Guido”. Italian American youth culture in New York City has historically maintained turf boundaries that were most forcefully enforced against non-whites (see Chapter 9). Despite adhering to an Italian neighborhood imaginary, Sciorra points out that “the vast majority of Italian American MCs live in suburban areas far from historical Italian urban neighborhoods” (ibid.: 41). I will argue below that rather than dismiss this as inauthentic, it represents the ongoing adaptation of ethnic culture, specifically in the relationship between second settlement outer borough communities and third settlement inner ring suburbs. GFella explicitly illustrates the melding of Italian neighborhood and suburban culture with videos for songs like “I’m a Guido” and “I Gotta a Guy”. Guido can be construed as the “missing link” between Doo Wop and Hip Wop although there is considerable overlap. Curiously, the more recent excursions of Hip Wop and Guido are more saliently identified with Italian ethnicity. Whereas Doo Wop culture is a precursor, Hip Wop can be construed as a branch of Guido which was an early poacher of Hip Hop. Together, these are iterations within a local youth style tradition that supplies a framework for the narrative of Guido in this book.

Configuring a Local Youth Style Tradition Desmond and Cinotto make a concerted case for an urban Italian American youth culture that engages popular American youth culture, specifically in relation to pop music genres at a particular historical juncture. The work of Cinotto and Sciorra solidify the view that urban Italian American youth not only turned to popular American culture but the possibility that they were early adopters of urban American styles from jazz, to Doo Wop, and disco. Urban Italian

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Americans also became producers within these genres including iconic artists like Frank Sinatra and Dion Di Mucci (Gennari 2017). This can be attributed to their proximity to urban Black cultures and specifically Harlem from the Harlem Renaissance forward, despite the provincial character of their ethnic enclaves that defended territorial borders. In the 1930s and 1940s, Harlem jazz clubs were a subway ride away from downtown neighborhoods; second-generation Italian youth in Greenwich Village also took “the A Train” uptown to swing. Local Italian American youth have historically been more oriented to Black musical styles than white-dominated genres like folk and rock; this was the case even in the Greenwich Village Italian American neighborhood which was literally in the shadows of a scene where artists like Bob Dylan (e.g., The Bitter End) and Jimi Hendrix (e.g., The Gaslight Café) performed when they arrived in New York (Tricarico 1984). Specific geographical and social locations help explain why Italian American greasers were in discos before SNF and Guidos were poaching Hip Hop before Rap music was in MTV’s regular rotation of music videos. In the absence of an extensive historical record, the remainder of this chapter seeks to flesh out a scenario for greaser as a vernacular youth culture that anticipates Guido. It attempts to construct a basic understanding of youth culture at the neighborhood level, organically connected to urban Italian American culture. This establishes a style tradition, in particular continuity with greaser, most notably in a tough masculine pose grounded in an urban street code. It presupposes a significant orientation to popular American culture by the 1950s. More importantly, it provides a background for the social and cultural changes in the local youth style tradition with the turn to disco in the 1970s, thereby establishing a meaningful contrast with Guido. Earlier iterations of local Italian American youth culture practice like greaser demonstrate a lower level of commodity consumption in fashioning a style. Greaser can be viewed as an interrupted or truncated youth subculture. There is no evidence that local Italian American youth claimed a “greaser” identity to draw a subcultural boundary and position themselves in youth style markets. There is also a contrast in the salience of Italian ethnicity as a signifier of style and as an agency or subcultural capital in its own right. As in South Philadelphia, American popular culture became more apparent in New York City’s Italian American neighborhoods after World War II as teenagers engaged an expanding mass media culture centered on Doo Wop. In contrast to the middle-class Italian American “student

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culture” that Fass described in middle-class Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in the 1940s, a youth style of leisure oriented to American popular culture was based in working-class Italian neighborhoods. However, youth agency was circumscribed by limited economic and cultural resources. Italian American youth culture in the city in the 1950s and 1960s privileged the locality, even the block, which increased the possibility of adult surveillance. It was quintessentially a “teenage culture” checked by early adulthood. The early arrival of working-class adulthood in the form of marriage, parenthood, and wage labor nipped youth culture fun and pleasure in the bud. Leisure was scarce and discretionary income was limited. The working class was only beginning to be incorporated into a burgeoning consumer culture in the post-World War Two period and the “youth culture industry” was in incipient development (Frith 1981). In contrast to middle-class college students, the working class did not enjoy a lengthy period of leisure with little “adult surveillance” necessary for youth culture development (Austin and Willard 1998). Consequently, the leisure styles of working-class youth were stunted by deficits in cultural as well as economic capital. With greater adult surveillance, greaser was more exposed to adult scrutiny, further inhibiting youth agency including the consolidation of distinctly youthful styles. Indeed, the style was imprinted by work, corrupting the commitment to leisure. Greaser was the class-based style of youth who performed dirty manual labor, literally anticipating adult careers as auto mechanics or “grease monkeys”. Its signature cultural capital was rooted in the conditions of this form of labor. Working-class youth able to convert cultural capital, specifically automotive mechanics, into automobile ownership afforded a space for leisure and status display removed from adult surveillance that was not always available to academic youth cultures including jocks as well as nerds (Eckert 1989: 16). Like Pachuco lowriders, Italian American youth staked a more powerful claim to the streets with distinctive cruising scenes in the vicinity of the Italian neighborhood which suggests the tempering of youth culture by adult influences. Italian American youth preferred American-made cars like Ford and Chevrolet especially the bigger models, very much like their fathers which suggests that adult influences tempered generational difference. Automobiles became central status symbols for youth that were disrespected in school and were not continuing their formal education beyond high school if they graduated at all.

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This collision of adult and teenage identities is on view in a grainy 1966 black and white Diane Arbus photo entitled “A Young Brooklyn Family Going on a Sunday Outing” (shauncn512659 2016). The composition portrays a young married couple in their early twenties with a small child and an infant in tow; another child is not pictured. The couple display a look culturally coded for greaser and Italian American ethnicity; the husband is an Italian immigrant. The young man is dressed in a dark (probably black) jacket and slacks; his black hair is greased back and formed into a pompadour, with the hint of a “D(uck)A(ss)” or flip at the nape of the neck. The wife’s look features “high”, teased black hair and a tight dress accented by a coat with a leopard-skin print (motifs evident in Jersey Shore hairstyles) draped over an arm that is holding the baby. The youthfulness of the married couple suggests that their fling with “teenage culture” was brief (they did not look much older than couples dancing on American Bandstand at the time) and truncated by parenthood. At the same time, they display a style as parents that marks a youth identity, suggesting that the latter lacks sufficient separation and is thoroughly confounded with adulthood. Although barely out of their teens, sullen facial expressions and tense postures betray alienation from the fun and pleasure pursued by middle-class college students and counterculture youth in 1966, one year before the release of the Beatles “Sargent Peppers” album and the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco. Arbus’ young married couple could “dress up greaser”, in contrast to counterculture youth, precisely because greaser culture did not achieve the space necessary to thrive in opposition to adult roles. In their early twenties, their look can be read as expressing nostalgia for a brief fling with a truncated life phase and the lack of a youth option vis-à-vis the counterculture. Without the economic and cultural resources to cultivate age peer fun in leisure, Italian American youth in the city’s Italian neighborhoods into the 1960s seem more attuned to adult styles, reflecting intergenerational solidarity within the family and the local community (Tricarico 1984). Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1972) depicts a male peer group pattern among young Italian Americans living in a lower east side Manhattan neighborhood where the film maker grew up that mimics adult mafiosi, from the suits and ties worn in after-hours clubs where the young men drink “highballs” and listen to Jimmy Roselli records on the jukebox alongside Doo Wop and rock, to the big American cars they drive. The young men depicted by Scorsese are auditioning for adult roles that

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are within reach and, therefore, configure “the promise of consumer desire” (Lipsitz 1994: 7) around adult styles. The film explicitly positions adult-centered youth in Little Italy outside the youth counterculture of the early 1970s including the sexual liberation of women in neighboring Greenwich Village compared to the surveillance and restraint of Italian American females. Similarly, The Wanderers (1979) depicts the inadvertent but inevitable collision of 1960s Greenwich Village youth counterculture with Italian American greaser youth in the Bronx in the matter of changing sexual mores. Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam (1999) updates this for Italian American youth style, now oriented to disco, in a Bronx Italian American neighborhood and lower Manhattan punk style in the late 1970s. Greaser youth culture through the 1960s was heavily imprinted by a masculine “code of the street” associated with lower- and working-class urban cultures (Anderson 1990). With females protected by the family, this featured “male camaraderie” based in the locality and open to fighting which enhanced the masculinist bond; the disposition to fight in comradeship explains the label “hitters” used in lieu of “greaser” by youth in my middle-class New Jersey suburban high school in the 1960s (the archetypal “hitters” lived in the predominantly blue-collar Italian American town of Lodi in Bergen County). However, it is should not be reduced to gangs specializing in organized aggression linking urban turf to “masculine honor” (Schneider 1999). It also extended to informal sociability, such as with “cornerboys”, as well as more well-defined local “crews” and Social/Athletic Clubs with chartered storefront locations that dotted first settlement areas like the South Village in lower Manhattan in the 1930s (Tricarico 1984: 35–38). Fighting occupied a central place in defining youthful masculinity in urban Italian American neighborhoods, largely valued as an activity that countered physical risk emanating from the outside notably neighborhoods that were not Italian. SNF depicts Tony Manero as a street fighter as well as an accomplished club dancer and sharp dresser, reflecting the salient markers of a youth style tradition that is prominently shared by Britain’s Teddy Boys (Cross 2007). At the same time, restricted opportunities to consume historically feeds the development of street gangs (see Schneider 1999). Italian American neighborhoods in New York City generated formal gang affiliations like the Fordham Baldies, which counted Dion DiMucci as a member in the 1950s, and The Golden Guineas which invoked ethnicity as a tough street pose and remained active through the 1960s. Gangs

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provided opportunities for males to construct youth identities around turf and fighting; their development was subject to institutional control within the Italian American neighborhood most notably by the Mafia syndicate through selective recruitment and in the interest of securing a safe space for illicit operations (Tricarico 1984: 63–71). The youth gangs that Schneider identifies in the Bronx and Brooklyn like the Fordham Baldies and The Golden Guineas were waning in the 1970s. Since that time, consumption style has overshadowed turf aggression as an organizing principle of Italian American youth identity in the city (see below). As Elijah Anderson (1990) notes, a lower or working class “code of the street” is not at all incompatible with style. And, as Cinotto (2014) shows, Italian American gangs adopted a greaser/Doo Wop pose. My research in the South Village in the late 1970s (Tricarico 1984) shows that actual gangsters in Italian American neighborhoods were in the forefront of adult style trends, reflecting a pattern that links cultural capital with economic and social (status) capitals (Bourdieu 1984). There was generational difference, as younger mobsters in the South Village wore leisure suits in contrast to the older generation following a more restrained regime of consumption; one Summer, the serious-looking patrons of a Mafia storefront “social club” featured pastel-colored leisure suits and white Capezio loafers—trendy fashion items that “fell off the back of a truck” (Tricarico 1984; see also Cunningham 2007). Mafia style celebrity was created in the mass media portrayal of John Gotti, “the Dapper Don”, in the 1980s. Known for a stylish look that featured “a shark skin suit” and “hand-painted silk ties” (Trebay 2002), Gotti’s conspicuous display of commodified status symbols reversed a traditional Mafia consumption strategy; his grandsons later evolved as Guido fashion plates (see Chapter 9). This book places Guido style squarely in the context of an Italian American street code with the Mafia at the center (see Chapter 6). Urban working-class youth culture into the 1960s seems to have been disparagingly labeled “greaser” in contradistinction to higher-class “taste cultures” (Gans 1975) most notably “preppie” styles of the day—a campus (private liberal arts or Ivy League) and private country club look signaled by shirts with button-down collars, pressed chinos, and penny loafers that had designer brand names (a status symbol that would later trickle down). Preppie is the look of the white, Midwestern high school students like Richie Cunningham and his friends in Happy Days that marks Arthur Fonzarelli as an urban ethnic (Italian American) greaser.

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The classic greaser look relied on a few core elements, especially the black leather jacket which signified masculine toughness and the dominant note of the identity (DeLong and Park 2007). It was a masculinity that was working class; dungarees outfitted the manual worker and was later adopted by countercultural youth. It also more than flirted with deviance since the black leather jacket was identified with biker gangs like the Hell’s Angels which pursued organized crime. In the moment, greaser was marginal to the pop culture mainstream represented by American Bandstand. Greaser, like Doo Wop, appears to have coalesced as a more or less cohesive style in retrospect, with a nudge from mass media portrayals like “Grease” and American Bandstand that softened the edges of a marginal youth culture of yesteryear. The designation greaser can be accepted with reservations in characterizing a local youth style tradition; Doo Wop may be considered apt but it is perhaps too narrow while the term “greaser” implies a Doo Wop soundtrack (at the level of youth culture, the distinction here is between the creators of the Doo Wop sound and the rank and file who appropriated it for a youth identity). Confounding this issue is that the identity symbol “greaser” has been validated for Italian American youth culture in the popular culture as with the Hollywood movie, “Grease”; the label did not have the sting of an ethnic slur when it was released in 1978 in contrast to the opposition to MTV for a reality TV show about “Guidos”. Also, in sharp contrast to Guido, there is no evidence that these youth embraced this identity themselves—that they called themselves “Greaser” with a capital G and that they invested this symbol with value that reversed stigmatization. Greaser never spawned a style-based youth subculture that transcended the local. Delmont (2012) suggests that an expanding youth market galvanized by television created a framework for Italian American teenagers to fold their local peer group styles into a mainstream white style. When greasers did invoke an Italian identity, it was made explicit in reference to turf-based fighting gangs like the Golden Guineas. To this extent, greaser provides an instructive contrast with Guido. This marks greaser as a latent or incipient subculture. Something had to happen to give rise to a bounded Italian American youth subculture in Guido. This question is addressed in Chapters 3 and 4. It is noteworthy that the label “greaser” indicates that ethnicity was vacated by class and race. Greaser was the class-based style of youth who worked on cars, or “grease monkeys”. Working-class youth opted for vocational high schools that taught trades including automobile

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mechanics. Preparation for these manual blue-collar jobs began in the neighborhood, often in alleys and shared driveways or in gas stations where youth worked for hours on cars and went home with engine grease around their fingernails. Many became owners of businesses related to auto repair including body shops which has been an economic niche for Italian Americans in Brooklyn and on the south shore of Long Island. The greasy look of dirty labor marks the ambiguous “whiteness” of swarthy (e.g., greasy) complexions and creates an equivalent racial status to Chicanos as the consummate greasers of the southwestern United States. Greaser identity is reinforced by urban lower-class masculine toughness and delinquency; I make the case in Chapter 7 that aggressive masculinity darkened Guido youth culture in the city in the late 1980s. While the comparison to Chicanos lacks urgency for geographical reasons, the nonwhite character of greaser blurs the distinction between lower-class Latinos like Puerto Ricans and Italians and explains racial tensions in neighborhoods like East Harlem where the latter succeeded the former after World War Two. Class and racial themes are sublimated in the transaction of Guido identity (see Chapter 4). Greaser as a label imposed by the mass media and by higher status others demonstrates a low level of youth agency as well as ethnic agency. The weak structural basis of greaser subculture in the 1950s and 1960s can be traced to restricted opportunities to consume in leisure. This is not just about limited discretionary income but also about the formation of a youth style market (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). For example, Doo Wop music did not articulate with a commodified spectacle along the lines of dance music and disco which was energized by a national pop culture “movement” in the late 1970s; media and entertainment industries were in the early stages of merchandising to a youth market (Frith 1981). American Bandstand galvanized a national style with a media platform but the teenage constituency was not ready for rituals outside adult surveillance like dance clubs; indeed, Doo Wop was performed on neighborhood streetcorners. Commodified appearance norms including designer fashions were also further down the road. Although enthusiastic adherents of Doo Wop, this 1950s pop genre did not engender a collective youth culture synergy revolving around a style of consumption in specialized leisure sites. While the Doo Wop genre was relatively short-lived, a more critical factor is that “youth” was too, interrupted by an earlier passage to adulthood. Until disco became a path to pop culture cool, youth in New York City’s Italian American neighborhoods did not have a named subcultural

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gesture—specifically, a claim on style in the name of ethnicity. Pre-Guido Italian American youth culture can be characterized as a teenage style with limited economic and cultural capital. The inhibition of a youth identity oriented to pop culture fun and pleasure is suggested by the absence of a named style. In contrast to Guido, greaser is an imposed identity that was never embraced by Italian American youth. It did not refer to a style of consumption that is respected for its pop culture credentials as much as the absence of one. Style does not even enter into the conceptualization of “greaser” by Huff (1970). In a study of a small California town he called “Patusa”, Schwartz (1987: 94) maintains that the label “greaser” was “synonymous with working-class and lower-class youth” who were academically deficient and had a “delinquent” orientation. Further, their leisure style was marked by “very little organization” a profile that strongly resembles the youth category known as “burnout”. This narrow characterization of “greaser” as a delinquent identity does not adequately represent the creative choices made by urban Italian American youth in relation to American popular culture. If music is an organizing force youth culture identity (Frith 1981), the denouement of a brief Doo Wop moment perhaps left Italian American youth in the city somewhat disoriented. Doo Wop can be heard on the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s 1972 film Mean Streets but so can soul music and rock, along with adult “top 40” radio playlist standards that continued to reflect a compromised youth space. Soul music, the Motown sound of urban Blacks, was the dominant soundtrack for youth in downtown Manhattan Italian American neighborhoods in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It represents a choice within a broad musical genre, R and B, rather than a leap over to rock music steeped in countercultural values. The city’s Italian American youth have always moved in step with Black youth culture even as they enforced a rigid color line in their neighborhoods, and they likely made the progression from Doo Wop to Soul Music although without comparable artistic representation suggesting a relatively tepid reception for the newer genre. Youth in Italian American neighborhoods were largely on the periphery of the rock and roll wave that dominated American youth culture since the Beatles arrived in New York City in 1963. Scorsese’s decision to add some rock music to the soundtrack reflects his own alienation from Italian neighborhood culture. Significantly, the eclectic Mean Streets soundtrack does not include electronic dance music. In that year, Dan “Pooch” Pucciarelli began to work as a DJ in the neighborhood lounges of southern Brooklyn.

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The Mass Media Record Given the paucity of research, the substantial mass media record of Italian American greaser, specifically situated in New York City, can provide a useful road map especially when it reflects the insider position of observers like Scorsese; the idea for Jersey Shore similarly originated with an Italian American woman named Sally Ann Salsano who admits to an affiliation with the scene (see Chapter 9). The actress who played the role of the Italian- American teenager “Cookie” went to “live for two weeks with an Italian American family in deepest Brooklyn” in order to learn the local peer group styles; she was particularly impressed with “the guys wearing medallions and the girls with long nails and hairspray, chewing gum” (Nightingale 1989). Italian American youth are framed by greaser in mainstream texts like West Side Story, Grease, Lords of Flatbush, The Wanderers, Happy Days, Mean Streets, and A Bronx Tale. All of these portrayals at least hint at the agency of Italian American youth in the tough street pose, and most make it quite explicit; they also depict, albeit in varying degrees, an engagement with popular American culture. Youth culture practices are put in the context of urban ethnic community in all of these films with the exception of Grease. The 1970s TV sitcom Happy Days and the 1978 Hollywood romantic comedy film Grease portray Italian American greaser youth culture, signified by core elements such as black leather jackets and customized cars, juxtaposed to more formidable leisure-based consumption: the dominant “preppie” or campus styles of suburban middle-class and upper-middle-class whites signaled by button-down collars, pressed chinos, and penny loafers. The lead played by John Travolta in Grease (Fig. 2.1), a musical comedy released one year after SNF, is the focus of a nonthreatening rendition of greaser, framed by suburban landscapes, a preppy girlfriend, and an orientation to fun rather than delinquency. Grease creates nostalgia for a style that is edgy enough for middle class, preppy audiences (e.g., muscle shirts and dangling cigarettes) but has been cleansed of troubling lower class signifiers like delinquency and greasy labor. When Happy Days and Grease were introduced, the blue-collar and lower-class ethnic communities in which they were embedded were largely in eclipse and thus were eligible as entertaining nostalgia rather than moral panic. Bensonhurst would later prove to be a fly in the ointment (see Chapter 8). Films like Grease can be read as prequels of the Guido narrative. The next chapter makes the case that the commercially successful film

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Fig. 2.1  John Travolta plays the lead greaser in a film that was a box office hit one year after SNF. His character demonstrates the makings of a free-floating style in the popular culture (e.g., black leather jacket, DA haircut). Like Happy Days, the musical comedy subdues the male greaser through contact with middle-class respectability (Source Grease—4 Movie Clips + Trailer, JoBlo Movie Clips, published on April 18, 2018, 3:45. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=atZLEN7dEWw, accessed 9.5.2018)

Saturday Night Fever (1977), depicting Brooklyn Italian American youth who fight and dance, can be read as a bridge leading directly to Guido as a bounded youth subculture, if not a midwife of change in the evolution out of greaser. The selection of John Travolta in leads for both Grease and SNF plays no small part in cementing this connection between related iterations of Brooklyn Italian American youth culture. In what is likely an attempt to further leverage the subject matter of after SNF, Guido is implied in the films Spike of Bensonhurst (1988) and Cookie (1989) although SNF depicts a more deviant version of Brooklyn Italian American youth culture than these later films. While these films mark a

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shift to a more committed style of consumption, the greaser thread is visibly woven into the new style particularly at the point of street culture. Guido is also strongly implied in Nancy Savoca’s film True Love (1989) about Italian American youth in the Bronx. Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam”, referring to the serial killer preying on lover’s lanes in the outer boroughs in the year that SNF was released, also captures Bronx Guido styles embedded in ethnic neighborhood culture without explicitly invoking the name. An Italian American tough pose identified with greaser and Guido has been appropriated for the performance persona of New York City punk rock bands “the Ramones, four kids from Jewish Forest Hills” and “The Dictators, five Jewish guys from Queens and the Bronx, who to varying degrees, tried to pass as Italian” (Beeber 2006: 84). The drummer of The Dictators further elaborated on this Italian American script saturated in outer borough interethnic meaning: Have you ever heard the term Juido?…I’ve heard Howard Stern use it. It refers to a Jew who wants to seem like an Italian, or Guido. I think that there’s something to that in relation to the Dictators. Handsome Dick [one of the band members] still talks the lingo of an Italian street kid even though he wears a Jewish star in the middle of his baseball cap. (Ibid.: 89)

Steven Lee Beeber (89) maintains that the band’s song, “The Next Big Thing”, is “the hybrid offspring” of “the sarcastic humor” of “physically unimposing” Jewish rockers and “the macho bluster of the New York Italian”. This is a different “ethnic look” than what the teenagers on American Bandstand offered mainstream youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s (see also D’Acierno 1998: 43). In the context of 1980s and 1990s New York City punk rock, the Italian look that The Ramones and The Dictators lifted from urban Italian American culture was intended to be oppositional to the mainstream; even more, an Italian American street pose may have lent an “edginess” to Punk that separated it from mellow Hippie counterculture.2 While Jewish punk rockers were not just appropriating media imagery but had direct knowledge of the Guido street pose, their appropriation further solidified this image in the popular culture. It is important to point out, however, that these punk rock bands were not performing the consumption style of tough Italian American guys; it was far too consumerist for an oppositional youth identity. They seem to be exercising editorial license that confounds iterations of Italian

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American youth culture, that is more greaser than Guido (not “Juido” but “Jeaser”?). Ironically, the authors of this urban Italian American youth style appropriated as a signifier of oppositionality were struggling to win space in popular American culture. They were decidedly uninterested in punk rock and the possibility of indirectly appropriating their own image. They were not clearly not inclined to reconcile a punk rock style within Italian American style tradition: the Mohawk hairstyle worn by an Italian American youth in “Summer of Sam” symbolized alienation from his Bronx neighborhood in 1978 that was moving to electronic dance music. Rock did not embellish a tough pose to them, perhaps because it was associated with the counterculture and hippies and Jewish kids from Forest Hills. Not that electronic dance music and dance moves were gender appropriate for a street culture tradition; although Dion and the Belmonts injected a defiant masculinity into Doo Wop with a song like “The Wanderer” about playing the field if not “scoring” (“I get around, around. I’m a wanderer”), streetwise masculinity was often freighted with a propensity for relationship expressiveness and sensitivity: “Oh, my Love, My Darling, I hunger for your kiss”. As we will see in the following chapters, popular American culture was appropriated within a local style tradition. As long as being Italian was the governing impression, tough was under construction even at the disco. A tough pose is a counterbalance for songs of love and dancing. Images of Italian American youth in popular American culture point to vernacular formations and practices. There is a fairly consistent picture that resonates with the available empirical research. For our purposes, this includes an impression of ethnic youth agency oriented to the appropriation or consumption of popular American culture. It is important to not overgeneralize and even to recognize the likelihood of ethnic stereotyping (e.g., the causal impression of girls with high lacquered hair “chewing gum”). The dynamic of mass media agendas is unpacked in later chapters in reference to a racial killing in Bensonhurst in 1989 and Jersey Shore in 2009. Importantly, however, mainstream media representations, especially as stereotypes, figure prominently as an “external boundary” in the transaction of identity, managing impressions not only with youth culture actors but with other audiences. This “feedback loop” of mass media representations and youth culture performances is evident throughout this book.

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Youth formations are overlooked or slighted in straight-line theory. In particular, little mention is made of second-generation youth and when it does occur it is in connection with deviance and assimilation (Maira and Soep 2004). The chapter makes the case that, in New York City, significant engagement with popular American culture can be discerned in Italian American neighborhoods at least by the 1950s, reflecting the burgeoning significance of the entertainment and media culture in the delineation of an age-based category of “youth”. This development represents a social and cultural change that takes place within urban ethnic culture. It is predicated on age peer relationships that have gained a measure of separation or institutional autonomy in relation to the family, the school, and the workplace (Frith 1981; Austin and Willard 1998). I would also call attention to increasing autonomy vis-à-vis the ethnic community including the parish and the immigrant societies that anchored first-generation Italian culture. Social institutions are “sets of relationships” designed to realize specific purposes (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 86), an established and predictable way to meet needs that strengthens the entire culture (Lindsey and Beach 1999: 105). Youth peer groups are agents of socialization in contemporary societies, forming a bridge between the family and the larger society, including American popular culture and consumer markets (Fong and Berry 2017: 92–95). Youth culture is an outcome of modern urban societies that fill the wait for adulthood with expanded opportunities for commodified leisure (Frith 1981; Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). The atrophy of Doo Wop did not signal the end of youth culture in New York City’s Italian neighborhoods, just as the atrophy of first settlement neighborhoods did not signal the end of urban Italian American culture in the city. Indeed, these developments are intertwined. The center of Italian American culture in the city had shifted to the outer boroughs from Manhattan. These were, in part, second settlement locations for upwardly mobile Italian American families descended from the old immigration. Outer borough enclaves were also replenished by new immigration, most notably Bensonhurst, in southern Brooklyn. Youth in these communities had picked up the thread and were engaging popular American culture with a heightened agency. The turning point was a pop culture “movement” that engendered heightened “consumer desire”. It was geared to a new musical genre and leisure style. It was based on a commercially successful film that not coincidentally depicted Italian American youth culture in southern Brooklyn. This intriguing feedback

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loop, reworking a local youth style tradition called greaser, will be considered in the next chapter. The turn to disco, an American pop culture trend, in the 1970s escalated a commitment to leisure styles in outer borough Italian communities necessary for the development of a “contemporary youth subculture” (Brake 1985).

Notes 1. When I was conducting fieldwork in the neighborhood in the late 1970s, a community in eclipse was demographically dominated by adults, in particular the elderly; the ranks of the young were too depleted to p ­ erform a “youth culture”. Researching the Italian Village blocked my vision of the disco scene bubbling up among Italian American youth in southern Brooklyn at the time. My research on Guido beginning in the late 1980s has contributed to the literature on Italian American youth culture (Tricarico 1991, 2001, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2017). Insights from these publications have been incorporated into this book. 2. I owe this insight into the relationship between Guido and Punk to Amy Traver.

CHAPTER 3

The Turn to Disco and Other Subcultural Developments

IA Youth Go Clubbing Greaser was not the culmination of Italian American youth culture in New York City. This chapter examines developments that brought qualitative changes in the way that local youth engaged in popular American culture, especially the mass media, and vice versa. The watershed event was a turn to disco that preceded the national trend that was sparked by a Hollywood film about the Italian American disco scene in southern Brooklyn in the late 1970s. Disco provided a spectacle that galvanized a subcultural identity—a development that was missing in Doo Wop. The new youth culture spectacle was increasingly commercialized and hedonistic. It was also mediated. The chapter makes a case that this mass media showcase had subcultural significance by allowing Italian American youth to appropriate their own images as a pop culture credential, foreshadowing JS. The chapter also examines the articulation with local FM radio and the emergence of an Internet chat room scene from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. A new relationship with popular American culture became a framework for a turn to Italian ethnicity which is explored in Chapter 4. As Doo Wop was being relegated to the margins and eventually pop nostalgia by soul music (the Motown sound), outer borough Italian American youth were left without an anchor in the popular culture and, therefore, a coherent profile in local youth style markets. The arrival of the Beatles in America in 1963 did not resonate with the © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_3

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local youth style tradition, certainly nothing that incorporated the pop culture trend, “Beatlemania”. The subsequent explosion of electric guitar-centered rock and roll that galvanized a youth culture with political implications (i.e., “Woodstock Nation”) further marginalized youth in Italian neighborhoods. The “disco wave” broke over this pop culture backwater. “Le disco” was imported to New York City from Paris in the late 1960s where it was associated with economic and cultural elites (Lawrence 2003). The disco was a club venue for dancing to electronic dance music spun by a disc jockey, or DJ who played records, “des disques”, on stage or in a booth. Although clubs also staged live performances by dance music artists, electronic music was in sharp contrast to the live rock performances by musicians in venues like The Fillmore East in the East Village, a converted movie theater with rows of seats that was suitable for a sonic and visual spectacle, including the projection of psychedelic shapes on a movie screen that pulsed to the live amplified music, but not dancing. Early downtown Manhattan clubs like The Loft, a private party in converted manufacturing space that portended the future of lower Manhattan development around manufacturing loft conversions like SoHo and Tribeca were identified with an underground scene. Midtown dance clubs like Studio 54 which became notorious for outrageous hedonism in the late 1970s adopted a more commercialized approach. Italian Americans made noteworthy contributions to the early disco scene as DJs and mixers. Francis Grasso who was born in Brooklyn, “went behind the turntables for the first time” in 1968 at an uptown club called Salvation 2 and became famous for the “mixing” of records and new techniques such as “slipcueing” (Strauss 2001). Steve D’Aquisto was the DJ at Tamburlaine a Manhattan club that “established itself as a serious alternative for New York’s evolving gay club crowd” (Lawrence 2003: 62). However, it is not clear that these contributions were marked by Italian ethnicity; it is not possible, for example, to read ethnicity into D’Aquisto’s persona and playlist (ibid.: 62). Moreover, the rank and file in outer borough Italian American neighborhoods did not have an ideological affinity for the early underground scene and would subsequently turn out for commercialized midtown venues. Their heterosexuality was also incompatible with the formative role of gay men on the Manhattan club scene. Strenuously objecting to the portrayal of a gay DJ in SNF, DJ Ralphie Dee (D’Agostino 2018)

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insists that “Back then there wasn’t one DJ in Brooklyn who was gay. Everybody was straight, hardcore, Italian, liked girls”. DJ Ralphie Dee is implicitly contrasting the Manhattan scene with what was happening in southern Brooklyn among Italian Americans, although it is possible that gay Italian Americans in the Manhattan scene brought the news back to the neighborhood. In the outer boroughs, disco was integrated into a local youth style tradition. When disco broke, guys like Ralphie were probably called “greasers”. Disco gave them a chance to “become somebody” else. Many jumped at the chance. It is not clear why “the hottest discos” (Echols 2009: 179) outside Manhattan popped up in an area of Brooklyn inhabited by large numbers of Italian Americans. It appears that there was vernacular interest in electronic dance music; DJ Ralphie Dee observes that there were DJs playing records in Bensonhurst “block parties” in the late 1970s, a gesture that parallels the emergence of Rap music in outer borough Black and Latino neighborhoods in the South Bronx in the 1970s (Rivera 2003). Dan “Pooch” Puccarelli began a career as a DJ when he was discharged from the Marines in 1972. His first gigs were in local lounges that were owned by neighborhood gangsters.1 Ralphie (Dee) D’Agostino, who was born in 1954, also began spinning dance music records in a local lounge in 1974, moving on to an array of clubs in the area including Nite Gallery and Pastels. He also played in The 2001 Odyssey, a gaudy club in a gritty industrial area near 65th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues on the boundary of Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge. The scene at Odyssey was in place when Nik Cohn arrived from Manhattan in a cab. Cohn was a British journalist who wrote about the Bensonhurst club scene for an essay in The New Yorker in 1976 that was initially offered as non-fiction. Although Cohn later confessed that he never managed to enter the club that evening, the essay resonated with what was happening on the ground in southern Brooklyn. It also inspired the 1977 Hollywood film SNF which, along with a soundtrack released as an album, ignited a “disco movement” in the popular culture (Lawrence 2003; Echols 2009). Within months of the film’s release, box office receipts were higher than any other film except for The Godfather and the soundtrack became “the largest grossing and most popular album of all time” (Lawrence 2003: 306). Like Cohn’s essay, the film can be read, albeit with caution, as a documentary record of an incipient Italian American youth culture scene: the scene was not a fiction. Together, they establish Italian American youth

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as early adherents of disco, although both texts portray the scene unfavorably. SNF is critically regarded as “an anti-disco film” and also depicts a broken outer borough Italian American family culture as well as peer group culture (Lawrence: 306–316; Echols 2009: 179–194). Cohn had to have been aware of an Italian American disco scene in Bensonhurst or else he would not have taken a cab from Manhattan one evening. SNF was filmed in southern Brooklyn to tap into this outer borough authenticity. The producers of the film not only used 2001 Odyssey but employed regulars as extras on the dance floor. According to a VH1 cable TV documentary, “Behind the Music” (6/17/01), “many of the young males” among the “thousands of fans” who watched the filming “looked like Tony Manero”. In truth, “Tony Manero” looked like them which suggests that a consumption style was already in the works. In the years that followed the city’s Italian American youth embraced disco as a peer group style, with the conviction that there was a proprietary connection to a mass, pop culture phenomenon. The opening scene of SNF is saturated with symbolism for Italian American youth culture: Tony Manero strutting in full Guido persona along 86th Street in Bensonhurst stops at Lenny’s Pizza, a neighborhood institution, for a “double slice” (Fig. 3.1). In October 2017, I assembled a focus group of six women who were in their sophomore year at a Catholic high school in Queens when SNF was released into local theaters in 1977 was assembled to recall the impact of the “disco movement” on their peer group life. The women were third-generation Italian Americans attending a school that was predominantly Italian American at the time. In the shared memory of old school friends, SNF marked the ascendance of disco/dance music over other expressive youth styles, in particular, rock which happened to be in creative and commercial decline in the late 1970s. Where the school previously sponsored “the battle of the bands” that played rock music, after SNF there were now “DJ battles” and rock culture was excised from the student culture perhaps leading to physical battles between youth representing the different styles. A sign of the new times, the rock opera, Tommy by The Who, was followed the next year by Grease—not disco but an homage to the style tradition. The must-have records were not rock songs but Disco Inferno by the Trammps, anything by Donna Summer, and the SNF soundtrack (now on 8-track tapes not vinyl). The popular kids were performing the new club culture which included a look crafted for dance clubs. Clubbing became a central peer group

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Fig. 3.1  John Travolta as Tony Manero in opening sequence establishes the authenticity of Italian American Bensonhurst in the disco myth (Source Saturday Night Fever [Opening Credits], 3:57, YouTube, published on 1.26.2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVEqy6K18Yo, accessed 9.19.2018)

ritual. Prestige was accorded to those who schemed with phony identification, or “proof”, to get into “over 21” clubs. Club-centered identities permeated school culture. While uniforms kept club fashion at bay during the week, males wearing bellbottom pants and shiny polyester “Huckapoo” shirts, and females wearing glitter and spandex posed a sharp challenge to the dress code legislated for school functions. Whereas males occupied positions of dominance as in the rock culture (Kearney 2017), females were afforded expressive space in dance club culture. The most popular males were DJs not members of rock bands; the burgeoning commitment to disco as an urban youth scene was reflected in the proliferation of the Italian American DJ. Aspiring DJs looked up to the old heads. DJ Mike C told me in a personal communication in 2000: “I learned to spin back in the late 80s. Self-proclaimed ‘Guidos’ in my hometown of Brooklyn taught me everything I need to know”. Italian American DJs cultivated “a culture of connoisseurship” in which detailed cultural knowledge is cultivated and transmitted within a scene for the

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purposes of acquiring social power or status (ibid.: 57). The DJ informed the ultimate mobility myth for young outer borough males at this time. Bensonhurst emerged as the epicenter of this outer borough disco scene after SNF. In southern Brooklyn, the “fever” metastasized as “madness”. The symbolic connection between disco and Bensonhurst is consummately illustrated by a 1979 public celebration of disco called “Midnight Madness”. The exact date is unclear and I am not aware of an archival record. According to Dan Pucciarelli (personal interview, August 20, 2018) and a post in the Disco Forum on January 29, 2009, 86th Street and surrounding streets were closed from 18th Avenue to Bay Parkway. Lights were hung from the elevated train tracks and four speaker towers were positioned on the sidewalk. Dan was playing records, including a mix of “Knock On Wood”, from the second story of a building overlooking the throng of dancers; his creative mixes had the crowd “screaming and chanting”. Although this appears to have been a one-time occurrence, it may have intensified the cruising scene on 86th Street into the 1990s, with dance music pumped out of the speakers of Guidomobiles.

Why Turn to Disco? It is not remarkable that youth in Italian American neighborhoods were becoming more engaged in expanded popular culture offerings in the 1970s; even ultra-orthodox Jewish youth in the Boro Park and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn have managed to cultivate an “adolescent culture” that revolves around collectable cards featuring the photographic images of rabbis that mimic baseball cards (“A Brief History of Rabbi Cards” 2016). However, it is necessary to consider why they turned to disco and not one of the other youth culture scenes notably Rock which was the dominant narrative for white youth. This section will remark on why the turn to disco is concomitantly an ethnic turn and not just a narrative about cultural assimilation. Chapter 4 examines the identification of this scene with “Guido”. Youth use popular culture to fashion “meaning systems, modes of expression and lifestyles” in response to “structural problems”—a “subordinate status” in the home, school, and workplace (Brake 1985: 8–26). The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies conceptualized style as a refusal of anonymity and subordination that was, at the same time, an expression and even ratification of powerlessness (Hebdige 1977; Cross

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2007). Alice Echols (2009: 209) refers to disco as “the music of outsiders – racial minorities and gays”. Similarly, Tim Lawrence (2003: 437) maintains that “discotheques became a key site of empowerment for dispossessed groups that included not only multiracial gay men and straight women but also white working-class youths…safe havens in which new identities could be cultivated”. These constituencies were marginalized by the dominant pop culture idiom, a Rock youth culture dominated by straight white males (Kearney 2017). The Hollywood film, SNF, that ignited a “disco movement” in America is credited with providing a narrative that made dancing and dressing up palatable to young working class, heterosexual males (Lawrence 2003; Echols 2009). In this reasoning, Italian American youth made a turn to disco from a class-based position. However, this requires fine-tuning for a particular ethnic narrative. To what extent can the turn to disco and popular American culture more generally be said to “empower” Italian American youth? Youth culture practice “empowered” ethnic youth to follow a script of fun and pleasure within expanded leisure roles. There was time for leisure to the extent that they were in school and delaying marriage. This was not institutionalized an ethnic minority group culture. In the immigrant tradition, there was the primacy of work and saving or the accumulation of financial capital. There was too little economic capital to invest in leisure so the possibility of a consumption style had to be referenced to mainstream American consumer culture. Social as well as economic capital was at issue, which placed limitations on peer group interactions outside the family. Second-generation youth also lacked cultural capital or the taste required to make the right style choices or be “cool”. Pop culture fun was “empowering” because it brought inclusion and even the promise of parity with a mainstream that is denied ethnic minority groups. As such, the appropriation of popular American culture is a challenge to a stigmatized ethnic status. Cultural assimilation imparted an appetite for pop culture fun. Second- and third-generation youth had the means to acquire it, including financial resources for more expensive nightlife choices. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, a mix of blue-collar and lower-middle-class households in the outer boroughs facilitated possibilities for leisure and consumption central for youth culture development. The old high school friends mentioned above were growing up in middle-class households and neighborhoods. While Italian Americans have been relatively slow to acquire higher educational credentials and

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commensurate occupational status, they have pursued small business opportunities, including pizzerias and construction contracting; youth had their own discretionary income to allocate especially if they stopped attending school to work in small niche businesses. While neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Ozone Park supported a tough street code, urban youth were increasingly exposed to the enticement if not pressures of commodified fun and pleasure exerted by expanding youth culture industries (Frith 1981; Eckert 1989: 16–18). Immigrant and second-generation youth turned to popular culture to negotiate their Americanization which is simultaneously framed as upward mobility. While the new second generation assimilated the local youth style tradition represented more Americanized cohorts, they may have received a boost from “Italo Disco”, a stream of electronic dance music that came from a modern Italy and was waiting for “real Italian” youth when they visited relatives for “ferragosto”, the Italian summer vacation gathering. “Italo Disco” converged with the beginning of the American “disco movement”. It also overlapped with American disco in key respects including the connection between the American disco diva Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder who not only collaborated musically but were married during the heyday (Moroder 2018). Moroder composed a song, “Un’ Estate Italiana”, that became the official soundtrack for the 1990 FIFA World Cup held in Italy which deflated the new second generation in the outer boroughs when won by West Germany on a late penalty kick. If not disco, where else would Italian American youth in the outer boroughs turn to satisfy a growing appetite for popular American culture? Dance club culture grafted a commercialized style of leisured consumption on to a lower-class “greaser” style tradition based on masculine turf honor. There is a historical resemblance to the working-class British subcultures like Teddy Boys that blended consumption styles and fighting in staking a position against racialized immigrants (Cross 2007); like British youth subcultures, Guido was initially named by the mass media in the context of “moral panic” (see Chapter 8). While Rock can be a soundtrack for fighting as in the case of the British Teddy Boys and Punk, it did not develop along these lines in the United States. There are parallels to the “ghettocentric” subcultures of racial minority youth in the United States that use ethnicity to blend a code of the street with commodity consumption and media culture (Rivera 2003). Tony Manero was iconic for Guido because he personifies the appropriation

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of stylish consumption within urban Italian American street culture—he even fought like them (see Echols 2009: 151–155). Although “le disco” may have been intended for elites and an underground, marginalized constituencies were still in the know. Information could have been disseminated by individual Italian Americans like Francis Grasso who made breakthroughs into the Manhattan scene prior to retiring from DJing to become a construction worker (Strauss 2001). The electronic mass media also supplied “informational access” (Meyerowitz 1986: 131). SNF radically changed the information flow about disco because, by casting local Italian American youth as protagonists in the narrative that made disco a national leisure trend, it was now possible for IA youth to appropriate their own mediated images to claim status within local style markets. Information does not guarantee physical or social access (ibid.: 131–133) which was the case for outer borough Italian American youth in a segmented club scene (see this chapter below). SNF solidified the position of Italian American youth already in the scene, like Ralphie Dee and Dan Puccarelli. SNF was hardly a vicarious experience. It actually intervened in an ongoing local Italian American youth culture, implementing a dialogic relationship. The film portrayed their scene and agency, even portraying 2001 Odyssey regulars as “extras”, including Ralphie himself. Alterations made to the décor of the club outlasted the production of the film including “over 300 flashing lights” and “big multicolored plastic balls…hung from the ceiling”. SNF disseminated the news about disco to wider taste publics like Italian American high school students in Queens. While discos opened throughout outer boroughs and inner suburbs, SNF trained the attention of Italian American youth throughout the city on Bensonhurst as the holy site, thereby mediating a special connection to their ethnic ancestry. This was underscored in 1987 when the “Guido MCs”, Matt the Horse and Frankie Flash, who grew up in the outer borough of Queens, performed two songs about the new Italian youth scene, “Guido Rap” and “Bensonhurst, 86th Street”, in a club in Bayside, Queens called Avanti (The Guido MCs Live 2011). If youth subcultures originate in a historical “moment” (Hebdige 1977), SNF marked a decisive turn in the local “style tradition” (Sansone 1995). As a DJ at the 2001 Odyssey DJ Ralphie Dee found himself “right smack in the middle of one of the biggest cultural events” (D’Agostino 2018). If it was easy for audiences to conclude that the

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climactic dance performance by Tony Manero on the dance floor of the Odyssey “became the founding moment of ‘discomania’” (Lawrence 2003: 307), it was also possible for Italian American youth in Tony Manero’s neighborhood, historically disenfranchised from pop culture cool, to stake a special claim. The authenticity of this seminal Italian American connection is reflected in the iconic image of “Tony Manero” on the disco floor on the web page of dance music radio DJ “Brooklyn’s Own Joe Causi”, a Guido style arbiter who grew up in Bensonhurst: “Everybody wanted to be like him, dress like him, act like him, dance like him,” Causi recalls. “I’ll never forget the first time me and my friends, we all got in the car and went to Bay Parkway and 65th Street. We all went to get Hustle lessons because if you went to a club and you weren’t dancing, you were the geek now.” (Barmash 2012)

SNF was a call to leave the provincial confines of the Italian American neighborhood and join the mainstream where America was doing the hustle. Causi paints a picture of Italian American youth who vicariously identified with an Italian American actor playing one of them in order to transcend “an insular community”: “You didn’t have to go out of a four-block radius”. At the same time, Italian American Brooklyn was an umbilical cord for Causi that was not cut throughout his career. This fusing of ethnicity and popular American culture is at the center of Guido. If youth manipulate popular culture to “become somebody else” (Calefato 2004), the iconic status of Tony Manero illustrates that this personal transformation occurred within ethnic parameters. It is notable and likely not a coincidence that an Italian American actor playing an Italian American character was instrumental in this transformation. This is a characteristically insular response to “becoming”. Unlike Tony Manero at the close of SNF, Guido does not look longingly toward Manhattan as an opportunity to transcend outer borough Italian American culture. It is argued in the following chapter that Guido is the name for youth who arrived in Manhattan club scene as Italian Americans, rooted in a youth style tradition rooted in an urban ethnic culture. Indeed, they often stayed in the outer boroughs, preferring local clubs to elite venues where “those with relatively low-status experience disrespect” (Milner 2004: 78). An ethnic subculture created a “safe space” for becoming that enabled Italian American youth in Brooklyn to harvest the impact of SNF, and the “disco movement” more broadly, on

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popular American culture. Causi portrays a local youth culture as a “safe space” that appropriated SNF as an origin myth that privileges Italian American youth in Brooklyn as authentic agents of disco. Their own scene was insular enough to oppose the “anti-disco” reading of SNF (Echols 2009: 151–155); Guido would also cultivate an ethnic ideology that opposed the portrayal of Italian American culture as broken and suffocating. It was possible to read mainstream media recognition as “respect”, although this was likely attended by a disposition (a vulnerability?) to believe that cool had finally arrived. This assumption was belied by the fleeting nature of the disco craze, symbolically going up in smoke in “Disco Demolition Night”, the bonfire of disco records staged as a promotion by the Chicago White Sox on the field at Comiskey Park after a baseball game in 1979 (an ironic play on the classic Tramps song “Disco Inferno”). Popular anti-disco sentiment fueled antagonism for Guido in rock-based youth culture (Gaines 1999). Although the “night fever” broke in mainstream America, the Italian American commitment to dance club culture retained an intensity. There was an institutional infrastructure of Guido cool in place in the form of clubs and local radio (see below). At the same time, their commercialized outer borough position made them personae non-gratis in Manhattan, an invidious distinction put into practice at elite Manhattan clubs like The Limelight that routinely excluded “bridge and tunnel” styles. Authenticity claims could be strengthened because they kept the faith in disco; the SNF origin myth may have inspired confidence to challenge the velvet rope that restricted access to outer borough youth. There was now a vested interest in preserving an authentic connection to disco. Thus, radio DJ Joe Causi “jumped aboard the Brooklyn bandwagon” as a sage career move, tapping into Italian American Bensonhurst and specifically SNF for a managed image of pop culture authenticity in commercial dance music (Barmash 2012). With roots in disco going back before SNF, Bensonhurst was a safe harbor when the bubble burst in the early 1980s. DJs like Dan Pucciarelli built large followings in local clubs in Bensonhurst and Staten Island. The Nite Gallery on 86th Street was drawing up to 800 patrons in the early 1980s when Dan was in the DJ booth. A “club review” in an industry publication, Dance Music, in February 1980 identified “a young crowd consisting mainly of neighborhood residents”, a “ve-e-e-ry Italian clientele”. This description also fits the most popular club DJs, namely, Dan and Ralphie Dee and Joe Causi, all of whom were later affiliated

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Fig. 3.2  Disco Dan in the DJ booth at Gatsby’s in southern Brooklyn, 1979 (Courtesy of Dan Pucciarelli)

with WKTU FM (see below). Still, there apparently were lean pickings for ambitious DJs in the city. Dan Pucciarelli, also known as “Disco Dan”, did gigs in England for several years, trading on symbolic capital, a 1984 clipping from the West Lancashire Gazette in Dan’s scrap book notes that “He’s from Brooklyn – you know, Saturday Night Fever territory”. At the same time, Dan went further afield because the disco bubble had burst and the local scene was atrophied (Fig. 3.2).

A Turning Point for Subcultural Development Popular culture is “a free space for the imagination – an area liberated from old restraints and repressions, a place where desire did not have to be justified and explained” (Lipsitz 1994: 9). In contrast to the workaday world, dance clubs “play out fictive scenarios of changed identities” (Lipsitz 1994: 8). According to a self-described “club junky”:

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Many young adults go to clubs to escape reality; it provides them with a fantasyland. The extra loud music puts people in a place they love, a place where they can get away from family members, school, and the ­workplace. Clubs make you forget all your problems and dance the night away. [Maria, 19, 2004]

The spectacular venues of the new dance clubs with exotic names— like Elephas, the name of an Asian elephant—promised an escape from the local routines that marked the restricted consumption choices of greaser styles performed on local street corners and alleys. This explains the affinity of Guidos in the 1990s for the “excessive midtown hedonism” associated with Manhattan clubs like Studio 54, Tunnel, and The Limelight in contrast to underground downtown venues like The Loft (Lawrence 2003: 3). Italian American youths flocked to these clubs because they were spaces where consumption mattered more than the expressive authenticity of “club culture” (Thornton 1995); their infamous reputations that invited the glare of the mass media perhaps also enhanced the opportunity to be “somebody” because they have been “seen” in the company of reputed “somebodies”. The new leisure style required a consumerist pose if not formidable expenditure to purchase the spectacular look including the set-up at the reserved tables and perhaps designer drugs in the bathroom. Clothing styles and hairdos became commodified, recalling the “fastidious” and “flashy” pose that distinguished the English “Mod” scene in the 1960s (Hebdige 1977: 52). Like the Mod youth subculture, which was also characterized by “glamorous” dance clubs and uncommitted music (Brake 1985: 24), disco offered a glamorous escape to youth from blue-collar, ethnic backgrounds like “Tony Manero” (Sembroff-Golden 1980: 92–93). Dance music holds the “promise” of “escape into another world, generally of heightened sensuality, from which time and its consequences are banished” (Leland 1989; Orman 1984: 163). Because “disco’s legacy is a happy suspension of reality” (Pareles 1999), it provided a timely escape from the socioeconomic reverberations of the “oil crisis” and corrosive double-digit inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although greaser was denigrated and marginal to the dominant Rock youth narrative into the 1970s, disco re-aligned these youth, at least for a moment, with mainstream popular cultural trends. And, where Rock has countercultural ideology that mutes if not opposes conspicuous

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consumption, disco is compatible with a “rising class” agenda that buys into mainstream American values (Ogersby 1999), thus the “promise of an escape” from ethnic minority group culture. The club fantasy is embellished by the mobility dream fixed on the celebrity entertainment culture. Maria (personal interview, 2001) maintained that the clubs are places where patrons are “discovered” by “talent scouts” for their dancing and even singing, adding that Club DNA in Astoria, Queens held a “talent search” modeled after the hit television program “American Idol”. Maria referenced the dream of being “discovered” to Hollywood: “Just like in the movie ‘Honey’ about a young girl who was spotted in a club dancing and then danced in music videos which was her dream”.2 Although the pristine white suit and tight shirt open at the chestworn by Tony Manero in the dance competition is iconic, the new club attire composed of a brightly colored polyester print shirt with a wide collar, tight bell-bottom pants, and platform shoes was the sartorial statement of a “nobody” who aspired to be a “somebody” (Calefato 2004). The new “Italian look” did not define them for crushing manual labor, like the “guinea tee”, but for “work” predicated on leisure and the youthful body (Fikentscher 2000). Dressing for the club signaled where they wanted to be, refusing the disadvantaged status they had as lowstatus workers or struggling students. To this extent, the unprecedented consumption of fun and pleasure refused, or talked back to, the stigma attached to an ethnicity framed by dirty work. Dressing up for the clubs also signaled a consumption style that set youth apart from greaser teenagers confined to local routines with limited consumption opportunities. Contemporary youth cultures are “leisure cultures, revolving around particular styles of consumption” (Frith 1981: 196). In the case of greaser, consumption is inhibited by limited discretionary income and youth culture industries that were still realizing the potential of the youth market. Disco was a turning point for Italian American youth in the outer boroughs. It escalated their engagement with popular American culture. In particular, it aligned urban Italian American youth culture with the “consumer goods and urban lifestyles” that “have become more central elements of youth identity” (Chatterton and Hollands 2003). The turn to disco relentlessly expanded the opportunities for social transformation in a spiral of consumption and can explain why stylized Italian American youth performances outgrew outer borough venues and demanded a bigger stage in Manhattan clubs in the 1990s. A dedicated consumption regime introduced a club pose that

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manipulated symbolic commodities like designer clothing and jewelry and voraciously expanded over time to include an array of commodities like hair gel, bodybuilding, tanning, waxing, and manicures. Clubs provided a public stage to conspicuously display a “style of consumption” for the “spectacle” of youth culture (Hebdige 1979: 18–19). The spectacular venues of the new dance clubs became “cathedrals of consumption” (Ritzer 2005) which was quite ironic in the case of the Manhattan club Limelight which was a former Episcopal church. In the years following SNF, disco activated the agency of Italian American youth in the creation of a “common culture” (Willis 1990), an informal production of meaning by vernacular subjects engaging the popular culture. Disco became the ritual center of a defining spectacle for a youth culture identity, a “somebody” defined by leisure and consumption. Like Mexican American zoot suiters in the 1940s, young Italian American bodies “intended to look and feel good” (Alvarez 2005: 86). Dance clubs replaced the neighborhood as the locus of shared experience, a glamorous contrast to an outer borough world that could be drab and workaday. The quintessential youth culture persona was a club regular so that an aphorism in the late 1980s held that “No matter what the occasion, a Guido is always dressed like he is going to a club”. Like the zoot suit, disco attire was an emblem of a social transformation. There was a new temporal rhythm; every Friday afternoon in the early 1990s, the local disco radio station, “Hot 97”, celebrated the arrival of the weekend with announcements of club attractions. Even their cars, “Guidomobiles”, were “dressed up” for disco, with miniature “disco ball” ornaments suspended from rear view mirrors and blinking electric lights on license plate frames; the lyrics of dance music anthems were stenciled on car doors. Dance music (disco, freestyle, house, etc.) and lyrics supplied a soundtrack for scenes beyond the club like cruising strips and gyms (Fig. 3.3). Delineating a youth space sufficiently removed from “adult surveillance” is a structural component of bounded “youth formations” (Austin and Willard 1999). Dance club culture shifted youth culture identity beyond the provincial confines of the ethnic community; clubbing creates a consciousness and practice that is fundamentally incompatible with the neighborhood bars, social clubs, Italian cafés and, other “third places” characterized by local ethnic solidarity. Dance clubs introduced the possibility, if not the reality, of a dramatic break with ethnic family culture. The pursuit of “immediate sense gratification” (i.e., “party”)

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Fig. 3.3  The 2001 Odyssey dance floor as it appears in SNF as the iconic ritual space for the Italian American turn to disco. The expensive lighting for the dance floor became a fixture at the club (Source “Saturday Night Fever [Disco Inferno The Trammps]”, 1:57, YouTube, published six years ago, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=BPV6kpNnr3c, accessed 9.5.2018)

within peer group contexts is not easily reconciled with a traditional morality grounded in a scarcity economy that was only one or two generations removed from the “evil eye” which constrained if not preempted conspicuous consumption; into the 1990s, it was not uncommon to see the horn amulet (il corno) that protects against the “evil eye” was often suspended from the rear view mirror next to the miniature “disco ball”. Even when family values embrace core American consumer values, popular youth culture creates a more “autonomous” and “hedonistic” consumer (Lipsitz 1994: 47; Campbell 1987: 89). The dance club effectively removed heterosexual relationships from “adult surveillance”, although this is not to say that ethnic institutions, especially the family, were disregarded. In the disco, an Italian American female became a “hottie”, a flagrantly sexualized club-based persona, although it is a measure of changing sexual mores in youth culture that females who “turn heads” and “break hearts” usurp the prerogative to label male “hotties” as well (see Chapter 5). The disco scene significantly impacted dating relationships in other ways. It altered the dynamic of dating markets just by expanding the supply of eligible partners, identifiable via style, from throughout the

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metropolitan area. While this brought Italian American youth from around the metropolitan area together, it also made it possible for youth who affected the style to cross ethnic lines; this is one of the points made by the focus group of women born in the early 1960s, several of whom dated and married non-Italian ancestry partners in this setting. Dance clubs may have empowered females in the dating market in part by expanding the pool of eligible partners beyond the locality. Dancing is a performance that privileged outer borough females more than males; despite the iconic significance of Tony Manero, males typically “danced to meet girls” which compromised their dance floor repertoires aesthetically. The male performance was more seriously compromised by fighting which Guido imported into the club space, resulting in restricted access to Manhattan venues (see Chapter 7).

Performing Popular Culture in the City: Ordered Segmentation Despite promises of expressive freedom, “the pleasures of the media and consumer culture” (Kellner 1998: 3) were performed within style markets that were segmented and stratified, reflecting a wider urban culture. The ethnicity of outer borough Italian American youth was thrown into relief by the “ordered segmentation” (Suttles 1968) of nightscapes that comprise New York City’s dance club scene. IA youth were set apart from outer borough Blacks and Latinos—with race and ethnicity negotiating not only similar club cultures but also street cultures. Local clubs kept youth in the neighborhood, a preference of immigrant parents of new second-generation females, and discouraged youth without neighborhood credentials. In the 1980s and 1990s, a Queens club designated Thursday evening as “Italian Night”. “Italian Night” does not signify an evening of Italian music for immigrant youth from Italy. Instead, it connotes a Guido scene presided over by an outer borough Italian American DJ with friends in attendance and oriented to contemporary American dance music, like The Guido MCs from Queens, although with some contemporary Italian sounds on the side like the tones of new second-generation Angelo Venuto and the Sicilians with organic ties to Bensonhurst and the Italian American outer boroughs. The ethnic reference is also a signal to Hispanic youth; they were given their turn to perform their ethnicity on “Latin Night” (Fig. 3.4).

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As clubs opened throughout the outer boroughs like Avanti and L’Amour in Queens and into the inner suburbs of Nassau County on Long Island like Club 107, youth moving about the area to attend these discos transacted a shared style in the process. Often, they networked via kinship (e.g., cousins living throughout the metropolitan area). Wider leisure networks were also created through attendance at Catholic Schools which recruited outside the local zone that supplied public schools. The six women who attended the same Catholic high school in Queens in the late 1970s all lived in different neighborhoods within the boroughs. Their shared network revolved around a popular DJ who attended their high school and was cultivating a professional career in clubs throughout the metropolitan area. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, new social media sites shared youth culture information beyond the locality.

Fig. 3.4  Matt Saladino performing at L’Amour, a Queens club circa 1987 (Source Guido Matt Saladino, Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/ Bensonhurst 86th Street, 12:19, published on YouTube by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018)

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Urban Italian American youth culture historically negotiated social boundaries. Youth have borrowed Black and Latino styles but only selectively and they do not appear to have sought access to their scenes en masse. On the other hand, social boundaries were crossed with the collective foray into Manhattan, a journey portended by the challenge issued to Tony Manero at the climax of SNF which gauged the stunted cultural worlds of the outer borough Italian American community as well as its disco scene. They were distinguished from Manhattan elites by a minority group ethnicity, which included a lower-class status, tinged with racial ambiguity. By highlighting the outer borough incursion in pursuit of commercialized disco, SNF introduced tension with the elite Manhattan scene and threw into greater relief a hierarchically ordered “taste culture” rooted in a stratified urban culture. This overlapped with “a system of hierarchies” that pivoted on the distinction between underground or “pure” club cultures with an aesthetic relationship to dance music and a commercialized variant (Thornton 1995: 10). Neither did an outer borough Italian American dance club culture promote a transcendent ideology of universal community like of Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect as with Rave (see Moloney and Hunt 2012). Manhattanbased club cultures enforced an especially formativ e boundary for outer borough youth as “bridge and tunnel”—a category intended for exclusion from hip, Manhattan venues based on “taste distinctions” that are proxies for ethnic, racial, and class distinctions. An Italian American position was differentiated from the “bridge and tunnel” category by virtue of its sheer size and a style tradition embedded in the city’s Italian neighborhoods. This Italian American position, which came to be named Guido, absorbed the “bridge and tunnel” category, thrown into relief by race vis-à-vis the city’s large population of Black and Latino youth, and class differences in relation to Manhattan elites. Chapter 7 focuses on the importance of boundary conflicts for subcultural development.

Consolidating Subculture: Local Radio Sarah Thornton (1995: 162) points out that “Communications media create subcultures in the process of naming them and draw boundaries around them in the act of describing them”. In particular, they “produce” youth subcultures by supplying “a network crucial to the definition and distribution of cultural knowledge” (Thornton 1995: 11). While the media identify youth for their own institutional purposes, youth read their

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own agendas and meanings into mass media outlets (see Prettyman 1996: 72–73). This is facilitated by the work of cultural intermediaries that call attention to cultural content and become available for “para-social relationships” as media celebrities (Caughey 1984). Youth subcultures informally appropriate media outlets as their own and draw them into their subcultural worlds through their symbolic work. In the process, mass media both reflects and reinforces the ordered segmentation of leisure and taste. Building on a turn to disco in the late 1980s, the position of Italian American youth in local club culture was solidified by a Bronx college station, WFUV FM, that played dance music on Thursday evening. However, the broadcast range was limited prompting Queens youth to drive closer to the signal for a regular youth culture identity vitamin. Subcultural loyalty turned to a commercial radio station, Hot 97/ WQHT FM, which used to broadcast live from night clubs like The Tunnel. By early 1993, the station switched to Hip Hop and R and B, precipitating a subcultural crisis in the outer boroughs. A mass media vacuum was more than remedied when WKTU FM adopted a dance music format in 1999 with a business model that factored in the metropolitan area’s Italian American audience. It is no coincidence that the return was announced with a Tony Manero impersonator, white polyester suit and all, in Times Square. WKTU became part of the fabric of Italian American Bensonhurst; the station’s mobile truck used to play freestyle records at the Santa Rosalia street festa, an annual event that mobilized the entire community to celebrate an immigrant heritage. Over the years, home-grown DJs like Dan Pucciarelli and Ralphie D’Allesandro were affiliated with the symbolic beacon of local dance music culture. DJ Joe Causi has been the principal cultural intermediary, knitting Bensonhurst Italian American youth culture to local ethnic culture and the entertainment and media culture (Fig. 3.5). The “new WKTU” prominently named the outer borough Italian American youth scene formed around dance music and clubbing as its listening base. An organic connection to outer borough Italian American communities and youth culture was embodied by openly Guido radio personalities, “Goomba Johnny” Sialiano and “Brooklyn’s Own” Joe Causi. Each manipulated the Italian American urban vernacular (“fuggedaboutit”) and dropped insider names and averred an intimacy with outer borough neighborhood life. Sialiano was blatantly street fashioning a Mafia persona through the symbol of “goumba”, a vernacular corruption of the fictive kinship term “compare” that generates solidarity

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Fig. 3.5  In this image, Causi makes a signature appearance at the most prominent Bensonhurst street festa, Santa Rosalia (Source Medugno, Vincent “Brooklyn’s Own Joe Causi Visits the Feast of 18th Avenue”, 6:04. Published on Sept. 5, 2009, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6wZOVx8xiU&t=14s, accessed 8.21.2018)

for the crime “family”. An autobiographical song recorded by Sialiano in 2001 that became a KTU staple and Guido anthem called “Feds Threw A Party”. The song is based on events leading to a prison term for tax fraud stemming from involvement in a Manhattan club owned by named Mafia interests including John Gotti, maintaining that the F.B.I. persecutes Italian American businessmen; he interviewed Gotti’s daughter on the air when his prison term expired. Causi has distanced himself from the Mafia but has actively manipulated the local youth style tradition. On a Sunday evening radio show from Studio 54 in the early 1990s, Causi presented a cast of stylized Guido personas in “The Supreme Cuginette” and “Joey Balls” and “Carminooch” the Brooklyn comics whose song “The 12 Days of Guido Christmas” was a holiday standard. Causi, who himself went by the moniker “Supreme Cugine” (Barmash 2012), lapsed into stylized insider jargon like “How ya doin’?” with cronies and expressed nostalgia for Italian Bensonhurst which he once portrayed on the air as having become with the influx of immigrants “like the friggin’ United Nations”. It was easy for the rank and file to read WKTU as “the Guido station” and “the official radio station of all Italians”.

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For a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, WKTU served as an unvarnished “construction site” for ethnicity with implications for an audience that was vastly expanding. In a space dedicated to dance beats, Joe Causi rhapsodized about his Sicilian heritage, including the virtues of the island’s olive oil. This musing often bent toward his other heritage, the disco scene: The Sicilians are better. Sicily is a beautiful island full of music and culture. Where do you think I got this beat from?

If the station advertised itself as “The Beat of New York”, then Causi led listeners to believe that “beat” had a proprietary ethnic soul. “Goomba Johnny” Sialiano was adamantly ethnic even promoting an invidious identification with Italian American ethnicity as in this caller interview: Goomba: “Hey kid, are you Italian? Big points if you’re Italian! Kid: “Yea!” Goomba: “Always tell people you’re Italian. Be proud that you’re Italian!”

Sialiano and Causi performed, here, ethnic entrepreneurs fusing the vernacular languages of pop culture and ethnic culture. Winning space in dance music radio and specifically a station that claimed to be “The Beat of New York”, put Italian Americans on a par with other constituencies including Blacks and Latinos that have formatively shaped the city’s dance club culture. As a commercial entertainment and media enterprise, in contrast to the college radio format that played dance music on Thursday evenings, WKTU made it easier for Italian American youth to imagine a youth consumption culture. The microculture of dance radio mediated a connection to a commercial entertainment culture, the consumption space of urban dance clubs— costly cover charges, drinks, and personal overhead including clothing, haircuts, jewelry, etc.—a commodified world of fun and pleasure including product advertisements that addressed “hottie” looks like tanning salons and taut bodies and promotional contests with prizes like Spring Break destinations and a Caribbean resort aptly named “Hedonism”. The radio broadcast integrated the soundtrack of the club into everyday life as well as other subcultural settings like gyms and cruising scenes. WKTU enhanced the challenge to pop culture cool, validating their claim on disco as the true descendants of Tony Manero. This breathed

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life into a subcultural style that was no longer aligned with a mainstream trend; loyalty to dance music put Guido on the wrong side of Hot 97. In particular, it clearly delineated an Italian position in local style markets. A local radio niche was necessary to manage an ongoing scene with links to popular culture. By disseminating shared information and an ideology with identifiable celebrity style leaders, it facilitated a breakthrough from local cliques to a youth subculture that spanned the metropolitan area. It was a command center for coordinating stylized subcultural performances around club dates scattered throughout the metropolitan area and, thus, further removed from adult surveillance. Causi, in particular, presently mediates a nostalgic connection to Tony Manero on behalf of Bensonhurst and the disco scene it symbolizes. In June 2018, he presided over the “John Travolta Day” festivities in front of Lenny’s Pizzeria made famous in the opening of SNF. A New York State Senate Proclamation officially recognized that “Travolta changed the culture of Brooklyn and America forever in both fashion and music” (Jenkins 2018). The celebration of Travolta linked Tony Manero to his new film vehicle, Gotti, another portrayal that contributes to the narrative of Italian American youth culture in the city.

Another Turn: An “Italian Place” Online Some twenty years after SNF, outer borough Italian American youth made another turn to popular culture, this time to carve out a youth culture space on the Internet. This turn to online popular culture reflects the ongoing project of subcultural development. The Internet is “a new cultural matrix” that contrasts with “previous media culture”, affording young people expanded opportunities to create their own text within global social networks and information “flows” (Best and Kellner 2003: 11). While this was initially thought to result in a “virtual world” separated from the “physical world” and social divisions like race, class, and gender, this view has been supplanted by the realization that online and offline experiences are “continuous” (Ward and Peterson 2002: 450–453; Kendall 2002).3 The turn to digital media has been seen as promoting fragmentation and instability of identities (Best and Kellner 2003). In a study of Goth youth, however, Hodkinson (2003: 286) found that “far from eroding the substance of the grouping, the onset of the Internet served to consolidate and strengthen its subcultural boundaries”. Bucholtz (2002: 543) maintains that “the blending of traditional

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cultural forms into new youth-based styles and practices and the possibilities for cultural production offered by new technologies” furnish “some of the richest avenues for the anthropological exploration of youth culture”. ItalChat occupied a tiny “niche” within the cyberspace universe of a major Internet company owned by a global conglomerate. Commercial Internet Service Providers mediate the vastness of the Internet for subscribers. They offer uniform content and the opportunity to participate in interactive formats, chat rooms and message boards, with ISP subscribers. While uniform content gives the Internet experience the properties of a mass medium, chat rooms and message boards function as interactive “niches” (Thornton 1995: 14). In contrast to message boards and even instant messaging among individual subscribers, chat rooms mediate synchronous connections to a group of age peers. This media space transposes a culture of “youth formations” predicated on little or no “adult surveillance” into the home. Member-created chat rooms were established and named by individual subscribers under a “terms of service” agreement and were available to millions of subscribers who paid uniform monthly fees. Like other chat rooms sponsored by the ISP, ItalChat was created by “members” rather than by the ISP and assigned a monitor who regulated content. It was embedded in a roster of chat rooms created by members of the Internet service; a survey of this roster revealed a multiplicity of identities including an array of ethnicities, lifestyle interests, and a selection of youth subcultures like “Goths” and “Thugz”. In contrast to message boards, chat rooms have to be created daily in real time. I discovered ItalChat in April 1999. The information about the new online scene was passed to me offline, face-to-face, by an Italian American college student who “presented” a “Guido” identity in everyday life and also in ItalChat. His invitation to join the chat included directions to a specific location in cyberspace; since it was buried in an extensive roster of chat rooms, finding ItalChat was much easier if one knew where to look. While I was already a subscriber to the Internet service, it is doubtful that I would have found ItalChat.4 The site was established by Italian American youth in New York City, reflecting their participation in a national trend (as with disco). It was established though their initiative, first, to open the room and, then, to keep it going for themselves. They put their collective name on the space and imparted their character to what took place. They also policed its

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boundaries (see Chapter 7). A relationship to an urban youth subculture determined access to the online scene where interaction referred back to an offline space, even consummated by a return to that urban world (e.g., meeting at a club). ItalChat, then, was not established by, or for, the “disembodied selves” of cyberspace (Turkle 1995) but grounded in an offline social world that was itself tightly bounded by “insider” status criteria. While most chatters may have been personal strangers, a feature that made it possible to expand a peer network, they were not expected to be cultural strangers. The name “ItalChat” is a pseudonym for two chat rooms that were listed separately on the ISP roster of member-created chat rooms. The two rooms had a membership (recognizable by screen names) that moved seamlessly from one to the other and evidenced the same vernacular culture. Both were up and running every evening that I searched the ISP roster during the period of data collection. Accessibility was on a first-come, first-served basis and both rooms operated at full capacity at peak times. A maximum of 23 subscribers could be accommodated although this was subsequently expanded to 30. I discovered nine other rooms that appeared to be affiliated but their existence was fleeting. The number of rooms in operation seemed to be largely a function of demand rather than ideological or style differences. ItalChat rhythms reflected youth social schedules; weekday usage surged by late afternoon, suggesting the end of the school day, and was “off the hook” late into the night. The age of ItalChat participants seemed to range from late teens to early twenties when offline leisure options expanded. While age is likely to be embellished online, it could often be checked against other identity presentations (e.g., as college students). The maintenance of ItalChat for the two years that I visited to collect data reflects a commitment to a new popular culture trend underpinning American youth identities. ItalChat was an artifact of the commercial popular culture and reflects a broader trend toward a youth culture practice on the Internet (Best and Kellner 2003). Online technoculture recast the spectacle around rhetorical strategies that offered opportunities for identity experimentation (Turkle 1995). A chat room is “the site where language takes place” (Mann and Stewart 2000: 195). In contrast to the “bodily representations” that communicate “spectacular” youth identities (Hall 1997; Hebdige 1979), the performance conventions of chat rooms privilege language, especially in the form of “written conversations” (Rheingold 1993). Language is “the most fundamental

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means of symbolic work” (Willis 1990: 99). It typically assumed the form of a conversation—“a fluid, interactive process in which all participants take turns to contribute, shaping the direction and structure of the text jointly as they go along” (Schirato and Yell 2000: 108–109). At the same time, conversation is based on words typed on a computer screen. Meaning in ItalChat was literally created in the “writing” of youth grounded in a local culture (see Bennett 2000: 64–65). Thus, the world of ItalChat is comparable to the “writing cultures” of urban graffiti taggers (Austin 1998) and “the notetaking/passing” of “young girls at school” (Prettyman 1996). Access to this new “technoculture” (Best and Kellner 2003) gave Italian American youth the opportunity to become “producers”, as well as “consumers”, of culture (Willis 1990).5 While online social networking aligned Italian American youth with a national trend, a chat space was clearly demarcated as an “Italian” (i.e., subcultural) site. ItalChat was a “safe space” because there was continuity with the local style tradition. Although online interaction is characterized by “the insubstantiality of the virtual venue” (Mann and Stewart 2000: 195–215; Hine 2000: 144), inviting stylistic experimentation including the possibility of new cultural blending and even boundary “crossing”, ItalChat was firmly situated in the “field” of local Italian American youth culture. A writing culture and the relative anonymity of cyberspace promoted the elaboration of an ideology that clarified subcultural boundaries. Screen names placed the new online culture in the local style tradition (“ItalianFreestyleBella”; “I’m a Freestyle Queen in Guidoland”). Even the most fantastic symbols and meanings could be interpreted from a position in “familiar real-world cultures” (Mann and Stewart 2000: 195–215). Offline conflicts were transplanted and further inflamed (see below). ItalChat flowed into other sites on the Internet (e.g., web sites for local dance clubs, personal home pages, etc.). It was linked to a “media niche” in FM radio (WKTU which was also accessible on the Internet) and to urban scenes, notably metropolitan-area dance clubs. Sociability and prospecting for dating partners were reserved for subcultural insiders defined by familiar “cultural foci” enacted within “local cliques” (Schwartz 1987). ItalChat was a place to “hang out” where the regulars knew your name. It anticipated the structured social networking sites Facebook and My Space except that it grew out of local peer group networks. ItalChat was not the creation of isolated and “disembodied” individuals. It was a place where everyone knew your name offline.

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It may have been founded by the members of a specific peer network as a way to communicate online as a group in real time. Local cliques were transplanted whole. As in my own case, it was probably the rule to be directed to ItalChat by an offline referral; two of my informants purchased a subscription to the ISP to join offline friends in the new online scene. On one occasion a request was issued in ItalChat for “someone” to “leave” the room so that a “friend” could enter. Youth routinely brought local cliques into the picture with “shout outs”. ItalChat participants were often personal acquaintances who knew your surname as well as your first name. An offline informant routinely connected with her offline social circle late at night when she “should be doing school work or going to sleep”. Peer group loyalties centered on the neighborhood (e.g., “Bensonhurst is the best”) which historically is a cornerstone of urban ethnic culture. There were ubiquitous references to the neighborhoods that map the Italian American presence in the city: Morris Park, Throgs Neck in the Bronx; Bensonhurst, Gravesend, Marine Park, Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights in Brooklyn; Astoria, Ridgewood, Howard Beach, Middle Village, Whitestone in Queens. The wide geographic distribution does not mean that youth stumbled on the site as ISP members but that they may have been drawn by insider youth culture codes. While a personal referral was not necessary, personal strangers had to be cultural insiders. ItalChat can be compared to the dance club as a cultural space that promoted the gathering of youth from different neighborhoods. Similarly, ethnicity supplied solidarity for a new configuration of Italian American youth subculture that transcended local and other insider differences. While Guido is blurred by the erosion of inner city turf boundaries and creeping Hip Hop, the Internet furnishes a safe space to align youth culture rituals with new circumstances outside the shrinking ethnic neighborhood. This represents continued structural development, promoting a breakthrough out of more local formations to a youth subculture bounded by a shared ethnicity and, thus, an antidote to a “postmodern” youth scene “characterized by fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal” (Maffesoli 1996: 76). To this extent, the new digital media was enlisted to extend and renew the practice of an offline youth formation. Thus, subcultural Italian American youth were able to exchange information that facilitated youth culture practice such as where “everyone” goes clubbing in the Hamptons.

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“Hanging out” online was a pretext for “hooking up” with the opposite sex which could progress to a more private online space for “instant messaging” or to an older communications technology in the telephone and ultimately to an offline encounter. The cultivation of online prospects served as the major interface with life offline, affording access the burgeoning metropolitan diaspora, perhaps to compensate for a dwindling pool of eligible Italian Americans in the outer borough neighborhoods. Competition for eligible partners promoted self-aggrandizement and invidious distinction: “I’m better than you”. There was skirmishing among males posturing for female attention. A virtual altercation once erupted that threatened to move offline. (# 1) I’ll meet you anywhere you want. (# 2) You’re a punk. (# 1) Ha, Ha. Competition for dating and sexual partners set the limits for “third place” sociability.

A Youth Subculture? A turn to disco created social and cultural conditions for the emergence of a “youth subculture”. A youth subculture is a type of “youth formation” (Austin and Willard 1998). Eckert (1989: 16) maintains that the concept of “subculture” recognizes “an abstract level of social organization” along with a “cultural component”; it is a structural formation that is differentiated from actual “groups and cliques” that claim individual membership. Schwartz (1987: 18) similarly distinguishes between youth “subcultures” and “groups”. Subcultures “do not have memberships per se, but represent ideologies and cultural forms that are variously adhered to by individuals and groups” (ibid.: 18–19). Eckert (1989: 18) maintains that youth subcultures “revolve around the symbolic meaning of stylized presentations of self and around the meaning that these performances have for a person’s image of what makes him or her a distinctive kind of human being”. Subcultural ideologies and “stylized performances” are referenced to broad themes in the popular culture but localized in peer groups. Greaser was typified by a collection of local peer groups that failed to coalesce as a bounded youth subculture.

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Although comparable to the term “youth category” defined by Eckert, I prefer to use the term “youth subculture” in this book to conceptualize outer borough Italian American youth culture practice in response to disco, in particular the coalescence of Guido. The concept of youth subculture designates a youth formation that is less “abstract” than a “category”, referring to objective differences on several levels. In this regard, the use of the term “youth subculture” is in line with the discussion in the youth/cultural studies literature that relates youth subcultures to popular culture and consumption style (Maira and Soep 2004). Although subcultures do not have memberships per se, the concept refers to a bounded space within the broader youth culture space (Muggleton 2000). “Youth culture” specifies a wider “system” of meaningful symbolism in which youth, as individuals and groups, differentiate themselves from other age-based cultures. It primarily links youth identities to a “postmodern media and consumer culture that is alluring, fragmented, and superficial” (Best and Kellner 2003: 11; also Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). A subculture can be distinguished in that space in regard to style. Following Brake (1985: 8), “style is usually a predominant defining feature of youthful subcultures”. The most significant differentiation is typically referenced to other youth subcultures and has a status dimension involving competition over the valuation of cultural capital and access to scarce rewards (Milner 2004: 78; Thornton 1995). Notwithstanding criticism of the Birmingham School for the way it “decodes” style as a symbolic “opposition” to “structural problems” (Cohen 1980: xii; also Muggleton 2000; and Bennett 2000), Guido is clearly bounded by Italian ethnicity, in particular roots in an ethnic minority culture formed by “isolation” and “subordination” (Eckert 1989: 15). With this in mind, then, it is useful to follow the definition of “youth subculture” advanced by Maira (2002: 38) in a study of the “Desi party scene” in New York City: a set of rituals that underpin their collective identification and define them as a group instead of a mere collection of individuals. They adopt and adapt material objects – goods and possessions – and reorganize them into distinctive “styles” which express the collectivity [and] become embedded in rituals of relationship and occasion and movement.

Maira’s definition stands out because it underlines a “collective identification” linked to “styles”. The next chapter unpacks the meaningful

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symbolism of Guido as a collective identity for Italian American youth culture practice in the outer boroughs and beyond. Outer borough Italian American youth made a name for themselves that referenced ethnicity (i.e., Guido) as they assimilated mainstream leisure repertoires oriented to consumption.

Notes 1. I conducted a lengthy telephone interview with Dan Pucciarelli on August 21, 2018. This was followed by an email exchange which featured the sharing of a trove of personal memories and mementos in the form of news clippings and posters publicizing club events. The time frame was 1979– 1984 when Dan was reaching his career zenith as a club DJ. 2. The outer borough disco fantasy was temporarily dashed by the horrifying reality of the “Son of Sam” murders from 1976 to 1978. The serial killer, David Berkowitz, targeted young heterosexual couples in the outer boroughs. Discos offered Berkowitz a prime setting to prospect for v­ ictims. There was a shooting on June 26, 1977 near the club, Elephas, in Bayside. The incident scared away partiers but the night after Berkowitz was arrested, “the club boomed more than ever” (Marzlock 2012). Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” captures Bronx Guido styles revolving around disco that were embedded in ethnic neighborhood culture. 3.  This has been empirically documented for “straight edge” and “rave” youth subcultures (Wilson and Peterson 2002). In particular, Williams’ (2006: 175) study of a straight edge message board documents “how the Internet functions as a new social space for subcultural identification and change” in relation to the offline music-based scenes. 4. The identity of the ISP and the precise location of ItalChat, a pseudonym, are concealed. Issues of privacy are not peculiar to Internet research but shared with offline ethnography (Kraut et al. 2004). Informed consent was not solicited to minimize distraction, an issue that is also present in offline ethnography. However, youth affiliated with the subculture were made aware of my research interests in offline conversations. I initially learned of “the chat room for Guidos” from them and was tendered invitations to join the chat room which was available to me as a subscriber to the ISP. I first visited ItalChat in late in 1999 although formal data collection took place from January 2000 until September of 2001. Observation presupposed a low profile achieved by a screen name devoid of youth culture meaning. A strategy of “lurking” for short durations sought to minimize requests to chat which were respectfully declined.

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5. The field of cultural studies is distinguished by the study of “texts” which can inform “ethnography” as “a means to discover the meanings people make” (Storey 1999: 163; Dimitriadis 2001). An online scene be researched as “virtual ethnography” (Mann and Stewart 2000: 195–215; Hine 2000). In this scenario, the online researcher is a participant-observer of synchronous interaction. Chat communication can also be experienced as an “artifact” (Mann and Stewart 2000); language even in the form of conversation can be downloaded, logged, and printed as hard copy. As text, the study of chat room communication seems to be predicated more on content analysis than ethnography. This especially applies to asynchronous “personal home pages” which were attachments to screen names not created in ItalChat although were used there and became identity prerequisites for more personalized communication. Because they permitted self-conscious preparation, these texts/sites were more conducive to stylized presentations of identity than real-time chat.

CHAPTER 4

Becoming Guido: Identifying a Youth Subculture

A turn to disco on the part of Italian American youth in the 1970s and 1980s raised the level of engagement with popular American culture in outer borough communities. Clubbing furnished “a set of rituals” that that were the focal point of a distinctive “style” able to “express the collectivity” (Maira 2002: 38). In contrast to “club cultures” exhaustively defined by the dance music scene (Thornton 1995), disco occasioned a “collective identification” referenced to ethnicity like Hip Hop and Pachuco. This chapter focuses on the transaction of an Italian American identity symbolized by Guido. The emergence of this identity symbol more clearly distilled a subculture within a category of Italian American youth engaged by clubbing. The stylized performance of Guido was coded as being Italian, effectively monopolizing Italian ethnicity as symbolic capital within local style markets. Within a set of local vernacular understandings, when certain stylized presentations surface, Guido is at least possible. At some point in the turn to disco, outer borough youth who were Italian American became “Guido” in local youth style markets. Accounts by first wave disco adherents like Dan Pucciarelli do not reference the early disco scene in southern Brooklyn as Guido. I surveyed hundreds of posts threaded from January 2005 to January 2011 on a nostalgia website (“Oh, the good times!”) that chronicled memories of growing up in Bensonhurst and adjacent areas of Bath Beach and Gravesend and there was not one mention of Guido although they inventoried the style in detail: © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_4

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88  D. TRICARICO “I won’t forget the Christhead chain”. “My cousin lost part of his ear in a fight in the Nite Gallery”.

http://www.lightningfield.com/05/01/211303.html (accessed 5.3.18). This section unpacks the meaningful symbolism of Guido as a “collective identification” for the stylized performances of outer borough Italian American youth. A “Guido” identity is transacted in a system of ethnic stratification that ranks groups in a hierarchy of value and privilege and grounded in a particular locality, the outer borough community of Bensonhurst which supported the thickest vernacular Italian ethnicity in the city in the waning decades of the twentieth century. In unpacking the meaning of Guido, the following points are made: 1.  Guido is a youth identity that distills a thick Italian ethnicity, ­especially referring to the more recently arrived “real Italians”. 2.  Guido is rooted in a minority group ethnic culture that has ­continuity with the period of mass immigration. 3.  Guido is a label initially imposed from outside the subculture, likely from both sides of the ethnic boundary, in the service of marginalization and exclusion. 4. Italian American youth have appropriated this label as a symbolic challenge on the levels of style and ethnicity. 5. This transaction of a collective identification signaling a subcultural boundary is situated in Bensonhurst at a particular historical juncture. The following section establishes the ethnic significance of Italian Bensonhurst for the transaction of Guido. This is found not only in the new layer of immigrant culture but in the complex cultural and status differences inside the ethnic boundary revolving around a new second generation.

Straight Outta Bensonhurst The opening scene of SNF portrays Tony Manero in outer borough style strutting along 86th Street near 18th Avenue. The elevated subway tracks, “the el”, immediately places the narrative in Bensonhurst. The previous chapter established Italian Bensonhurst at the very center of a new youth identity oriented to disco. In the largest Italian neighborhood

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in the city and, for that matter, the entire country, it is not a surprise that being Italian would figure prominently in how they positioned themselves. Guido came straight outta Bensonhurst with a narrative that Italian American youth throughout the city could appropriate to claim authenticity on the level of style as well as ethnicity. The contiguous areas of southern Brooklyn of Bensonhurst, Gravesend, Dyker Heights, Bath Beach, and Bay Ridge were far more Italian in 1977 than SNF let on. The largest and densest Italian population was found in Bensonhurst. More than fifty years after Federal legislation ended mass immigration from Italy, there were more than 100,000 persons of Italian ancestry in Bensonhurst comparable to the pre-1924 mass immigration settlements of East Harlem and the Mulberry Street neighborhood at their peak. Italian Bensonhurst stood out as the largest of the neighborhoods inhabited by European ancestry groups. After 1965, the population of the city was more racially diverse partly as a result of immigration from places outside of Europe like Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Europeans ancestry populations dwindled (Alba et al. 1997). Even here, its size and density was unusual for immigrant settlements in the new multi-ethnic city. The city’s neighborhoods were more likely to be “multi-ethnic” with fewer census tracts were dominated by a single group (Warikoo 2004: 364). In advance of the post-1965 immigration, Bensonhurst’s Italian population was significantly augmented by Italians arriving after World War Two (Fig. 4.1). SNF not only does not convey the impressive demography of Italian Bensonhurst, it paints a picture of ethnic cultural dysfunction. Older cohorts transplanted ethnic family traditions interwoven with American cultural patterns that reflected upward social mobility. The new immigrants transplanted a more traditional culture based on the domestic traditions of the southern Italian family. As with the mass immigration, they also formed voluntary associations with roots in southern Italian towns like Craco, Caggiano, and Mola di Bari; these communal institutions incorporated children, like the Caggiano Society dances that sponsored parental attempts to control mate selection in America. Lived Italian immigrant culture could be found in the heart of Bensonhurst in walking distance of the shops on 18th Avenue owned by Italian-speaking merchants and selling goods imported from Italy, from brightly colored tins of olio olivo (olive oil) to dischi (records) and maganette (expresso pots). Ironically, a thick(er) new immigrant ethnicity was in a more modern ethnicity in comparison to the pre-1924 immigrants. It has been more

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Fig. 4.1  Map of Bensonhurst and southern Brooklyn (Source Brooklyn Neighborhoods Map, Wikimedia Commons, July 18, 2009. Based on content from OpenStreet Map, author Peter Fitzgerald, accessed 8.21.2018)

compatible with a modern consumer culture thanks to the post-war “economic miracle” whereas pre-1924 ethnicity was a scarcity culture based on peasant traditions. Newer immigrants were more likely to identify as Italian than was true for pre-1924 immigrants for who the “paese” was not translated as “country” but as town (e.g., Montemurro), province (e.g., Potenza), or at most region (e.g., Basilicata). This reflected

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the ascendance of an Italian national culture owing to a modern educational system and a mass popular culture featuring a film industry (e.g., Cinecitta) and spectator sports notably professional soccer and especially the national team, Azzuro, which has spontaneously ignited wild public displays of ethnic solidarity similar to that of post-1965 immigrants. Fittingly, these more recent celebrations have been staged in Bensonhurst not Manhattan’s official “Little Italy” (Fig. 4.2). To this extent, the new immigrants were hardly later versions of the old. Internal cultural differences overlapped with status c­onsiderations. This is a function of socioeconomic mobility based on a timeline or the number of generations in America, resulting in a status ranking pegged to the immigrant queue. In particular, recent immigrants are assigned a lower status rank because they are foreigners and not just because late arrival impacted on socioeconomic status. It is common in every

Fig. 4.2  The “thick” ethnicity of Bensonhurst Italian Americans was performed collectively and in public when the Italian national team won the 2006 World Cup (Bensonhurst Home of the Italians, 2:29, published by BkLynGuiDo718 on Jan. 16, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN_6nRja-ZA, accessed 8.21.2018)

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immigrant group for later generations to assign those “fresh off the boat” to a lower status rank (see Lee 2005). Status resentment occurs when vernacular understandings are disrupted, especially when more recently arrived “real Italians” have evidenced some economic advantage like an expensive and showy home renovation or a luxury car (Tricarico 1989). James Pasto (2017) similarly documents a “hostility” among Italian Americans in the North End of Boston for “newcomers” who were “accustomed to working 20, 24 hours a day” and “then went out and bought houses”. Relative differences between new immigrants and older cohorts depict an internally differentiated Italian American community; not just that “real Italian” ethnicity was “thick” but that it was “thicker” and had implications for status rank. In this scenario, Guido becomes interchangeable and synonymous with ethnic slurs such as “greaseball” and even “guinea”. Italian American enmity for “real Italians” in the North End was expressed by the “greaser” label (Ibid. 113). In contrast to other European ancestry neighborhoods in the city, the immigration after World War Two that replenished communities like Bensonhurst created a “dialectic” between different moments of an Italian diaspora and new divisions inside the ethnic boundary (Tricarico 2005).1 The “thick” ethnicity and status of “real Italians” contrasted with the descendants of mass immigration cohorts that came to Bensonhurst as a second settlement, informing an internal differentiation that contributed to the formation of an ethnically bounded youth subculture (see this chapter below). Immigrant institutions and culture were found alongside more acculturated lifestyles of older cohorts; there were soccer clubs and cafes as well as Little League baseball, ice cream parlors (Jahn’s on 86th Street under “the el”) and diners (e.g., The Vegas Diner also on 86th St.). Cultural differences tended to correspond to class differences which were manifest in spatial concentration. More recent immigrants lived in apartment buildings and six-family houses closer to 18th Avenue. More Americanized members of the community were more likely to live on blocks with one-family houses in adjacent upscale residential areas like Dyker Heights between 10th and 14th Avenues and bordered by an 18-hole public golf course on the north and more ethnically diverse and upper middle class Bay Ridge to the west. Located between Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights had just over 20,000 persons of Italian ancestry in 1980. Ethnic communities like Bensonhurst position its members in the city (Tricarico 1984). Italian American neighborhoods have been characterized by a possessive investment in space (i.e., turf) which managed

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relationships across a spatial boundary. This “defended neighborhood” culture (Suttles 1968) was established in the second generation as an adaptation to the city (Tricarico 1984: 33–45). While Bensonhurst was a throwback in terms of size and density to first settlement Italian communities in Manhattan before World War II, the sharpest interethnic conflict has been with Blacks and to a lesser extent Latinos, specifically Puerto Ricans. These nonwhite ethnic minority groups have furnished a more critical external boundary for Italian Americans in the outer boroughs in place of the Irish and other European immigrant groups that served as the primary reference groups for earlier cohorts. The Marlboro Houses, a low-income project consisting of 28 high rise buildings that was overwhelmingly African American by the 1970s, marked a racially charged dividing line on Bensonhurst’s southeastern border with Gravesend (Lowenstein 1988; also see Pinderhughes 1997). The chief protagonists were young males that defended ethnic claims to turf. Canarsie on the boundary of predominantly African American East New York was another site for intergroup tensions in the seventies and eighties (Smothers 1972; Reider 1986; Lizzi 2011). Post-1965 immigrants began impacting Bensonhurst in the 1990s. The first wave was an influx of Chinese immigrants that generated tensions in the 1980s, including the informal circulation of “poison pen letters”, but never boiled over into major street incidents.

The New Second Generation The “renewed immigration” created “pockets of intense ethnicity” throughout the city, notably in Bensonhurst, marked by foreign cultural practices like the use of Italian language at home (Alba et al. 1997). However, what caught my eye in the 1980s was intense youth culture expression, the style pose of the teenagers and twenty-something youth performing an Italian ethnic identity in ways that were not scripted by a traditional heritage. A core segment were the children of post-1945 immigrants, a new second-generation youth completely overlooked by Alba et al. (1997). Their ethnicity was “thick” enough to matter on both sides of the ethnic boundary. However, the children of recent immigrants from Italy were also under pressure from an increasingly commodified popular culture to cultivate a style of consumption while still inside urban ethnic community. The fact that a “real Italian” ethnicity (Ruperto and Sciorra 2017) was “thicker” compared to earlier cohorts (i.e., third-generation youth) was instrumental in the transaction

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of a discourse of ethnic authenticity within a local style market that was already segmented and stratified. Second-generation youth are more exposed to the world outside the ethnic boundary than immigrant parents and, so are once removed from “real Italians”. Their early experience of socialization in America places them in formative relationships outside the kinship group and forms of immigrant solidarity oriented to the old country (i.e., paesani). The most important is the local peer group, an assemblage of age peers that assumes increasing importance in contemporary societies as an agent of socialization specializing in pop culture (Milner 2004). It does not necessarily follow that youth culture choices reflect ethnic identity and culture. Birmingham School of Youth Studies scholar Paul Willis maintains that contemporary youth turn to popular culture because “traditional resources” and “inherited meanings” have “lost their legitimacy for a good proportion of young people” (Willis 1990: 10; see also Bennett 2000: 27). On the other hand, George Lipsitz (1994: 8) recognizes that second-generation youth can be “bifocal”, performing identities shaped by ethnicity as well as American culture. Being “bifocal” implies a juxtaposition and compartmentalization of divergent practices; they could be immersed in kinship traditions as well as peer group rituals. An authentic connection to an Italian family culture is represented by second-generation Silvio (2002 interview): A Guido’s family is very important to him, and the same goes for a Guidette. A Guido is always protective of his family members. They always respect and stick up for their mothers and grandmothers, who they call “ma” and “nonna”. They usually work for their father and plan to take over the family business if there is one. A Guido always watches over their sisters and never lets a guy go near them. Guidos usually live at home until they get married. A Guidette looks for protection and financial support from their family. Guidettes are very close with their fathers. They are their father’s favorite, which makes them Daddy’s Little Girl. That’s how the expression “Italian American Princess” came about.

Nineteen-year-old Josephine, who was a college student in 2001, attended Craco Society galas with her parents accompanied by her boyfriend, not from Craco but new second-generation Italian, although the dating couple mostly went to dance clubs. Many new second-generation youth participated in kinship scripts that reached back to Italy when they visited the paese in Summer for ferragosto. Transnational outer borough

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youth could sit at the supper table for a traditional meal with Italian relatives before they went out to nightclubs with their Italian cousins, dancing to “Italo house” and other forms of electronic music. While Second-generation youth are presented as reconciling with “parental ethnicity” (Maira 2002), an ethnic family culture adapted to a modern Italy also becomes more accommodating in urban America. As noted above, the second generation have more room, structurally, to interact with peers and to consume the new media and entertainment culture—to become “youth”. The financial support of children that Silvio mentions reflects a strategy to enhance family cohesion by investing resources in the younger generation. Indeed, children may be assigned the lead in matters of discretionary consumption to show off the family’s new class culture; growing up in more affluent households, second- and third-generation youth are socialized by the mass media to be specialists in leisured consumption. Nevertheless, youth consumption, i.e., consumption within a youth space oriented to entertainment and media culture, has to be differentiated not only from the scarcity culture underlying Italian immigrant ethnicity historically but from consumption within a domestic sphere and specifically centered on the family home with the house as a sign of Americanness and whiteness (Cohen 2007; Lizzi 2011). To the extent that post-1945 immigrants from a more modern Italy were more amenable to consumerism, there may have been less urgency to “escape” from this variant of ethnic family culture. At the same time, “bifocal” youth like Silvio and Josephine internalized a thicker ethnicity and seemed to welcome the restraints of “traditional resources” and “inherited meanings”. The new second generation have “real Italian” parents which place them in an ethnic culture that is relatively “thicker” than the third generation, further complicating the internal structure of outer borough Italian communities like Bensonhurst. The thicker ethnicity of new Second-generation youth impacts the emergence of Guido—a youth style identified with Italian ethnicity. New immigrant ethnicity impacted their youth culture choices, including their relationship to the local youth style tradition. Second-generation ethnicity embedded in Italian Bensonhurst was mobilized for a youth style markets saturated with popular American culture, commodities that are not equated to the “ethnic cultural goods” consumed by the immigrant generation or by the third generation as “symbolic ethnicity” (Henry and Bankston 1999: 245).

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Cugine as Cousin of Guido New Second-generation youth culture practice is prominent in the emergence of a youth formation in southern Brooklyn known as “Cugine”. Cugine is the Italian word for cousin, so the designation makes ethnicity prominent for collective identification. I am not aware of the term being used until the 1980s. Like Guido, it was centered on males and was embedded in a style tradition heavily inflected by street culture. Its chief constituency appears to have been the new second generation which is consistent with an identity symbol that underscores Italian ethnicity. This named Italian youth subculture is the germ of Guido, a relationship that furnishes insight into the transaction of local Italian American youth identity at different historical moments. Greaser did not occasion a named Italian American subculture. Instead, it performed as a category defined by a style that was comparatively stunted and not specifically aligned with Italian ethnicity. Although greaser articulated with named urban gangs, it did not rise to the level of a collective identification. The “cugines” make an appearance in Thomas Boyle’s 1985 novel, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. Boyle’s novel (1985: 180) indicates a link to greaser forms of urban deviance: “The guys … the cugines … they got fancy cars, gold chains, comb their hair a lot, fight a lot, do a lot of uppers and downers”. The cugines, at least in the author’s purview, did not go clubbing. This may be an oversight or perhaps erring on the side of menace in the service of a crime novel narrative. Boyle also does not shed any light on the ethnic character of cugine, in particular its new Second-generation origins. An article in a local community college newspaper written by the Editor-in-Chief of the Fordham University campus paper who happened to live in the nearby southern Brooklyn community of Manhattan Beach (Baer 1986) identified “cugine” (“PRONOUNCED KOO-ZHEEN”) provided a field guide for recognizing a youth style that that was being performed in southern Brooklyn, in particular Bensonhurst singling out meaningful venues in the community like the Vegas Diner. Baer does not pick up the deviance thread, at least explicitly, and instead provides a sardonic field guide for a youth style that that was being performed in southern Brooklyn, in particular Bensonhurst, “a phenomenon the likes of which had never been seen before”. Baer author explicitly refers to “cugine” as a “subculture” with a style replete with ethnic signifiers: Italian speaker systems for autos, Italian gold crosses and “horns”, and

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Bensonhurst itself. The article mocks “Cugine” style performances that are not in step with current trends in pop culture like disco (i.e., bad taste). Foreign status (i.e., a position at the back end of the immigrant queue) is demeaned by broken speech like “axe” for “ask” which symbolizes a lack of mainstream cultural capital. Neither Boyle nor Baer show appreciation for the ethnic significance of cugine. Cugine suggests a contrasting youth culture strategy was in place among the new second generation, providing insight into the internal differentiation within the Italian American community in southern Brooklyn. New Second-generation Italian youth were deploying a thick ethnicity to set themselves apart, not just in the city, but also from more Americanized cohorts—this is suggested by the choice of an Italian rather than an English word although the corruption “cuz” was substituted later on perhaps as more Americanized youth became attached. It is likely that cugines did not intentionally name a subculture rather that their ritual form of address identified a youth category to others. It is plausible that a collective identity symbol was assigned by cohorts possessing a thinner ethnicity. They were not only in a position to observe cugine but even to hold it (i.e., a thicker ethnicity) against them. Appropriation of a cugine identity implies the valuation of an insider status on the part of those at the back end of the immigrant queue where the lowest status is assigned to those “just off the boat” (see Lee 2005). As a kinship term, cugine is hardly a random ethnic symbol. Cugine does not designate a relationship as close as the sibling metaphor appropriated in the case of other groups notably Blacks although it is stronger in a more traditional Italian heritage. Nevertheless, the appropriation of a kinship term suggests a moral obligation attached to ethnicity, in particular some measure of traditional values in loco parentis. While real kin went out together, fictive “cugines” added a layer of kinship morality. The moral community of Italian “cousins” was marked by the signifiers of ethnic family rituals such as Italian gold crosses and other jewelry bestowed by adult kin as gifts. Cugine style repertoires signaled a pool of eligible partners compatible with parental preferences for ethnic endogamy. Kinship morality buttressing a shared ethnicity took on extra importance in the dance club scene. Cugine also demonstrates a deep connection to la famiglia. The new second generation know Italy directly from regular visits to family, including “cugini”, rather than package tours. In the immigrant enclave, the term “cugini” was appropriated to strengthen the solidarity of paesani, or people from the same

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town in Italy. Thus, an announcement by The Craco Society of Brooklyn and Manhattan for the “Third Annual Crachesi Del Nord America Reunion” in 2009 exhorted interested parties to “Join your Craco cousins!” (Untitled Document, Italian American Museum, [email protected] accessed 10/14/2009). By underlining a “real Italians” ethnicity, cugine reinforces the boundary around the new second generation, a symbolic reversal of the rank order calibrated to the immigrant queue.

What’s in a Name? Becoming Guido Although it does not name Guido, the Baer satire points to a place and time for its coalescence, specifically Bensonhurst in the mid-1980s. It also explicitly references a core style ritual in disco and its connection to SNF, sardonically referring to the film as the “Bible” and Tony Manero as “canonized” first ancestor. It establishes disco at the center of a style repertoire that is saturated with American youth culture rituals like cruising in American automobiles and provides early evidence of rap music seeping into its soundtrack. And this representative American youth scene is, somehow, represented as Italian by youth themselves and the author. It is notable that the vernacular origins of this new Italian American youth identity was framed by influential outsiders in terms of the status inferiority of a thick ethnicity. The Baer article establishes a precedent for the role of media as an external boundary by opening the subculture to wider public scrutiny although confined to campus circulation in contrast to mainstream media representations down the road. In particular, it begins the unrestrained vilification of Guido as an ethnic youth style in the wider public discourse.2 In retrospect, it is interesting that the Baer article does not mention “Guido”. That same year, two Queens rappers named Frankie Flash and Matt the Horse released an underground tape of the songs “Guido Rap” and “Bensonhurst, 86th Street”. The lyrics of the two songs delineate a subcultural profile for Guido that substantially overlaps with Baer’s cugine. “Guido Rap” calls attention to proficiency in fighting and cool cars although it accentuates the importance of “disco”. Since the self-styled Guido rappers articulate an insider position, Italian American youth culture practice is extolled rather than mocked; “Guido Rap” anoints the Guidos as “the Kings of the Discos!” The songs brag about Italian American affluence and street toughness and idealize Italian ethnicity, mimicking Gangsta

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styling. In contrast to the Baer article, “Bensonhurst, 86th Street” portrays the iconic epicenter of this Italian American youth style. The appearance of this lyrical statement suggests that Guido had taken a step beyond cugine. It does this by assimilating cugine identity and styles. Thus, the song, “Guido Rap” which became an anthem for a burgeoning subculture extolled the pose of the “mean cugine”. The ascendance of the term Guido seems to have been seamless and embraced the legacy of “Cugine”. However, in the late 1980s Guido largely replaced “cugine” as the identity symbol for an Italian youth style based in Bensonhurst (not “Cugine Rap”). This was self-naming that does not seem to have occurred with cugine (and with earlier iterations) and it is connected to an ethnic consciousness as well as style consciousness: “You tell ‘em you’re Italian!” The identities Guido, and Guidette, were specifically invoked to validate membership in bounded scenes like “Italian Night” at local clubs and cruising 86th Street. They were literally spelled out in the online social media space created in the late 1990s, contributing to the architecture of screen names (“Brooklyn Guido”) and applied to other insiders: “Chasin the Italian Ladies. Lookin for a Guidette”; “Its all about spikey haired Guidos”. What explains the ascendance of Guido? The term cugine may have been too closely connected to the thick ethnicity of cafes, Italian soccer, and styles referenced to “real Italians”. Perhaps a new name was needed for a style oriented popular American culture and especially to disco after 1977. It is notable that the lyrics of the songs “Guido Rap” and “Bensonhurst, 86th Street” were concretized in a 1987 performance at a Queens disco, L’Amour, that has been uploaded to Youtube (2011). It is plausible that the original cugines (OC’s?) underwent a metamorphosis in the discos, aligning more with popular American culture. It is also possible that they aged out of youth culture and were replaced by a younger generation in the late 1980s that came of age with disco; “cugine” can still be heard as nostalgia for this older cohort. The infusion of more Americanized Italian ancestry youth was not compatible with “real Italian” youth culture. A step closer to the mainstream, which can explain the early interest in Hip Hop, can account for the recruitment of Queens youth who came to Guido with a much thinner ethnicity. The Guido MCs were from Queens not Bensonhurst and may have adapted cugine style for a new pop culture trend. Queens youth conflated Guido with (Italian) Brooklyn.3

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What became Guido sublimated internal differences within a local youth style tradition identified with Italian Americans. Core style choices, in particular, disco, were contributed by youth who were third generation in the 1970s like Dan Pucciarelli who was born in the early 1950s and did not speak Italian. New Second-generation youth assimilated local styles but also seem to have transacted a more prominent connection to ethnicity. Dan did not use ethnicity to position himself in the 1970s and 1980s and did not personally identify with Guido—he was “Disco Dan” although his other nickname, “Pooch” resonates as an Italian neighborhood moniker. However, his generation of local Italian American youth was forging a style that marked them as implicitly or “ve-e-e-ry Italian” (American). Disco energized a local youth style tradition that called attention to Italian Americans both in the city, including the club scene, and in the mass media.

Why Say Guido? The spectacle of an outer borough Italian American youth style known as Guido was firmly entrenched in the local youth culture in the late 1980s. In particular, there was a fairly concise understanding of the relationship between certain style signifiers and Italian ethnicity among youth in the outer boroughs which was conveyed by the new identity symbol such as “A Guido is an Italian who listens to disco” or “an Italian who drives a Monte Carlo”. Devoid of traditional meanings at least on the surface, the space privileged by contemporary youth culture, being Italian acquires “fresh meanings” (Brake 1985: 60). The identification of being Italian with “an inventory of looks and expressions” catalogued in popular “style markets” (Ewen 1988: 72) was trending past its outer borough roots and was beginning to receive mass media recognition as a youth subculture defined by style. While Guido unequivocally identified an Italian American youth style, what accounts for the choice of the symbol? This is important to the extent that social actors are constrained to live up, or down, to (the social expectations that come with) their name. As mentioned in the beginning of the book, I first heard the name Guido used to refer to a youth culture performance in Bensonhurst, ground zero for “thick” Italian ethnicity in the city and, now, making a name for itself. This also happened to be the first time I ever heard the word “Guido” used in any context so it came to my attention without any preconceptions; it was

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not a category in the community culture of the south Village neighborhood that I studied in the late 1970s. The Queens college students who informed me about Guido were describing a youth style referenced to popular American culture. It was perhaps naïve to take for granted the meaning of this symbol for stylized youth performances. I may have been lulled by the matter of fact usage of the term; the Jersey Shore Guidos similarly found the identity symbol unremarkable and were disinclined to expend energy on nomenclature when their main preoccupation was having stylized pleasure (see Chapter 9). I was ambushed by the raw sensibilities of colleagues at the 1989 American Italian Historical Association meeting in San Francisco who reflexively defined “guido” as a category of ethnic prejudice. While I was amiss in not probing the meaningful symbolism of Guido at the outset, this did not preclude an awareness of the antipathy toward Guido that rippled out from local youth style markets to the mainstream. I have always seen this as rooted in the status competition between youth subcultures, involving ethnic animus to be sure but not reducible to ethnic stereotyping and prejudice. Moreover, I presented Guido as a manifestation of youth agency that opposes ethnic stigma. It is necessary here to trace the symbolic development of Guido that attended and promoted the coalescence of a bounded youth subculture after SNF. Like cugine, it is highly likely that Guido was imposed from the outside. Both terms are framed to call attention to a thick, foreign ethnicity. Guido is a common Italian male name which invokes ethnicity and, thus, vacate other status attributes such as class and race (whereas greaser explicitly racializes). A parallel can be drawn for other groups, like Irish Americans for whom the common male name “Paddy” has been generalized to the entire group; “Paddy Wagon” is an overgeneralization, or stereotype, that stigmatizes the urban Irish as unruly. Other male Italian names have surfaced in the urban youth culture space in recent years, notably “Mario” in Chicago and “Gino” in Toronto. Foreign nomenclature resonates with the status calibrations of the immigrant queue. The imposition of a singular name for an entire ethnic category is a stereotype that also vacates meaningful individual variation. A common or ordinary proper name that when overgeneralized diminishes by reducing an entire category to a single or predominant ethnic attribute. At this point, Guido is an “ethnic slur”, intended to deeply offend and even dehumanize a group defined by ethnicity in order to exclude them from scarce resources (Croom 2015). It resonates with historic epithets like

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“guinea” rooted in an earlier stage of ethnic prejudice and discrimination that is grounded in a system of American ethnic stratification. Guido converts thick ethnic difference into the denigration of Italian ethnicity, ultimately as a status putdown. The antidefamation protest of Jersey Shore for saying Guido in the public discourse reflexively assumed that Guido was an “ethnic slur”, an assumption that has become an iron law into the present. Is there any evidence that Guido crystallized as an ethnic slur imposed from the outside and, if so, why did it suffice as a label for an Italian American youth culture practice? Further, what are the social parameters of this symbolic development and identity transaction? There is little scholarly discussion about the origin of Guido as an ethnic label for Italian Americans. Perhaps the most useful is found in the erudite and encyclopedic study of Italian Americans in popular culture by Pellegrino D’Acierno (1999: 689) which defines Guido as a “style” enacted by “Italian men”, not as a style performed by Italian American youth. He conjectures that Guido derives from the Italian word to drive, guidare, as a preeminent form of traditional masculinist display. However, although cruising scenes established continuity with a local style tradition that originates with greaser, clubbing became the quintessential youth culture practice in the 1970s. It is unlikely that the new second generation named themselves as “drivers” and also that outsiders were able to parse the meaning of the Italian verb guidare. This makes it more plausible that Guido was being used as a proper name (with the attendant affects). D’Acierno (1999: 647) posits Guido as a “pejorative” term for Italian Americans that is meaningful in terms of class culture or taste, specifically “the tacky world of vulgar consumerism” which is distilled in mass media; it is easy to read his contempt for Guido as a “vulgar” consumption style which he sees as balm for a stigmatized ethnicity. Although D’Acierno is on the verge of conceptualizing a youth culture identity by characterizing Guido as a style enacted by Italian (American?) men, he denies this agency by implying that they are unwitting ciphers of mainstream media representations that only disparage them and their ethnicity. D’Acierno’s Guido is too passive to name themselves and making this identity construct an ethnic stereotype rather than an ethnogenesis. This characterization informs the identity politics of the anti-defamation organizations that denounce MTV for its use of “Guido” as an ethnic slur in Jersey Shore while refusing to own it as an artifact of urban Italian American culture (See Chapter 9).

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Curiously, the playwright Mario Fratti who was born in Italy but has lived in New York since 1963 takes almost an opposite view.4 He rebuts the notion that Guido is a pejorative, hypothesizing that Guido is a metaphor for a prestigious style of leisure and consumption in contemporary Italy. Fratti has in mind the insouciant style of the Italian flaneur represented in a different movie spectacle, the Italian neo-realist film “8 1/2” whose main character is “Guido [italics are mine] Anselmi” and was the inspiration for Fratti’s lead in the play “Nine”. However, the Guido pose is more Bensonhurst than Milan, more minority group ethnicity than the elite characterization of the suave Marcello Mastroianni. Guido was modeled on Saturday Night Fever not 81/2 or Nine. Recognition in the mainstream Italian media likely encouraged an orientation to American popular culture rather than to contemporary Italian style. It is clear that the Italian press did not have “Guido Anselmi” in mind when JS decamped to Florence for a season of shows (see Chapter 9). Guido was translated as “tamarri” and “cretini” which designates a person who is boorish and without manners (Nadeau 2011). Parallels can be found in the Mexican term “pachuco” and the Dominican label “platanos” which refers to a rural backwardness also expressed in the American term “white trash” and “cracker”. In the case of Italians, there is a resonance with the internal status differentiation between northern and southern Italians especially during the mass immigration. The stratification of “high Italians/alt’Italiani” and “low Italians/bass’Italiani” had a racial as well as a cultural cast and was institutionalized in immigrant enclaves, for example, in the form of separate parishes and funeral parlors and even residential segregation (Tricarico 1984). These distinctions suggest that Guido gains force as a status putdown inside as well as across the ethnic boundary. The pejorative meaning of Guido may be rooted in the negotiation of an internal boundary separating newer, post-1945 immigrants from Italy from older cohorts and specifically new Second-generation youth from third- or fourth-generation youth. We are still in search of Guido’s origins as an identity symbol for outer borough youth culture practice. Popular American culture provides clues. “Mario” is likely a reference to the “Super Mario Brothers” cartoon which portrays stereotypical Italian bodily features and mannerisms. The name “Joey” surfaced in the upscale Hamptons summer resort was invoked to further level a clubbing scene that was already painted by a broad brush as Guido. “Joey” extrapolates the pop culture persona of “Joey Buttafuoco” to devalue Italian American youth reaching critical

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mass in Hamptons’ clubs patronized by Manhattan elites during the summertime (Appelbome 2008). Since Buttafuoco is from Long Island and was on the social radar in the Hamptons for the Summer season, there is also a highly local cast to this stereotype imposed from the outside.5 Joey is noteworthy as an Americanized Italian, not foreign but apparently different enough to symbolize the marginalization of Italian American youth. This is the point where Guido signifies an ethnic minority group identity (see Chapter 10). “Joey” gives hyperlocal flavor to the genus, “Guido”. A plausible hypothesis for the ascendance of Guido leans on the coalescence of a mass media stereotype. Rather than Fellini’s Guido, the character of “Father Guido Sarducci” performed on Saturday Night Live circa 1978 by the comic Don Novello may have mediated the translation of “Cugine” outside the ethnic community in order to disparage youth agency in the outer boroughs identified with a thick Italian ethnicity. “Guido Sarducci” named a stylized Italian pose, more Via Veneto than New Utrecht Avenue, intended to be ridiculous in the persona of a Catholic priest. Sarducci’s Guido is a dandy with a clerical collar, closer to Fellini’s and Fratti’s Guido with his signature cigarette holder and scarf than a cornerboy in a tracksuit; ironically, Fratti’s Guido may have been smuggled in second-hand by this American stereotype. The Guido Sarducci persona Italianizes Guido as youth culture in terms that are intelligible in American popular culture (i.e., referenced to SNL). Inside the ethnic boundary, it becomes a label that more Americanized cohorts can invoke to equate “real Italians” with status inferiority pegged to the metrics of Americanization. More Americanized ethnic group members can buy into the status assumptions of the immigrant queue in order to distance themselves from a minority group ethnicity.6 If Guido Sarducci accounts for the meaningful symbolism, why did it specifically target new Second-generation Italian youth culture practice in the outer boroughs? While local Italian American youth engaged with popular American culture, there were no named Italian American youth subcultures based on style into the 1970s. The Guido Sarducci character is the antithesis of the “tacky” or “vulgar” presentation of urban Italian Americans. I hypothesize that “Guido” is a status putdown that delegitimates the collective claim on cool by outer borough Italian American youth in local style markets after SNF. The power of the label is in the capacity to denigrate Italian Americans on the level of ethnicity as well as consumption style. The term “Guido” marks style outcastes marked

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by a contaminated ethnicity, employing symbolism that is meaningful to mainstream audiences. The imposition of a stigmatized identity symbol from the outside is disempowering. Guido calls attention to difference that is too Italian so that it can be devalued. The consolidation of a stigmatized youth identity in the late 1980s can be attributed to the crossing of a critical status boundary that exclusively reserved “cool’ clubs” in Manhattan (See Chapter 7). Manhattan discotheques historically excluded the “bridge and tunnel crowd”, a coded designation that historically labeled the outer borough white working class. Guido set Italian American youth apart from the “bridge and tunnel” category, an elite Manhattan-centric cognitive device that singled out a category of youth from the margins. This distinction was a response to an unwieldy flow of Italian American youth crossing the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan to go clubbing, with a youth style in tow that was not allowed on stage. A symbolic reaction solidified a subcultural boundary that was already in formation. Moreover, style deviance blurred with social deviance. John Gennari (2017: 134) goes beyond “tacky” by locating “guido-style” in the “spectacle of uncouth behavior” in Bensonhurst that was directed at protests of a 1989 “racial killing”. This Guido is not “tamarri” but an urban menace and what makes Guido more Bensonhurst than Via Veneto is the association with the ethnic minority culture of the Italian American neighborhood. This critical juncture in the symbolic career of Guido is taken up in Chapter 8.

Working with the Symbol Names are explicit symbols of group affiliation transacted when it becomes important to acknowledge the objective reality of a person, event, or thing (Isaacs 1985). The articulation of identity constitutes a social agenda to represent a category of difference within specific historical circumstances (Cornell and Hartmann 2007). Youth identities are transacted, both asserted and assigned by others, in stylized rituals of status competition (Milner 2004). It is telling only half of the story to interpret at Guido as a label imposed from the outside to disparage an ethnic category, in this case signified by consumption style. The nomenclature of Guido has to be viewed in a transactional context. The other side to the story is the way young Italian Americans appropriated the symbol and reworked its meanings.

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If youth are not passive actors (Best 2000), why did Italian American youth identify with a label intended to denigrate and exclude them? Perhaps they misread this symbolic reworking of Guido. After all, they were by definition marginal to the mainstream including the irony of the SNL entertainment paradigm intended for cosmopolitan audiences like Manhattan yuppies. Regardless, they may have flattered by the mass media recognition. A name called attention to their scene, a reprieve from invisibility. Guido was an identity that they could claim, that positioned them in the popular culture and in the city. It elevated them from the nebulous “bridge and tunnel” space. It also unmistakably reconciled their youth identities with their ethnic identities mediated by their family and the local ethnic community. To this extent, exclusion occasioned if not warranted self-identification. Youth cultures typically engage in “symbolic challenge” in response to “structural problems” (Frith 1981: 195; Willis 1990). A minority ethnicity further compromises the youth agenda of “pride and self-assertion”. Whereas immigrant ethnicity may be apolitical in deference to mainstream power, youth agency routinely opposes dominant meanings (Hebdige 1977). Insofar as mass media images are read by audiences according to their position and interests (Best 2000), outer borough Italian American youth had already appropriated a hostile SNF narrative for a subcultural agenda oriented to disco. A boundary hardened because they were more than Italian enough, and there were more than enough Italians, to establish their own scene where they could make prestige claims that work for them. Whereas greaser was denigrated and Doo Wop was marginal to dominant Rock subculture, Guido boldly staked a claim to popular American culture as the true descendants of “Tony Manero” as “the Kings of the discos” (“Guido Rap”). The claim to disco authenticity promised to remedy the anomic status of Italian American youth in the popular culture and provide a bargaining chip in local style markets. Guido committed to the struggle to sustain a scene oriented to dance club music after the collapse of disco in the pop culture mainstream. A bounded Italian American identity also negotiated distance from other minority youth subcultures anchored in dance club cultures, notably Latinos and Blacks, and fortified the assault on elite Manhattan clubs (see Chapter 7). Guido assertively mobilizes ethnic resources for a youth culture strategy. It underscored the ethnic character of stylized performances. The lyrics of “Guido Rap” are full with boasts about ethnic ancestry: “You

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tell ‘em you’re Italian”. Youth in a “Guido chat room” studied from 1999 to 2001 exhibited ethnic “pride” in a shared ancestry as a subcultural credential. Guido calls attention to Italian ethnicity but also underscores a difference vis-à-vis the parent generation particularly in regard to leisure and consumption; being Italian is celebrated by the linkage to mainstream commodities, like Cadillacs and leisure suits. This project was not linked to the symbolic ethnicity of mainstream elites, but to the local youth style tradition. Symbolic ethnic capital reversed an inferior status in the ethnic stratification system and refuted the status earmarks of minority group identity which Roosens (1989) sees as re-evaluation as fundamental to “ethnogenesis”. Guido explicitly talks back to the stigma of a “negatively privileged” or “dominated” identity. This occurs in the manner of appropriating ethnic insults as “a badge of honor” that enhances insider solidarity (Isaacs 1976: 76) in the manner of “nigga” and “pachuco”. The underground song “Guido Rap” conflates “Guido” identity with “guinea” perhaps the most scurrilous ethnic slur invoked against the pre-1924 immigration. The identification with a minority group ethnicity is also reflected in references to Bensonhurst, the city’s largest Italian American community at the time and heavily imprinted by the new immigration. The song “Bensonhurst, 86th Street” delineates the community, linked to the legacy of the “cugine”, as symbolic ethnic capital; there is also the symbolic representation of minority group ethnic capital for stylized repertoires in a vernacular speech pattern that confounds a “Brooklyn accent” with “talking Italian” (“Italglish”) that combines fragments of dialect with unpolished “street” English resulting in phraseology like “fuggedaboutit”. In these configurations, “Guido” is a signifier of a stigmatized Italian ethnicity which is, then, reversed in the stylized performances of subcultural insiders. Presentations conflated Guido with historical epithets in a strategy to maximize symbolic ethnic capital: “I’m just the ordinary Guinea and Guido I guess”. To the extent that youth others and the mainstream media are persuaded differently, “Guido” is the new Guinea” (see Chapter 6). It has become a name that, like “nigga”, warrants a careful determination of insider status. In fact, as gangsta has invigorated Guido style with a cool “street code” Guido has been conflated with “nigga” (see Chapter 7). This development supports the view of Italian American anti-defamation organizations that Guido is a “pejorative”. However, this position discounts the agency of Italian American youth that opposes the pejorative meaning of Guido, evidencing an

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oppositional psychology that is characteristic of contemporary youth subcultures like Punk (Hebdige 1977). A consciousness of this oppositional identity is evidenced by a 20-year-old from Queens: The word ‘Guido’ is supposed to criticize Italians but some Italians actually like the fact that they are called ‘Guido’. So really this word has many levels of affect. It all depends on what generation and how strong the person’s pride is in the word ‘Guido’. The word ‘Guido’ applies to me and also to my friends. Because we did take that offensively we actually like it when we are considered ‘Guidos’. It gives us what you would say is a rep. [written statement, A, 2004]

Although this comment does not make it explicit, self-identification also pushes back against hegemonic constructs of Italian identity inside the ethnic boundary, as a term used by to disparage “real Italians”, reflecting a practice where recent immigrants who are “just off the boat” are assigned a lesser status as “greenhorns” and “greaseballs”. As a discursive space, ItalChat entertained questions about the fit of Guido as a collective identity. On the one hand, Guido had wide currency in ItalChat and true “insiders” knew the code. It supplied a dominant theme, a building block, for screen name architecture (“BrooklynGuido”). “Guido” and the female derivative “Guidette” signaled insider credentials (“Where my Guidos at?”) and articulated a more exclusive subcultural boundary (“If you’re not a Guido get out”). Identification with Guido expressed a defiant claim to status honor (cool) referenced to a style of consumption and ethnicity: “Guidos rule!” On the other hand, there was some ambivalence about Guido as a collective identity symbol. While Guido implied “being Italian”, it did not name a room. Several attempts to open a room in the name of Guido failed to attract a substantial and consistent following and were shortlived. This may have reflected dissatisfaction with an identity that, at the time, was stigmatized both in the public discourse and, more importantly, in local youth culture scenes (see Chapter 8). I did not witness an open discussion or referendum on this issue in ItalChat. Instead, reservations were expressed in a scattershot fashion. One youth identified as “Italian” challenged the default position that Guido and being Italian were equivalent: “Italian does not equal Guido, grow up”. Another repudiated Guido on the level of style: “IM A GINNY NOT A GUIDO SO DON’T TELL ME ‘HOW U DOIN’. THAT GOES OUT TO ALL OF THE GUIDOS THAT LISTEN TO WACKTU [a play

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on commercial FM radio station WKTU] AND FREESTYLE”. On the whole, there was only mild opposition to Guido which did not invalidate it as a default subcultural identity—a heuristic device for drawing a boundary around Italian American youth culture practice. In the ensuing years, Guido reinforced a monopoly on the appropriation of Italian ethnicity for a local youth culture strategy; the name “Cugine” (“cousin”) which was popular in the 1980s was not in the ItalChat vernacular and faded away, expressing an older generation (“OGs”) identity specific to Bensonhurst as with DJ Joe Causi who was known as “The Supreme Cugine”. It is also plausible that Guido mobilized a tighter bond around the opportunity to revalue a contaminated and reviled ethnic ancestry (see chapter below).

Cousin Gino? The collective youth identity “Gino” in Toronto raises interesting comparative questions about the intersection of Italian immigrant ethnicity and youth popular culture in another national context. While there is no empirical research published to this date, Gino has registered in the popular culture. Posts that define “Gino” on Urban Dictionary (2018) suggest intriguing parallels in style preferences in particular an affinity for electronic dance music and club culture alongside a car culture, designer brands (e.g., Diesel, Mexx), and “spiked hair”. Stylized performance accords salience to Italian ethnicity although one entry also allows for a “person” of “Greek or Persian descent”. It is not clear whether style has diffused from metropolitan New York City; Guido has spread throughout the Northeast, to cities like Philadelphia and Providence. The name, Gino, suggests a close cousin, although it predates Jersey Shore and Toronto is not close to the Guido epicenter. Yet, there is a similar dynamic for transacting identity. Like Guido, the ethnic nomenclature is rooted in a minority group dynamic and there is a precedent for using other demeaning stereotypes within vernacular contexts like “Joey” in Long Island. In 2002, Toronto city councilor Rob Ford was accused by an Italo-Canadian colleague of “making a racial slur against him” by calling him a “‘Gino boy’, a term used to disparage Italian Canadians” (Demara 2013). The style similarities make a case for cultural diffusion. However, it is also possible that style choices are narrowed along the same lines as for Italian American youth in the outer boroughs. The underlying structural conditions show similarities but also differences. Stanger-Ross’ (2010) work on the

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post-World War Two Italo-Canadian community in Toronto sees ethnic cohesion into the second generation which can explain a new Secondgeneration youth style. However, the post-1945 Toronto settlement does not seem to have an embedded ethnic neighborhood culture established during an earlier mass immigration, which also establishes a status dynamic between older cohorts and new “real Italians”. Stanger-Ross perceives Toronto as a venue where post-1945 immigrants were able to transplant a solidarity based on the paese, or paesani ties, a solidarity that was transplanted outside the urban enclave to the suburbs. Stanger-Ross does not address Gino and youth culture practices. However, a new Second-generation framework may be relevant in Toronto as well, suggesting that there may be a generic assimilation strategy for fitting into contemporary North America. A “transnational perspective” (Wirth 2016) may inform another comparison, in particular, linking to the popularity of electronic dance music in Europe, specifically “Italo Disco”. If Gino appeals to other new Second-generation youth, it may be because it offers a more appealing alternative to other ethnic and class positions as in the case of Guido (e.g., Muslims, white middle-class Canadians). At the same time, the size of the post-1945 immigration to Canada may mean that a new Italo-Canadian second generation may not be meaningfully referenced to older cohorts. Gino may not have the same robust street culture and youth style traditions, which may make Gino a cousin that is not cugine. Gino also has to be carefully assessed for border interactions. The new immigration in New York City contributed to the persistence of a minority group culture that set Italian Americans apart as “not yet white”. Urban Dictionary does not suggest the same level of vitriol from outsiders and formative negotiations with racialized Black and Latino youth cultures which underscores the peculiar structural conditions for Italians in New York City. To this point, Gino style is not on the radar of the mainstream media and other cool merchants, although it is worth considering the shadow cast on JS by its American cousin.

The Symbolic Work of Subcultural Distinction The Guido identity symbol points to the hardening of a subcultural boundary formed by the intersection of Italian American ethnicity and popular American youth style. Unpacked, a “subcultural ideology” is delineated, a collective strategy to manipulate forms of capital in order to gain

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social recognition and status (Thornton 1995). Following Pierre Bourdieu, Sarah Thornton maintains that youth subcultures fashion “ideologies” that “are a means by which youth imagine their own and other social groups, assert their distinctive character and affirm that they are not anonymous members of an undifferentiated mass” (ibid.: 10). In Thornton’s study of British “club cultures” (86), which leans heavily on Bourdieu’s related concepts of “cultural capital” and “distinction” (1984): Subcultural ideologies are a means by which youth imagine their own and other social groups, assert their distinctive character and affirm that they are not anonymous members of an undifferentiated mass.

Youth subcultures are situated in a “status hierarchy” where they “jockey for power” around “claims” to high prestige and the presumed “inferiority of others”—a dynamic of “the distinctions of cultures without distinction” (Thornton 1995: 10). Ethnic youth fashion subcultural ideologies around ethnicity and consumption style—“dual discourses” reflecting the “multiple identities” and “contradictions” of the second generation (Maira 2002). Thus, a Guido is “A person who is up on the music and current styles in clothes, shoes, etc.” (Guido youth) or “An Italian who listens to a lot of disco” (youth other). The spectacle of an outer borough Italian American youth style known as Guido was firmly established in the arena of local youth culture by the 1980s. In particular, there was a widespread recognition of the relationship between certain style signifiers and Italian ethnicity among youth in the outer boroughs. The identification of Italian ethnicity and “an inventory of looks and expressions” catalogued in popular “style markets” (Ewen 1988: 72) had registered in the mass media, reaching its zenith with JS in 2009. The subcultural ideology of Guido references an ethnic identity, not just a style, that is “without distinction” (Thornton 1995) in the wider society. Like Pachuco and gangsta, symbolic annihilation of the stigma attached to minority group ethnicity transacted in the context of ethnic prejudice and discrimination elicited a defiant claim to status honor in American popular culture: “Guidos are back in style! Guidos rule!” The symbolic reversal of an ethnic slur represented an oppositional “attitude” that claimed the right to fun and pleasure including privileged consumption like designer brand clothing and dancing at elite clubs in Manhattan. To this extent, Guido symbolizes a “subcultural

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ideology” that deploys ethnicity to manufacture distinction within popular American culture and local style markets. Guido is invested with symbolic ethnic capital, providing “a sense of social worth” (Thornton 1995: 163) in its own right and the construction of a valued ethnicity challenges a “dominated culture” (Hall 1992). As such, Guido renames Italian American ethnicity in response to stigmatization, making a claim based on youth consumption style. Guido is an ethnic group performing a youth style that is performing ethnicity. As such, it not only symbolizes an ethnic claim to youth culture “distinction”, but a youth culture claim on ethnic “distinction”. The next two chapters focus on the process of distinction-making that maps the dual coordinates of subcultural ideology that are inextricably linked in the real world. The following chapter presents a thick description of a signature youth style staged in landscapes of consumption such as dance clubs and, more recently, Internet chat rooms. The subsequent chapter focuses on the construction of ethnicity for subcultural distinction in stylized youth culture performances.

Notes 1.  Whereas the Irish were the principal ethnic antagonist into the 1950s, tensions with Blacks and Latinos were evident in Manhattan’s Italian American neighborhoods in the 1970s. Although the South Village was being transformed by accelerating gentrification revolving around SoHo in the 1970s there was racialized turf conflict that pitted local Italian American teenagers and African American students attending Chelsea Vocational High School (Bird 1972; Tricarico 1984). 2. It is puzzling why a local community college newspaper published a satire of local Italian American youth written an author with a non-Italian surname. One explanation is that Italian American youth were not significantly represented in the campus community. In fact, high school graduation rates for Italian Americans were among the lowest for ethnic groups in the city at this time. It perhaps implies that there were no Guidos on a college campus to take umbrage which is a comment on the class character of Guido at least at the outset. It is even more puzzling that this occurred at a CUNY college which had only recently accorded affirmative action status to Italian Americans and that there was no organized anti-defamation response. 3.  Into the recent period, NYC Department of Highways traffic signs announced the Italian American imprint on Brooklyn: “Leaving/Entering

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Brooklyn: Fugedaboutit!” Brooklyn currently figures in the collective imaginary of African Americans and, more recently, hipsters. 4. Fratti voiced these ideas at the conference by the Calandra Institute on January 21, 2010 in response to the protests of official Italian American organizations surrounding the debut of MTV’s Jersey Shore. See at www.i-italy.org, accessed 12/10/10. Fratti’s hypothesis may have been partially vindicated by the designer brand “Guido Fashion” (2017) which features “sultry and hot Italian looks” for men and women. 5. Because the sordid details of the story of Buttafuoco’s affair with 16-yearold Amy Fisher who shot his wife at their home were in the news, Joey is also timely and therefore more relevant. See Sheila Weller (1994) who placed Buttafuoco and Fisher in the Guido style performed in the south shore Long Island area that was the backdrop of the story. Weller interviewed me to garner insight into the Guido subculture that she maintained was the backdrop for Fisher’s social life, including sojourns to Bensonhurst. 6. SNL has long appropriated outer borough ethnicity for its brand of comedy reflecting a Manhattan-centered Yuppie or hipster point of view. It aired a skit called “The Bensonhurst Dating Game” (Saturday Night Live, October 10, 1992) that demonstrated a close familiarity with Guido. Another iconic skit “Cheeburger, Cheeburger” in the 1980s satirized Greek diner grill men.

CHAPTER 5

Performing Style

Following in the tradition of the Birmingham School, “style” is “a predominant defining feature of youthful subcultures” Brake (1985: 8). A “youth subculture” is a group whose practices “revolve around the symbolic meaning of stylized presentations of self and around the symbolic meanings those performances have” (Schwartz 1987: 16–18). According to Clarke et al. (1976: 176). What makes a style is the activity of stylization – the active organization of objects with activities and outlooks, which produce an organized group-identity in the form and shape of a coherent and distinctive way of “being-in-the-world”.

“Meanings” that originate in the popular culture, especially in the mass media, are transformed and arranged to suit a youth agenda which revolve around having “fun” or pursuing pleasure (Cohen 1979; Eckert 1989: 15–18). The style repertoires of contemporary youth subcultures reflect “the power of commodities” that “inevitably shapes the contours of personal and collective identity” in consumer societies (Lipsitz 1994: 26; see also Frith 1981: 281; and Ogersby 1999: 142). The Birmingham School discerns four dimensions of style that attain maximum subcultural significance in leisure spaces: dress, music, ritual, and argot (Williams 2007: 578). Stuart Ewen (1998: 22) maintains that style is a “managed image” of “surfaces and commodities” performed for the youth culture “spectacle” (Hebdige 1979). A style profile puts youth subcultures on © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_5

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the radar of youth culture industries like MTV that merchandise symbolic youth culture capital or “cool” (Merchants of Cool 2001). Even subcultural projects that repudiate commodified cool, like Punk and Grunge, are susceptible to commercial “branding”. Guido claims a franchise on the “consumer goods and urban lifestyles” that “have become more central elements of youth identity” (Chatterton and Hollands 2003: 11; also see Lipsitz 1994: 26). This chapter looks at the stylized performance repertoires that have distinguished Guido as a youth subculture from the late 1980s within the style tradition as well as in local style markets. This facet of subcultural distinction revolves around a “visual vernacular of style” featuring bodily appearance and adornment; a soundtrack that has almost exclusively relied on electronic dance music and signaled a fealty to disco; a distinctive attitude or demeanor, and; kinesthetic behaviors (bodily movement) like dancing and fighting, and their blended expression in the “fist pump” dance move. Subcultural styles are both expected and performed to maximum effect in designated local settings, or “scenes”, that feature a “repertoire of commodities” and other “symbolic paraphernalia” (Irwin 1977).

Style Claims There is a historical awareness of local Italian youth agency among first wave adopters that is focused on disco. Like early Hip Hop, DJ Ralphie Dee traces Italian American dance club culture to Bensonhurst “block parties” in the 1970s (D’Agostino 2018). In a personal email from 2002, DJ Mike C. claimed that “I learned to spin back in the late 80s. Self-proclaimed ‘guidos’ taught me everything I needed to know”. Data collected among college students in Queens in 1988 and 1989 illustrate a consciousness of a distinct style called Guido oriented to consumerist versions of age-graded fun and pleasure.1 Cora, an eighteen-year-old “Guidette” from Middle Village that I interviewed in 2001, expressed an awareness of a style-based identification with other Italian American youth that suggests a youth subculture: All I listen to is freestyle and club music. Most people say that freestyle is all Italians listen to. I have to say that for the most part, that is true. [Cora, 18, 2004]

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Like other youth subcultures “Guidos make their own style” according to 20-year-old Michael, a self-identified Guido (personal interview 2001). There is a putative belief in agency that amounts to a selective appropriation of elements that collectively identify Guido in local style markets. Cora narrows agency for a distinctive style in the local peer group: My friends and I pretty much have the same hairstyle. All the girls wear it straight and shoulder-length. All the guys wear it short and gel on top. If one were it differently we would have to make sure our friends would ‘approve’. We pretty much wear the same type of jewelry; things like gold crosses, pretty rings, and bracelets our boyfriends gave to us. Before I started hanging out with this group all I listened to was rap and reggae. Now all I listen to is freestyle and club music. When we drive around in our cars, that is all we play and when we go to clubs that is all we hear.

Guido style is an ensemble of style elements. A subculture is evident in the convergence of local styles within relatively narrow limits. There is the appropriation of new trends like tattooing and bodybuilding but also a shift in organizing principles, notably the increasing salience of hedonistic and commodified consumption. Reliance on staples like tight clothes and track suits demonstrates continuity with a local style tradition that allows for the absorption of change over time (see this chapter below). Guido style acquires distinction from a local youth style tradition that is embedded in an urban ethnic culture. A coherent style position framed by history and culture has distinguished adherents from “post-subcultural” youth actors (Muggleton 1999) from the 1980s forward. Like other contemporary youth subcultures, Guido has mined mainstream media texts to construct a distinctive style. It is noteworthy that outer borough Italian American youth have been able to appropriate their own images, which is a way of performing the local style tradition at a second remove. Distinction-making is driven by the mechanism of mass media validation for subcultural identities oriented to mainstream inclusion, notwithstanding discordant mass media agendas and accompanying ethnic stereotypes. Evidence of this feedback loop, especially the role of media imagery for a “subcultural ideology”, is made clear in Chapter 3 in relation to SNF. The import of Mafia media narratives like Goodfellas for subcultural development as a discourse of ethnic distinction is considered in the following chapter. JS has noisily added to the repository of

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media images by naming Guido and imparted the most significant youth style credential to date (see Chapter 9). More than a consciousness of agency into the present, there is an awareness of distinction-making, the subcultural project of capitalizing on stylized performances to claim the privileged youth culture capital (i.e., cool) that positions their group favorably in local youth style hierarchies (Thornton 1995; Milner 2004). Being a Guido, or a Guidette, is, above all, an identity that is performed in relation to other stylized youth culture identities in the city, geared to “win” pop culture “space” for stylish Italian Americans: “Italians in the house!!!” This entails accumulating symbolic youth culture capital, above all, style. The songs “Guido Rap” and “Bensonhurst, 86th Street” can be viewed as anthems that are blueprints of subcultural distinction. They invest the style with privilege, calling attention to the core ritual performances like clubbing and cruising. The style makes “Italians cool”; a Queens youth told me in 1988 that “Guidos are the best”. He also observed that “Italians started it”. While the implication is that a cool style redounds to their credit, we will see in the next chapter that being Italian is cool on its own terms. A style coalesced in the late 1980s that made Guido recognizable as a contemporary American youth subculture. In the neighborhood, Guidos wore sweat pants and athletic shoes common to other youth. However, the pants were rolled up or cut off to the knee and worn with extralong sweat socks. They would often don a turtleneck shirt and a cardigan sweater with black dress pants when “going out”, although they were known to “dress up” in casual settings (e.g., “hanging out”). Males typically dressed to accent their muscularity, a central peer group value for “muscleheads”. In 2001, a Guido named Michael (personal communication) considered “tight muscle t-shirts a wardrobe staple” that “can be worn with sweatpants and Nikes or with a shark skin suit”; the look featured tank tops, aka “guinea tees”, in summertime. Guidettes in the late 1980s wore tight-fitting Spandex pants, in contrast to sweat pants, that expose bare ankles, an occasion for ankle bracelets, and oversized tops. Female attire was decidedly more glamorous and risqué when making the club scene. The fashionable Guidette was also outfitted in designer jump suits. Both sexes prominently displayed gold jewelry. Males favored heavy neck chains and pinky rings; females wore large earrings and ankle bracelets which could be worn on a chain about the neck. Gold jewelry was

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featured in both casual and formal settings as a primary subcultural marker, making it urgent to “know a guy” in the jewelry business. It was acquired as gifts from family members and exchanged within dating relationships. One 16-year-old Guido had a reputation for bestowing gold jewelry on his girlfriends—a proprietary claim and not mere generosity (“this girl is taken”). Gold is also a dramatization of material status. “Italian gold”, imported from Italy but also meaningful as a life-crisis gift in the Italian kinship system, adds value to the symbol. Chains worn around the neck allow for the display of charms and medals that symbolize the mélange of subcultural values: a Christhead, a Playboy bunny, an Italian “horn”, an automobile logo. The prominent use of gold jewelry is evidenced by the Guido MC in a 1987 performance, showing early Hip Hop influences (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1  Guido MC Matt the Horse in style (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/Bensonhurst 86th Street”, 12:19, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018)

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Hair is a key symbol for all social groups and especially for stylish youth. It is one of the more distinctive Guido markers. In sharp contrast to hippie influenced styles, males have historically preferred their hair close-cropped and slicked back with gel, in keeping with the greaser tradition; in the late 1980s, the tight, swept-back look was denigrated by others as “90 m.p.h. hair”. For a time in the 80s, the back was worn long in a D.A., and the sides shaved tight—a style originally made prominent by Black youth. Except for an occasional moustache in the old days, a concession to contemporary American fashion not immigrant grandpas, males have been clean-shaven. The gelled, spiked hair style of the recent period, showcased in a commercial advertisement by JS cast member DJ Pauly D for a hair gel product, is consistent with this older look. In sharp contrast to the male style, females, or Guidettes, wore their hair long. It is made even more conspicuous by teasing, or “bouffed out”, which, when lacquered, is arranged high on their heads, as “tall hair”. Hair spray is thus an essential item in their toilette and handbags were sized to accommodate the clunky aerosol cans. Guidette hair styling was complemented by heavy make-up, featuring black eye liner, and long fingernails polished in bright colors. By contrast, preppie and hippie styles were characterized by cosmetic minimalism. Figure 5.2 illustrates the signature Guidette club look in the late 1980s and 1990s, featuring “bouffed out” hair. New styles have been accommodated within the profile over time. A Middle Village, Queens Guido named John (2002) portrayed an evolving fashion code: Instead of wearing baggy and oversized clothes, Guidos make sure their clothes are tight. Straight legs are very common. They go perfect with their Skecher boots. Shirts have to be tight to show off their muscles and tattoos. You still need a gold chain to go with your outfit. New accessories have been added. Now it is almost mandatory to have one of the newest cell phones attached to your belt.

While monitoring pop culture trends in consumption like tattoos and cell phones and corporate name brands, Guido names the youth agency behind this style gesture. There is continuity with the local style tradition, for example the privileging of physicality and a tough pose for males. In the process, new appropriations respect the boundaries with other subcultures. John’s example above implies a distinction between

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Fig. 5.2  Guidettes dressed for the club circa late 1980s (Source “Cruisin’ 86th Street [movie trailer]”, a documentary film by Willian DeMeo/West Street Productions, published on Nov. 9, 2015 by MrRobDale, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=CqeSBNuae_Y, accessed 8.21.2018)

clothing that is “tight” vis-a-vis the oversized, “sagging” clothes that marked gangsta Hip Hop that also featured “muscles and tattoos”, “gold” jewelry, and the “newest cell phones” at the time. Styles are also dramatized by behavior and demeanor (Brake 1985: 12). The persona or self that Guido youth present to the youth scene has salient features, making it possible to outline a “managed image” (Ewen 1988). Both sexes are regarded (by themselves and youth others) as very “fashion- conscious” and “up on the latest styles”. Youth others are quick to perceive this as Guido cockiness and, in this respect, Guido recalls the British Mods of the 1960s among whom “vanity and arrogance were permissible” (Hebdige 1977: 54) although a more relevant subcultural comparison is the boastful narcissism of Gangsta Hip Hop which combines conspicuous arriviste consumption (i.e., the prominent display of gold jewelry, the luxury cars) and a menacing

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street posture. More pointedly, a tough pose continues a thread that is tied to the defended Italian American neighborhood. This makes physical intimidation a default position conditioned by defended neighborhood assumptions. Macho Guido masculinity is manifest in an aggressive attitude toward anyone outside the peer group, the subculture, the neighborhood, and the ethnic group. It is communicated by the posturing of groups that “hang out”, establishing rights to turf and females and, so, aimed at males across the relevant boundary. The pose included scowls and verbal taunts (“What are you looking at?”), muscle shirts and a “pumped up” gait, and imposing automobiles with powerful sound systems—“Guido Rap” proclaims Guidos to be “ruler of the roads”. Cultivating violence as style, if not substance, can explain allusions to “the Mafia” among Guido males. Thus, “Guido Rap” refers to fathers who “never leave home without their bodyguards” and have “serious friends”. The tough pose is a default response to insider competition for status rank including access to scarce resources like dating partners (see Chapter 6). Macho Guido masculinity is also manifest in an aggressive attitude toward the opposite sex—the disposition to “hit on” or “come on to” desirable females; early Guidomobiles were bedecked with Playboy paraphernalia; in one case, a question mark painted on the front passenger door is an open invitation. The “underground” song, “Guido Rap”, boasts of numerous sexual conquests and prowess among Guidettes, who are cast as decorous sex objects. While Guidettes are typically not street tough, they historically posses a hard, tough look. In general, they are defined more by a visual image and a relationship to Guido males who have been the main protagonists of this subculture. Thus, Guidettes are described as a “sideshow” in “Guido Rap”. These qualities are probably attributable to the teased hair, heavy dark make-up and even idiosyncrasies, such as gum-chewing (“Guidettes just chew gum”). This look earns them a reputation within the youth scene for being easy. The impression that Guidettes “look kind of slutty” was common in outer borough youth culture circles in the 1980s and 1990s, leading one to maintain “I may look like a slut to you but I’m not”. They were also represented as having a low level of intelligence—“tall in hair and short in brains” and “airheads”. These motifs were stereotyped on JS although Guidettes were also accorded a sexual gaze or agency (see Chapter 9).

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Staging Guido has entailed a jargon, although it never had the integrity and inventiveness of Hip Hop, argot which it poached early and often for pop culture cool (see below). The main linguistic stem is a streetwise vernacular associated with lower-class ethnic populations in the urban Northeast. Guidos and youth others identify it as “a Brooklyn accent” (and jargon) perfected by Italian Americans in Bensonhurst— an observation corroborated by mass media culture (e.g., the personas portrayed in Mafia narratives). To Guido youth in Queens, a Brooklyn accent makes one “more Italian” and, thus, “more Guido”. Speech is flavored with phrases, such as “Get outta here” and “fuggetaboutit” (forget about it), expressed with wonderment or a gruff disdain, “Let me tell you somethin” (an assertive opening to discourse), and the common greeting “Sup” (“What’s up?”). Guido jargon had characteristically featured shards of immigrant Italian dialects (e.g., “gumba [sic]”). Male speech is spiked with vulgarity, often in Italian like “vafancul(o)”.

Performing Club Style Disco came along when outer borough Italian American youth were already committed to popular American culture. It was embraced as centerpiece of a youth identity, integrated into a local style tradition. It altered the script, making the related commitment to clubbing and dance music necessary and even sufficient for a subcultural gesture in the name of Italian ethnicity. Guido calls attention to the urgency of disco for an urban Italian American youth style. Disco created a formidable subcultural framework in the nexus between the mainstream mass media— movies like SNF, disco recordings, FM radio—and entertainment venues in urban nightclubs. In contrast to a youth culture based on Doo Wop, disco ratcheted up the importance of consumption as a peer group ritual. An identification with dance music aligned Guido with the cultural mainstream especially when consumed in the context of ritualized clubbing. Popular music is a stamp of youth subcultural identity and informs a paradigm for an entire style (e.g., Heavy Metal “Headbangers”, Punk, New Wave). The music of choice for Guido that informed the subcultural DNA was disco, or electronic dance, music although there was early interest in Rap. In the late 1980s, electronic dance music was prominently identified with Black and Hispanic artists (e.g., Donna Summer, Gloria Estefan, Jodi Whatley and Kool Moe Dee, Bobby Brown) and audiences,

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although this does not signify that Guido identifies with Black and Hispanic youth cultures, in particular, Hip Hop (see Chapter 7). From the outset, a club-centered style negotiated the ordered segmentation of leisure—local social divisions of ethnicity, race, and class. The spectacular venues of the new dance clubs provided an alternative to the restricted consumption choices that marked hippie styles and a countercultural youth culture based on college campuses in the 1970s. A “Guido club” in the 1980s and 1990s was marked by the prevalence of “house” and “free style” music and the installation of a DJ with an “Italian” name. A visual vernacular of style reinforced the boundary that existed with rival styles, often the styles of turf rivals. For example, a dress code proscribed “baggy pants” and “sneakers” associated with the “thug” or “gangsta” styles performed by youth in Black and Latino neighborhoods that were increasingly defecting from the dance music scene for Hip Hop (Rivera 2003). Italian American youth also adopted a commercial hedonistic orientation to disco that sharply contrasts with an “underground” aesthetic that informs an ideology of community in the case of club cultures (Echols 2009: 179; also Thornton 1995). It explains the affinity of Guidos for Manhattan clubs patronized by the “glitterati” and “jet set” like Studio 54 that defined the paradigm for “excessive midtown hedonism” (Lawrence 2003: 3). Italian American youth have patronized these clubs because they were spaces where consumption mattered. Without the requisite economic and cultural capitals, they were unable and perhaps unwilling to passively follow elite examples, so consumption remained grounded in local youth style traditions and ethnic culture more broadly as a framework for selective appropriation. Money was likely a factor. A musician with a disco group interviewed by Echols (2009: 179) recalls that the outfits worn in local discos were not expensive: “Quiana shirts were, like $10 apiece. You’d buy one with a print, one solid”. Bridge and tunnel youth were tentative about new consumption-based youth identities, which may explain why early styles were apparently conservative and adultlike. Echols’ musician contends that those guys “wore suits, not because they had to but because they wanted to”. According to a Brooklyn DJ, Dan Pucciarelli (2018), “The guys wore nice pants, a nice shirt, a leather jacket, collar over, collar up. The girls always wore heels, always wore a dress, always put on make-up, always had their hair done”. While girls are remembered wearing “Lycra body suits under either a skirt or skintight jeans”, it was “always with heels”. Implicit in the acceptance of an adultlike aesthetic is the mandate to look “nice” which

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Fig. 5.3  The new look of Italian American youth culture in a Queens club is reserved for 1987 (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/Bensonhurst 86th Street”, 12:19, YouTube, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018)

is coded as “dressing up” to reflect a higher social status. Dressing up has historically been important when outer borough New Yorkers go “into the city” for extraordinary occasions like a Broadway show (Fig. 5.3). Adult influences suggest the early stages of a youth culture boundary in relation to parental values. However, disco pointed a new Italian American style of consumption toward closer alignment with the values of the media and entertainment culture. Conservative adultlike fashions were eschewed for the tight bell-bottom pants and platform shoes showcased in and likely promoted by SNF, like the Quiana shirts mentioned by Echols’ musician. The outer borough scene was undoubtedly lured by the hedonistic excess of Manhattan club culture which explains the subsequent interest in Manhattan venues. The disco became the consummate space for ritualized consumption—a veritable “cathedral of consumption”, a development that took an ironic twist when the infamous

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Manhattan club Limelight opened in a renovated Episcopalian church. The Manhattan club scene raised the premium on consumption style—to purchase entrance to the dance floor, drinks at the bar and perhaps drugs in the bathroom. Although the consummate spectacle was found in Manhattan dance clubs like The Limelight and Sound Factory, these sites have always made it difficult to decode fashion rules that are notoriously unstated. Marginalized by outer borough club culture capital, Italian American youth were framed as “crashing” Manhattan discos (see Chapter 7). Differences in cultural capital can explain a reputation for conspicuous (i.e., “flashy”) display or the big gesture: big jewelry, big cars, big hair, big muscles, etc. that manipulates the volume of consumption to mask the cultivation of the requisite style. By the late 1980s, a Guido style referenced to clubbing was already defined by a specialized and burgeoning “repertoire of commodities” (Storey 1999: 168). The centerpiece of this style was mainstream designer brands, Members Only, Sergio Tacchini and Z. Cavaricci. A continuously expanding repertoire includes jewelry and cologne (Armani Exchange, Curve, and AXE), cell phones, and hair products. Defined by polyester in the initial turn to disco, Guido style has gravitated to more expensive brand names clothing such as Polo, Chanel, Armani, and Dolce and Gabbana. A cornucopia of commodity status symbols is inventoried in this Urban Dictionary entry for “Guido Style/Fashion” (2011): armani exchange, diesel, dolce & gabbana, gucci, versace jeans couture, dirty english, ed hardy, affliction, blac label, ben sherman, guess, g by guess, superdry jeans, evisu jeans, dkny jeans, gf ferre, 7 for all mandkind jeans, lacoste polos, hugo boss polos, abercrombie & fitch, burberry polos, energie, 55dsl, diesel black gold, famous stars & straps (younger guidos), marc ecko cut & sew, tommy hilfiger, prada, just cavalli, calvin klein jeans, kenneth cole reaction, express, french connection, fcuk, john galliano, ag adriano goldschmied, inc international concepts, buffalo david bitton, zara, h&m, sergio tacchini polos and tracksuits, puma tracksuits, ferrari tracksuits, adidas tracksuits, air jordan tracksuits, pierre cardin tracksuits (older guidos), air jordans, af1s, gold or silver chains, most notably in figaro or curb link style, gold or silver bracelets, high end diamond watch such as rolex, breitling, cartier, tag heuer, gucci, joe rodeo etc. if not diamond watch, then armani exchange, dolce & gabbana, hugo boss, movado, or rado watch. expensive loud sunglasses, big diamond earrings most likely on both ears (obvious giveaway youre a guido if not gay), gucci or lv or armani wallet, gucci hats, ed hardy hats, rhinestone hats, armani exchange

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hats, kangol berets (older guidos/greaseballs), pinky rings (mainly older guidos/greaseballs) tattoos of jesus or cross or italian flag etc., armani exchange belts, dolce & gabbana belts, diesel belts, gucci belts.

The extensive array of commodities listed here suggests consumption style boundaries that are rather “open” and, therefore, “unstable” (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). To this extent, Guido is less defined by particular commodities than the conspicuous consumption of trendy upscale commodities. Privileging commodity consumption provides a sharp break with the local youth style tradition as well as an ethnic tradition that pivots on economic scarcity. Guido performs a “longing” for consumption if not its “visible practice” (Campbell 1987: 89) that suggests a coherent world view. According to self-identified “Guido” from Queens, Mike (2004), “To be a true Guido means that you are able to afford the Guido lifestyle, which includes the expensive clothes, cars, and nights”. Another Guido named John (2001) describes the look, previously defined by a predilection for polyester, as dependent on “expensive brand name clothing such as Polo, DKNY, Armani exchange and dolce and Gabbana”. It is complemented by expensive accessories like “oversized gold jewelry”, “the flashier the better”, and automobiles such as “a Maxima, Acura or a Lexus”. In the 1990s, a more extensive landscape of consumption included tanning salons, gyms, and beauty parlors where “the Guidettes get manicures, pedicures, and have their eyebrows waxed”. Impressive financial expenditure has been built into dating relationships. Twentyyear-old Josephine’s “boyfriend” and “future husband” has an income derived from “a family business”: This allows him to buy me the material items such as diamonds and the latest clothing gear. Just the other day he bought me the entire Chanel snowsuit for when we go out in his 2001 four-wheeler, now that winter is here (2001).

While Josephine is describing a high ranking style that is predicated on sufficient discretionary income, Guido also symbolizes the “consumer desire” (Lipsitz 1994: 5) of less affluent Italian American youth. Mass media lifestyle guides have been enlisted to hone Guido consumer desire and taste; GQ magazine was described by youth in the late 1980s as “the Guido fashion bible”. According to 19-year-old Michael:

128  D. TRICARICO Money is very important to Guidos and is seen as a high social status. If you don’t have the money for the Guido lifestyle you have to pretend you do (2004).

A consumerist pose represents an escape from parental class, although not parental aspirations for a distinctively American scenario of socioeconomic mobility. The following chapter suggests a similar reworking of parental ethnicity.

The Weight of the Local Style Tradition The turn to disco did not become a “club culture” nor did it result in a passive mirroring of elite clubbing. Instead, disco was folded into a local Italian American youth style tradition. This was proactive, an artifact of outer borough ethnic culture, and not simply owing to deficits in economic and cultural capital vis-à-vis the “glitterati” and “jet set” dominating the Manhattan club scene. In a similar manner, Guido stood up to the burgeoning pop culture presence of Hip Hop (see Chapter 7). The weight of this youth style tradition is most prominent in regard to the male tough pose. Guido is distinguished by the performance of male identity embedded in the lower-class urban street culture that spawned greaser. Elijah Anderson notes that “the basic requirement” of the “street code” is “the display of a certain predisposition to violence”, relying on “facial expressions, gait, and direct talk” as well as “clothes, grooming, and jewelry” (Anderson 1990: 72–74). Anderson situated a “code of the street” in the Black “ghetto” in West Philadelphia but observed, in a side note, that due to similar structural conditions, it “can be observed in working class…Italian communities” (ibid.: 84). The weight of an Italian American street code can be seen in the bodily appearance norms that underscores a working-class masculine performance of “physicality”. However, street culture masculinity underwent changes in the club space and its attendant consumption opportunities. The sensual atmosphere of the club enlists the Guido body as an “all-consuming project” (Fikentscher 2000) in ways that transcend working-class greaser masculinity. It makes the Guido body an object of display in its own right. Street culture masculinity made the body matter for fighting, especially in the context of turf defense. However, the importance of “looking ripped” (“stomach-pump chic”) sublimates fighting; muscularity is redefined by an aesthetic yardstick—about the

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gaze not the body as an instrumentality. The chiseled Guido upper body is in contradistinction to the blue-collar worker’s upper body mass and even girth. Guidos “escape class” by undressing the body to symbolize a conspicuous leisure style that requires time off from work and family obligations. Narcissistic themes are accentuated by routines that complement the bodybuilding regime such as tanning, which refracts light in a way that makes muscularity appear more defined. The elevation of the male body in the visual vernacular of Guido has also been promoted by the popular culture trend of bodybuilding. Weight lifting had been a working-class pastime and gritty areas like Benonhurst and Gravesend were dotted with small unpretentious and inexpensive gyms. By the early 1980s, gym membership became a subcultural credential. The Guido gym scene that crystallized in the outer boroughs in the 1980s was predicated on increased leisure and discretionary income for memberships, stylish workout clothes, and chemical supplements to enhance performance and muscularity. It gradually became a complement to the club as a quintessential subcultural venue featuring a merger of aesthetics and performance strategies. Indeed, the gym has taken on the ambience of a dance club, with throbbing dance music pumped out by powerful speakers and shiny glass and metallic surfaces. The ascendance of a bodybuilding aesthetic, in turn, impacted on the club as the major reference for Guido style. Thus, workout fashions gym pants and “muscle shirts” were adopted for clubbing. Designer brands like Armani Exchange and Deisel have aestheticized as well as commodified the “guinea tee”, a garment that marked the dirty labor of greasy Italians. This transformation was validated by GQ magazine for JS Guido (see Chapter 9). Bodybuilding has ironically led to practices that blur gender differences. A bodybuilding aesthetic subverts the working-class gender ideal of “physicality” with an ethos of “narcissistic perfection” (Cross 2008). Bodybuilding has also delivered the feminine beauty regimen of depilation, countering a stereotypical Italian American body. The removal of hair from the upper and lower torso via techniques such as waxing complements an aesthetic focused on muscle definition. It also seems to be a factor in the removal of facial hair including the beard and in the sculpting of eyebrows via threading, a practice and aesthetic that is now diffused into the mainstream youth culture. A bodybuilder adds that “Being Italian and living so close to Howard Beach I’m around a lot of guys that get their nails manicured” (personal communication 2005).

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Despite a “macho” image, males have steadily become more fastidious in arranging their look; the JS mantra of “gym, tan, laundry” enshrined masculine narcissism as a default position (see Chapter 9). At the same time, the elevation of the male body as an aesthetic ideal has been under pressure from the Italian “code of the street”. “Looking ripped” remained in the service of aggressive masculinity as Italian neighborhoods that continued to stage episodes of street violence (see Chapter 8). Fashion is coded for gender inequality when “muscle tees” are also called “wife-beaters”. More to the point, aggressive masculinity continued to be represented in the style, and not below the surface, to the extent that fighting can break out in the clubs, which are otherwise a place where dancing happens. It is noteworthy that the signature Guido dance move into the 2000s was “the fist pump” which is fighting pose that does not conceal the Guido’s reputation for not being a good dancer, now further impaired by muscularity. The fist pump erupted into a violent exchange on the dance floor of the Metropolis in Queens in 2001 between Guido cliques with connections to rival Mafia families, an incident that led to the club’s closure. Guidos were linked to episodes of fighting in Manhattan clubs in the 1990s (see Chapter 7). Staged in the ritual center of dance club culture, fighting accentuates Guido style much like the Teddy Boys (Cross 2008). This predisposition to fighting was highlighted by JS. A masculine tough pose bids to correct for the drift toward “narcissistic perfection” associated with manicures and depilation as well as the privileging of female status in on the dance floor. It also counters a gay aesthetic that heavily imprinted on the Manhattan clubs (Fikentscher 2000). As such, Guido validates a dubious masculine sensuality in reference to a street code much like gangsta hip hop. Car culture also retained its ritual importance for Guido. Guido embellished a car culture that was a key greaser pastime and positioned Italian American youth in the mainstream youth culture. Like “greasers” but also Chicano “low riders”, Guido is strongly identified with “cruising”—socializing with friends in moving cars for entirely expressive purposes. Cruising scenes are public spaces that furnish a common destination for private vehicles. When I first heard about Guido in 1986 it was not in reference to clubbing but a cruising scene along New Utrecht Avenue and 86th Streets which were wide thoroughfares providing enough space to pull over to the curb or double park in order to fraternize when friends and dating prospects were encountered. It was celebrated in the Guido MCs song “Bensonhurst, 86th Street”.

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This cruising scene was the only routinized public “spectacle” aside from the dance club. As in other cruising scenes, Guidomobiles converge on meaningful locales such as a park or a stretch of avenue; in the process, rights are established to a piece of turf (a public place is privatized). Cars pass through the circuit, moving at a relatively slow clip to maximize expressive possibilities. All along the route, cars are parked or idled, and youth “hang out”. Their sociability remains tied to the automobile as source of music, topic of conversation, furniture, and signal to other cruising youth. Every outer borough community had its own cruising scene like Astoria Park in western Queens and Francis Lewis Boulevard in eastern Queens. The Bensonhurst scene on weekends along a commercial street framed overhead by elevated subway tracks, the “el”, attracted youth from other boroughs and even the suburbs. The scene was bustling by 10 p.m. and continued into the early morning hours, attracting Guidos and Guidettes for a rendezvous before or after the club performance. In pleasant weather, the strip was congested with cars and youth posing in style. Cruising scenes were linked to racing strips that were in proximity to Italian American neighborhoods such as Conduit Blvd. which runs parallel to the Belt Parkway in Ozone Park and a stretch of Francis Lewis Blvd. in Bayside, Queens (“Street Racing at Franny Lew ‘Up By Prep’” 1994). Street racing scenes seemingly embellished if not instigated by the Hollywood film “Fast and Furious” were problematic for local residents and NYPD precincts especially when they led to tragic accidents (Fig. 5.4). A distinctive driving style resonates with underlying values. Vehicles were enlisted to manage an image of aggressive masculinity, reflected in the term “muscle cars”, and privileged consumption. It also articulated with the club spectacle. Cruising preceded and followed clubbing and involved an activity the overlapped with the club: dance music blared from car speakers and occasionally dancing would erupt along the route. Cars were dressed up for the club moved outside to the urban streetscape. Since the cruising scene has deep subcultural significance, cars had to be in style. As with their personal adornment, the cars were “loaded” with subcultural symbols. Into the 1990s, the Guidomobile was adorned with symbolic paraphernalia like cascading ribbons, garter belts stretched around sun visors and Playboy door locks, disco balls suspended from the rear-view mirror and blinking lights on the dash, gold chain license plate frames, and ethnic insignia such as an Italian flag decal for the rear bumper, or red, white and green streamers for the rear-view mirror.

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Fig. 5.4  Mint Caddy Fleetwood with Red Ribbon tied to Rear-View Mirror at Astoria Park for the weekend cruisin’ scene (Source “Astoria Park 80s”, 13:41, published by cos1965 on Jan. 13, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wXyKpukNKy8&t=2s, accessed 8.21.2018)

Disco and rap music provide an insistent sound track that caused the glittering disco balls suspended from the rear-view mirror to gyrate. Guido was elaborated in a distinctive driving style which requires steering with the wrist, typically with the right arm stretched out across the headrest of the front passenger seat. Exaggerating this posture, the driver lists to the right, sometimes so sharply that his head is barely visible from a position outside the car. Known in youth circles as “the Cugine Lean”, it suggests a confident attitude toward driving, presumably befitting “the rulers of the roads”, one of the numerous boastful lines in “Guido Rap”. The “lean” assumes an acrobatic dimension, especially when the left leg is extended out of the driver’s window. The relaxed driving posture, which recalls the road demeanor of the Pachuco low rider, was thrown into relief by a default style that was “fast and furious” and, so, complemented their tough pose. Guidomobiles were the product of symbolic work that clearly marked a public space.

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Cars mediated a Guido identity, articulating with other style elements. Within the subculture, the automobile becomes a “surrogate self” (Ewen 1977: 76) for the Guido male; in the late 1980s, it was not uncommon to see the owner’s name and the names of intimates stenciled on car doors along with meaningful lyrics of dance songs. Cruising is a ritual that showcases the car rather than the driver, although prestige redounds to the latter. The dark tinted windows, a signature style element that is illegal in New York City, make it impossible to see the driver; this may explain attempts to personalize the vehicle, for example, the owner’s name stenciled on the car and the “personalized” license plates, although this is another manifestation of the merging of man and machine into the Guidomobile. Thus, the car as self also “wears” an Italian horn on the rear-view mirror and gold chains around the license plate. Paralleling the attention paid to personal grooming, the car is pampered with accessories and upgrades like custom wheels and receives frequent washing and waxing—paralleling the regimen of “narcissistic perfection” surrounding the Guido body. The merging of personal identity with the automobile was perhaps best reflected in the nickname of one youth: “Robby Eldorado” which, in this case, expressed an aspirational status for an 18-year-old college freshman that was subsequently realized in the form of a used Cadillac. It only follows that the automobile affects status in the male peer group and is a major bargaining chip in attracting Guidettes. Although he struggled to make car payments with an income derived from a job as a busboy in a local Italian restaurant, “Robby Eldorado” was persuaded that he could “hook up” more with a Caddy. Cars have been a vehicle for negotiating Guido in relation to other youth subcultures. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the “coolest” or ideal “Guidomobile” (also “Cuzmobile” in the late 1980s) was a late-model American make in the luxury class such as the Cadillac Eldorado, Seville and Coupe Deville—Guidos were conversant with the distinctions—and the Buick Riviera; to a lesser extent, it referred to smaller, racy American models like the Camaro (IROC Z) and Trans Am built for speed and so reflecting a youth culture agenda. In both cases, there is a contrast to customized Japanese imports known as “Rice Cars” and favored at the time by Asian youth but also Black youth. Guidos incorporated “rice cars” into their repertoire in the late 1990s aligning with a broader trend. Luxury cars remain idealized but the classic “Dadillac” Eldorado has given way to the Escalade, a model favored by gangsta rappers and Guido Pauly D on JS, continuing to favor an American design over prestigious imports like Mercedes and BMW.

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Bellas and Fellas in Cyberspace New stylized performances were added when outer borough Italian American youth went online to establish a chat room scene in the late 1990s, a generation after SNF and the turn to disco. ItalChat is an artifact of the commercial popular culture and reflects a broader trend toward the establishment of youth culture practice on the Internet in the late 1990s (Best and Kellner 2003). A chat scene positioned local Italian American youth in a youth culture practice that has since evolved into extensive sites for social networking like Facebook and You Tube. As a commercial media space it was accessible to youth from throughout the metropolitan area (and beyond), facilitating subcultural development revolving to a significant degree around an agenda to expand the network of dating and sexual partners. As with newer forms of social media like Instagram and Twitter, chat rooms were characterized by distinctive performance conventions. Discursive contexts like Internet chat rooms can be viewed as a “microculture” that generates “flows of meaning which are managed by people in small groups that meet on an everyday basis” (Wulff 1995: 64). Although participation was not face to face, the concept targets a number of important conceptual issues for ItalChat, especially the opportunity for youth culture actors to negotiate identities as they “choose cultural concerns that relate to their specific situation and reformulate them on their own terms as far as possible” (Wulff 1995: 64). ItalChat adapted the performance conventions of Internet chat to the agenda of an offline youth subculture which revolved around of identity display, social networking and sociability, and prospecting for dates and sexual partners. Considerable energy was invested in the stylized presentation of identity. This referenced familiar offline elements although the Internet occasioned a different kind of spectacle. Home pages facilitated on-screen face work and self-advertisement anticipating the popular youth sites Facebook and Myspace. The computer screen provided a virtual wall for cyber writers. Virtual culture allowed for the creation of “expanded identities” (Turkle 1995) and “life-movies” that were more “imaginative” than “expressive” (Gabler 1998). Born in Italian Skies Sent Down to Brooklyn To Put Sparkles in Your Eyes Freestyle Goddess Livin in this Bensonhurst Fairytale

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Stylized presentations routinely appropriated popular media texts, like the lyrics of a favorite song: “The way I feel is sexual. It can’t be intellectual”. Fantasy was not only acceptable but expected. However, this was a virtual embellishment of a local cultural script. After all, the turn to disco had already provided outer borough Italian American youth with a regular dose of fantasy escape. Stylized performances in ItalChat were situated in a proprietary youth style performed in offline worlds. A local cast of characters was transparent in virtual ItalChat narratives. A club culture that was quintessentially Guido had totemic value in ItalChat: There is no better music than freestyle. House music is life. Without it there is No Life.

The display of youth culture capital was evident in stylized screen names: “I’m a Freestyle Queen in Guidoland”. Dance song lyrics were quoted in chat text and sampled for home pages, mimicking the lyrics hand-stenciled on “Guidomobiles” in the late 1980s. One homepage evoked the physical milieu of the dance club with a digital graphic of an iconic glittering silver disco ball rotating against a wall of luminescent color, recalling the miniature disco balls suspended from the rear-view mirrors of the “Guidomobiles”. The ritual of privileging local dance club venues as youth culture practice was celebrated as the quintessential act of subcultural production. Clubbing credentials were submitted as subcultural capital: Its clubs, clubs, and more clubs. We tear up the Dance Floor.

Loyalties were expressed for clubs currently patronized by subcultural Italians like Sound Factory: “You Can’t Compare That Club To Anything”. On club nights there was excited anticipation: Factory Off The Hook Tonite [scrolled as it appeared]

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Rendezvous were arranged: “It’s club night my Guidos. Anyone going to the Palladium tonite?” Individuals identified as “club promoters” extended invitations for their “guest list”. Chat service not only offered a new commodity to be fashioned for youth culture identity in the form of a new setting for leisure-based consumption. A chat scene supported discourse about a consumption style that was becoming more oriented to the media and entertainment culture. In contrast to WKTU, it was a site for commodity talk inside the peer group—a focus group for an expanding repertoire of consumption. Chat and identity work in personal web pages (a precursor to social networking sites like Facebook) disseminated information about commodities. As with other consumerist identities, close attention was paid to arbiters of taste in the mainstream media, notably WKTU, which they listened to and discussed while online. The men’s fashion magazine GQ, perhaps the definitive arbiter of the Guido club look, was a popular building block for a screen name (e.g., “GQGuinea”). Consumption talk was also directed at the poaching of commodities identified with other youth styles, most notably hip hop. ItalChat reveals the way youth culture insiders use commodities like designer brands to cement relationships, a practice that has been exploited by corporations in contemporary social media like Facebook and Youtube. On the other hand, chat room discourse created invidious style distinctions with subcultural rivals (see Chapter 7). The discursive format of ItalChat promoted experimentation with new forms of youth culture capital including gangsta. A significant development was the appropriation of more empowered female identities in names like “Bella” in lieu of the derivative and negatively privileged “Guidette”. An interactive media space that opened up the conversation about Guido identity revealed internal differences including the possibility that Guido is not appropriate symbolism. While ItalChat offered a “safe space” to claim a distinctive boundary in some respects, youth others sought to infiltrate the cyberspace border to poach scarce resources. Cub culture hedonism was expressed in the nomenclature of “hottie”. ItalChat discourse reconciled a conspicuously sexual persona with ethnicity: “Where are my Italian Hotties!” The term especially identified a female sexual gaze in the heightened sensual environment of the dance club (“Im at the clubs hanging out with all the hotties”). Appropriation by females flouted traditional patriarchal authority with to “turn heads” and “break hearts”. The nomenclature also repudiated the derivative

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Guidette label and was extended to Italian males weakening Guido as an identity symbol in the process. The Hottie symbol was invoked for one of the two long-running ItalChat rooms suggesting the ascendance of club culture hedonism over masculinist Guido street values. “Hottie cool” was referenced through home page links to a local dance club industry web site that sponsored contests for the “hottest” contestants, males as well as female, represented in digital photographs. Chat culture underscored the importance of clubbing for a distinctive “Italian look”. ItalChat introduced new conventions for meeting dating partners. Chat room presentations of self were groomed for “hooking up”: “Chasin the Italian Ladies. Lookin for a Guidette!” Although digital photographs were increasingly prerequisites for hooking up, the limited repertoire of visual cues meant that sexual interest was primarily conveyed through wordplay rather than meaningful looks. Heterosexual interest could be communicated with blunt directness: “Where’s my Guidettes at?” Relative anonymity may have promoted more blatantly sexualized presentations: “Any ladies in here wanna sex me up?”; “Saving Sperm for Cancun”. While females could follow a romantic tack, they also affected a sexual gaze; anonymity may have promoted a challenge to a masculinist ideology that framed “Guidettes” as sexual property that, in the words of a Guido interviewed in 1989, could be “used and abused”. In this online setting, females subverted the masculinist ideology of Guido when they represented as sexual predators and objectified males: “Where are my Guidos!” A “Full-time Guidette” appropriated the cruising rituals of male car culture for “Guido runs”.

Poaching Hip Hop Incorporating Black style is hardly new in the local Italian American youth style tradition. This act has to be distinguished from the appropriation of popular American culture like disco because it is a “common culture” which makes a compelling claim to ownership. This form of appropriation is textual poaching and it constitutes a practice of boundary crossing leading to social as well as cultural change (Lipsitz 1994). Guido has generously appropriated style elements from across the subcultural boundary. Notable examples include styles identified with other subcultures encountered in the disco space like gays. However, textual poaching has been more significantly oriented to Hip Hop, reflecting a historical preoccupation with Black style tradition. While the historical

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problem of popular Black music is that it lies across a racial boundary that is integral to the construction of Italian ethnicity not only in local youth culture but in the city. However, the mainstreaming of Hip Hop in the late 1980s, for example with representation on MTV’s “Yo, MTV Raps”, likely enhanced the predisposition toward Black music in the local style tradition to the extent that it provided pop culture validation. At the same time, commercialization may have weakened the proprietary claim of Black youth on Hip Hop. Hip Hop was in the sights of outer borough Italian American youth in the mid-1980s when it was only beginning to cross-over to white youth. While “Guido Rap” ratified the position of Guidos as the “Kings of the discos!”, it also staked a claim to a genre that was the creative property of a rival ethnic group. Rap music contributes a sensibility that portrays masculine swagger and pounding bass lines that make even Cadillacs “go boom”, to borrow a lyric expression from a late 80s Rap song. A more sophisticated response to Hip Hop and specifically the rap music genre would follow that straddles the subcultural boundary (Sciorra 2011). Rank and file Guido have continued to poach elements of Hip Hop, especially rap for their soundtrack and some clothing fashion, which they carefully calibrated for subcultural distinction. A New York Times story that provided background to a racial attack on a black youth in Howard Beach in 2005 depicted hip hop as the dominant youth style with photographs showing youth decked out in turned— around baseball caps and baggy “clothing by G-unit, Sean John and other hip hop labels” (Confessore 2006). This turn to Hip Hop was corroborated by a reality TV series “Growing Up Gotti”, a reference to the three teenage sons of John Gotti’s daughter Victoria who grew up in Howard Beach which has remained the site of the Gotti family homestead. Their foray into Hip Hop featured an attempt to network into the rap business with an African American rapper who legally changed his name to “Gotti”. The ItalChat ethnography indicated that Guido had extensively absorbed the argot of gangsta Hip Hop by 1999, which may be construed as a barometer of the subculture’s appetite for this Black youth style. Interest in Hip Hop focused on stylized “gangsta” speech. “Gangsta” is a rap “genre” which flaunts themes of “ganglife, or more generally, life in the ghetto from the perspective of the criminal (or liminal, transgressive) figure” and has even defined “a new genre” called

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“don rap” that ironically mines Mafia themes (Krim 2000: 70–83). Gangsta music and music videos have proliferated in the mainstream media graphically depicting the “playa principles” embraced by “the pimp”, “the hustler” and “the mack” (George 1998: 50). ItalChat youth did not reference the music by name but evidenced familiarity with Black street culture imagery; thus, a self-proclaimed “Guido” lived in “Crooklyn”, the title of an autobiographical Spike Lee film, and Bronx Guidos borrowed the Hip Hop designation “Boogie Down Bronx”. The ostensible purpose is to cultivate an attitude or pose that communicates a cool style—cool because it reflects the values of their local worlds as well as its media value. The words and narratives authored by another youth category expanded the expressive capabilities of ItalChat youth including a new vocabulary of personality traits (“phat”, “fly”), new performance repertoires (“illin’” and “sweatin’”) and new gendered poses (“playas” and “pimps”, “hoes” and “bitches”). There seemed to be sheer enjoyment in using the words of gangstas. ItalChat gangstas used the expression “aight”, a southern folk corruption of “alright”, dropped final consonants (“pimpin”) and substituted “a” for “er” (“playa”) and “z” for “s” (“boyz”), with the latter often exaggerated as a final consonant (“Boyzzz”). They adopted the use of the verb form “to be” that Italian American chatters identified as “Ebonics”: “Be pimpin hoes nationwide”. Perhaps nothing indicates their embrace of urban Black youth jargon more than the use of the word “nigga”, a symbolic reversal of a racist epithet intended to resignify an aggressive, genuine Blackness: “Sup my niggaz”, “I love my tru niggaz”, “F__K You Niggaz who hate me”. In a setting that privileged words, gangsta furnished a cool lexicon for a youth culture pose committed to hedonistic consumption: “I’m into chillin, cruising, pimpin, partying, drinkin, blazin”. It established an idiom for dramatizing values of consumption and masculine power that were at the center of the Guido performance: Pimpin da Benz…Spendin da phat cash My pockets are always fully loaded like a gun. [lyric by Jay Z] Pimpen the Bitchez Im a playa for life, a real Guido Full-time Guido. Pimpin da Hotties

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Gangsta jargon and imagery were seamlessly incorporated into the online scene of these Italian American youth. Ethnicity prominently assisted in the expropriation. Gangsta challenged the derivative “Guidette” persona with a female sexual gaze: I Pimp da Fellaz Im the one that makes all the pigeonz drool and all you scrubs look like foolz Watch your man cause guys be sweatin us like whoa Tell me why these hoez don’t like me

The stylized jargon of gangsta critiqued the male hegemony inherent in Guido: Y is it wen a guyz a playa hes considered a PrO But wen a Girl take ha turn SHeS considered a Ho

Without adult surveillance, gangsta sexuality brazenly challenged the remains of a traditional female gender script especially any pretense of being a “good Italian daughter”: If your girl only knew that you waz tryna get wif me and if your girl could only see How you be dissin her ta talk to me Wha would she do Stop Jocken

Poaching makes claims to an authentic style problematic. Poaching Hip Hop is a problem for Guido not only because it involves raiding another group’s symbolic property but because of the antipathies between Italian Americans and African Americans that were quite raised at the time in the city especially in Bensonhurst (see Chapter 8). Incorporating Hip Hop within the style tradition is a way of managing subcultural identity. Ethnicity, here, plays an important role in this strategy, a symbol bank that authenticates style within an Italian American culture and naturalizes elements that are poached or appropriated. The following chapter will expand on the role of ethnicity in calling attention to Italian American youth style.

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Note 1.  Data was collected from community college students in Queens using three instruments: (1) a written questionnaire consisting of 13 openended items distributed to self-identified Guidos/Guidettes; (2) written responses to the open-ended question, “What is a Guido?” (N ==116); and (3) essays volunteered for a graded assignment on the subject of “youth subcultures”.

CHAPTER 6

“It’s Cool Being Italian”: Fashioning an Ethnic Youth Style

The previous chapter focused on the stylized performances crafted from the “expressive artifices” of popular American culture (Ewen 1988). Style is an idiom that is distinguished by the consumption of “all things that give immediate pleasure and little lasting use” (Ogersby 1999: 142). Ethnicity, on the other hand, is an “idiom” that derives its “power” from the “primordial” sphere of “blood ties” and “cultural tradition” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 16–19). While youth is fleeting and style is ephemeral, ethnic identity answers the question “Who are we?” and it begs the more fundamental question “What are we?” (Nagel 1998: 57). Invoking ethnicity for style-based youth culture is ostensibly a contradiction, “at one and the same time calling attention to ethnic differences and demonstrating how they might be transcended” (Lipsitz 1994b: 119). This contradiction is magnified when ethnic youth style is merchandised within the popular culture (see Chapter 9). However, a resolution is found in a constructionist perspective of ethnicity which allows for a purposive or strategic manipulation of meaning in order to enhance identifiable positions (Cornell and Hartmann 2007). As such, Guido is a project to position Italian American youth in the name of ethnicity for the consumption of American pop culture styles in dress, music, sexuality, leisure activities and other scarce youth culture resources. Ethnicity is invoked as a boundary marker in the competition for status within youth “style markets” (see Milner 2004: 78). It is constructed as a scarce resource in itself, as “primordial” cultural capital, only to be reconciled with youth popular © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_6

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cultural idioms, agendas, and settings—the “power” of the stylishly superficial and ephemeral. This chapter focuses on the symbolic work that constructs ethnicity for a distinct youth culture identity.

A Hybrid Space Ethnicity and youth style are not airtight, mutually exclusive compartments. The concept of “bifocality” (Lipsitz 1991) suggests separate strands of culture and identity that, instead, become entwined with and even blended by youth agency (Maira 2002). Ethnicity is dramatized as an integral part of a Guido image, “presented” to both insiders and outsiders in stylized performances within the youth scene. This happens inadvertently or by default insofar as American youth culture is practiced by actors who possess a thick Italian ethnicity (i.e., there is bifocality). It is also conscious and dramaturgical, reflecting an agenda that preserves cultural difference and competes for scarce resources. Guido is the performance of a style that performs Italian American ethnicity. In the late 1980s, Italian American ethnicity was necessary to be “a real Guido”. Subcultural youth traded on ethnicity for youth culture status. “Guido Rap” tells fellow ethnic youth to “Stand tall and proud, ‘cause we’re Italian”. However, this bestows an entitlement, that they are “allowed to rock this joint”—to assert their status in terms of youth culture claims and values The photo (Fig. 6.1) the Guido MCs coming on stage at a Queens club in 1987 waving both Italian and American flags; it is the former, however, that is accentuated in the song’s lyrics. Being “Italian” (i.e., an identity that is “more Italian” than “Italian-American”) is valued because it is assumed to privilege insiders in the youth scene. It was believed to convey sexual advantages (“Girls see more in Italian guys”; “The mintest girls are Italian”). There was also the belief that Italian ethnicity elicited turf deference (“Nobody f—s with you.”). Finally, being Italian is a highly valued personal attribute that is rewarded with peer group popularity. Your [sic] more socially accepted. People look up to you. Its [sic] cool being Italian. It is in. Its [sic] the best.

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Fig. 6.1  The Guido MCs called attention to being Italian in the context of American youth popular culture (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/Bensonhurst 86th Street”, YouTube, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018)

Guido youth highlighted their Italian ancestry to enhance their youth culture status; one teen underlined the fact that her parents were “just off the boat”, claiming prestige for what historically has been denigrated as “greenhorn”. Youth were inclined to manipulate the ancestral record; a 17-year-old began calling himself “Salvatore” in lieu of his given “American” name and substituted his mother’s maiden Italian surname (his parents were divorced) for the family’s Irish name. At the same time, ethnicity was stylized. When asked, “What makes you and your friends Italian?” Guido youth point to visual elements of style: “The way we dress, the haircut, gold and cars”. Youth others corroborated this hybrid ethnic-youth space, framing Italian American ethnicity in terms of style as well: “A Guido is an Italian who drives his father’s Cadillac and likes disco”. These shared

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understandings linking Italian ethnicity and style have been established over time, spreading from local style markets to the popular culture. However, reading ethnicity into style can be misleading, as a college student discovered when on closer inspection, “a guy who looked Italian” was wearing a Star of David. In certain circumstances, this could lead to a discourse of authenticity (see this chapter below). “Salvatore” dropped some Italian words in his “line” with girls to appear more authentic. Youth with questionable ancestry may resort to more exaggerated ethnic “impression management”. Privileging ethnic Italian ancestry by insiders in local scenes has led to invidious distinctions regarding “wannabe Guidos” who have the right style but the wrong ethnic background. In the competitive youth culture market, status value is highly contested (Milner 2004). Guido is noteworthy for the animus it has elicited within the youth scene (see Chapter 8).

Ethnic Discourse Popular culture is a “critical site” for ethnic youth in negotiating “multiple identities” (Maira 2002). While it is possible to escape ethnicity, the turn to popular culture made outer borough Italian ethnicity salient in a segmented leisure market. Italian ethnicity became even more compelling when they turned to the new Internet social media in the late 1990s. This happened for several reasons. First, being Italian was an extension of who their fundamental position in the city which shaped a collective youth culture identity offline. Second, this offline youth culture practice influenced online relationships and agendas; indeed, youth networked back and forth across the boundary between these two spaces. Third, ethnicity was put to similar strategic purposes especially in regard to the performance of identity and boundary work. Indeed, ethnicity was put to new uses in the Internet chat room setting. In particular, it was called upon to embody virtual youth culture actors. In the absence of a visual style vernacular and a soundtrack, youth had to literally spell identity out. Ethnicity cuts through this clutter of multiple identities—and the identities of a multiplicity of groups. It is compelling, taking precedence over other identities because of its primordial character—an ability to ground the individual in meaningful relationships to others and to the past, and when there are few alternatives in contemporary society, including consumerism and the popular culture

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which figures prominently in the subcultural agenda. Rhetorical strategies for constructing ethnicity, including a “constructed primordialism” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 89), were harnessed to the accumulation of symbolic capital, perhaps as compensation for limited style display online. Youth had to invest more resources in form of effort and time if not money in this online setting. The turn to virtual reality for sociability and dating prospects may have elicited some trepidation among youth in 1999. Although offline connections undoubtedly allayed much of those concerns, a structural byproduct of media spaces is porous boundaries (Meyerowitz 1986). In the absence of visual cues, ethnicity may have become, if not the acid test, then a more reliable credential of belonging and insider identity. Toward that end, ethnicity was invoked to delimit a “safe space” (Fine et al.) within the new youth culture space. It was invoked for a subcultural boundary that kept others at a distance. Inside the boundary, ethnicity established an underlying cohesion among personal strangers drawn to the online scene. Being Italian was the key that unlocked the door to the chat space. Hence, the most popular room was called “Italian Place”. It is noteworthy that ethnicity, not Guido, was the symbolic marker that was used as a boundary. A plausible way to interpret this is that, in the context, of a specific youth culture practice, anyone who mattered knew how to interpret this. As mentioned above, Guido and Guidette were routinely invoked in ItalChat as identities that were not just implicitly Italian but interchangeable: “I am 100% Guido. I love Italian girls only”. While it was appropriate to ask “Is everyone Italian in here?”, Guido fine-tuned the youth culture meaning of being Italian in an “Italian Place”: “It’s all about spikey haired Guidos, fly cars, cafes, Being Italian”. In ItalChat and related offline spaces, “Italian” was coded for vernacular meaning. The limitations of ethnic identity as a credential were reflected in the consternation of “L’Italiano” who wandered into ItalChat without the usual social capital and the implicit understanding of cultural signifiers: “Io sono Italiano. Perche nessuno parlano Italiano qui?” (“I am Italian. Why is no one speaking Italian here?”). Ironically, “L’ Italiano” implicitly denied the claim in the room to authentic ethnicity and dismissed ItalChat youth as “idioti, cafoni, stronzi” (“idiots, boors, turds”). However, this kind of confusion was rare because youth typically flashed subcultural credentials and, so were guided by offline indications and expectations.

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Idioms of ethnicity seem more conducive to the chat room scene as a space where language mattered. Youth were not primarily interested in the performance of ethnicity which was authentically located in primordial arenas like the Italian family. However, the performance of style was relatively limited in chat space by the absence of visual images and sound. At best, language had to be used to describe their engagement with popular culture such as a look that featured designer fashions and a passion for dance music. While this had to be done for the construction of ethnic identity as well, the online chat space tended to level the playing field between the dual subcultural discourses. Perhaps more importantly, ItalChat revealed that outer borough youth were prepared or disposed to use ethnicity for youth culture practice when the opportunity or need arose. A chat room scene was another space that facilitated a hybrid ethnic youth identity. Since ethnicity was an identity staple, necessary and even sufficient legitimate access to ItalChat, it became a focal point for impression management (Lyman and Douglas 1973). Relying on language, the construction of ethnicity for subcultural distinction was more explicit and transparent in the online scene. ItalChat presentations unequivocally signified that “we” were, above all, “Italian”. It was made clear in the room name on the ISP roster. The display of ethnicity by participants required ongoing “symbolic work” that imprinted on chat room “microculture”. An Italian identity was overtly stated in a setting where language mattered and nonverbal cues were missing; this had to be continuous in real time because printed comments kept scrolling downward. It was routinely asserted in personal advertisements for dating partners which occupied much of the chat room scroll: “male/Italian/19” “18/f/Italian/Bensonhurst” “Any nice Italian stallions in here to talk to?” “I Love Pretty boy Italians”

It was necessary to communicate Italian ancestry in screen names which carried the burden of making first impressions and were lodged in the left-hand margin of chat text. An ethnic screen name gave the “disembodied” chat persona an ethnic “look”. Ethnic identification had the weight of a social obligation. Failure to signal and account for ethnicity warranted queries such as “Are you Italian?” and “Is everyone Italian in here?”

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The preferred identity symbol of a shared ethnicity in ItalChat was not “Italian American” but “Italian”. This is noteworthy because ItalChat youth were second and third generation; the lingua franca of ItalChat was English not Italian and the cultural frame of reference was decidedly American. This probably reflects a vernacular usage in which a hyphen is implied or unnecessary and assumes that all ethnic identities are American identities. However, being “Italian” rather than “Italian American” suggests a strategy to maximize difference based on Italian nationality across the ethnic boundary. It also implies an insider focus on ethnic authenticity. There were other significations of insider status, such as common Italian given names like Maria and Anthony (surnames were not used in the interest of online anonymity). Places saturated with ethnicity were also referenced. This included Italian American neighborhoods—Bensonhurst was especially popular—as well as the old country (“ItalyzFinest”). The collective claim to being Italian (“we”) was implicitly coded to signify a local youth subculture. Insiders could infer this from meaningful symbolism conveyed in screen names like “BrooklynItalian” and “ItalianGQ”. Invariably, ethnicity was conjoined to youth culture values, such as the club scene (“FreestyleItalianBaby”) and sexuality (“SexyGuinea”, “ItalianStallion”, “ItalianHottie”). To this extent, it was necessary, but not sufficient to possess/claim “Italian” nationality; ItalChat was a forum for youth culture players and true “insiders” knew the code. Thus, ethnic signaling was embedded in a larger transaction in which a meaningful connection was established between youth styles and Italian ethnicity. The coded meaning of “Italian” was lost on some Italians like the “Italiano” who became so exasperated with the stylized online performances that he disparaged ItalChat youth as “cafoni”, “idioti”, and “stronzi” and stormed out of the room. The identity symbol Guido efficiently implied the connection between Italian ethnicity and a certain youth style. The latter was a basic component of screen name architecture (“BrooklynGuido”) and was otherwise a generic identity frame in the chat room (“Where my Guidos at?”; “If you’re not a Guido get out”) and in personal web pages (“I am the King of the Guidos”). “Guido” had youth cultural implications because it was linked to styles distinguishing Italian American youth in metropolitan New York City. A commitment to this style configuration distinguished them from other Italian Americans and (Italian) Italians. Since ItalChat was designed to achieve a critical mass of subcultural youth, it was

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important to communicate the insider meaning of “Italian” and this was available in “Guido”. Guido signaled a meaningful connection between popular culture, especially cool youth styles, and Italian ethnicity: Its all about spikey haired Guidos, fly cars, cafes, Being Italian, How well you shake it, expensive clothes, looking Bello/Bella, XTC, and Da House musick.

Ethnicity was emphatically read into the consumption culture. It was invoked by dropping Italian designer brand names like Sergio Tacchini and Z. Cavaricci and more recently, Armani. The home page profile of a 19-year-old female adapted an American Express Card television advertisement to manipulate these ethnic signifiers to dramatize conspicuous stylish expenditure: *Price List* Versace Top $379 Prada Thong $95 Moschino Pants $95 Dolce and Gabbana Bra $119 Gucci Purse $320 Cabrio GLX $27,000 The Look When I Step Out of My Car *Priceless*

Manipulating Traditional Ethnicity Individuals and groups typically appropriate “materials from the past” for the construction of ethnic identity (Nagel 1998: 58). Musical genres and narratives embedded in a traditional heritage are conspicuously appropriated by Chicano youth in the southwest (Lipsitz 1994b) and AfricanAmerican youth in the southern United States (Dimitriadis 2009). Maira discerns the fusion of traditional Indian sounds with Hip Hop to form “bhangra” as an attempt by “Desi” youth in New York City to “showcase” ethnic “authenticity” primarily to demonstrate a connection to a “parental ethnicity” that was still committed to the ideal of arranged marriage (Maira 2002).

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In an ethnography conducted in the late 1980s, there were no references to an “Italian” heritage in local peer group performances including their music of choice (Tricarico 1991). Compared to Desis, for example, third-generation Italian American youth may not have as much traditional ethnicity at their disposal. Recent Italian immigrants come from a modern country where tradition has eroded considerably in recent decades and which supports a full-blown consumer culture (Ginsborg 2003). Since the first great wave of immigration occurred 100 years ago, local Italian American ethnic culture has absorbed more American influences into a “traditional style” (Royce 1982); this includes a local Italian American youth “style tradition” (Sansone 1995) oriented to American popular culture. Still, new second-generation youth are noteworthy because they were in a position to incorporate a thicker ethnicity into stylized performances which third-generation youth could assimilate. They appropriated the Italian language spoken at home and in the community for a street vernacular, an “Italglish” pronounced with a “Brooklyn accent”. They also tapped into the ancestral language to absorb gangsta Hip Hop, as when “playa” becomes “giocatore”. They listened to disco music with friends at the Santa Rosalia feast and incorporated local cafes into peer group repertoires which represented alternative leisure choices in relation to bars and later dance clubs—choices that may have knowingly accepted some adult surveillance. They could sing the Italian lyrics of “L’Italiano”, by Angelo Venuto and the Sicilians (Venuto came to the United States at the age of 10 and grew up in Brooklyn), the diaspora anthem that consummately expresses the privileged solidarity of a new second generation in outer borough clubs. They can also recognize objects that are believed to have or reflect ethnic value, like gold jewelry imported from Italy and Italian designer clothing (e.g., “Z. Cavaricci” jeans and “Sergio Tacchini” jump suits). The new second generation in the outer boroughs flaunted Italian national symbols like the tri-color flag and Italian soccer paraphernalia like “Azzurro” tee-shirts. Ethnicity was not just on the surface, the vernacular meaning attached to an “Italian look” that could be elaborated as in the long black hair worn by females, teased high with sticky chemical spray. The surfaces of Guido style are routinely blended with “inherited meanings” (Willis 1990: 10). Ethnic family tradition was blended with subcultural rituals. Family culture was symbolized in gold crosses made of Italian gold and

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brought over from Italy, as gifts from parents or “nonna and nonno”. It imprinted on peer group repertoires when new second-generation youth went out in groups that included siblings and cousins and with friends who were part of the family circle (this was especially intended as a moral safety net for Italian females). The thick Italian family morality that explains “cugine”, the Italian word for cousin, was incorporated into Guido. Although cugine does not designate a relationship as close as the sibling metaphor appropriated by African American youth it is stronger in the Italian heritage and suggests a moral obligation attached to ethnicity, in particular a measure of traditional values in loco parentis. While real kin went out together, fictive “cugines” added a layer of kinship morality. The moral community of Italian American “cousins” was marked by the signifiers of ethnic family rituals such as Italian gold crosses and other jewelry bestowed by adult kin as gifts. Cugine style repertoires signaled a pool of eligible partners compatible with parental preferences for ethnic endogamy. Kinship morality buttressing a shared ethnicity took on extra importance in the dance club scene. ItalChat youth demonstrated scant interest in the “materials from the past” that ethnic groups typically use to construct cultural boundaries (Nagel 1998: 58). The “little traditions” of “la famiglia” that Covello (1970) placed at the social and moral “center” of Italian life in New York City in the 1930s echoed only intermittently in ItalChat and, then, only superficially: “What meat does your mother put in the sauce?” More often than not, ethnic traditions were adapted to youth culture idioms. Thus, the term “brasciole”, the rolled, stuffed meat, trussed in twine, that accompanies meatballs and sausage in mama’s Sunday gravy was used in the context of sexual innuendo as a vernacular synonym for Italian American males: “Where are the brascioles?” The hijacking of a family culture icon is another example of the appropriation of traditional heritage for a hybrid youth culture practice. The primordial value of famiglia was accessed and, at the same time, compromised by youth culture concerns like web page “shout outs” that acknowledged family members alongside “my peeps” (friends) and gangsta idioms like “R.I.P. Nonna”. In a space organized for “hooking up”, there was only one guy looking for “Sweet Italian girls that still have some morals, can cook, knows respect”. Symbolic work also elaborated the “Italian Princess” persona which reworks an ethnic stereotype for Jewish Americans was an arriviste distortion of traditional family morality. The Princess is

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“Daddy’s Little Girl”, an identity challenges the primacy of the Guido boyfriend in the name of fathers who “spoil” their daughters with consumption (i.e., “shopping”) and are “too spoiled to work”. The Princess was often emboldened by paternal overindulgence: “Italian Princesses don’t follow rules, we make them”. Ethnic meaning was also extracted from the name “Bella”, which is Italian for a “beautiful woman/girl” and is a term of endearment within the Italian family. While “hottie” can be construed as a “putana”, like Guidette, Bella re-appropriates iconic family values. It was a further assault on the male power of Guido notably in slogans like “Bellas B4 Fellas” and “Fellas Come and Go But Bellas Are Forever”. Bella inspired a derivative identity for males: “Chillin with Mah Bellas and Mah Fellas”. While “fella” could be read as ethnic street culture (i.e., the Mafia movie Goodfellas) gendered discourse produced the male derivative “Bello”. While Desi youth felt nostalgia for India in their youth subculture and talked about traveling there (Maira 2002) there was only intermittent nostalgia for the home/old country in ItalChat: “I miss Sicily”. Place is a primordial reference in the construction of ethnic identity. Italy was an authentic place, but only on a superficial level. Thus, youth were “Italian” or “Made in Italy” but they evidenced little knowledge of Italy and little interest in the country; while interest in Italian national politics was hinted in the phrase “Forza Italiana” which literally means “Italian Power” and is the name of the political party of the Italian prime minister at the time, Silvio Berluscioni, the phrase appeared only rarely and never sparked a discussion of Italian politics. Instead, a primordial sense of place focused on the outer borough Italian American neighborhoods. Italian nationality was much more likely to be authenticated by the urban neighborhood which played no role in the ethnic iconography of Desi youth including their relationship to parental ethnicity. Neighborhoods, like Astoria and Bensonhurst were stages on which they played out individual and group identities. Local urban places routinely framed individual and group identity linked to ethnicity in ItalChat: “Sal from Bensonhurst”, “BrooklynGinzo”, “BronxBella”. Bensonhurst was anointed as quintessentially Italian: Where the real Italians are at. Bensonhurst, the home of the Italians Bensonhurst…where an Italian can be an Italian

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As the city’s most populous Italian American community Bensonhurst is to Guido what the south Bronx is to Hip Hop, its ethnic authenticity was validated in the scene and in the mainstream culture. While rivalries existed in staking claim to preeminence as the place “Where the real Italians are at”, Bensonhurst was widely accepted as the quintessentially Italian place. Its iconic may have been enhanced by the bad press resulting from the Yusuf Hawking killing (see below). Still, while Bensonhurst was a place to “be Italian”, there were other places like dance clubs and chat rooms where an Italian youth can be “cool”. Ethnicity was signaled in ItalChat through an insider-speak was derivative of the hybrid vernacular of immigrant Italian American neighborhoods, although recognized by Guido as native to Bensonhurst and southern Brooklyn (i.e., “a Brooklyn accent”). It was formed by the collision of Italian peasant dialects from earlier periods of immigration and lower-class American English. It is a signifier of “street” smartness and toughness, on the one hand, and a lack of formal education signifying elite class cultural dominance, on the other. It has absorbed traces of Americanized Italian dialect reflecting a hybrid Italian American culture rooted in the ethnic neighborhood. In ItalChat, snippets of Italian dialect typically occurred in the form of salty, scatological references (vafanculo, brasciole, strunzo, putana) and vernacular phrases (Che brutto). Nevertheless, the effect was to create an insider jargon that was also spoken by the “organic” Guido personalities on local dance music station WKTU FM “Brooklyn’s Own” Joe Causi and Goomba Johnny. Italian words were often transformed by misspelling (goombah instead of “compare”) or chat room linguistic conventions (Kbrutto), reflecting a collision between ethnic neighborhood culture and media culture. This was registered, above all, in the expressions “fuggedaboudit” and “How you doin?”1

The Mafia as an Ethnic Script Ruthless Mafia power is associated with Italian American neighborhood culture and has been valued as a resource in the city (Tricarico 1984: 63–71, 147–155). On the urban stage, having Italian ethnicity has been constructed as a cultural marker of Mafia identity. Bonano crime family associate Chris Paciello sidelined his family surname Ludwigsen for a proper southern Brooklyn nom de guerre to enhance his ascent in the ranks (Owen 2003: 89). It parallels the choice of Warren Wilhelm, Jr. to

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change his name to Bill DiBlasio before he became Mayor of New York City in 2013 (Smith 2013), albeit tapping into a different set of ethnic meanings and cultural competencies. Urban Italian neighborhood culture has provided Guido with an ethnic script in the form of the Italian American Mafia. The local Mafia syndicate and male streetcorner groups dovetailed within the defended Italian American neighborhood (Tricarico 1984: 63–71). Young males defended turf identified with the ethnic community. In Italian American neighborhoods like the South Village, local civil order was underwritten by the Mafia syndicate which was organized to maintain a market peace—the ability to conduct illicit business without surveillance by governmental authority. The defense of turf by young males was sponsored by ruthless Mafia power which auditioned prospective members with a tough street pose. Mafia figures living in Italian American neighborhoods have been role models for youth oriented to street culture. They exhibited wealth and power which could trickle down to neighborhood residents, including the July 4 street fairs hosted for the Ozone Park community by John Gotti. Career opportunities were available to young males inclined to a “queer ladder of mobility”, like Sammy Gravano who was a teenager in Bensonhurst in the 1960s. A restaurant in Queens was popular as a place of employment in the 1990s for local youth because it was owned by a notorious gangster. The Mafia offered economic opportunity in the dance club industry. Dan Pucciarelli told me that he was introduced into a network of lounges owned by local gangsters; he had to secure permission to move his record collection to the newer clubs, suggesting an indentured servitude to gangster power. Frank Owen (2003) maintains that Italian American toughs from the boroughs exploited Mafia affiliations for financial gain in Manhattan dance clubs. Chris Paciello, a self-described “big Guido from New York”, worked his way up the ladder by “shaking down drug dealers” in Manhattan clubs like Limelight before operating his own clubs in South Beach with the backing of the Bonnano crime family (Kolker and Brown 2000). In the early 2000s, WKTU DJ “Goomba Johnny” Siliano served prison time for his involvement with a Manhattan club that was alleged to have Mafia ownership.2 The Mafia has historically inspired a consumption style predicated on power and wealth. Mafiosi in the South Village were also men of leisure who dressed up in the neighborhood. In the late 1970s, the serious looking patrons of “Members Only” clubs, with sideburns a little longer

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than usual, sported leisure suits and white Capezio loafers (Tricarico: 147–155). In the 1980s, John Gotti caught the eye of fashion critics when he represented a less restrained regime of personal consumption, initially sporting a “white polyester leisure suit with short sleeves kept cuffed” and, later, “hand-painted silk ties with matching pocket squares” (Trebay 2002). There were Guidos like 21-year-old John in 2001 who wore “a shark skin suit and dress loafers” to mimic Mafia celebrity. Gotti took a big step toward self-indulgent consumption with a “bouffant haircut, which he had blown dry daily as he had his manicure” (ibid.). The manicure became part of the Guido repertoire of bodily presentation in the late 1990s that was amplified by eyebrow threading. As “the Dapper Don”, Gotti as media celebrity opened up a link between outer borough Italian American youth and the spectacle of personal consumption. However, a direct connection to Guido was mediated by younger generations of the family. John Gotti Jr. was described by Pete Hamill in Esquire as wearing “a trim Guido haircut” (Hamill 1989b). A reality TV show in 2004, Growing Up Gotti, focused on the household dynamic of John Gotti’s daughter Victoria and her three teenage sons, refracted Mafia culture in the form of nostalgic references to the imprisoned grandfather facing Federal racketeering trials. Although the term Guido is not used explicitly, it is easily read from the presentation of cultural signifiers. This became even clearer when the grandsons opened a tanning salon on Long Island that symbolized the look of nouvelle Guido. One of the grandsons became a runway model for a male clothing start-up company, “Guido New York” (see Chapter 9). Youth with Mafia family connections have historically comprised a Guido elite based on powerful “connections” and financial power, allowing them to be both style leaders and leading tough guys. This was on display when rival Guido crews from Brooklyn and Queens fought it out at the Metropolis club in College Point, Queens in 2001, which led to a closure of the club. Gotti youth continue to exhibit Italian American street culture power in suburban Howard Beach in southeastern Queens (Feuer 2017; Marzulli and McShane 2016). In ItalChat, Mafia cultural and social “capitals” were referenced in groups that “watch each other’s backs” and comport themselves with the “respect and honor” of “true Italians”. There was an attempt to situate a Mafia script in Italian neighborhood culture: “You wouldn’t talk so tough if you knew who my family is”. Alluding to powerful connections is a ritual performance in gangster street culture that was the subject of

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an inside joke: “If you know who I know you’d fuggedabout who you know”; the ritual performance revolves around the practice of dropping powerful names as in the G Fella music video, I Gotta Guy. Because it inflates the potential of fear and harm, the value of Mafia connections as social capital is cultivated and overstated. While real connections could not be discounted because the Mafia historically enforced a street code in Italian American neighborhoods, this blurred with mass media narratives; thus, a home page shrine in ItalChat manipulated images from The Godfather portraying John Gotti as “a man of respect”. Youth culture and Mafia intertwined when Goomba Johnny was incarcerated for evading Federal tax on income derived from a Manhattan supper club owned by John Gotti and Gambino family associates it resonated in ItalChat in postings to a personal web page that resembled graffiti: “Free Goomba Johnny” “Free John Gotti and Goomba Johnny”.

The imprisonment of an organic media celebrity generated a subcultural crisis in ItalChat: “The station sux without him”. Reinstalled on WKTU, Goomba boasted about his new street cred(ibility) in the rap record “Feds Threw a Party”. A relationship to the Mafia as an ethnic script was further explored in ItalChat. In one session, 5 of 23 screen names included the words “capo”, “wiseguy”, “Mafia” (twice) and “Gotti”. Reflecting its absorption by the entertainment media, the Mafia was a source of fanciful poses: Question: What’s your job? Answer: I’m a hitman for the mob! LOL. Hollywood productions like Goodfellas and The Godfather and the HBO TV series The Sopranos inspired online life-movies in ItalChat: I made them an offer they can’t refuse. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. [The Godfather] Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a gangster. [Goodfellas]

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Mafia imagery was occasionally appropriated for a female pose. Thus, “MafiaBella” called her girlfriends “Mafiettes” and re-purposed a gender-appropriate Mafia movie fantasy: “For as far back as I can remember, I wanted to marry a gangster”. Compound names linked Mafia imagery to youth culture values such as being “sexy” or the “club” life. Mafia movie imagery has been especially valuable as a consumption guide for the transformation of a “nobody” into a “somebody”. The commercially successful HBO production The Sopranos likely helped keep the track suit relevant, mimicking the one worn by Sammy the Bull Gravano on a “walk-talk” with John Gotti captured on FBI surveillance film. Michael, a twenty-year-old self-identified Guido, maintained in 2001 that young Italian American males like himself are “inspired by movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, Casino, and A Bronx Tale because they portray spending money, having nice cars, nice clothes, beautiful women lots of power and the good life”. He volunteered his favorite Mafia movie to describe a scene from his personal “life-movie” (Gabler 1998): We didn’t have to wait in line as one of the guys had a connection that put him on the waiting list of the club. It was like we were Ray Liotta when he entered the Copa Cabana through the back door in Goodfellas. (Michael 2001)

The stature of Mafia movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas in popular American culture furnished Italian American youth with another mainstream credential alongside SNF. Vicarious identification with Mafia power offers a “symbolic” resolution (Hebdige 1977) of a negatively privileged ethnicity referenced to ruthless power and the gangster’s characteristically “ostentatious display” (Ogersby 1999: 30). At the same time, Mafia media narratives validated a traditional ethnic morality. The theme of “respect” for “the family” was prevalent in personal web pages. In one case, family solidarity was expressed in two memorable lines from The Godfather: “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family is not a real man” and “Never take sides against the family”. There was also a reminiscence from Goodfellas: “A couple of kids from the neighborhood carried my mother’s groceries all the way home. You know why? It was out of respect”. These media narratives can be read by Italian Americans experiencing nostalgia for a family culture weathered by assimilation. It also maintains an invidious contrast with rival groups, inside the ethnic boundary as well, that have lost their way.

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While Mafia media narratives are a promising symbol bank, watching the video has itself become a peer group ritual that confers distinction: When my friends and I are really bored we usually watch a movie. Of course, it’s a choice of Goodfellas, The Godfather, or A Bronx Tale. They were not my favorite movies until I started hanging out with these kids. When we first started to hang out, they would say a line from a movie. I never understood what they were talking about. Now that I’ve seen almost all the Italian Mafia movies, I can join with the quotes: ‘I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse! [Corrinne, 18 year old college student, 2001]

Referencing Mafia movies is a way of connecting to popular American culture. Rudy Giuliani used The Godfather 1 for his own life-movie when he used the phrase “hit by a thunderbolt” to characterize his own first encounter with his new wife (La Ferla 2003b). Giuliani supported the invitation of The Soprano’s actors to march in the 2002 Columbus Day Parade in the city while at the same time is insulated from the Italian American anti-defamation reproach because he embodies mainstream achievement (“America’s Mayor”) and vigorously attacked real Mafiosi as U.S. Attorney. The example of Italian American youth suggests a need to capitalize on Italian Americans as pop culture celebrities whether as Mafiosi or as ballplayers like the Mets’ Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza. The mass media continues to conflate Mafia and Italian ethnicity in the popular imaginary. At the time of the ItalChat study, a 2001 Budweiser beer commercial depicted a small group of middle-aged men with a stereotypically Italian American gangster “look” assembled in an unassuming “neighborhood” bar with nothing to say to one another except “How you doin?” Years later in 2017, when urban Italian neighborhoods were mostly memory, a Subway commercial for an “Italian Sandwich” assembled a cast of stereotypes that featured a Mafioso performance. At the same time, acknowledging media influence should not dismiss the role of local Italian American gangsters. ItalChat youth manipulated this “feedback loop” of mass media imagery and vernacular culture to embellish Italian American ethnicity. Guido emerged from Italian American communities like Bensonhurst that are platforms for Mafia crime families into the twenty-first century. The appeal of Mafia is more than symbolic to the extent that its power has remained a resource in urban Italian neighborhoods. This includes the long-held vernacular assumption that Mafiosi “Take care of the neighborhood” (Tricarico 1984: 63–71).

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A view expressed on the local Howard Beach grapevine had it that the violent assault on an Italian American woman jogging on local trails in 2016 would have played out differently “if John Gotti was alive” (see Marzulli and McShane 2016). Guido symbolizes the conflation of Italian ethnicity with the Italian American Mafia. As such, stylized performances of Guido take their cue from the Mafia; this is evidenced in the music videos of contemporary Hip Wop rapper G Fella, notably the cuts “I’m a Guido” and “I Got a Guy”. In this construction, Guido can be construed as a synonym for Mafia. There are parallels with gangsta Hip Hop in this regard. This insider knowledge can explain the hypersensitivity of Italian American anti-defamation organizations to the public airing of dirty ethnic laundry. Pushing back against MTV for saying Guido in JS opened another front in the war against the Mafia stereotype in popular American culture (see Chapter 9).

Italian Gangsta: Poaching with Ethnicity Ethnicity is relevant for instrumental as well as affective purposes (Cornell and Hartmann 2007). We have seen that ethnicity configures the appropriation and expression of youth popular culture. The city’s Italian American youth culture has wielded ethnicity in the poaching of Black styles. New York City’s Italian American youth have had a formative relationship with urban Black musical culture that began with jazz and became marked with a turn to Do Wop in the 1950s followed by soul and disco. It was not surprising that Guidos began appropriating Hip Hop prior to the seismic crossover of white youth in the late 1990s, entailing more than a style shift since local Italian American youth identities have become increasingly opposed to “Blackness” (see Chapters 7 and 8). It is likely that the appropriation of a stigmatized ethnicity was cued by the use of the racial epithet “nigga” by African American youth within gangsta Hip Hop. Early replication of a “cool” Hip Hop response can be seen in the verse of “Guido Rap”, “Hey Guinea, Guinea”. There was a representative belief among Italian American youth interviewed at the time that this behavior was mimicry of gangsta, with Italian American youth seeking to represent a similar ethnic persona. An Italian American street culture consummately expressed by the Mafia, established as an authentic ethnic script, was used to absorb the gangsta idioms that were roundly favored in ItalChat.

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ItalChat furnished new resources to resolve this contradiction that was predicated on the privileging of Italian gangster tradition. Appropriation of the Mafia in the name of ethnic authenticity provides a response to gangsta Hip Hop which is seen as having “ripped off Italians” in the words of a 19-year-old Guido, further advancing the feedback loop between the two ethnic youth styles. Mafia imagery is a prototype for a “bad” or “thug” Italian ethnicity. Like gangsta, Mafia imagery provides ethnic identity motifs in relation to street toughness on the one hand, and conspicuous consumption on the other. It also provides a framework for naturalizing gangsta which has become a mainstream source of youth culture cool, a project fortified by wider references to Italian American ethnicity. With ethnicity doing the heavy lifting, ItalChat youth were not positioning to mimic gangsta as “wiggers”. Instead, they naturalized appropriations with ethnic markers that sidestepped questions of racial identity: I’m a gangsta. 100% Italian. wack…phat…strunz Im Italyz Finest. GOODFELLAS. Pimpin the Girls. Wassup to my peeps. Forza Italia Giocatore [Player] Anthony

Italianizing gangsta was also evident in the substitution of the historic ethnic epithets wop, dago and especially “guinea” for the central gangsta identity “nigga”: ILLest Guinea GinnyPimp Ginzos have da phat cash USweatDisGuinea I’m a straight-up Ginny!

The use of “guinea” to construct a “bad” ethnicity follows the example of a Bronx street gang called “The Golden Guineas” in the 1960s. However, Guido absorbed the properties of this historic epithet in competition with the gangsta symbol “nigga” that evoked a credible street culture alternative complemented by a cool style of consumption. In the Guido toolkit, gangsta furnished a cool new idiom for articulating youth identities rooted in the ethnic neighborhood, a central motif in urban Italian American culture:

162  D. TRICARICO Representin Astoria to the fullest. Big ups to my Astoria crew. Shout to my guineas in Bensonhurst Bensonhurst in Da House

In an online safe space, Italian neighborhood culture was reformulated in terms of the “ghettocentric” core of gangsta Hip Hop (Rivera 2003: 98): “What up my ghetto people?” Italian urban places were reframed by gangsta idioms and myth. One male referred to himself as “straight outta Brooklyn” in lieu of the rap group Public Enemy’s original reference to “Compton”, California. Bensonhurst became known as “da Hurst”, a play on the “da hood”, the primordial place “Where a guinea can be a guinea”. Every Italian neighborhood in the city was “repped” in the language of gangsta: Bad Asstoria Throgz Neck Thugz Neck Howard Bitch Howard Biatch

A “GangstaPrincess” from middle-class Whitestone in Queens staked a claim to “High Class ghetto chic”. Italian American “ghettocentricity” crossed the city line to Nassau County in Long Island: “Floral Park, New York, Da Suburban Ghetto”. Gangsta “Bedda” (Sicilian for Bella) paid tribute to the home country: “Dese Palermo streets raised me crazy like whoa”. Gangsta lends an infusion of streetwise masculinity compromised by a dance music scene dominated by gay men (Fikentscher 2000). It reinforced the hypermasculine bent of Guido, especially its street code and the sexism and misogyny of its gender strategy, although in ItalChat, females also assumed a gangsta pose reconciled with ethnicity: Puttana Princess Dis Bella Runs Da Hood Puppa Bella Be Makin You Sweat [“puppa” is Sicilian for “little doll”]

The mainstreaming of Hip Hop predicated on a massive crossover of white youth makes Hip Hop more appealing as a consumption style steeped in a street culture ethos, and Mafia style is not a meaningful

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alternative. This can explain why Guido has branched off into a hip-hop hybrid in certain locales, including Howard Beach, the site of a racial attack on a young black man in 2005, where a background story on that incident in The New York Times (Confessore 2006) reported the prevalence of hip-hop styles and designer brands like “G-Unit and Sean Jean” with a soundtrack provided by Eminem and Fabolous. At the same time, Guido is able to embed gangsta in Italian American gangster narratives. “Guido Rap” refers to “fathers” who “drive Cadillacs” and have “bodyguards”. The Gotti brothers flirted with rap careers and, in one episode of “Growing Up Gotti”, provided a platform for an African American rapper named “Gotti”. The erosion of an urban ethnic culture that supported local Mafia power is magically resolved in the music lyrics and video of New Rochelle rapper, G Fella. The Mafia is portrayed as still formidable in its new environs, the suburbs north of the outer borough Bronx. In the songs, I’m a Guido and I Gotta Guy, the Italian American rapper flaunts the connection of consumption style, ethnicity, and the Mafia. He wears “Member’s Only sweatsuit, drives an Iroc Z, patronizes a nail salon, and has “a guy who gets Ed Hardy shirts”. G Fella is not self-conscious about performing in a Black musical genre and even gives “props” to Bronx rapper Fat Joe and whereas other Italian American rappers eschew or mute the connection to Guido, G Fella is “straight-up Guido” who in the way he showcases outer borough Italian American culture.3 The appropriation of gangsta suggests that Guido can bridge urban Black youth culture for European ancestry youth that remains in the city, especially in neighborhoods that have experienced succession by post1965 immigrant groups like Ozone Park (John Gotti’s turf) which is predominantly Indo-Guyanese. An Italian American style tradition sets limits to the appropriation of Hip Hop. One of the more important places to look is the reliance on Mafia in lieu of gangsta imagery as a reference for a street culture pose. The prominent referencing of mass media texts like Goodfellas and The Godfather suggest an Italian American alternative to gangsta films like Menace to Society and Straight Outta Compton. It is also an authentic response to the appropriation of Mafia films by gangsta rap (e.g., Snoop Dogg as “The Doggfather” and impresario for Mafia movies on a cable TV channel) and films like The King of New York (1990) and Made (2001) which announce the eclipse of the Mafia by a new breed of young Black gangsters.

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Building Symbolic Capital: “It’s a Gift” ItalChat was fundamentally a youth culture project. A site built around language was conducive to meaning-making, opening a window on the exploration of Italian ethnicity as an identity marker and a coordinate of subcultural distinction. Ethnicity was accorded salience in this space in relation to style which relied heavily on a visual vernacular (e.g., clothing, the body) and a soundtrack (e.g., music, jargon). In the two years that I researched the ItalChat site, ethnic discourse featured a thread that produced a “constructed primordialism” (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 17–18). In this scenario, Italian ethnicity had totemic significance, presented as an emotionally charged “symbol” or “badge of group identity” (Isaacs 1976: 71). Ethnicity was presented as a “feeling” that was ineffable rather than something cognitive; it was socially constructed as a given: It’s not a big deal. Being Italian is a big deal. It’s all about being Italian. Not only am I perfect, I’m Italian.

Unabashed declarations of ethnic pride seemed surprising considering the youth culture context: I love being Italian. I wake up smiling because I got pride. It’s everything I want.

On one personal web page being Italian was quintessentially spiritual, less an ethnic identity than an “ethnic soul” (Lyman and Douglas 1973). The best thing that God could have given me is being Italian. Being Italian is not a nationality. It’s a gift. And I’m blessed with it.

Constructed primordialism enlisted racial imagery to make ethnic identity an absolute even more powerful and mysterious, something that is not easily put into words (Isaacs 1976). A verse (of unknown origin) that surfaced as a virtual anthem in a number of personal web pages conveyed a mystical sense of racial purity and solidarity: Italian Pride is in My Mind. Italian Blood is My Kind. My Italian pride I will not hide. My Italian race I will never disgrace.

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Italian Love is all around. My fellow Italians never let me down. Show your pride.

Unlike cultural markers, a racialized ethnicity cannot be constructed or achieved: “The initiation to be Italian is to be born one”. This gave rise to racial musings, such as whether a “Northern Italian” with “light skin, blonde/blue eyes” was “better than your traditional Gini”. The issue of whether southern Italians, especially Sicilians, were “Black” or “African”, flared in ItalChat from time to time, echoing the racial framing that occurs in the vernacular culture. I did not witness a single challenge of this absolute and privileged Italian essence from inside the ethnic boundary nor any calls to elaborate on the meaning of essentialized ethnic constructs. The claim of a racialized ethnicity deepened the primordial boundary that separated Italians from youth others and carried with it a caveat: Don’t try to be Italian. A strong warning was served for “wannabes”. A particularly graphic web page illustration displayed an obscene hand signal to “Fake Italians”. A concern with identity fraud reflects the desire to guard against the filching of ethnic capital (see Isaacs 1976) which is especially problematic on the Internet (see below). Given the claims made in the name of ethnicity, it is not surprising that individuals wrangled to present maximally Italian personas. While ethnicity formed a boundary with non-Italians, status claims were made inside the boundary. Following the calculus of an essentialized ethnicity, being born in Italy was superior to being born in the United States although it allowed the more acculturated third generation to emphasize the ascribed construct of ancestral purity. There was once a spontaneous competition in which “Italian” youth tried to outdo one another in regard to ethnic purity: 100% Italian 100% here as well 100% Italian (born in Italy) 110% Italian I am the Italianest

This effervescent ItalChat moment temporarily substituted a primordial ethnicity as the basis of subcultural identity and solidarity in contrast to shared style. Being Italian transcended the hierarchy of “cool”:

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“Not only am I perfect, I’m Italian”. While style is superficial and can be poached, essentialized ethnicity is, here, an “inalienable” source of “cool” (Milner 2004: 207). An ethnic absolute enchanted what was otherwise a consumption-oriented youth subculture: “It’s not a big deal. Being Italian is a big deal. It’s all about being Italian”. The value of ethnic capital led to a creative search for the ethnic essence. A visceral, absolute ethnicity was further invigorated by symbolic reversals. Ethnic group insiders are known to use epithets hurled at the group by outsiders to signify a degraded status, a practice consummately utilized in Hip Hop youth with the “n-word”; the poaching of gangsta Hip Hop accentuated this idiomatic strategy although the “Golden Guineas” street gang were employing a symbolic reversal in the 1960s. According to Isaacs (1976: 75–77), appropriating labels of “inferior status and outsiderness” conveys “boldness and strength”. Insider discourse reversed ethnic stigma with a “banteringly, even affectionately, and sometimes, in a complicated semi-jocular or say-it-with-a-smile transference” (ibid.: 78): “What up my woparones!” Epithets are typically used “behind the backs” of others, who are not granted copyright. Besides neutralizing the power of the epithet, usage signifies ethnic authenticity. Ethnic insults like “wop” and “guinea” are claims to a superior status against antagonists and “insiderness” that are used to promote communal solidarity and convey a quintessential ethnicity because it elicits an outgroup threat. In signature fashion, an oppositional Italianness was couched in youth culture idioms: Where my guineas at? The Ginzo is here!! I am the ginniest ginny in this room!

The use of ethnic epithets was playful but reversing stigma was empowering to youth actors: “That’s Mr. Guinea to U” (seemingly borrowing a line from Disney’s animated film “Lion King” when the warthog stands up for himself in battle with a male lion at his side). Historical epithets were linked to youth culture cool in hybrid screen names like “Sexy Guinea”, “GQGuinea”, and “GuinzoGQ”. The frequent misspelling of “guinea” may have followed the convention of phonetic spelling in chat rooms; other spellings were gini, ghini, giny, ginzoe. It also points to identification with Hip Hop including the agency (temerity) to make symbolic alterations suggesting that meaning has been formidably

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altered, as in the inversion signified by “nigga” and “niggaz”. The misspelling of “guinea” may also reflect temporal distance from the historical context of mass immigration that spawned these collective insults. The virtual rehabilitation of a “spoiled identity” seems motivated by the “recovery” of a more authentic ethnicity. The epithets “guinea” and “wop” have historically been reserved for Italian immigrants who were “just off the boat” and, thus, were synonymous with the more generic labels “greaseball” and “greenhorn”. They have even been imposed by more assimilated Italian Americans in an attempt to claim status based on a hierarchy of Americanization. It is noteworthy, then, that ItalChat youth were appropriating signifiers of a spoiled identity as prestige claims: “I am the ginniest ginny in this room”. It was as if this identity contained a purer, more crystallized form of ethnicity; a place like Bensonhurst “Where A Ginny Could Be A Ginny” distilled pure Italian ethnicity. Broadly satisfied that respect for a shared ancestry has been restored, it follows that “guinea” was a quality that others coveted: “For All U Wannabe Giniz Go F*CK Yourselvezzz”. In a reversal, others are contaminated (“dirtbags”) and envious (“wannabes”). As suggested in Chapter 4, these historic ethnic epithets were collapsed into Guido. Symbolic reversals of Italian American ethnic stigma in ItalChat immediately responded to a particular source. There was no historical consciousness of prejudice and discrimination of Italian Americans as an ethnic group, in which symbolic reversals become a provocation aimed at a system of ethnic stratification in which the Italian “race stock” was regarded as “inferior and degraded” (Lord et al. 1905: 17). There was, however, a broader pattern of constructing Italian ethnicity in terms of “resistance” or “opposition” to select dominant meaning systems (Hebdige 1977). There was part of a satirical project of hijacking the symbols of institutional power to enhance insider status. Thus, “CSI” for the College of Staten Island was made to stand for “College of Sexy Italians” and, on the subject of academia, “PhD” meant “Pimpin Hoes Degree”. The anagram “F.B.I.” was made to stand for “Full Blooded Italians”, subverting official government power in the interest of essentialist distinction. The anagram “IBM” referred to “Italian Business Man” which, together with “F.B.I.” can be read as the symbolic hijacking of two venerable mainstream institutions to promote the interests of the Mafia. The FBI, at the time, was engaged in the effort of imprisoning Mafia leaders and the reference to pure “blood” could be a way of symbolizing a traditional Mafia boundary. “Italian Business Man” is

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a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for a Mafioso. At the time of the study, John Gotti, who listed his occupation as a plumbing contractor, was in a Federal penitentiary. There was substantial support for Gotti in ItalChat, including calls to “Free Gotti!” and a website shrine in which Gotti was revered as “a man of respect”; there was animus toward the F.B.I. alongside effusive eulogies when Gotti died in prison. This insider meaning of FBI was also performed at the time by the Pro Wrestling character “Little Guido” who styled himself as the leader of “Full Blooded Italians” and made public appearances with “Goomba Johnny”.

Constructing Ethnicity in and for Youth Culture Practice While the medium effect of Internet chat increased a commitment to ethnicity relative to style, especially as a visual vernacular, ItalChat opens a window on the utility of ethnicity in positioning Italian American youth in popular American culture. Youth culture actors construct ethnicity in a purposive manner, to solve practical problems. The primordial character of ethnicity afforded a moral language that generated solidarity among personal strangers in a virtual setting. Ethnicity furnished the boundaries of a “safe space” (Fine et al. 1997: 253) comparable with the “defended [Italian American] neighborhood”. Indeed, ItalChat was itself rooted the “ordered segmentation” of the youth leisure styles and the city, and competition and conflict reflecting local social divisions spilled over to ItalChat (see the following chapter). The task for subcultural Italian American youth has been how to operationalize ethnicity for youth culture practice. This entails reconciling ethnic idioms with the artifices and ephemera of popular American culture, no small task, and often resulting in the awkward coupling of stylish fun and primordial drama. ItalChat demonstrates that ethnicity is being invoked to stake a claim to style. Symbolic online work is not primarily oriented to the past or a traditional ethnicity, nor is it focused on the “home country” or a “diaspora space” (Maira 2002). Instead, what is principally being symbolized is a place in a popular youth culture marked by rituals of fun and pleasure like clubbing and commodities like designer clothing brands. Italian American youth in the 1980s, especially the new second generation, were relative newcomers to cool consumption styles. While they make a claim to cool this is against the backdrop

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of widespread “dissing”—disrespect for the style of consumption identified with Guido. This, in turn, has to be seen in the context of historical ethnic stigmatization. Nevertheless, youth in ItalChat appropriate ethnicity for symbolic capital. Although it is a negatively privileged ethnicity, it compensates for a shortfall of style capital. This is symbolically available for manipulation—a symbolic reversal that restores ethnic honor. Working from a (relatively) safe space, insiders are able to inflate the value of their heritage, symbolically (e.g., on the screen, with designer labels), while they set aside issues of purchasing power and taste. In a sleight of hand, an authentic ethnicity picks up where consumption style falters as subcultural capital. Italian American youth create their own symbol bank of cool style. Constructed as an “essence” or “absolute”, ethnicity naturalizes subcultural “distinction” (Thornton 1995). They have it. Everyone else not only lacks it but envies them for it (i.e., are wannabes). This makes them more “cool”. Guido consummately expresses an ethnic identity motif that both embraces and challenges the stigma of ethnic minority group status, resonating for ethnic youth subcultures like Hip Hop and Pachuco. Thus, “Guido Rap” exhorts the audience to be “proud because we’re Italian”, but accompanied by the chorus, “Hey Guinea, Guinea”, a historical slur that is mocked by images of conspicuous wealth and power consummately represented by the Mafia. Crystallizing in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Guido evokes the symbolic challenge of a “bad (talkin) nigger” reflected in the intimidating posture of the militant Hip Hop of Public Enemy with its “minister of information” and Niggers With Attitude (see George 1998). Guido evokes the image of a “bad Guinea” that draws heavily on images of the Mafia in the popular culture. Thus, Guidos have been characterized as “Italian boys with attitudes”, an image presented in the press in response to the Bensonhurst incident. Like “Guinea” and “nigger”, “Guido” is a label that outsiders (who do not subscribe to the reversal of symbolic meanings) must use with discretion (i.e., behind “their” backs). As the new “Guinea”, “Guido” has become a name that, like “nigga”, warrants a careful determination of insider status. In contrast to these other ethnic slurs, it was not used humorously in ItalChat perhaps because it is heavily freighted with the gravity of the present. These meanings have become conflated in the evolution of Guido as a broader ethnic stereotype, a topic left for the conclusion of this book.

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The use of ethnicity to construct a youth formation, and the construction of a youth formation within an ethnic formation, occurs at the intersection of very different cultural idioms. Guido ethnicity does not primarily refer to traditional imagery, “something known or transmitted by custom” (Ewen 1988: 23). Although youth evidenced some awareness of “traditions” (e.g., “food, holidays”), they are offstage and not relevant for the youth scene, even a repudiation of an Old World Italian culture (“La via vecchia”) based on the family and a scarcity economy (Gambino 1974). While Guido ethnicity does not have the “substance” found in the repertoire of traditional groups like the family, an Italian “look” may suggest (give the appearance of) a substantive ethnicity beyond the youth spectacle. Youth cultures like Guido also assert a “putative” belief in shared ancestry (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 17–25). Nagel points out that ethnic identity is “closely associated with the issue of boundaries” (1994: 6–12) which enclose “mutable” cultural content that is “borrowed, blended, rediscovered, and reinterpreted”. Ethnicity is dynamic and adaptive (see also Barth 1969; DeVos and Romanucci-Ross 1975; Yancey et al. 1976; Royce 1982), which underscores its dramaturgical potential and amenability to techniques of “collective impression management” (Lyman and Douglas 1973) and “fictitious accounts” (Shibutani and Kwan 1965: 43). Although not as volatile or trendy as style, ethnic cultural referents are variable; Royce (1982: 147) has even proposed that the term “style” be used in place of “tradition” to give proper emphasis to the ongoing “development” of ethnic culture. As such, ethnicity is suited to the “expressive artifices” of modern urban society (Ewen 1988: 19) such as the “spectacle” of youth culture (Hebdige 1977). The mark of ethnic youth subcultures, then, is a discourse of distinction that confounds ethnicity with style, making ethnic youth subculture a hybrid institution, the outcome of “bricolage” (ibid.). Even when primordial themes are referenced, ethnicity is appropriated for the rigors of “self-conscious acting” on the modem urban stage (Irwin 1977: 228), not for a “community of memory” (Bellah et al. 1985). Above all, it is translated for a “visual vernacular” fashioned out of images and commodities found in popular American culture. While Italian ancestry is valued, an “Italian look” is prerequisite, an “image” that can be achieved through the “inventory of looks and expression” available in popular “style markets” (Ewen 1988: 72). Indeed, matters of ethnic “substance”

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may be waived if the correct “surfaces”, or appearances, are evidenced (e.g., “anyone who drives a Monte Carlo, listens to disco …”). Ultimately, the meanings intended are more properly “youth culture” than “ethnic” when “being Italian” means “being cool” and “up on the latest styles”. Because ethnic ancestry is decontextualized, located in the youth popular culture rather than in the family, it takes on “fresh meanings” (Brake 1985: 60) including the possibility that being Italian has meaning for “being a Guido”. Since ethnicity is not always declared by Guido actors, this presupposes a familiarity with the symbolic meanings of popular cultural elements like teased hair and gold chains. Reading ethnicity into visual style can be misleading, as a college student discovered when on closer inspection, “a guy who looked Italian” was wearing a Star of David. Guido, however, is notable for removing any uncertainty that a certain style ensemble is “Italian”. Referring to Hebdige’s “definition of punk”, Muggleton (2000: 54) makes a distinction between “style or image” and the “attitudes and values that underlie the purely visual”. Thus, “high hair”, “Drakkar” cologne, “Skecher’s” shoes, and gold jewelry have contributed to a pose that dramatized an Italian American youth subculture in New York City youth culture. While symbolizing an Italian American position, style can be read for related meanings. Thus, muscles and tight clothing for males construct a tough pose for fighting; gold jewelry and designer fashions communicate a conspicuous status display. These are construed as “Italian” in the vernacular settings of Bensonhurst and beyond, referring to the mass media imagery as well as the suburbs. An Italian “attitude” also refers to traditional dispositions or feelings toward complex of practices that constitute the “Italian American family”. The inability to conceptualize ethnic change including “mutable” cultural content informed the view of establishment sociology that there was a “resurgence of ethnicity” in the 1970s which could, then, be dismissed as both a “dying gasp” of immigrant culture or “inauthentic”, mere “image-making” (Steinberg 1981: 62). Guido was a surge toward popular American culture by authentic Italian Americans, demanding that others pay attention. Outer borough youth already had ethnicity; the new second generation perhaps had too much of it. What they lacked was a cool consumption style. However, Guido signals the appearance of Italian American youth who are active in regard to assimilation rather than passively incorporated into mass consumption and mainstream culture more generally, especially by consuming in the name of ethnicity.

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As such, they demanded attention for Italians because of a new consumption style; the new Italian American subject is distinguished as a mainstream consumer. This recognizes the role of ethnicity as a “structuring element” in cultural consumption. Ethnicity regulates both the appropriation of style and scarce youth culture rewards, suggesting an attempt to temper “the postmodern adventure” (Best and Kellner 2003). This seems to have moderated the “excessive hedonism” of Manhattan disco into the 1990s and was evident in the creation of a safe space on the Internet. The poaching of Hip Hop is clearly constrained by an ethnic boundary (i.e., Black youth as an ethnic other). Traditional Italian family values are served by exclusive ethnic boundaries for dating purposes. While style choices are broadly reconciled with “parental ethnicity”, the conversation takes place in a space with age peers free of “adult surveillance”. The following chapter considers the transaction of subcultural identity with youth others in the context of local style markets embedded in wider urban status hierarchies.

Notes 1. There was official municipal recognition of the vernacular. In 2017, the city’s Highway Department still used the phrase “fugghedaboutit” to mark highways signs announcing the rider’s arrival in Brooklyn—one exiting the Brooklyn Bridge on to the lower BQE and another at the Queens border on the Belt Parkway. 2. Mafia power in the neighborhoods was recognized by city officials. Lizzi (130) points out that “In order to stop the violence in E NY, the City Youth Board formally deputized the Gallo brothers to act on its behalf among the community’s IA youth”. In my view, however, Lizzi does not accord enough substance to Mafia’s historic role in exercising ruthless violence to defend its own interests albeit rationalized by a historical claim to legitimacy (i.e., the Mafia “takes care of its own”). 3. Joseph Sciorra (2011) positions G Fella in the hybrid creation of “Hip Wop” and, in full disclosure, introduced us at a colloquium held at SUNY Stonybrook on Italian American youth culture in April 2010. G Fella belongs on the “Hip Wop” family tree that branches off toward the “wop”. He can be contrasted with Jo Jo Pellegrino who employs a “ghettocentric” lens to portray his turf in Staten Island. I argue that it can be better classified as a branch of Guido that veers toward Hip Hop musically but not as a culture.

CHAPTER 7

The Local Struggle for Cool

Social identity is inherently relational, negotiated by individual and group actors across meaningful boundaries (Hall 1996). The constructionist approach to ethnicity calls attention to “transactions” informed by the respective “purposes” and “power” of social actors on both sides of the ethnic boundary (Royce 1982: 1–3; see also Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 195). Matute-Bianchi (1996: 205; see also Kibria 1998) specifically calls attention to the way ethnicity is “strategically exploited and manipulated within specific contexts as various groups compete for scarce resources”. A similar scenario can be found in the youth culture literature. The Birmingham School fixed the “boundaries” of British youth subcultures in a collision with mainstream values as in the examples of Punk or Teddy Boys (Hebdige 1979; Cross 2007). With the growing impact of nonwhite immigration in Great Britain in the 1970s, researchers also examined the interaction of British youth with “the Black immigrant presence” especially Jamaican Rastafari and the absorption of reggae and ska music by British rockers like Eric Clapton and punk rock bands like The Clash (Hebdige 1977: 29, 36–37). Bjustrom (1997) finds a “struggle over social identity” in the “dialogic relation” between Swedish and Black youth subculture. A concern with status and competition for scarce rewards is underscored in Thornton’s work on British club cultures that are “jockeying for power” in the style spectacle (Thornton 1995: 33–36). Milner (2004: 9–12) similarly emphasizes

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the competition for status as the central dynamic of American youth peer group cultures. British youth culture scholar Les Back (1996: 238) calls attention to the “local” setting in which urban youth identities are “created and imagined on a, more or less, daily basis”. Guido historically represents an agenda on the part of outer borough Italian American youth to use ethnicity to position themselves for the consumption of scarce youth culture resources regulated by local style markets. Where the previous two chapters focused on the youth agency of subcultural insiders, this chapter looks at the “transaction” of distinction across subcultural boundaries, in particular what Royce (1982: 3–5) calls an “external boundary” that marks the positioning of significant others or reference groups that also invoke identities and assign them meaning. The assertion of a cool youth style identified with Italian ethnicity has been challenged in local style markets. In particular, exclusion of outer borough Italian American youth from privileged Manhattan nightscapes is at the root of Guido as an identity symbol. A neighborhood-based youth culture has historically struggled with other ethnic minority youth engaging popular American culture notably Blacks and Latinos. Their youth style performances are bound up with the struggle for scarce urban resources like local turf.1 Border work is complicated by the fluidity of contemporary youth styles diffused by the mass media and the Internet, and the potential for social mixing in “urban nightscapes” (Chatterton and Hollands 2003: 10; also see Yon 2000). The “post-subcultural” position taken by Muggleton (2000) stresses the blurring of boundaries that makes youth “post-modern tribes” (Maffesoli 1996). Notwithstanding symbolic convergence seen in the adoption of gangsta vernacular and a bodybuilding aesthetic prominent in gay styles (Cole 2008), Guido deployed ethnicity to maintain clear boundaries.

Boundary Work In 1986 “Guido Rap” Guido brashly announced the arrival of an Italian American youth style in a competition for cool. The song incites insiders “to rock this joint … because we’re Italian”, claiming not just difference but dominance in style, specifically as “rulers of the roads” and “Kings of the disco”. Reflecting a status dynamic at the center of peer group sociability (Milner 2004: 78), the rank and file youth similarly made

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claims that “Guidos are the best”. As we have seen, consumption style and ethnicity were the basis of “distinction”. Subcultural distinction was elaborated in the language of class privilege with an emphasis on consumer affluence. “Guido Rap” brags about Italian youth with “credit cards” (“We never carry cash”), driving Cadillacs, and the habit of “always buying gold”. Asked what you “like most about being Italian”, a Guidette college student in 2003 replied “Being rich”. Youth others corroborated this perception: “They have the best of everything”; “Their parents are well-to-do”. While the competition for cool is endemic to youth peer group cultures, Guido has earned a special reputation for debasing others: “They call other kids ‘dirtbags’.” A nonItalian college student maintained that a “Guido fraternity” at an upstate SUNY college was elitist: They act toward others with prejudice, superiority and a lack of respect. They think they are better than the rest. One of the lines they use to refer to people is ‘They aren’t worthy’. Instead of saying “They’re not cool”, they say “They’re not worthy”. I mean that in itself says how much they put other people down. [written statement, Daniel, 21, 2002]

At the same time, Guido has been notoriously debased by youth others. The 1986 parody of “cugine” in a local college newspaper inaugurated a pattern of public ridicule. The emergence of youth culture sites on the Internet expanded the opportunity to elaborate an external boundary that disparages, if not vilifies, Guido. The following were the “top” definitions of “Guido” in the mid-2000s on the interactive site Urban Dictionary: A stupid Italian American who slicks back his hair with various amounts of goo, wears tight-fitting tank tops, only does upper body workouts, blasts stupid nigger and club music from his car, wears gold chains outside of his shirt, and speaks like a f—-g moron. (http://www.urbandictionary.com, accessed 4/13/04) Can be found nightly at mainstream dance clubs they read about online (Sound Factory, Webster Hall, etc.). Guido cars usually have a boomin’ system through which cheesy music like freestyle, commercial club/trance and hip hop (anything KTU plays) is loudly blasted. (http://www.urbandictionary.com, accessed 1.6.05)

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The clash of youth subcultures is most meaningful in a local context. Sociologist and rock critic Donna Gaines (1999) sheds light on the boundary between rock and disco in the outer boroughs: Disco was rooted in gay, non-Caucasian, urban dance culture, but we late’70s bridge-and-tunnel kids didn’t know that then; we just wanted guitars. By the time we heard about disco, it had filtered upward to places that excluded us. We used different drugs, we wore leather, the synthesizer wasn’t our world. We preferred the piss-factory dives with pool tables, bikers, broken beer bottles, and backroom pirate love. Uptown, we’d never get past the ropes, or afford the covers. Eventually, as disco mainstreamed, it spread outward, toward the boroughs, the Saturday Night Fever Guido vanguard. “Disco Sucks!!!” we screamed at the carloads of cretin boys who mistook our miniskirted, ripped fishnet, big bad hair–rocker-sleaze look for Bowery hookers.

Rockers were not an important reference group for Guido, however. In New York City, Punks did not fight Guidos, did not claim turf, and did not have a “code of the street”. Spike Lee juxtaposes these styles in the Bronx Italian American neighborhood that is the backdrop of “Summer of Sam”. However, Punk is framed as the pose of a youth who is alienated from the disco-centered Italian neighborhood youth culture. Invidious distinction and status competition have been more consequential with rival street cultures. As we have seen, local Italian American youth style tradition is rooted in the defended neighborhood, an urban lower-class moral order that fused with ethnic minority group culture (Suttles 1968). Schneider (1999) shows that young males in urban lower class neighborhoods in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s formed peer group s cultures characterized by masculine “honor” manifest in physical intimidation and the control of turf. The expressive performance of a male street code, a tough Italian American pose, has been referenced to the Mafia which asserted a monopoly on local violence as the guarantors of local order including surveillance over the male tough posers. Mafia economic and political power was accompanied by cultural power or the influence of Mafiosi as consumption style leaders. Allusions to Mafia connections in “Guido Rap” (“Our fathers never leave home without their bodyguards”) prominently link youth style to Italian street culture power. Guido is a youth subculture based on style not delinquency; never mind that a northeastern Queens “gang” in the early 2000s specializing in car thefts, called itself “Big Bad Guidos”.

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A “streetwise” sensibility including turf-based masculine honor was discernible in Italian American communities in the outer boroughs into the 2000s especially in transitional neighborhoods (Reider 1986; Pinderhughes 1999). Guidos regard a tough pose as a focal concern in a world where it is paramount to “have lots of friends who watch each other’s backs”. This turf ethos has utility for the club scene: I remember one time I was at a club and saw these Guidos I am kind of friends with. They were about to get into a fight in which they were outnumbered and destined to lose but went out fighting for each other. This is a very good way to be and I think more subcultures should take care of their own as they do. [John, 19 year old male, 2001]

Guido, here, closely recalls the Teddy Boys of the 1960s and 1970s who combined street “toughness” and “fighting” with “dressing up” (Cross 2007; Frith 1981: 219). Indeed, dressing up for urban nightscapes created opportunities to move beyond greaser styles, sublimating or constricting gang membership and actual fighting (sports contests have a similar effect which is why the NYPD sponsors a “Police Athletic League”). In Hip Hop, this is seen in the ritual of “rap battles”. Nevertheless, masculine aggression can simmer just below the surface of expressive settings including clubs. Multiethnic urban neighborhoods expand opportunities to negotiate youth style boundaries in relation to culture and status (Back 1996: 237–238). Into the early 2000s there were skirmishes between Italian and Albanian youth in the Bronx that confounded consumption style and turf claims in a neighborhood undergoing ethnic succession (see this chapter below). A 19-year-old second generation Italian named Fabrizio was wary of Albanians in his Astoria neighborhood as uncomfortably foreign: “Have you ever seen those guys smoking those funny looking things?”, alluding to the water pipes favored in the Muslim cafes along Steinway Street. Albanian youth have mounted a tough street presence in the Bronx Belmont neighborhood where an “Albanian Mafia” competes with the Italian version and where there have been tensions with Black youth, including the Bloods street gang, along a turf boundary. There has been a marked affinity between Italians and Greeks in Astoria which resulted in mixing in the dance club DNA in the early 2000s. Italian youth volunteered the axiom “Una facia, una razza”, a line in the 2001 film Captain Corelli’s Mandolin about Italian

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occupation of Cephalonia during World War Two, to express a “racial” connection to Greeks who echoed this sentiment in equal measure. Fabrizio, sounding a note of southern Italian provincialism, was skeptical about the Corelli doctrine: “We get along, but you have to watch out. Greeks are two-faced. They call you guinea and wop behind your back”. Such reserve perhaps explained the segmented Italian and Greek club scenes and cafes including Oasis (pronounced by Greek insiders as O-as-ee) in the Bayside section of Queens in the shadow of a new Greek Orthodox church. Into the present period, nationality based identities are presented in subtle touches like the type of gold cross worn around the neck. While the label “Greedo” suggests a style convergence referenced to a hybrid, “new ethnicity”, it resonates more with the dominance of an Italian style adopted by wannabe Greek youth because “Italians started it!” The relationship with Greeks has lacked the enmity that exists with the more recently arrived Albanians who also negotiate a fraught boundary with the Greeks. Local Italians and Greeks have established an accommodation over two generations that is now marked by a comparable degree of social mobility that includes relocation to the same middle-class outer borough neighborhoods like Whitestone and Malba (in Queens) and Nassau County suburbs and, despite formal religious differences, increasing intermarriage. A more consequential boundary for the transaction of Guido identity is with the racialized youth culture identities of Latinos and Blacks. Like Italian Americans, these racialized youth have compelling local style traditions embedded in urban minority group cultures. In particular, they have formative relationships to the musical genres that have supplied a soundtrack for an Italian American youth culture practice revolving around the dance club scene (Fikentscher 2003: 210–211). Invoking Italian ethnicity, accentuated by Guido, establishes a hard border with Black and Latino youth and their youth styles. These boundaries resonate in SNF. While the DJ in “2001 Odyssey” is Latino (and gay) and there are a smattering of Latino couples on the dance floor, Tony’s peer group and dating practices are organized along ethnic lines; there is also street fighting between Italians and Puerto Ricans inhabiting adjacent neighborhoods. While Black youth are remote, this is decidedly not the case for their music. When Tony Manero and his pals were entering “2001 Odyssey” one of them assesses his personal store of fashion capital and confidently declares, “Sharp as you can look without looking like a nigger”. Fully satisfied that they understand where this difference lies,

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they strut in the direction of the dance floor to the sound of the classic 1976 disco song, “Disco Inferno” by the Black group “The Tramps” with the lyrics of militant racial discourse: “Burn, Baby Burn”. The large and expanding Latino population in the city has maintained a club circuit that features Latin dance beats that connect the generations in contrast to the musical divide between Italian American youth and their parents. Despite a shared affinity for electronic dance music among Italian American and Latino youth, invoking ethnicity structured separate club spaces like the Queens disco in the late 1980s that alternately staged “Italian Night” and “Latin Night”. This ethnic boundary has made it possible for Italians to dance to “freestyle” that was not “Latin freestyle”; in a segmented urban culture, there is careful negotiation of a shared leisure style. Italian American neighborhoods contained their own clubs that supported a local constituency. In the 1970s, bars and lounges that were often owned by the local Mafia syndicate absorbed disco reinforced this provincialism. Danny “Pooch” Puccarelli cut his teeth as a DJ in Italian American venues in Bensonhurst (Lopez 2009). This parallel dance music universe imprinted on WKTU FM, “The Beat of New York”. Italian Americans did not have KTU all to themselves, they had to share it with Latinos. The station included the local Latino audience in its business model. The ordered segmentation of local clubbing was accompanied by programming that was ethnically divided. WKTU played a critical role in differentiating an Italian position in dance club culture vis-à-vis Latinos who possessed an ethnic tradition centered on “Latin freestyle” music and dance styles to draw on such as bachata, salsa, and meringue; the tarantella was left in the space of Italian American family-wedding culture. Boundary crossings were entertained but the representatives of Italian style held the line against Latinization. There was some mixing of ethnic personalities. Goomba was part of a morning show anchored by a Latino although an ethnic hierarchy was suggested when a conspicuously Puerto Rican persona deferred to Goomba as “papi”; he once chastised his sidekick because “You don’t call an Italian woman ‘mami’!”. Goomba’s rap song about his incarceration incorporated Latin beats and Spanish language lyrics. If there was an anthem for this alliance it was the Rosemary Clooney (not Dean Martin) version of “Mambo Italiano” that promoted the Latinization of Italian Americans: “Try an enchilada with your baccala”. DJ Joe Causi who grew up in Bensonhurst drew the line against Latinos musically, emphasizing the connection of an Italian American audience with

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“classical disco”; the iconic photo of Tony Manero on his professional website authenticated the subculture’s roots in SNF. WKTU kept Italian American style kept on a separate orbit by reaching out to the suburban diaspora and new leisure nodes like the Jersey shore. WKTU was not a space for bridging the complex relationship between Italian American and Black youth. By the late 1980s, the latter had largely moved on from electronic dance music and the city’s Hip Hop radio stations did not embrace Guido despite the growing appetite for Hip Hop among Italian American youth in the outer boroughs. At the same time, I am not aware of antipathy between these radio stations and WKTU. There was some sniping at Guido in the early 2000s by local radio stations that featured rock and contemporary pop music, presumably in response to a morning drive-time ratings battle with Goomba and perhaps also reprising the vitriol surrounding the “death of disco” reaction of the late 1970s. One of the personalities of Z100 FM (3.20.03) which played contemporary rock at the time presented an on the air caricature of “Guido” that featured “tank tops”, “a tan that comes in a can”, and sexual impotence resulting from the abuse of “[ste]roids” for bodybuilding. Another attempt to emasculate referencing ethnic family culture is evident in the line, “Guidos in the club and on the phone, they don’t tell you that they live at home”. A DJ on a classic rock station, WAXQ FM, made a statement on 6.2.02 that registered as an egregious ethnic slur: “Italians are niggers that have lost their memories” (Guglielmo 2003: 1; also see www.H-ITAM.org Italian American Message Board, accessed 7.12.02). The on-air conversation about Italians racial ambiguity was joined by DJ Joe Causi on WKTU, musing on the geographical proximity of Southern Italy and especially Sicily to Africa: “Sicilians are dark meat”; this island off the coast of North Africa is where Causi “got this beat from”. Nevertheless, Causi’s remarks sounded gratuitous in light of still simmering racial tensions in the outer boroughs. Goomba, on the other hand, may have offended racial sensibilities on both sides by admitting an attraction to African American singer Samantha Mumba, fantasizing on the air about a “Mumba/ Goomba union” (and taking a stab at humor). Relationships were tense between Black youth and Italian youth in southern Brooklyn and throughout the city into the new millennium (Pinderhughes 1997). Both groups had street culture traditions and skirmishes across turf boundaries were frequent and often erupted into violent and occasionally deadly outcomes. Indeed, Elijah

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Anderson delineates an oppositional urban youth subculture as a “code of the street” which he finds in lower-class Black West Philadelphia and, owing to similar structural conditions, “can be observed in working class Italian … communities” (Anderson 1990: 84). Localized conflict was particularly acute in the outer borough communities of East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn in the 1970s (Lizzi 2014; Reider 1986). Turf fights between youth groups flared for a period in the 1970s in the South Village, a settlement established during the mass immigration, culminating in the death of a Black teenager who commute to the area to attend a vocational high school in a fracas on a basketball court that was at the center of a turf dispute. As Guido was crystallizing as a named style, turf conflicts in Howard Beach in 1986 and Bensonhurst in 1989 resulted in the death of Black youth. The following chapter situates Italian American youth street culture in ethnic community norms. Black youth style has provided a porous external boundary for Italian American youth in the city. As seen in previous chapters, Guido is a project that selectively poaches Black popular culture without identifying themselves with Black youth and their scene and without incorporating them into their own. At the same time, street-level conflict with Black youth was built into the fabric of peer group sociability otherwise preoccupied with stylized youth presentations. Cora, an 18-year-old said this about a “Guido” crew in Middle Village in 2001: If they are really bored, they will drive around looking for someone to beat up. Sometimes they would come back with a story of how they just jumped some Black kid because it looked like he was up to no good. [Cora, personal communication]

The boundary appears to have been racialized with mounting urgency with the thinning of Italian population in the outer boroughs and the ascendance of African Americans in local politics (see following chapter). At the same time, assertions of ethnic distinctiveness may be expected to intensify “as the apparent similarity between forms on each side of the boundary increases, or is imagined to increase” (Cohen 1985: 40). Black youth culture has also been absorbed through the mass media. Despite the acrimony of Italian Americans in the neighborhood, Black filmmaker Spike Lee (1989), participating in the protest march in Bensonhurst several days after the killing of a 16-year-old in a street fight on Bay Ridge Parkway in August 1989 was “treated like a celebrity”

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and asked to “bring Michael Jordan and Flavor Flav down”. Lee was well-received despite making a film, Do the Right Thing (1989), that put Italian American and Black tensions under a spotlight following a racial killing in Howard Beach. In fact, one Bensonhurst resident asked Lee “How about making a movie in Bensonhurst?”. Lee did precisely that with the release of Jungle Fever in 2001 in which a young working Italian American woman defies community norms by entering into an intimate relationship with a professional Black male, likely one of the last things that Bensonhurst Italians wanted to see. Celebrity worship suggests the possibility of separating Black style from local Black youth, thereby strengthening an ethnic and racial boundary. “Guido Rap” introduces an element of invidious distinction with an explicit style challenge is issued to Black youth: “I hate to wake you homeboys up out of your dreams, but us Guidos got the cars that cause the screams”. Boundary conflict is implied in the act of poaching which is appropriation of something that comes with ownership; it is Black style and not merely circulating in the popular culture like disco. “Guido Rap” usurps a proprietary relationship, inviting insiders to “listen to rap the Guido way … listen to Italians without delay”. Claiming to have “a whole lot of rhythm”, the Guido rappers dare homeboys to beat their “rhymes”. Resisting identification with Black youth, Guidos bite the hand that feeds them style; drawing on a “cool” ethnicity, “Guido Rap” summarily concludes that “Guidos are the best!” At the same time, the Guido rappers separate the putdown of Black youth style, or Black youth performing Black style, from the advocacy of racism: “Don’t get us wrong, we ain’t prejudiced …”. When the song was performed at a Queens club in 1987, the Guido MCs were accompanied by a Black DJ (Fig. 7.1). The complexity of the relationship between Italian American youth and Black youth revolving around turf boundaries and textual poaching was the subtext of a 2005 street culture incident in Howard Beach. In contrast to previous episodes of street conflict between Black and Italian youth (see next chapter), the Italian American “attacker” and the Black “victim” had “a number of things in common”: “Although neither had steady work, both had a taste for luxury items, from the Prada shoes that Mr. Moore was carrying to the Rolex watch that Minucci was wearing” (Santora and Rashbaum 2005). When the NYPD apprehended Minucci in his home, Mr. Moore’s stylish “Jordans” (Nike designer footwear) were hanging on the wall above his bed as a youth culture trophy. “Fat Nick” Minucci unequivocally presented as a Guido in style and demeanor, albeit a new Guido

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Fig. 7.1  Despite unvarnished challenges to Black youth culture, the Guido MCs cross an ethnic boundary with a Black DJ (Source Guido Matt Saladino, “Guido: The Guido MCs Live. The Guido Rap/Bensonhurst 86th Street”, 12:19, YouTube, published by Mighty 1221 on Jan. 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F89N1kVg0OU, accessed 8.21.2018)

that was incorporating Hip Hop style. His most salient credential was membership in a crew (“posse”?) that formed around John Gotti’s grandsons, and even appeared in an episode of the reality TV show “Growing Up Gotti” which, in turn, connected him to a subcultural negotiation with gangsta Hip Hop. This was highlighted in an episode (2.20.2005) in which a Black rapper from the Midwest who legally changed his name to “Gotti” in honor of the erstwhile “Don”. The absorption of gangsta into Italian gangster escalated with the intimation of fictional kinship (i.e., comparaggio) in which the “Gotti” was “treat(ed) like a brother” by the Gotti brothers who were initiating a move into rap music. While the Gotti brothers did not achieve that goal, the crossover of Italian American youth into gangsta rap music notably in the persona of G Fella has flaunted the ethnic boundary. To the extent that gangsta recycles Mafia identity, especially the Gotti myth, its appropriation by Guidos closes a symbiotic

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circle/feedback loop. The crowning irony of the boundary crossing by Minucci was the defense strategy that sought to undermine the hate crime charge brought by the Brooklyn District Attorney with the claim that the Howard Beach Italian American youth was not referring to the African American victim as a “nigger” but instead was using the Hip Hop term “nigga” (Meenan 2006). Guidos did not crash Black or Latino clubs in contrast to Manhattan venues (see following section of this chapter). In light of turf disputes with Black and Hispanic youth, the most vexing border issue has how to consume Hip Hop especially now that it has become a dominant pop culture vernacular, although mainstreaming with the emergence of an “urban style” has mitigated this issue. Asserting ethnicity appears to be an attempt to have it both ways, to claim difference while appropriating what has defined the other. Invoking an Italian identity challenged the youth culture cool of racialized ethnic groups especially African American and Latino youth that inhabited the dance music space as well as urban spaces on the boundaries of Italian neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, succeeding Italian Americans headed for the suburbs in numerous places like Brownsville and Canarsie in Brooklyn. The negotiation of subcultural distinction vis-a-vis African Americans and Latinos is made urgent by the need to stake a decisive claim to whiteness, a project that is complicated by an urban ethnic minority culture. Anxiety associated with this racial project was further exacerbated by the immigration after 1965 from hemispheres outside Europe; this new immigration threw Italians into relief as the largest and, therefore most beleaguered, European ancestry population left in a city that was becoming dominated by non-whites.

Bridge and Tunnel The dance club scene, sharply bounded by the rock scene, is highly diverse drawing youth from all over the metropolitan area. Into the 2000s, Guido imprinted on local clubs in the outlying boroughs, discouraging the participation of other style constituencies. A Guido club was marked by the prevalence of “house” and “free style” music and the installation of a local DJ with an “Italian” name (“Italians in the house!!!”). Clubbing became the epitome of a youth subculture called Guido. The spectacular venues of the new dance clubs set Guido apart from greasers confined to local routines, the primary space to “jockey

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for power” referenced to popular American culture in relation to other stylized youth culture identities in the city. Ethnic identity was reworked around this claim to pop culture cred(ibility), not for greasy manual labor but for “work” that was predicated on leisure and the youthful “body” (Fikentscher 2000). It was one thing to pursue cool in their own outer borough clubs like 2001 Odyssey and Nite Gallery. It was quite another when they challenged a status boundary, symbolized by the doorman and the velvet rope, regulating privileged access to Manhattan clubs. The Manhattan club spectacle was the pinnacle of the outer borough disco scene. SNF alluded to Manhattan as an external boundary that disparaged not only the Odyssey scene but outer borough Italian American life as vulgar and stunted. When they did turn to Manhattan clubs like Exit, The Limelight, and Sound Factory in the 1990s, they had to “crash” a space that excluded outer borough styles in the course of constructing its pedigree of cool. As argued above, the size of the invasion across the bridges and through the tunnels and the integrity of a collective boundary formed by the conjunction of style and Italian ethnicity was instrumental in delineating “Guido”. As with other marginalized youth subcultures that took a collective position in the youth culture spectacle, such as Pachuco and Hip Hop, “their public presence demanded attention” (Alvarez 2003: 89). While the spectacle of Manhattan clubs offered the ultimate “escape” from class for outer borough Italian American youth culture, access was restricted or blocked in the interest of elites notably affluent patrons and an avant garde subculture known as the “Club Kids” (Owen 2003). Manhattan clubs gradually raised style barriers (the velvet rope) to exclude Guido. Outer borough aspirants lacked the requisite economic and cultural capital, resorting to the conspicuous display (e.g., designer logos, oversized gold jewelry) characteristic of nouveau riche status “insecurity” (Bensman and Vidich 1971: 179). The most “popular clubs” in Manhattan have always made it difficult to “decode” fashion rules. Styles are often specific to each club, but also highly fluid and, above all, notoriously “unstated” (Patner 2005). Thus, at Frederick’s, “a chic basement lounge” on 58th Street, “the key look for men” in 2005 featured an “expensive blazer, dress shirt, elegant shoes and jeans” although those with the most economic capital are likely to be deemed in style and allowed into the club. On the other hand, rules are clear about the style markers of undesirable groups. At the uptown club Marquee, “a slickly-dressed doorman” enforces tacit rules that exclude

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young men who show up wearing “warm-up suits, sweat pants or gold chains unless you are a chart-topping rap star” (ibid.). This rule excluded rank and file Guido and gangsta. A Manhattan club could explicitly state in 1998 that “Thugged Out Stays Out!”. Guido style was singled out in a New Orleans club in the aftermath of Jersey Shore: “If It’s On The Jersey Shore, It’s Not Coming Through The Door” (Lambert 2010). In the case of both Guido and gangsta Hip Hop, a defiant street culture masculinity clashed with the “underground” sensibility of “club culture” especially the universalism attached to global ideologies like “techno” and “rave” (Thornton 1995). While Guidettes went clubbing “just to dance”, it was understood that Guidos “dance just to meet girls”; notwithstanding the iconic significance of “Tony Manero” they have earned a reputation as poor dancers. The Guido persona was read by elites as intimidating rather than sensual. Violence has too often erupted from the Guido pose including a dance move known as the “fist pump” (although a great dancer, “Tony Manero” was also a very good fighter). A former club industry security employee maintained that, within the industry, Guidos were “red flags” who were “prone to violence” and “kept on a short rope” (C., personal communication 2000). A lengthy thread on the Club NYC message board in 1998 framed Guidos as a “major problem” that verged on moral panic in the Manhattan club scene: “The club scene in NYC has gone down so fast. Why? In one word Guidos …”. The Village Voice columnist Trish Romano, assessing the closing of the Manhattan clubs Exit and Sound Factory in 2003, concluded that “perhaps the most serious consequence of the closures: Guidos will suddenly descend en masse, ruining the few remaining ‘cool’ clubs …”. The Club NYC message board (1999) reverberated with censures for a pariah subculture with a notable slide away from style toward ethnicity: 100% Italian w/a Heavy Duty Ginzo attitude Black slick-backed hair w/lots of gel in it Lots of muscles, usually shown off wearing a tight shirt Starts fights on any fleeting moment Have a Cadillac or some Mafia style Ginny car Hang out on 86th St in Brooklyn

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Antipathy for Guido vacated the realm of youth culture altogether as in this posting on the Club NYC (1999) web site that tapped into a theme of ambiguous “whiteness”: All Italians from Sicily are part Black. Since the island was invaded and there [sic] women were raped by Africans that’s [sic] why they are so dark. Get it?

Outer borough Italian youth opposed symbolic annihilation, issuing a defiant claim to status honor in American popular culture on the Club NYC message board (1999): We need more Guidos to fill NYC Clubs. It’s all about the Guidos in ’98! Guidos are back in style! Guidos rule!

The struggle for access to cool Manhattan clubs persisted well into the 2000s. Ironically, successful entry to Manhattan clubs posed a threat to a “safe space” (Fine et al. 1997) bounded by Italian ethnicity by creating a multiethnic dance floor. This was abetted by commercialized mass media, in particular local dance music radio, that disseminated information about clubs. In the late 1990s, this was intensified by Internet promotions like this Club NYC blurb for the Sound Factory: “If you’re looking for Italian girls come here” (accessed 2.7.99). In practice, however, youth formations are able to erect boundaries to regulate sexual competition, notably by sorting themselves by style as a code for ethnicity. Symbolic boundaries are important in the eroticized atmosphere of dance clubs especially when inhibitions are lowered by the consumption of alcohol and drugs, increasing the likelihood of a collision with the code of the street. Since ethnic boundaries often overlap with sexual boundaries (Nagel 2003), the appearance of rival others who might be “looking for Italian girls” could prove incendiary as in the 1989 Bensonhurst incident (see following chapter). Porous ethnosexual boundaries may account for the retreat of Guido from Manhattan venues to clubs in the outer boroughs and the Jersey shore. The demand for a “safe space” promotes subcultural boundaries that restrict access

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to scarce resources like prospective dating and sex partners. A bounded space, more generally, is more likely to furnish a consensus regarding the tenets of the “subcultural ideology”. It provides a buffer against the disrespect encountered in Manhattan clubs, thereby making it easier to navigate the status dilemmas attached to a minority ethnic culture. Once a franchise on popular American culture was asserted, it became paramount for the nascent subculture to support its own honor within status hierarchies; thus, the claim to a thick ethnicity as the cornerstone of a subcultural ideology. A “safe space” also shielded youth culture actors experimenting with new styles and the wherewithal to bundle appropriations into a coherent style position. In particular, a space inhabited by insiders made it relatively safe to perform styles poached from rivals; without Black youth culture actors in the frame, Italian American youth stood a better chance to make a plausible (authentic) claim to Hip Hop jargon, gangsta rap, baggy pants, etc. and not be labeled “wiggers”. A “safe space” makes it possible to turn the tables in the struggle for cool.

Winning (Cyber) Space The Internet was a threatening frontier for Guido. Popular culture sites like Urban Dictionary and specialized sites like Club Planet and Club NYC promoted outsider definitions of Guido in much wider circulation than the 1986 Baer satire in a community college newspaper. The top definition of “Guido” posted to Urban Dictionary in 2004 had 20,173 likes in November 2017: A sad pathetic excuse for a male; not necessarily of Italian descent, but most likely; usually native to the New York/New Jersey Tri-State area. WARDROBE: tight zipper shirts, tracksuits, designer jeans, fuzzy kangol hats, tiny hoop earrings, fake  gold chains, and related Euro-trash garb and tacky cheese-wear. NATURAL HABITAT: Known to frequent Tri-State area malls looking for club gear to waste their week’s pay on (most likely spotted shopping at “Bang Bang” in Staten Island). During the day when not at their food delivery, telemarketing, or construction job, can be located at their local gym tanning or lifting weights. Can be found nightly at mainstream dance clubs they read about online (SF, Webster Hall, Etc.). Most notable for cruising the Jersey shore in an old car (Honda, Mustang, etc.)

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which has been tinted, painted and sports $1,000-$3,000 rims in a feeble attempt to look like new. Guido cars usually have a boomin’ system through which cheesy music like freestyle, commercial club/trance and hip-hop (anything KTU plays) is loudly blasted.

The Internet also provided opportunities for a safer youth culture space in the late 1990s in the form of chat rooms furnished by corporate service providers. As mentioned above, each room was limited to 24 participants and, although it was formally accessible to every subscriber of the Internet Service Provider, insiders possessed the informal knowledge of precise directions to an online location. Internet chat fortified youth agency with a powerful new tool. It offered the possibility of a niche to pursue a subcultural agenda. ItalChat opens a window on that agenda, or at least what mattered when these Italian American youth came together in this (cyber) space. The establishment of an Internet chat room opens a window on the struggle for cool and its fundamentally local parameters. A “safe space” on the Internet had to be won on an ongoing basis. Agency had to be exercised to create the space in the first place by establishing criteria of membership that distinguishes insiders from outsiders. This did not preclude the incessant policing of boundaries for interlopers. Constant subcultural signaling was required with reference to style and ethnicity. As mentioned above, ethnicity was accorded greater importance in this online space, virtually belying the agenda of a style-based youth culture. The message for individuals who identified themselves as “not 100% Italian” or “only part Italian” was clear: If you’re not 100% Italian you ain’t Italian. Hyphenated Italians were on thin ice. A “PUERTOSICILIAN” was ignored. A female “Mexiwop” attracted the interest of only one person, a male who took the opportunity to come out of the closet: “I’m not sure what I would be … my father is Italian and my mother is Spanish”. A web page featured a graphic of an obscene hand signal intended for “Fake Italians” with an inscription, borrowed from Hip Hop, “Its an Italian thing”. Another web page profile asked What kind of Italians we got in the room? To be Italian you must go through The Initiation … Be Born One No Fakes Allowed

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Setting the highest market value on being Italian, the subcultural ideology employed a binary rule: “There are two kinds of people in the world, those that are Italian and those that just wannabe Italian”. In this market, claims to “being Italian” not just than Italian American maximized status honor. An ethnic boundary was made clearer by claims to invidious distinction, trafficking in subcultural honor in order to rig the competition for scarce rewards in their own favor and to the detriment of outsiders. Ethnicity, with its primordial properties that are ascribed or given, was particularly suitable to this boundary project. In ItalChat, privileged ethnic capital was mined for “status honor” (Milner 2004: 207–208). Invidious distinction was amplified by youth culture hyperbole: ItaliansCantBeStopped Everyone is equal but Italians are better. You are what you are but being Italian is better. If you ain’t Italian I’m sorry.

Cliches like “Italians Are the Best” and “Italians Do It Best” resembled the “We’re Number 1” mantra of high school and college sports cheerleaders and fans to create solidarity by asserting superiority over rivals. This sentiment appeared sophomoric at times: It’s not a big deal. Being Italian is a big deal. It’s all about being Italian. Not only am I perfect, I’m Italian.

This was more pointedly translated into the idioms and grammar of youth culture: Two Types of People in the World: Italians and Wannabes. Italians Rock the Rest Jocks. Italians Rule and the Rest Drool. If its not made in Italy it sucks.

Assertions of superiority were explicitly situated in a struggle for power. Dominance referred to style performances and ethnicity was manipulated to stake a meaningful claim to cool styles; authentic ethnicity legitimated an authentic relationship to Italian designer brands like Gucci valued as mainstream fashion. Street culture aggression

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was prominent notwithstanding style ambitions: “Don’t mess with the Italians because we kick your ass”. Specifically ethnic street culture capital was invoked in the new youth culture idioms: “”. The assertion of “power” could be grandiose. The following declaration was scrolled in the youth cultural vernacular, one line at a time, into running chat text: Italians Rule This Fucking World.

In the symbolic economy of gangsta Hip Hop, others were doomed to inferiority, insignificance, and ethnic envy and, thus, deserving of being “dissed” (disrespect). Gangsta style and Mafia morality were melded in a war of us against them in this personal web page ode to “Da True Life of A Guido”: Don’t ever Chill Wit Anyone But Fellow Guidz. Respect Thoz Who Should Be Respected and F*CK Everyone Else. Family Life in Any Guidoz Mind is Very Important So If Anyone Comz Close 2 Da Family Make Sure Its Taken Care of. Never Talk About Da Family Wit Outside Sources. Those Who R A Disgrace 2 Italians Should Be Shot Not Once But Twice …

The struggle for urban youth culture power was taken to a paranoid extreme in this post: A true Ginny has many enemiyz. To be Italian is to be loved by some, hated by many, respected by all, harmed by none.

Guido, here, expresses an anger that is inchoate and diffuse, suggesting a status wound inflicted by a “negatively privileged” or “dominated” ethnicity (Hall 1992; Scott 1992) implied in the reversal of ethnic stigma discussed in the previous chapter.

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Cornell and Hartmann (2007: 241) observe that “Symbolic repertoires have little impact in identity construction unless those repertoires can be put to use”. Above all, ItalChat was a place where ethnicity and style was manipulated to create privileged access to sociability in order to harvest dating and sexual opportunities, much like the microculture of the dance club. Subcultural credentials were screened to restrict access to the scarce rewards attached to the site, above all, prospective sexual partners. An “ethnosexual boundary” (Nagel 2003) called out interlopers: If you ain’t Italian I’m sorry. Don’t waste my time if your not Italian.

The nomenclature of Guido and Guidette, Bella and Fella finetuned the location of ethnosexual claims in a youth subculture: Don’t IM me if youre [sic] not a GUIDO. I am 20 years old and I live in Middle Village [a Queens neighborhood]. I am 100% Guido. I love Italian girls only (only ones I date).

Ethnicity was a source of sexual distinction when males appropriated the identity cliché “Italian stallion” popularized by the “Rocky” films: “Once you go Italian, you neva [sic] get off the Stallion”. Life in ItalChat was promising if you were Italian: I love being an Italian boy. I can wake up smiling everyday cause I know I got pride and I got anything I want in the world! IM me Italian girls.

Ethnic groups typically guard against the filching of ethnic capital and an essential ethnicity locates it outside style creating tensions with its own youth culture agenda, weighing phenotype over consumption style; the increasing demand for personal photos may have underscored the importance of validating “Italian looks”.

Virtual Border Skirmishes An “exclusionary politics of identity” (Bloul 1999: 7) tirelessly worked to separate insiders from outsiders. Because ItalChat boundaries could be breached, subcultural tenets occasionally had to be defended against challenges launched from the outside. In one instance, someone

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presenting as “a little white boy” and “an American” living in “New Jersey just across from Staten Island” made disparaging ethnic comments about “Italians”: “Why all you Guinnys come to my country America anyway”. This was followed by a diatribe in which “greasy guineas” were portrayed as “not white”. The stream of invective was interrupted by an “Italian” who dismissed “little white boy” as “a redneck”. Another “Italian” chimed in that the “little white boy” would “probably soon be on “The Jerry Springer Show”. In another case, a lone sniper ridiculed Guido symbolism: Any Mafia members in here? Any Guidettes here? Don’t touch the hair. Anybody drive an IROC.

There were continuous encounters with individuals representing other local youth culture positions. The struggle to win space in the city was imported to cyberspace, interrupting the default microculture of ItalChat that revolved around stylized sociability and pursuing sexual partners. Offline tensions were occasions to test youth culture boundaries in ItalChat. These are local youth subcultures possessing similar styles and competing for scarce resources—a relationship that reflects ethnic, racial, and class positioning. ItalChat registered tensions with Latinos which focus on a shared commitment to electronic dance music. While Italian American and Latino DJs represented on WKTU FM, “The Beat of New York”, it was possible in ItalChat to have Latino music without Latinos: A. Why are all the Spics In here? B. Cuz they wanna be Italian A. Enrique is on KTU B. I love this song!!!!

Ethnic closure made it easier to naturalize the cultural property of others: “I love freestyle and I love to be Italian”. There was no acknowledgment of a shared dance musical legacy let alone that ItalChat had a Latin soundtrack. The occasional infiltrator made insider cultural claims dubious: “Puerto Rican Girls Blow Italian Girls Away”.

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While ItalChat insiders were in denial about their style debt to Latinos, there was concern about crossing too far into Hip Hop. The groundswell of gangsta that energized ItalChat was opposed on the level of style, for example, as a preference for freestyle or house music over rap. Style differences were loaded with ethnic meaning: V: Whats [sic] the Deal My Italian Niggas? R: Italian Niggas … That’s a Nice Mix R. ← WHITE BOY

When “ANTHONY DA GINNY” exclaimed “YO MY NIGGAS IM BACK” it was met with a firm reprimand that referenced an offline racial boundary: I feel real sorry for you Italians that like to speak moulians [corruption of “mulignano” for eggplant]. For some reason in ItalChat, aight and niggas has entered into the Italian language.

While vernacular English expressions including chat jargon apparently did not compromise ethnic authenticity, Hip Hop warranted a hard line: IF YOU SPEAK OR ACT GHETTO DON’T IM ME. Stop talking like a nigger … maybe people would like you more I hate wannabe niggers. I ain’t sending my picture to anyone named WOP Cause “WOP” means WANNABE BLACK PERSON

Framing gangsta in the context of racial division did bring awareness of a central contradiction: B: If U Don’t Like Blacks Y Do U Talk like them, Listen to There (sic) Music and Dress Like Them? J: U Have A Good Point E B: I always ponder this.

However, this rumination ended abruptly, since no one in the room was able to conjure an understanding of Blacks as not “other”. I never witnessed a defense of this apparent contradiction—having it both ways—and

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ItalChat youth were not willing to concede that they were “acting Black” by affecting Hip Hop styles. While the contradiction had been articulated, the problem of being Italian in relation to blackness remained unresolved. This would have implications for being Black in an Italian space (see below).

Albo Chat The most compelling subcultural challenges originated in the local urban culture. And, the only intergroup tensions that did not involve Blacks and Latinos in ItalChat were with Albanians. The concerted invasion of ItalChat by three Albanian youth linked ethnicity, consumption style and street culture. The relationship of Italian Americans and more recent Albanian immigrants has been characterized by accommodation and intercultural exchange. The principal Albanian settlement in the city has been in the North Bronx, notably the Belmont section of the Bronx dominated by Italians informally identified as a “Little Italy”. While there was no mention of a specific offline encounter, local tensions between male street crews were persistent. It is possible that a flare-up was ignited by an online incident. Just prior to the invasion, “Albanian Princess” entered one of the rooms, apparently enjoying a level of comfort in ItalChat, perhaps even extended a personal invitation but was asked to vacate the premises because “this was an Italian place”. Soon after, a surprise attack was mounted during an otherwise uneventful weekday evening chat. Three persons who identified themselves as Albanians stole into the room one at a time, a plan that presupposed “intelligence” about access protocols. They did not spring into action until the third person had entered. The intruders had screen names that proclaimed chauvinistic Albanian identities; online noms de plume became noms de guerre for a concerted “flaming” that released a scroll of invective against Italians. Except for the Albanian term “Hadje”, translated as “Come on” to provoke a response from Italian Americans, the attack was carried out in American youth culture jargon. Their stated target was “Italians” not specific individuals and their assault was made as “Albanians”. Its main thrust was staccato assertions of “Albanian Power” combined with ethnic insults: “Italians suck”. A takeover of the chat room space took the form of the incessant and rapid scrolling of phrases in bold type like “ALBANIAN CHAT” and “ALL ITALIANS GET OUT OF THE ROOM” which had a disorientating visual effect. A sense of usurpation was enhanced by the use of unconventional fonts

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and type in the colors of the Albanian flag. This surprise attack effectively overwhelmed an Italian response for several minutes prompting the invaders to declare that ItalChat had been liberated. One of the invaders renamed the room “Italbanian Chat” until a second was emboldened to celebrate a complete takeover with the name “Albanian Chat”. The symbolic liberation of ItalChat was studded with patriotic pledges of support for the recently concluded war with Serbia in the former Yugoslavia. At this juncture, the slogan “KLA ALL THE WAY” (Kosovo Liberation Army) was repeatedly scrolled in bold red (the color of the Albanian flag) blocking other text. The concerted Albanian attack usurped ItalChat routines for over one hour. At the outbreak of hostilities, Italians kept to routines like flirting that were derailed by the sudden explosion of dissonant chat that plunged ItalChat into crisis. They gradually mounted a counterattack that defended their (cyber)turf and fundamental subcultural ideology. The Italian majority returned fire by raining ethnic insults on Albanians. Disparagement singled out Kosovars suggesting a familiarity with the recent Eastern European conflict; salt was rubbed in this ethnic wound with expressions of support for the Serbian military. However, the conflict quickly assumed a local dimension when Albanians were accused of filching the good name of Italians: Albanians are wannabe Italians Albanians are fake Italians They even got Italian flags on their cars and start to believe that they are

The Albanians turned this charge around, flaunting their own ethnic cultural capital: “Italians are wannabe Albanians”. Italians hammered away at the wannabe theme, apparently sensing that they hit a nerve: “You just want to be Italian and your [sic] not”. An intriguing exchange of ethnic insults drew on historical patterns of racial subordination in the United States and the racial anxiety of immigrant groups from Mediterranean Europe. As the Albanian barrage escalated, Italians were disparagingly referred to as “Blacks” and Sicilians were singled out as “Africans”, possibly reflecting a familiarity with regional prejudices in contemporary Italy where Northern Italians disparage Sicilians as “Africani”. When an Italian responded in kind, the charge flew back that “Albos don’t have niggas … but Sicily does”. Labeling each other “Black” was significant

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since both groups have had hostile relationships with African American youth and may be interpreted as a breach in a local alliance. Ironically, invidious darkening of Italians was complicated by Albanian claims to gangsta authenticity: I’m a real Albo nigga Ya Niggas Can Jock My Style But It Takes A Real Albo Nigga To Rock The Bitches Wild” ALBOS BE RUNNIN ITALCHAT Albos sweat Italians

Italians did not challenge the Albanian claim to gangsta authenticity and did not assert their own, perhaps ceding that position or sensing that this turn was overkill. The upheaval ended with a hasty Albo retreat. I did not witness another altercation except for scattershot sniping by a lone Albanian the week following. Weeks later, a veteran of the cyber battle who billed himself as “an Albanian wrecker” explained that it was the direct result of offline fighting between rival Bronx crews. It was part of a final, telling volley which now framed the episode as fundamentally a competition between consumption styles. In this tack, the clothes worn by Albanians were “uncool” alongside the designer brands “that we wear”. An “Italian female” chimed in, “I hate their cologne” (implying close physical proximity) and an “Italian male” mocked their cars: “If UR Albo Its Nothin to be proud of …U buy ur cars at the Federal Auto auction”.

Race and Sex in the (Cyber) Hood The Albanian affair was replete with self-aggrandizing claims to ethnic and style distinction that hinted at underlying ethnosexual tensions. Subcultural challenges in ItalChat were often initiated by males pursuing “ethnosexual adventures” (Nagel 2003). The relative anonymity of cyberspace effectively removed the physical danger associated with sexual prospecting on urban turf. Monopolizing sexual access was integral to the masculinist control of turf found in lower-class communities in New York City (Schneider 1998). It was at the root of a street confrontation in which a Black teenager was killed in Bensonhurst in 1989 (see next chapter).

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As their numbers in outer borough neighborhoods have dwindled, Italian Americans have been less able to control their urban turf. Internet chat offered the prospect of a safe space but boundaries proved porous there as well. The volatile interplay of sexuality and ethnicity was reenacted on numerous occasions on ItalChat turf. An amorous “Irish boy” from one of the outer boroughs “looking for an Italian woman to love me” became disgruntled when he attracted no interest and derided “Italian girls” as physically unattractive (e.g., “ugly body hair”). Several Italian males returned the insults which escalated into trading claims about the fighting prowess of “Irish guys” and “Italian guys”. It is notable that “Irish boy” was tolerated until he challenged masculine power. Racialized masculinity would have been stopped upon presentation. Indeed, preemptive and exclusionary warnings were issued to nonwhites (“no spics”). Comments denigrating African Americans were gratuitously inserted in stylized presentations. Racial enmity fueled an episode that exposed combined masculinist concerns with turf and sexuality. “Papi” jolted the usual routine of stylized display and hooking up with the introduction: “FINE BLACK MALE LOOKING FOR A FINE WHITE WOMAN” which he continued to scroll in the running text which was conventionally reserved for socializing. In a linked web page “Papi’s” persona was elaborated as a “Black Latino” from “Brownsville” embellished in gangsta imagery as a “Ghetto” in “Brooklyn”. When ordered by several chatters to leave the room, “Papi” instead aired a “beef” (a Hip Hop term) stemming from an altercation the previous evening: “Find out what happened Last Night in Glendale Queens”. This headline was scrolled until it filled the screen and was followed by the inside story that the night before “Italian boys” had “backed down” from a street fight when Papi and his group showed up in their Glendale neighborhood on the Brooklyn border. Papi: All the Italians ran from my boys earlier in the day and that night A: Yo Boyz Lets Go To Brownsville and Show Them Who Italians Really R [sic] Papi: No White Boy Has Ever Come Here Looking For Trouble And Never Will B: No one was running we were all there waiting for you Papi: And at Cleveland [a local high school] all the Italians ran and left the Italian kid to get beat up

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Papi: 70 Italian Guys Ran Away from Black and PR Guys A: Hey Nigger Papi: Find Out Before Your Times out Guineas

The posturing about masculine toughness veered back to the sexual when Papi turned his attention to express sexual designs for the “sisters” of “Italian boys”, unleashing a cascade of bilingual racial invective: Go Back to Africa Morocano, Ziangaro [Italian for gypsy] Get Out Moolie [corruption of “mulignano” for eggplant] Italians Only

When Papi retreated, his account was corroborated by two individuals in the room who were privy to the local grapevine. With the masculine street code of Italians discredited, ItalChat youth attempted to restore the damage done to the subcultural ideology by switching to a status honor based on style distinction: “They show up in vans … we rollin in the Benzos”. They staked a further claim to style distinction by invoking a lower class racial stereotype: “Papa in the Housing Project”. The claim to style superiority allowed them to arrive at symbolic closure: “Italians kick Moolies Ass”. The boundary was repaired and the space was reclaimed in the name of Italian ethnicity. When someone asked “Is anyone a true Italian in here?”, implying that policing an ethnic boundary in cyberspace was a daunting affair, a “Dominican” female was flushed out. When one of the males who fought off Papi demanded her expulsion, an “Italian” female made a plea for racial tolerance which won the day. Perhaps ItalChat had wearied of border work, although it probably mattered that the interloper was a female. Like the Albo invasion, the Papi incident was a cyber version of an urban turf battle with offline reverberations. Although no one asked how a street culture adversary discovered their online redoubt, Papi must have shaken any complacency that cyber turf would be easier to defend than urban turf. A more profound boundary crisis was instigated by a “21 year old Italian female” named S. who lived in Bensonhurst and claimed fluency in the Italian language which she occasionally exhibited. She ate pasta on Sunday in a traditional ethnic home. She had insider knowledge of the ethnic neighborhood. She dropped the names of

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subcultural youth and venues: “Did you see _______ last night at the Sound Factory?” Her impeccable subcultural credentials were corroborated by several others and she seamlessly fit into ItalChat routines. It was jarring, then, when S. announced a sexual interest in “Black men, 21-25” to the exclusion of “white boys”. Her sexual politics were scrolled over and over again in staccato bursts of bold black lettering: “Don’t Ask for a pixx if UR a White Boy. Black Guys Only”. This included a terse reference to her personal web page for further elaboration where a cryptic message awaited: “White Boys Read Profile Stop Asking Why”. She became more defiant when reproached: “Ive been with black guys for 4 years”. She subsequently identified “Dominican” and “Puerto Rican” men within a field of sexual interest which was now spanning further into the African diaspora. An Italian American female crossing the “sexual color line” (Nagel 2003: 117) flagrantly challenged a cornerstone of the subcultural ideology linking a monopoly on dating and sexual “property” with a system of masculine honor. Presenting as a “Blonde and Blue-eyed Italian” mocked a strategy of unambiguous whiteness as well as claims to a pure Italian ethnicity. Impugning the virility of Italian males in relation to nonwhite males and usurping their proprietary claim to Italian females attacked the masculine codes that underlie street culture. She denigrated the privileged sexuality of Italian males evidenced in the frequently used persona of the “Italian stallion”. S. lumped “Italian” men together in a racial taxonomy with “other whites”, although she later portrayed whites as “less virile” than Italians, delineating a hierarchy of sexual performance in which Italians occupied a middleman or “in-between” racial status (Orsi 1992). While this measured sexual compliment may have thrown ItalChat males off guard, no one in the room staked a claim to Black ancestry in what constituted a formative subcultural moment. Mocking male virility was reinforced by denying the claim to physical toughness that is the linchpin of defended Italian American neighborhood order and was thus an attempt at total emasculation. Physical control over turf implies the ability to exclude rival males from the competition for females by physical force; a perceived threat to local Italian females from young Black males sparked the 1989 Bensonhurst “racial killing”. S. astutely linked sexual power and physical power: “I like Black/Dominican/Puerto Rican men Rest of you white Boys are scared of them So that’s a turn on”. The responses of ItalChat youth were consistent with the moral order of Italian American neighborhood culture. Two threads are notable:

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S.: Italian guys aren’t as tough as Black guys Room: Black guyz R scared of Italians aint No REAL Italian scared of a fawkin Moolie U Nigga Lover Im not afraid of Black guys S I have a Black guy in my family tree … In fact he’s still hanging there S.: Yo I live in Bensonhurst and all these Italian wites Be mad scared of a brother Room: “Come to Howard Beach w/your brothers and we will see what happens They will be running for the highway like the last bunch U were probably talking about the Jews All The Gangs That The Spics and Blacks Got … The Italians Got 1 … The MAFIA

The references to Howard Beach and Bensonhurst were significant since they were sites of infamous episodes of racial violence in 1986 and 1989, respectively, inspiring Spike Lee’s films Do The Right Thing and Jungle Fever. The latter film involving an adulterous affair between a working-class Italian American from Bensonhurst and an African American architect in the firm in which the former worked as a secretary. It is also noteworthy that “the Mafia” was invoked as the ultimate weapon in the Italian American street code. When S. taunted that “the Mafia was all made up in movies”, she was invited to “Come to Howard Beach and we’ll show you there is no Mafia”. In fact, Mafia social and cultural capitals have been implicated in episodes of street violence in the city’s defended Italian American neighborhoods. An eruption was imminent whenever S. was in ItalChat. Even when she was conforming to expectations, her body of work including her home page profile was enough to provoke racial invective aimed at African Americans. When she/her persona was not present, she was personally attacked for the repudiation of core group values: “She gives Italians a bad name”. Perhaps most despicable was the embrace of the consummate “other”, suggesting the betrayal of the racial project to achieve “whiteness”; thus, S. was a “sellout”, a “wigger”, and finally “a moolie lover”, a vernacular term that calls attention to the ethnosexual boundary. After a time, it was explained that it would be in her self-interest to go elsewhere, since if she was really interested in nonwhite males there were none to be found in ItalChat (at least in theory). Although repeatedly disparaged and told to leave, she asserted a right to remain as an “Italian”.

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S. continued to undermine the claims of Italian superiority as an absolute and specifically in relation to nonwhites, and especially in relation to masculinist values of sexual performance and physical toughness. She remained as a provocateur, once advising someone she met in ItalChat to “wear FUBU” for a rendezvous at a Manhattan club (FUBU is a Hip Hop inspired clothing company and the anagram stands for “For Us By Us”). She sabotaged a discussion underscoring the historical affinity of local Italians for Black styles with a reminder of the enmity between the two groups that boiled over when a Black teenager was killed in a street fight with local Italian American youth in Bensonhurst in 1989 and Al Sharpton led a highly publicized protest march through local streets: S: An Italian stabbed Al Sharpten [sic] C: I hate Al Sharpen [sic]

When the thread of cultural crossing was resumed several days later, S. insisted that adopting “lifestyles” did not “make you another color”. In an episode that revealed the complicated agendas of the protagonists, S. received the support of an “Italian female” curiously named Bianca who defended the right of “Black and Latino men to meet Italian girls” in ItalChat. This was folded into an ideology that posited “being white” as the ultimate threat to “being Italian”: If youre Italians and you consider yourself white you have no heritage. You probably eat Prego [a commercial tomato sauce] and say F*CK Im Italian.

However, S. slyly turned against this position by asserting that “Italians are white” and that borrowing a “lifestyle” did not impart “another color”. This placated the room until S. complained that “there are too many Italians in this country” with their “guinea” ways. S. was an anomaly that precipitated close scrutiny of her home page profile: “I never saw a blonde haired Italian”. Several hypotheses were floated as to her “true identity”. One scenario framed S. as “a guy” who was Italian and from Bensonhurst who fomented controversy to cloak a homosexual identity. Another cast S. as “a Black Italian” embittered by racial stigma. There was support for a scenario in which S. was

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a Black male who was “race baiting”; this included a hypothesis that S. was really “Papi”, which S. playfully deflected: “No I Be White”. The acceptance of an authentic ethnic identity led to a call for insider justice: “We need 2 beat some pride into her”. A warning was issued that crossing the ethnosexual boundary was “not going to happen” in ItalChat. After more than a month of turmoil, the “subject of Blacks” was pronounced “Boring!!!” S. abruptly and inexplicably dropped an adversarial persona and resumed the role of sociable insider. But, the potential for ethnosexual conflict remains high especially on the Internet. Nagel (2003: 255) points out that “there is no more potent force than sexuality to stir the passions and fan the flames of racial tension … sex-baiting is a mechanism of race-baiting when it taps into and amplifies racial fears and stereotypes, and when sexual dangerousness is employed as a strategy to create racial panic”. Tensions were fueled by the theme of Italian American racial ambiguity, which happened to be the subject of a lengthy and heated thread on the ISP Message Board for “Italian Americans” just a few clicks away from ItalChat. Blackness was actually embraced in ItalChat on one occasion when a male declared that the size of the male sexual organ was a function of ethnicity and credited “Sicilians” with having “the longest penises” because “Sicilian is like half black”. This assertion was not challenged and actually flushed out a male who was “1/2 Sicilian/1/2 Black Right Here From Coney Island, Brooklyn”. A correction was offered that made this more nuanced: “Sicilians aren’t half Black there half African”.

The Struggle for a Safe Space Popular culture has become an important site for the construction of youth identities in contemporary societies. ItalChat depended on the ongoing construction of ethnicity for the symbolic boundaries supporting new cyber rituals in uncharted pop culture territory. In contrast to an urban style spectacle that privileges visual vernaculars, identity in ItalChat was communicated via “rhetorical strategies” (Thornton 1995). Opportunities for identity experimentation promoted cultural “crossing” (Lipsitz 1994: 119) and “bricolage” (Hebdige 1977). At the same time, a local urban culture constrained virtual processes of becoming. The youthful architects of ItalChat were pursuing youth culture

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agendas within a socially exclusive environment built on a strategy honed in the urban environment. Invoking ethnicity to restrict access to scarce youth culture resources has historically been at the center of a lower-class “masculinist” strategy to control a symbolic “turf” (Schneider 1998). ItalChat became a relatively “safe space” to “work within and across traditional fault lines” of ethnic identity (Fine et al. 1998: 253). An ethnic space was “safe” because it implied a greater degree of trust. In the city, ethnicity creates an expectation of moral safety or understanding, and thus a boundary of relative physical safety. It was also “safe” from the predation or competition of outsiders. Italian American ethnicity was being used in ItalChat as subcultural capital to create a “resource niche” within local youth culture (Nagel 1994). In particular, ItalChat offered a trove of romantic and sexual prospects. An “ethnosexual” boundary relied on cultural capital including a myth of Italian superiority in sexual matters: “Once you go Italian, you neva get off the Stallion”. In a familiar ideological strategy, ethnic capital was conflated with “sexual capital” (Nagel 2003). A bounded discursive setting enhanced the opportunity to “extract a premium price” (Arvidsson 2005: 247) for subcultural capital in local style markets. Youth subcultures and ethnic groups are “status groups” that construct identities based on “authentic” and “inalienable” value (Milner 2004: 77). ItalChat suggests that, even on the Internet, boundaries and status claims are situated in a “dialectical interplay of similarity and difference” (Jenkins 2008: 12–14). Local divisions and rivalries refract the appropriation of style, including global flows like club culture and Hip Hop. Cyber-sparring with Albanians was an extension of tensions in the city’s immigrant queue and reflects turf competition among youth with similar nationality cultures. Blackness amplified turf threats and the lingering insecurity about being definitively white in America. In ItalChat, ethnicity was as valuable as a contrasting strategy as offline. However, whiteness was complicated by a pronounced affinity for Black youth styles. The next chapter shows that Guido was more fundamentally darkened by the defended neighborhood culture that positioned Italian Americans in outer borough neighborhoods like Bensonhurst.

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Note 1. The straight-line assimilation model is focused on the relationship of immigrant groups to the mainstream or host society (see Ware 1965). It does not pay enough attention to other immigrant/ethnic groups that inhabit their everyday social worlds. The Irish, for example, have been important mediators of American urban culture for Italians that moved into neighborhoods in New York City to the extent that their earlier arrival placed them in dominant institutional positions like the Catholic Church, the Democratic party, and the NYPD (Tricarico 1984). These vernacular worlds, in this case a local urban culture assembled by Catholic immigrant groups that arrived at different times, is as important if not more so than the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant “mainstream” that straight-line theory uses as a measure of “Americanization” or assimilation.

CHAPTER 8

GUIDOVILLE: Labeling Italian Americans Deviant

This chapter examines a different kind of external boundary, outside youth culture and with more far-reaching implications. Thornton (1995) calls attention to the role of the mass media in “naming” youth subcultures. While youth cultures demand attention, the mass media has often responded by labeling them deviant. British working-class youth subcultures like Teddy Boys were infamously named in the context of “moral panics” (Cohen 1983; Hebdige 1977; Cross 2007). Dimitriadis (2007: 32) similarly calls attention to the “pathologizing discourses” that name Hip Hop in the context of racialized fear and loathing. Pachuco has similarly been “pathologized” in the mainstream media in articulation with other dominant institutions going back to the “Zoot Suit riots” in Los Angeles during World War Two (Alvarez 2003). Urban working-class greaser styles have also been embedded in a discourse of gangs and juvenile delinquency (Schneider 1999). The turn to disco in the late 1970s positioned Italian American youth throughout the city in popular American culture and impacted local style markets. SNF pointed out Italian American youth culture in the outer boroughs to the mainstream as well to themselves, not only influencing style development but reinforcing boundaries in the process. While SNF did not explicitly name outer borough Italian American youth culture, it facilitated its development. As we have seen, the name Guido crystallized in the mid-1980s in relation to an outer borough scene that revolved around dance music and clubbing. However, Guido was not © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_8

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named in the mainstream mass media until 1989. It was represented as ethnic youth identity, an expression of Italian American Bensonhurst. Significantly, popular American culture and style were by no means in the forefront. Guido was named into the public discourse in relation to the “racial killing” of a Black teenage in Bensonhurst on August 23, 1989, regarded by sociologist Howard Pinderhughes (1997: 2) as “one of the most infamous bias incidents in recent history”. The news reports and commentary in the mainstream media on the killing, the ensuing protest marches, and the subsequent court cases spanned the better part of one year. The external media boundary that labeled Guido deviant also ensnared the urban Italian American culture of Bensonhurst, ground zero for Italian ethnicity in the city as well as Guido youth style in the troubled narrative of a troubling “racial killing”. This chapter traces the construction of Guido around motifs of deviance that have always been close at hand in the representation of Italian American youth in the mainstream media. It asks why oppositional meanings like lawlessness and racism were appropriated to interpret Guido, overshadowing consumption and leisure style, and, more generally, Italian American ethnicity in media accounts of a “racial killing”; questions about “the processes that motivate ethnic boundary construction” (Nagel 1999) lead directly to the complicated structural position of urban Italian American community in the late twentieth century which elicited motifs of deviance historically available in the construction of Italian ethnicity in American society.1

Setting the Scene Contemporary discourse about ethnicity in the mainstream media, informed by the implicit acceptance of multiculturalism, is typically celebratory and to specifically avoid negative generalizations let alone stereotypes. Thus, a staple of local PBS stations are documentary films on American immigrant groups that try to create a warm and fuzzy photo-album profile, citing the same solid virtues across the board: strong work ethic, family cohesion, religious piety and the ability to make great food. It is not a coincidence that the PBS productions are aired for “pledge week”, thus leveraging the appetite of the third and fourth generations for nostalgia that is at the core of “symbolic ethnicity”. Once a despised immigrant minority (Lord et al. 1905), Italian Americans have lately received their share of ethnic celebration in the

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media. A New York Times Magazine cover story in 1983 (Hall 1983) trumpeted “the new respectability” of Italian Americans in mainstream life without compromising ethnic values like personal warmth and family cohesion. PBS has celebrated the group with several installments including a four-part series that aired in 2015, The Italian Americans, with a companion coffee table book that whets the appetite for a “symbolic ethnicity”. Even the tenement slums that were the bane of reformers like Jacob Riis and fodder for urban developers like Robert Moses have become cherished in the mainstream press as colorful places for its readers not just to visit but to live: Historically, this northern edge of Little Italy was a sleepy family neighborhood, home to several waves of immigrants who settled in its five- and six-story tenement buildings. Some of them moved up and out, but others turned into the gray-haired grandmothers who still sit out on the sidewalk in pleasant weather. (Cohen 1998) Like Mrs. Maggio, Tony Dapolito recalls a simpler time. His Vesuvio Bakery is an institution in the neighborhood…. During business hours the man some call the Mayor of Greenwich Village holds court, giving treats to babies, catching up and talking politics with a seemingly endless stream of people. (Lappe 1998)

The Genovese crime family was also “an institution in the neighborhood” and a far more formidable force. Nostalgia for “simpler time” obscures the historical memory of an ethnic minority culture that kept the city at arm’s length.2 Like other outer borough Italian neighborhoods, Bensonhurst was not well-integrated into a city centered on Manhattan. It stood at the watery edge of the city’s vast geographical expanse, its coastline at the opening to the lower harbor defined by a six-lane parkway looping eastward toward Long Island in one direction and back around to Manhattan in the other; from the water’s edge it stretched inland to a hardscrabble mix of residential and industrial properties. It was not a target for gentrification like the older Manhattan enclaves that became SoHo and Nolita after they disgorged their Italian American population. It lacked the ambience and housing with architectural importance that catches the eye of gentrifiers. It had few interesting restaurants that could be consumed by cosmopolitan taste publics within a short subway or cab ride of Manhattan zip codes. Rik Cohn’s 1976 essay on the local disco 2001 Odyssey for New York Magazine that inspired the film SNF portrays the local scene as

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offensive to the good taste of readers; we later learned that Cohn fled in the cab that he took from Manhattan before even entering the disco when he was put off by the unruly antics of patrons outside the establishment (Kashner 2017). Bensonhurst was so geographically and culturally remote from hip, cosmopolitan Manhattan that the punk rock star, Iggy Pop, choose to live there in 1982 in creative self-exile (Mandl 2012). Bensonhurst has generated considerably less interest in the mainstream media than the historic Manhattan neighborhoods settled during the mass migration from Italy. Two years after the Yusuf Hawkins killing, a Times food critic writing about the late summer zucchini harvest in backyard gardens portrayed Bensonhurst as “a living Italian neighborhood” where families make red wine and “there are first communion celebrations that cost a year’s rent”; the article featured a local restauranteur who not only puts zucchini on the menu but sings opera for his customers (O’Neill 1991). It is not remarkable that images such as these were conspicuously missing in the media response to the Hawkins killing. What is remarkable, especially in light of the current etiquette in the public discourse, was the representation of a contaminated ethnicity. The Bensonhurst case resulted in extraordinary coverage in the print media, the bulk of it reporting on the circumstances of the killing and the subsequent criminal trials. New York City newspapers were obviously a major forum; an INFOTRAC search performed in 1996 yielded 147 entries associated with the name “Yusuf Hawkins” from The New York Times alone. The incident received feature coverage in national news magazines like Time and Newsweek and was the subject of a cover story in New York Magazine. Essays appeared in both Harper’s Magazine and Partisan Review, publications appealing to a cultural elite. A book was written on the subject by a freelance journalist (DeSantis 1991) almost two years after the “media spectacle”, focusing on the lives of dramatis personae into the initial round of court trials; in contrast to reporting in the local press, it is significant for muting the ethnic angle. The incident was also the subject of a documentary film narrated by Shelby Steele, “Seven Days in Bensonhurst” that first aired on PBS on May 15, 1990. An explicit connection between the killing and Italian ethnicity was advanced with prominent roles assigned to Guido and the Italian Bensonhurst community. The New York Times published two investigative features within a week of the murder in which the ethnicity of Italian Americans was designated, on page one, as a major plot element (Bohlen 1989; Kifner 1989). Local newspaper columnists Pete Hamill

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(1989) and Amy Pagnozzi (1989) offered acerbic commentaries that referenced vernacular ethnic stereotypes. The Village Voice, an “alternative” weekly rooted in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, published related investigative features on the violent character of Italian American life in Bensonhurst in the September 5, 1989 edition. The memoirs of two former residents of Bensonhurst that were published, respectively, in Harper’s Magazine in March 1990 and in Partisan Review in the summer of 1990 used the killing as a pretext to deconstruct Italian ethnic culture in light of personal grievances.

Staging Ethnicity: Placing Italian Americans at the Scene of the Crime Sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins and three teenage friends traveled to Bensonhurst by subway from the East New York section of Brooklyn on the night of August 29, 1989 to look at a used automobile that was for sale. Approaching the comer of Bay Ridge Avenue and 20th Avenue shortly before 9:30 PM, they were confronted by as many as twenty five youths from the neighborhood. The latter had mobilized to engage the Black and Hispanic males who were reputedly invited to a sixteenth birthday party for Gina Feliciano. Gina “jilted” someone in the Bensonhurst contingent, Keith Mondello, for “a Black lover”. It was Mondello who assembled the neighborhood group to seek revenge (i.e., more ethnosexual tension). The unsuspecting Hawkins and his friends were mistaken for Feliciano’s guests. As matters spun out of control, four shots were fired from a handgun and Hawkins was struck twice in the chest. Shortly after the incident, a protest march through the streets of Bensonhurst was organized by Black activists under the leadership of Reverend Al Sharpton and the Reverend Herbert Daughtry. More than three hundred demonstrators clashed with local residents, with police in riot gear caught in the middle. Newspapers and television carried incendiary visual images of hecklers, most of whom were young males, insulting Black marchers with conspicuous displays of watermelons and the chant of “Go home, niggers, go home” (Harney and Lubrano 1989). This event had a special significance for the media narrative, not only because it compounded the tragedy of a “racial killing”, but because it trained the media spotlight on the Bensonhurst community. Ethnic framing was not evident in every story, even those in which ostensibly Italian American actors (i.e., individuals identified by Italian

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surnames) were present. Most, although not all (e.g., Hamill 1989a), accounts conceptualized the incident as a racial drama in which Bensonhurst residents were cast as “whites”: ‘The black people don’t belong here’, a white teen-age girl said as she stood on the corner of 20th Avenue and 68th Street, not far from where Yusuf Hawkins was killed. (Terry 1989) Bishop Francis J. Mugavero of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Brooklyn yesterday questioned the decision of some clergymen to conduct protest marches last weekend in Bensonhurst, where a black youth had earlier been shot to death after being chased by a white gang. (Glaberson 1989)

Bensonhurst residents were also framed by social class, although largely to modify racial and ethnic identity: Both Bensonhurst and the area of East New York where Mr. Hawkins lived are communities of blue-collar workers, many in construction or holding municipal jobs. (Kaufman 1989) Such comments do not surprise Joanne Carretta, a 26-year-old white woman who has lived in the largely white, working-class neighborhood all of her life. (Terry 1989)

A class analysis was salient in a November 1989 New York Magazine article (Stone 1989) that emphasized the effects of dislocations in the city’s economy on working-class communities. Michael Eric Dyson in The Nation (1989: 302) utilized a class perspective in juxtaposing “the two racisms”—the racial violence of “tightly-turfed, blue-collar communities” like Bensonhurst and “its less visible but just as vicious middleand upper-class counterparts”. Nevertheless, a distinctly Italian American “story” is easy to read in the overall narrative. Ethnic framing was implicit in the high volume of actors with Italian surnames although it was pointed out that the mother of Keith Mondello was “originally Jewish” (Stone 1989). The ethnic credentials of local actors were often embellished. For example, the defendants were identified as “the children and grandchildren of immigrants from Italy” (Hamill 1989). It was noted that the parents of the alleged killer (Joey Fama) “had emigrated from Italy and spoke only Italian at home” (Bohlen 1989). The “community” of Bensonhurst was perceived as “predominantly Italian American”, a population that “still lives in a

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web of traditions and rituals, many of them transplanted from Italy” (Bohlen 1989). Allusions to the old country underscored the essentially Italian American character of Bensonhurst (Kifner 1989; Quindlen 1989; Bohlen 1989). A front-page New York Times (Kifner 1989) feature one week after the killing drew on tabloid convention to throw this ethnic dimension into sharp relief in the lead paragraph: Banners and lights of red, white and green-the colors of the Italian flaghang along 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst for the feast of Santa Rosalia. Normally the neighborhood’s biggest event of the year, the feast is overshadowed now by the murder of Yusuf K. Hawkins, a black youth who had ventured into the neighborhood to look at a used car and was surrounded by a crowd of white youths and gunned down.

Italian ethnicity was tacitly invoked with references to vernacular styles like “elaborate hairdos” (Kifner 1989) and “ankle bracelets” (Pagnozzi 1989). Allusions to popular films like Goodfellas, Do The Right Thing, and Saturday Night Fever lent pop culture credibility to ethnic framing (Dyson 1989). Blurring the distinction between fiction and reality was a signature element of the “media spectacle”. In a guest column written for The New York Daily News, Spike Lee (1989) uses the comments of a character in a film to explain the animus of Yusuf Hawkins’ killers: “Pino, the racist son in ‘Do The Right Thing’, tells Sal, his father, ‘We should stay in Bensonhurst and the niggers should stay in their neighborhood’”. In the column, Lee, who was a visible participant in the first protest march staged in Bensonhurst, noted that the film’s script was drawn from [the] Howard Beach incident in 1986-a case of life (Bensonhurst) imitating art (“Do The Right Thing”) imitating life (Howard Beach). The mass media “make meanings” using “codes” that “interpret reality” (Grossberg et al. 1998: 178). These interpretations of reality are representations. As Grossberg et al. (ibid.: 179) point out, “The word representation literally means ‘re-presentation’. To represent something literally means to take an original, mediate it, and play it back”. The media narrative in response to the killing of an African American teenager represented Bensonhurst with three interrelated motifs: 1. provinciality and bigotry; 2. criminality, and; 3. social disorganization.

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These themes comprised an “interpretive framework” (Ferguson 1998: 132) that supplied the scaffolding for the “story” about Bensonhurst Italian Americans embedded in a local murder drama. They purported to inform the public who Italian Americans were as an ethnic group, and who they were not. As with all interpretive frameworks, alternatives were precluded or overshadowed. This was not a feel-good story about families making wine and growing zucchini. Guido was named in the middle of this media narrative.

Provinciality and Bigotry Twentieth Avenue in Bensonhurst starts in the Hudson River, where it is called Gravesend Bay, only a couple of miles from the Atlantic Ocean. You can see the ocean across the Belt Parkway, but Bensonhurst rarely looks. (Sullivan 1990: 13)

A major thread in the Italian American story stresses the group’s social and cultural isolation. The first two feature stories in The New York Times referred to Bensonhurst as “a closed community”, a theme that echoed in synonyms such as “insular”, “provincial”, and “tightknit” (Kifner 1989; Bohlen 1989). New York Post columnist Amy Pagnozzi portrayed the life choices of young Italian Americans as circumscribed and “predictable”: The typical cugette might work in Manhattan as a secretary or receptionist while she waits to be married to the typical cugine, who might get a job at the airlines or in construction or on the police force. And they marry: definitely within their race, almost definitely to an Italian, probably to someone from the neighborhood.

The “provinciality” of Bensonhurst was underscored by distinctions of cultural taste. A Times reporter remarked on the “plastic pink flamingos and ceramic madonnas” found in some front yards (Terry 1989). Even Andrew Sullivan’s alternative interpretation Bensonhurst Italian Americans slipped a comment on the local taste culture with a description of “a statue of Our Lady of Guadelupe on the lawn, covered in cellophane to protect her from the rain” (Sullivan 1990). Another Times reporter called attention to young girls with “elaborate hairdos and names spelled out in gold necklaces” (Kifner 1989). Cultural distinctions assumed an invidious dimension in the columns. New York Post columnist Pagnozzi (1989) sarcastically described a neighborhood landscape in which “big catering houses are as plentiful as the auto supply shops” (Pagnozzi 1989).

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When the tempest in the news cycle had run its course, the theme of cultural isolation was given scholarly validation in the Partisan Review with an essay by Maria DeMarco-Torgovnick. A cultural insider who cultivated a plan to escape via an academic career and an exogamous marriage, she reaffirmed the by now accepted maxim that “Italian Americans in Bensonhurst are notable for their cohesiveness and provinciality” (1990: 458). She described a way of life that “tends toward certain forms of inertia” and envelops residents, including her own parents, in an almost pathological fear of “change” (ibid.: 459). In a less strident voice, Barbara Grizzuti-Harrison (1990: 75) recalled that, in her day, “Italians didn’t believe in college because it threatened family authority”, adding that “this has not changed”. Interestingly, Grizzuti-Harrison and DeMarco-Torgovnick both drew invidious contrasts in regard to Jewish culture and credit their relationships with Jews and liberal Jewish values for liberating them from the oppressiveness of Italian American life in Bensonhurst. Likewise, a CBS television producer named Alan Wiseman (1989) maintained in a Times Op-Ed piece that he took refuge in his father’s Jewish heritage to escape the obtuse pettiness of his mother’s Italian American ancestral culture. DeMarco-Torgovnick, who went on to become a professor at Duke University, found it difficult merely to visit Bensonhurst, the community where she grew up; a stay at her parental home for “several days” when her father is hospitalized by a stroke is enough to make her feel like she is “going to go crazy” (1990: 465). “Insularity” and “provincialism” were not portrayed merely as cultural eccentricity, but were linked to moral concerns. In particular, the media narrative underlined a tribal morality that featured the exclusion of strangers. This tribalism was evident in the assertion of a “neighborhood loyalist” interviewed by Bauman and Chittum in Die Village Voice (1989): “This neighborhood has been Italian for 100 years and it’s not going to change”. Times Op-Ed columnist Anna Quindlen (1990) purported to capture the essence of communal amorality in the blasé remark of an elderly woman that the media attention and the protest marches “had ruined the feast of Santa Rosalia”. DeMarco-Torgovnick corroborated this dark side of Italian American insularity and provincialism, adding that “only the slightest pressure turns those qualities into prejudice and racism” (1990: 458). Grizzuti-Harrison (1990: 71) portrayed Bensonhurst Italian Americans as “so embattled”: “the ‘Americans’, the Jews, the others-were out to get them”. Memories were retrieved

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depicting a strong animus toward Jews. Grizzuti-Harrison maintained that “almost all” of her “Italian neighbors were casually anti-Semitic” (1990: 77). This corroborated Alan Wiseman’s Times Op-Ed piece (1989) which depicted the pervasiveness of anti-semitism in the Flatbush (Brooklyn) Italian American community of his youth. Wiseman expands on the violent proclivities of Bensonhurst, featuring “a regularly scheduled pummeling every Friday outside the rectory” dispensed to orthodox Jewish children at the hands of older Italian American youth. These personal experiences with anti-semitism validated the precedence for Italian American “racism and prejudice”. The most egregious manifestation of Italian American tribalism in the media narrative was the deep hostility toward Blacks. A front page New York Times story immediately following the killing reported “blunt expressions of racism” in “interviews with dozens of Bensonhurst residents” (Kifner 1989). Another Times reporter described local residents “flaunting a racism so blunt that it shocked even veterans of the civil rights movement in Mississippi” (Bohlen 1989). These and other articles established the overt (“blunt”) and ordinary character of Italian American racial bigotry. Thus, “Richie a clerk from an auto-supply store” concludes that the girl (Gina Feliciano) whose birthday party set the stage for the murder should be faulted for the killing because “Any girl who brings blacks into this neighborhood is asking for trouble” (Pagnozzi 1989). Even a venerable senior citizen like DeMarco-Torgovnick’s father, when challenged to morally respond to the killing, can casually and unequivocally remark that Blacks “don’t belong” in the neighborhood (1990: 459). Once sentiments such as these were recorded, characterizations of Bensonhurst Italian Americans as “tightknit” and “insular” have to be read as coded representations of racist sentiments aimed at Blacks and other racial minorities. The identification of Italian American youth culture can be discerned at this juncture. New York Post columnist Pagnozzi (1989) used vernacular youth culture labels underscored by a local ethnic class culture: You can still hear Jimmy Roselli singing on the jukebox of the Vegas diner, home away from home to Bensonhurst’s cugines and cugettes.

The typical cugette might work in Manhattan as a secretary or receptionist while she waits to be married to the typical cugine, who might get a job at the airlines or in construction or on the police force.

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And they marry: definitely within their race, almost definitely to an Italian, probably to someone from the neighborhood.

The name “Guido” first appeared in a column inspired by ugly altercations between Bensonhurst residents and predominantly Black protest marchers. The column was written by The New York Post’s Pete Hamill (1989a), the son of a working-class Irish immigrant who grew up in Brooklyn and had a vernacular connection to local Italian culture. Hamill held nothing back in his contempt for Guido. He derisively catalogued local styles like “tattoos” and the “Guido cut, the hair cut straight across the back of the neck” as expressions of a stunted culture. Demonstrating the ear of Bernard Shaw’s Professor Higgins, Hamill reserved extended comment for the local jargon, the few words and phrases that make up the language of “Guidoville”: “Ey, wah, ming, mah… ‘Ev, I like to get some a dat… Whassamatta wit you, Joonyuh… I truckin’ tole huh, I says to huh, I says, I dough wan no truckin’ backtawk, and den I slap huh in da truckin’ mout’, I mean, in the mout’, cause dat’s all a trucking broad respects, a rap in da mout… Huh mudthuh tells huh to be home oirly, says to huh, Who you truckin’ gonna listen ta, ya truckin’ mudthuh aw me? Mah…”. Guido “insularity” was a repudiation of core middle class, American values. Underscoring the false arrogance of “Guidoville”, Hamill wrote that The Guido decides early that homework is for jerks. So is work… Go to a library? Read a book? Finish high school? Go to a university? Figget abo’t it! Om gonna go work construkshun, eight bills an hour!

Although Hamill attempts to distinguish “Guido” from the majority of “respectable” people in Bensonhurst, this was undermined by the use of group stereotypes for Italian Americans, in particular, the use of “Guido” itself. Although racism was perceived as endemic to the community and ethnic culture, young males, now identified as Guido, were portrayed as the agents of racial aggression. Street violence in Bensonhurst and in other Italian American areas like Howard Beach, in fact, was perpetrated by males in their late teens and media accounts described them as inveterately hostile to Blacks and other minorities. Indeed, racial violence was depicted as the consummate expression of their peer group life and their role in the community (Baumann and Chittum 1989;

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see also Pinderhughes 1997). In a Village Voice article, these young males, “armed with baseball bats”, were portrayed as having “taken their battle [with racial minorities] to the streets” (Bauman and Chittum 1989). The portrayal of embedded bigotry was tempered in a New York Magazine story which maintained that tolerance for nonwhites had significantly improved in the years immediately preceding the killing (Stone 1989). The article noted that, despite some organized opposition, the nonwhite residential population of Bensonhurst had been increasing. It also pointed out the apparently contradictory fact that a nineteen-yearold Black youth (Russell Gibbons) was part of the mob that confronted Yusuf Hawkins and his friends. After recounting “anecdotes of racism”, Andrew Sullivan’s article in the New Republic (1990) reported that racial mixing in Bensonhurst was more common than what was portrayed in media accounts immediately following the killing. On the whole, however, the perception of racial tolerance was overwhelmed by the weight of images that framed Italian Americans as racists; one journalist overgeneralized “racist incidents” in communities like Bensonhurst and Howard Beach into a trend whereby “blacks have been murdered in predominantly Italian neighborhoods” (Haalasa 1989). Discrepancies with the dominant interpretation that cast the killers as Italian Americans and Italian Americans as racists were muted or swept aside (see below).

Criminality The Bensonhurst media narrative made criminality an integral element of both the killing and local Italian American life. An especially significant role was attributed to the “Mafia”. Mafia employment was portrayed as highly desirable to young males. Would-be wiseguys talk in hushed tones about an uncle who’s “connected”, a cousin who’s “involved”, hoping to be set up for life…. (Pagnozzi 1989)

A Village Voice article uncovered a “hard-core” element striving for “a position in ‘La Cosa Nostra’”; one “wannabe gangster”, a twenty-yearold named “Frank”, was portrayed as auditioning for local “wiseguys” by committing small-time crime (Bauman and Chittum 1989). According to Daily News columnist Mike McAlary (1989), “In Bensonhurst, as in Howard Beach, we now have wiseguys and wannabe gangsters all over

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the place”. In a national weekly magazine, a song by Melvin Gibbs called “Howard Beach Memoirs” was recalled for the lyrics: “Ethnically, the only thing these white Italian youth have to look up to is gangsters” (Haalasa 1989). Village Voice reporters remarked that street violence aimed at nonwhites by Italian American youth was “fortified by their faith in the Godfather myth” (Bauman and Chittum 1989). Mafia influence was portrayed as having more far-reaching significance. A Village Voice article reported that “the Mafia presence still pervades Bensonburst, cloaking the neighborhood in ostentatious secrecy, like the tinted windows of the stretch limousines that line 18th Avenue” (Bauman and Chittum 1989). A New York Times story noted that “Federal prosecutors say the Mafia… has a strong presence in the community” and that the Mafia was part of the cultural baggage “transplanted from Italy” (Bohlen 1989). Bauman and Chittum (1989) eased the Mafia into the local landscape: A few blocks from their corner is the old bakery where the “Pizza Connection” heroin busts were made. At 74th Street and 18th Avenue is the Caffe Giardino, allegedly owned by Giuseppe Gambino, nephew of Carlo, who served as “boss of bosses” in New York until his death in 1976.

There is also the impression that Mafia codes are embedded in a shared culture or, perhaps, vice versa. The opening paragraph in DeMarcoTorgovnick’s (1990) essay makes the case that the Mafia has historically received legitimation from Bensonhurst Italian Americans for excluding Blacks: The Mafia protects the neighborhood, our fathers say, with that peculiar satisfied pride with which law-abiding Italian Americans refer to the Mafia: the Mafia protects the neighborhood from “the coloreds”. In the fifties and sixties, I heard that information repeated in whispers, in neighborhood parks and in the yard at school in Bensonhurst. The same information probably passes today in the parks (the word now “blacks”, not “coloreds”).

While the reluctance of the local population to give testimony in the case can be attributed to Mafia intimidation, the term “Bensonhurst amnesia” used by prosecutors and the press implied complicity on the part of Bensonhurst residents in Mafia moral codes (Roberts 1989; see also Pinderhughes 1997).

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For the most part, however, it is a “wiseguy” street culture with indirect and latent ties to the Mafia that is the centerpiece of the criminality motif. Bauman and Chittum (1989) elaborated on the menacing character of these youth, especially their commitment to violence: “For some reason, I’m up all the time”, says Frank. “I just like to abuse people”. Even when the guys on the corner are not doing anything to attract police attention, they play at being wiseguys. Most of them own BB guns. And on a really slow night, they meander down to Gravesend Bay and shoot at rats-“target practice” for more serious games.

The article emphasized the inveterate ruthlessness of their ways. Sal, “a young enforcer for the mob”, sent a message to local “crackheads”: Sal soon caught up with the next kid. He stabbed him in the throat-slit him-17 stitches.

The authors concluded that the predatory disposition of these youth meant that “pedestrians”, not just Blacks, were vulnerable to “group harassment” in Bensonhurst. In fact, they cautioned that the “wiseguy” menace was being exported to upscale neighborhoods when the member of one crew bragged about “going over to the Village to beat up some Yuppies” (Bauman and Chittum 1989). As discussed below, the violent nature of menacing Italian American youth was later elaborated by a “feral” metaphor that sounded notes of dehumanization and primitive danger (Roberts 1990; Letwin 1989). “Wiseguy” street culture was the link between “the mob” of neighborhood youth that confronted Yusuf Hawkins and his friends and “the mob”, aka the Mafia. It was noted in the first news reports that the youth who allegedly shot Yusuf Hawkins had relatives with affiliations to a Brooklyn crime family; a certain uncle allegedly helped him flee the city and acted to suppress harmful testimony against him (Kifner 1989). In addition, the youth who assembled the neighborhood mob was rumored to have been sponsored by the Mafia as a low-level drug dealer (Stone 1989).

Social Disorganization A third frame in the media narrative depicts an Italian American community in disarray and in eclipse. In this scenario, Bensonhurst is “the last Italian neighborhood in the city” (George 1989). It is portrayed as

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imminently threatened by unwelcome outsiders, especially immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America. This had, in fact, been occurring, as Italian Americans continued to leave for more suburban settings. Interestingly, the media narrative largely ignored processes of acculturation and upward mobility, which is difficult to reconcile with the assumption of cultural backwardness. Notwithstanding this discrepancy, Bensonhurst was portrayed as on the brink of ethnic succession by racial minorities. This succession was seen as corroding Italian American institutions. A Village Voice story by Nelson George (ibid., 1989) delineated an apocalyptic scenario where “remaining white homelands” like Bensonhurst “turn into Third World Villages”, “the local pizzerias will sell beef patties”, and new ethnic “mafias” operate the rackets; this prospect was expected to exacerbate “the anxiety of the working class Italian teen in Bensonhurst, getting bum-rushed culturally if not physically every day of his life” (George 1989). George, an African-American who is an expert on Black popular culture, appears to be playing with the symbolism of the pizzeria as it figured in both the Howard Beach racial killing in 1986 and Spike Lee’s response to that incident in the film Do The Right Thing. Disorganization assumed an economic dimension that was most consistently developed by Michael Stone in New York magazine (1989; see also Dyson 1989). Stone linked the eclipse of Italian American Bensonhurst to the erosion of the city’s blue-collar economy, in particular, the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and the loss of union jobs. With “an economy in the toilet” (Quindlen 1990), youth were portrayed as particularly anomic and desperate. It was reported that the school drop-out rate was burgeoning and that Italian Americans, in fact, had the highest rate among the city’s white populations; none of the youthful defendants in the Hawkins killing were enrolled in school (Stone 1989). A link was established between a high school dropout rate and high rates of unemployment on the one hand, and an increase in violent crime (30% in the five years prior to the Hawkins killing) and the use of illegal drugs on the other (Stone 1989; see also Bauman and Chittum 1989). A number of journalists, including Maria Laurino (1989) who subsequently became a speechwriter for David Dinkins during his mayoralty, concluded that these developments had created “an underclass” among Italian American youth. The stigma attached to this label made Italian American youth even more dangerous (see below).

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Bensonhurst was portrayed as under siege from the inside as well as the outside. A Village Voice feature created the impression of an ominous state of affairs in which gangster culture ruled; according to the article, the “calm surface” of the neighborhood belied a situation where “sudden death from less than natural causes is not unusual” (Bauman and Chittum 1989). By all appearances, “wiseguys” had a free rein, intimidating solid citizens and inhibiting civic responsibility (Roberts 1990; Hamill 1989). As long as residents obeyed local codes, the violence under the “surface” was mainly spent in tribal conflicts among “wiseguys”. Other accounts portrayed divisiveness as a communal trait. Thus, DeMarco-Torgovnick (1990: 458) called attention to “Italian Americans’ devotion to jealous distinctions and discriminations”. Grizzuti-Harrison (1990: 71) illustrated one of the more significant intraethnic divisions, reflected in the animosity and resentment on the part of Italian Americans for the new, post-1945 Italian immigrants: We got this big influx of Italians from the Old Country-geeps. They’re not like us. They got a chip on their shoulder…. The geeps are here three years, and they got money to buy a four-family house. That’s all they think about is money. They never heard of going to the movies. They never heard of anisette. They never even heard of coffee. What kind of Italian is that?”

Bauman and Chittum (1989) gave internecine divisions a bellicose cast: According to Frank, Brooklyn Italians hate Long Island Italians, Long Island Italians hate Jersey Italians, and they all hate Staten Island Italians. Furthermore, Brooklyn Italians from different turfs are obliged to knock heads. “If different Avenues are at a club, they always have to fight each other”.

Grizzute-Harrison (1990: 71) echoed this perception, concluding that the incidence of “internecine fights” signified mistrust and fear dominated within the ethnic community. In these portrayals, the image of a cohesive ethnic community—“a world of tightknit families” (Kifner 1989)—is regarded with a cynical eye. There is an inference that, in contrast to mainstream American community, social commitment is seriously deficient in Bensonhurst, even within the ethnic group. Communal solidarity (i.e., what makes families “tightknit”) in Bensonhurst was depicted

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as essentially a war of all against all (and “all” against Blacks, Jews, etc.), a scenario that resonates with the “long discredited”, though apparently still resilient, Banfield thesis of amoral familism (Filippucci 1996: 54; Tricarico 1984). Outsiders reading these accounts could infer that the “last Italian neighborhood” in New York City had descended into anarchy. In the mainstream narrative, Guido was leading the way down.

Labeling Guido Deviant Motifs of racial bigotry, criminal violence and social disorganization framed Italian American ethnicity as a “social problem”. To that extent, the “construction” of an ethnic boundary was simultaneously a process of “deviance construction” (Schur 1984: 28; Becker 1963; Gusfield 1981). In the Bensonhurst case, media accounts positioned Italian Americans outside of mainstream cultural life; their cultural otherness was evidenced in matters ranging from consumption styles (e.g., pink flamingos and jogging suits) to speech patterns (e.g., “broken” English). Cultural difference was then linked to moral deviance, in particular criminal violence and racial bigotry. Indeed, Italian American identity was stigmatized by the very fact of being referenced to a “racial killing” and an ensuing “moral panic”. “Cultural stories” that associated Italian American peoplehood with “stigma-laden definitions” were legitimated by the establishment media and disseminated into the public discourse (Schur: 5–12). The media narrative muted or omitted alternative, empowering motifs for constituting Italian American ethnicity. In particular, there was no recognition of a viable moral order based on shared family traditions (Tricarico 1984: 20–32). The mainstream narrative left little room for the views of Italian Americans, with the exception of those prepared to corroborate the deviance paradigm. The tone of these accounts implied that Italian Americans were not privy to the discussion taking place about them, perhaps even that they lacked the cognitive requirements for access to literate publications like The New York Times and Partisan Review. The article in The New Republic by Andrew Sullivan (1990) published almost a year after the killing offered a perspective that did not surface in the “hysterical media”. Sullivan called attention to “the easy racial mixing on the street”, although noting that since Bensonhurst had “virtually no Black residents at all”, this mainly pertained to those for whom Bensonhurst was a workplace in the daytime. In contrast

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to Hamill’s gratuitous reference to a moral “bourgeois” majority in Bensonhurst, Sullivan (17) inspired a credible belief that “another Bensonhurst clearly exists”: Or take Gerard. Born and brought up in Bensonhurst, he’s a wiry, almost nerdy Italian in early middle age who made it to Columbia College and Law School. He went to Wall Street as a corporate tax lawyer, but in his twenties decided to do something for his old neighborhood and started a basketball team for local youth. (16)

The media narrative placed Guido at the center of the “problem”. An Italian proper name, “Guido” designated an Italian American style within local youth culture. It was also hovering in a space where negative ethnic stereotypes are coined. In the press, however, “Guido” was interpreted as a category of deviance. “Guido” was elaborated as an ethnic epithet in Pete Hamill’s column in The New York Post (1989); Hamill’s portrayal of “the boys from Guidoville” as “snarling imbeciles” put into print what is typically said in private discourse (“behind their backs”). Even more startling was an explicit connection to the killing. This occurred when the youth who fired the handgun was identified as “a typical Guido” in a Village Voice background story published shortly after the incident (Dobie 1989). The “problem” was elevated to the status of a “moral panic” when Guido was linked to highly publicized issues of street violence associated with Black and Latino teenagers, more specifically the “wilding crews” blamed for the “epidemic” of street crimes in the city, especially “the Central Park jogger case” (Letwin 1989; Stein 1990). Generalizations were made beyond the youth involved in the killing. A New York Times columnist detected “similarities between the feral youth of Bensonhurst and their Black and Hispanic counterparts” (Roberts 1990). “Feral” metaphors were generalized to “Bensonhurst boys” displaying “an animal energy” and “forming pack groups” that threatened whites in upscale neighborhoods (Bauman and Chittum 1989). Perceived “similarities” to African American and Latino youth led a Village Voice writer to label “Italian American kids, the third underclass in the city right now” (Laurino 1990). This comparison effectively slotted Italian American youth into the “media images and political discourse” that routinely links nonwhites to social pathology and represents whites

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as “besieged” (Lipsitz 1998: 112). Linked to a culture of underclass pathology, young Italian American males were represented as having crossed the color line.3 This “moral panic” demonized “Guido” as a “folk devil” for episodes of “wilding”, a metaphor that prominently stereotyped African-American youth in “the Central Park jogger” case and recalled the menacing “dago” of yesteryear (see Cohen 1980). The Guido “menace to society” was given a pronounced Mafia spin by the press, articulating with the overexposure of young urban “wiseguys” by Hollywood, another parallel with Black youth. Moral panic in the press in regard to Bensonhurst may have made easier to express enmity for Guidos, and for Italian Americans more generally, in the public discourse. A post-Bensonhurst “menace” motif was evident when a local politician criticized a Giuliani administration policy that targeted nonwhite neighborhoods for aggressive street policing: “What makes him think if he stopped every Italian kid in Gravesend, Coney Island, Ozone Park, and Bensonhurst, he wouldn’t get a fair amount of gun possessions there?” (Bastone 1999).4 Feral references might have become more prominent were it not for availability of Mafia imagery and the casting of Italian American teenagers as “wannabe wiseguys”. When John Gotti’s brother Gene was depicted in a “Fila jogging suit”, “Guido” style acquired Mafia connections (Pagnozzi 1989). Still, it was the comparisons to “wilding” Blacks, even more than the Mafia, that made “Guido” a public peril because “Guidos” were not Black, crass stereotypes could not be construed as racist. The press had created a new “folk devil” (Cohen 1980), with the “Guido” as contemporary version of the notorious “Dago”. With this depiction in the press, youth cultural style became a conspicuous marker for social deviance and moral degeneration (see also Pagnozzi 1989; Quindlen 1990).

The Agendas of Deviance Labeling The Bensonhurst racial killing occasioned the construction of Italian American ethnicity in the print media as a social problem. It remains to inquire about “the processes that motivate ethnic boundary construction” (Nagel 1998: 58). The intention to invoke ethnicity and the manipulation of ethnic meaning reflects interests and strategies that fluctuate with changing circumstances (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 77).

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Media representations in the Bensonhurst case can be referenced to “ideological choices” (Grossberg 1997: 178–179) that reflected organizational and personal agendas linked to underlying structural changes at a particular historical juncture.5 The murder of Yusuf Hawkins as immediately imbued with political significance in the city anticipating a Mayoral election in just over three months between a Republican candidate with an Italian surname and an African American. It became a prominent platform for the political activist Reverend Al Sharpton who led civil rights marches through Bensonhurst; Sharpton was stabbed at one of the marches by a young Italian American man who was part of the crowd. These protests produced a drama that overshadowed the killing; Sharpton was determined to create and manipulate a “media spectacle” (Steele 1990). Without a prominent leader with a savvy media strategy, the Bensonhurst incident, like the racial killing in Howard Beach in 1986, may not have acquired a compelling public profile. These two episodes can be contrasted with the death of a Black vocational high school student in the South Village in 1974 in a fight with local Italian American youth over the use of a local basketball court; as in Bensonhurst, there were rumors in the neighborhood that the Mafia spirited the Italian American youth into hiding. The case generated only token media attention and had no political fallout (see Tricarico 1984: 97–101). Labeled a “racial killing” in the press, the Bensonhurst episode took place just days before the Democratic mayoral primary and two months before the general election. It made a compelling case for the election of the city’s first African American mayor who could, perhaps, vindicate Black anger and keep the populist Al Sharpton at bay while salving white liberal guilt. In the context of the 1989 mayoral election, Black leaders like Al Sharpton and Herbert Daughtry whitened both the issues and the cast of characters in Bensonhurst to fit a racial scenario. Prominent liberal political columnists projected a Dinkins victory as vindication for racial violence and the evils of white racism more generally (Klein 1989; Roberts 1989). Dinkins’ Republican opponent was Rudy Giuliani whose ethnic connection to Italian American Bensonhurst may have accentuated the perception that he was not sensitive to racial minorities; Giuliani’s law and order profile may have reinforced the stereotype of Italian American racial bigotry and, to this extent, his politics resonated with Italian Americans as whites. Notwithstanding an Italian surname, Giuliani is not typified as an Italian American on the public stage; notwithstanding broad Italian American electoral support he provoked the ire

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of many Italian Americans when he threatened to shut down the city’s most popular street fiesta for alleged Mafia ties. Media outlets may be assumed to pursue their own “agendas”. According to Ferguson (1998: 56), media representations are “usually undertaken without reflection or consideration”. Lule (2000: 356) suggests the influence of taken for granted cultural understandings, noting that representations “may result in part from the press’ limited and limiting cast of symbolic types”. Regardless of whether media outlets pursued an “intentional agenda” (Ferguson 1998: 56), coverage of the Bensonhurst incident exposed an external ethnic boundary. Notwithstanding the establishment media’s ethnocentrism, deliberate decisions were made inside media organizations to invoke Italian American ethnicity as relevant to a “racial killing” and to allow certain images to proliferate in the public discourse. It is instructive to note that ethnicity was not invoked in a front page Times article about the history of “racial violence” in the intergroup relations of Hasidic Jews and Blacks in Crown Heights. Indeed, although the Hasidim were essentially described as insular and exclusive, ethnic cultural traits did not inform an “interpretive framework” in the narrative of the community’s conflict with Blacks (Yardley 1998). Similarly, the Times did not invoke ethnicity to frame the “roving bands” of young men that sexually assaulted as many as fifty women near Central Park immediately following the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, in an incident that recalled the “wilding” panic of 1989 (Rashbaum and Chivers 2000). Accompanying pictures of the participants culled from videotapes suggested that ethnic framing was plausible. However, the Times portrayed the suspects as without any defining ethnicity: “the police yesterday arrested six young men, from all around the region and all walks of life, and charge them in the rampage of sexual assaults Sunday in Central Park” (Rashbaum 2000). A week after the riot, a front page story reinforced a perspective that de-emphasized ethnicity: Just as a thundercloud is fueled by moisture and heat, Sunday’s attacks on women in Central Park were fueled by an alchemy of alcohol, marijuana, oppressive weather, testosterone and lapses in police strategy, tactics and communication. (Barstow and Chivers 2000)

In the Bensonhurst case, the significance of being Italian American was often exaggerated in media accounts. For example, the “mob” that confronted Yusuf Hawkins was not ethnically homogeneous. Of the six

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defendants in the murder case, one had a German surname (Charles Stroessler) while another, the alleged “ringleader” (Keith Mondello), was half Jewish (Stone 1989). A young Black man (Russel Gibbons) admitted to have carried baseball bats to the attack. However, this diversity was muted during the “media spectacle”. It took more than three years for a reporter to ask “the most obvious question: What was a black man doing with a group of white guys who intended to beat up a group of black guys for coming into their neighborhood?” (Gelman 1992). “They’re my friends”, he answered. “We do everything together. If I was in trouble, Keith Mondello would come to my side. I was there for him” (ibid.). An “interpretive framework” that privileged Italian American ethnicity could not effectively assimilate this information; the discrepancy created by Gibbons’ racial identity was significantly alleviated when criminal charges against him were dropped in a plea bargain. The stereotypes that dominated the narrative, legitimated by the popular culture, created the appearance that the individuals who comprised the mob, regardless of their actual ethnic and racial identities, were acting Italian American. Deviance labeling is typically grounded in “the definers’ perception that the deviants pose some kind of threat to their specific interests or overall social position”; devaluation and stigmatization processes operate to keep deviants “under control, or in their place” (Schur 1984: 8–9). In the Bensonhurst case, media representations of Italian Americans similarly established invidious contrasts that are at the core of ethnic constructs (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 20). By invoking and, then, devaluing Italian American ethnicity, blame was compartmentalized—a “cognitive device” that deflected blame from white Americans (Zack 1998: 63). Insofar as establishment media serve as the “guardians” of mainstream morality (Schemerhorn 1970: 12), the privileging of Italian American ethnicity reverberated for a “moral economy of racism” (Lipsitz 1997). This moral calculus was identified by Shelby Steele in a PBS documentary, “Seven Days in Bensonhurst” (1990), which aired almost eight months after the killing. It is now as disturbing for a white to be called a racist, as it is for a black to be called a nigger. By making a special show of concern for Hawkins, whites could demonstrate their racial innocence, if for no other reason than to fight off the charge of racism. Where race is concerned, innocence is power.

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The positioning for “racial innocence” may be viewed as a strategy for resource competition” (Nagel 1998: 58). Moreover, the “scapegoating” of Italian Americans for morally reprehensible acts (Schaefer 1996: 47) had consequences beyond the assignment of racist guilt. Political and economic claims could also be contained to the extent that racist violence could be construed as an isolated, Italian American problem rather than a societal problem. This “problem” with Italian Americans disguised a “problem” that is quintessentially American (Lipsitz 1998; Dyson 1989). Racial violence in Bensonhurst made white racism translucent, which was a problem in its own right that invited censure. To the extent that Italian Americans strive to be white, the dominant position in the American racial hierarchy, attributing racial ambiguity to Italian Americans can be construed as a punitive response. An “interpretive framework” based on ethnic deviance preempted explanations based on race. Except for an essay by African American Studies professor Michael Eric Dyson in The Nation (1989), establishment media did not frame the “racist” attitudes and behavior of Bensonhurst residents as racial deviance, even when they were identified as “white”; although Bensonhurst Italian Americans could be categorized as white, their racism was attributed to their ethnicity. They were also portrayed as acting “blue-collar” or “working class”, although class deviance was largely confounded with ethnicity. Deviant cultural distinctions, such as “broken” speech and “high” hair, are also class signifiers, as is the “blue- collar” occupational profile attributed to “Guidos” and “cugines” (Hamill 1989a; Pagnozzi 1989). Similarly, the socioeconomic status of Bensonhurst Italian Americans, which made them vulnerable to structural changes like the decline of a manufacturing economy, exacerbated their purported predisposition to “problem” behaviors like racism (Stone 1989).6 Deviance labeling was promoted by the “moral panic” associated with “wilding” crimes. The use of feral metaphors in the public discourse illustrates the extent of the “moral panic” in the city at the time (Letwin 1989). A connection between random sexual assault, such as in the Central Park jogger case, and the “turf” fights that characterized both the Bensonhurst and Howard Beach incidents, was a stretch. Nevertheless, Italian American youth appear to have been swept up in the fervor. Embedded ethnic stereotypes made them vulnerable to inclusion in “wilding” imagery. Naming “wilding” outer borough Italian American youth “Guido” specifically identified this threat to Manhattan

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elites. The use of an ethnic epithet in “Guido” in the establishment press reveals the moral panic that surrounded Italian Americans. The moral panic in the mainstream press that generalized to an ethnic community, labeling Italian Bensonhurst deviant, was extraordinary. Escalating fears in the city about violent street crime which peaked in April of 1989 with the Central Park jogger assault can explain the broader context. However, Italian Americans may have been scapegoated as a safer target that the Black community for the rising anxiety of a city that was poised to gentrify much further in the coming decades. It was safer politically in 1989 to label Italian Americans as an urban menace because they were not Black. At the same time, to the extent that Bensonhurst Italian Americans were not acting white in sharp contrast with the white gentrification gaining ground in the outer boroughs, it could be inferred that street violence was a Black problem. Representations of Italian Americans can also be linked to media agendas in relation to the 1989 mayoral election. A guest column written by film maker Spike Lee in The Daily News (1989) explicitly placed the event in an electoral context. The depiction of Italian Americans as anti-Semitic in Wiseman’s Times Op-Ed essay may have been intended as a message to elements in the city’s large and influential Jewish population, struggling to salvage a tradition of liberalism in a trying period for Black-Jewish relations. A vote for Dinkins, who was endorsed by The Times, reflected a commitment to this tradition. It should be noted that support for Dinkins did not include Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights and Williamsburg who were embroiled in racial conflicts in their own neighborhoods and have been among the most consistent supporters of Guiliani’s mayoralty (Yardley 1998). Since the mayoral contest symbolically “re-presented” the ethnic issues played out in the streets of Bensonhurst between African Americans and Italian Americans, blame for the racial hostility of Italian Americans in Bensonhurst could be transferred to Rudy Giuliani who shared in an ethnic heritage that was framed as morally dubious. Even without the play of “intentional agendas”, issues of power and ideology are implicit in the “interpretive repertoires” of the media (Ferguson 1998: 30–32). In the Bensonhurst case, media power was evidenced in the way that representations of Italian Americans were “imposed” rather than negotiated through “dialogue” (ibid.: 168). The Times did not publish an OpEd piece that balanced the blatantly incriminating essay by Alan Wiseman and printed only four response letters,

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none of which critically challenged to Wiseman’s logic and motivation (see below). The Times did not give Italian Americans an opportunity to write their own story. It is noteworthy that when Italian Americans were given significant space in the establishment media, in particular Grizzutti-Harrison in Harper’s and DeMarco-Torgovnick in Partisan Review, their essays collaborated in disparaging Italian Americans from inside the ethnic boundary. An opportunistic personal politics fueled the institutional media agenda. This was reflected in recollections submitted to the public record by wounded insiders who defected from the ethnic community. They had personal scores to settle and the moment was propitious; they were given access to prominent publications to vent personal troubles that overlapped with public issues. Both Grizzuti-Harrison and DeMarcoTorgovnick, for example, harbored deep grudges against Bensonhurst’s ethnic culture for perceived personal oppression; the latter still claims to be traumatized by “the conditions of [her] youth” (1990: 466). In Alan Wiseman’s Times OpEd piece (1989), the denigration of Italian Americans (his comments are not confined to Bensonhurst) originate in a family conflict, in particular, his maternal grandfather’s disappointment with his mother for “marrying a Jew”, and the bullying of Jewish schoolboys by tough “Italian kids” in the old neighborhood. His conviction that Italian Americans were capable of racial violence in Bensonhurst, even though he admitted that he did “not know what really happened”, is based on the actions of other Italian Americans in some other place and at some other time. Deviance labeling is facilitated by a power imbalance, in particular, a perception that there would not be commensurate responses to “counter stigmatization” (Schur 1984: 8). In the Bensonhurst case, a power imbalance was rooted in the historical subordination of Italian Americans in the American system of ethnic stratification, featuring a “discursive reserve” (Ferguson 1998: 130) of hurtful cultural stereotypes. Moreover, Italian American advocates may not have possessed the necessary leverage to “represent” the group in the mainstream media, for example, to obtain Op-Ed space in the Times. An Italian American anti-defamation group did secure a private meeting with Pete Hamill and The New York Post, presumably reacting to the most egregious expression of ethnic antipathy in the media spectacle, and on the part of a writer prominently identified with a historic ethnic rival. Nevertheless, an Italian American response to “Guidoville” was not incorporated in the public record.

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There is also the possibility that capable ethnic entrepreneurs, and mainstream Italian Americans more generally, were intimidated by the media “panic” and reluctant to publicly align with the spoiled ethnicity of Bensonhurst Italian Americans, especially “Guido” youth (Vecoli 1996: 14). To this extent, the Bensonhurst incident may have exposed invidious status and cultural distinctions among Italian Americans; upward mobility and assimilation have historically been predicated on “escaping” blue-collar, ethnic minority neighborhoods like Bensonhurst. The media spectacle exposed a crisis for the urban “Italian neighborhood”, a communal position in the city rooted in the mass immigration period (Tricarico 1984). The otherness and deviance attributed to Bensonhurst by the establishment media was fundamentally a response to these urban strategies which Suttles (1968) locates as the core of a “defended neighborhood”. In this scenario, a “moral order” in Bensonhurst was structured by the interplay of ethnicity, race, and class within segmented urban spaces; “Greater Bensonhurst” was itself segmented into myriad “defended neighborhoods” with units as small as the block. Within these spatial units, insiders are defined as relatively trustworthy and outsiders are either superfluous or threatening. Blacks were threatening in Bensonhurst primarily because of the acceptance of racial discourses. Racial threat had an immediacy because demographic shifts portended integration and even succession by nonwhites (Green et al. 1998). Racial belligerence was confined to an element of the community that was structurally vulnerable (e.g., unemployment or underemployment). This vulnerability promoted a “turf” consciousness, as competition for scarce resources (e.g., “respect”) was centered on the locality; thus, young males with little mainstream social capital served as the principal agents of a “defended neighborhood” culture. Bensonhurst, and other outer borough communities, was untamed relative to Manhattan neighborhoods. Indeed, the lower Manhattan neighborhoods had recently been packaged for the cultural consumption of the affluent and cosmopolitan. In 1974, the Lower East Side/ Mulberry Street Italian American neighborhood was designated by the New York City Planning Commission as the city’s official “Little Italy”; this landmark status enshrined a restaurant economy as the symbol of Italian American life at the very moment that the neighborhood was being absorbed by Chinatown. The ongoing gentrification of downtown Manhattan has more recently spawned a real estate concoction called NOLITA, an acronym that stands for “North of Little Italy”

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(it is actually within the limits of the historic ethnic community). The name attempts to capitalize on the cachet of the SoHo development in the 1970s (acronyms are the nomenclature of gentrification in lower Manhattan) in order “to attract a young and trendsetting clientele of artists and professionals”; with upscale newcomers poised to inherit the neighborhood, an article in The New York Times real estate section described the residual Italian American population as a residential amenity (Cohen 1998). Although historic downtown neighborhoods may soon have more Italian restaurants than Italian Americans, media culture can perhaps stand in for a neighborhood culture: Grand Ticino, the homey Italian restaurant featured in “Moonstruck” (1987), is on Thompson Street, a couple of blocks below the park. This is where Danny Aiello proposed to Cher, and where Olympia Dukakis arrived for dinner alone…. (Gates 2000)

Unlike ethnically depopulated and gentrified Manhattan neighborhoods like the South (Greenwich) Village and “Little Italy”, “a living Italian neighborhood” (O’Neill 1991) in Bensonhurst was not available as a commodified and symbolic enclave experience. Through the 1980s, the communal character of Bensonhurst reflected the working class and ethnic strategies of a large and dense Italian American population. Bensonhurst was unlike those Italian American neighborhoods that have historically played a “middleman” role in the “racial discourse” of New York City, providing a strategic buffer between more affluent and educated whites intent on reclaiming the inner city and low status Blacks and Latinos. They have done this by stabilizing real estate values and by discouraging predatory street behavior. Artists and “bohemians” have historically found Italian American neighborhoods in the city appealing. The area below Washington Square Park, for example, afforded inexpensive housing and restaurants in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s and 1970s with the development of the SoHo artists’ community. In the 1970s, the first wave of newcomers who were typically in their twenties and early thirties and incubating professional careers were also drawn by the belief that Italian neighborhoods were relatively free of street crime. Moreover, they evidenced little moral conflict over how neighborhood peace was secured. Gentrification did not displace restaurants and shops that were able to stage a co modified ethnic experience suitable for cosmopolitan residents and visitors without a working-class ethnic community (Tricarico 1984).

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Gentrifiers made a dubious deal with the forces of the defended neighborhood. “Street work” has been the specialized role of tough Italian American youth backed up the Mafia (ibid.: 67–69). Jonathan Rieder’s study of Canarsie (1986) in the 1980s noted that Italian Americans served as “Jewish muscle” in a neighborhood that was experiencing racial succession; this allowed Jewish Americans to resolve the contradictions between opposition to racial integration and a signature liberalism, although a tough street response eventually emerged with the formation of the Jewish Defense League. Artists and incubating professionals (yuppies) moving into the South Village in the 1970s appreciated the vigilance of cornerboys, without actually condoning physical violence (Tricarico 1984: 102–111). Although it occasionally posed problems for newcomers, the “street work” of Italian American cornerboys has made gritty inner city neighborhoods safe for gentrification. In contrast to areas like the South Village which have locational or architectural significance, Bensonhurst held virtually no appeal for bohemians or gentry. Its peripheral status to the material and social concerns of strategic urban actors may have facilitated a moral repositioning of Italian Americans, in particular the criminalization of “Guido”. The Bensonhurst media narrative suggests that middlemen ethnic groups are vulnerable to scapegoating and deviance labeling when caught in the middle of conflict involving dominant and subordinate groups. If the mass media is crucial in naming youth subcultures, then, the reporting by the mainstream press on a “racial killing” in Bensonhurst gave Guido a bad name. Guido was introduced to mainstream audiences as a youth subculture defined more by social pathology than style—a familiar trope in the way ethnic minority youth are characterized during moral panics (Cohen 1983). However, Guido was a manifestation of ethnic pathology. Given the central assumption of a “racial killing”, there was ample room to construe events in terms of race relations. While race figured prominently, it was not a sufficient explanation. At times, nationality was juxtaposed to race, with Bensonhurst residents depicted as both Italian American and white. There were also times when nationality mattered more than race, and even confounded or contradicted it with scenarios in which Italian Americans were “less than white” (Roediger 1994). Media representations of Italian Americans in Bensonhurst racial killing reflected “a particular kind of identity” (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 184). What it meant to be Guido and, more broadly, Italian American was conveyed by a cognitive distortion (i.e., ethnic stereotypes); certain

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traits found in every population, like insularity and racial intolerance, were made salient while others were minimized or consigned to insignificance. By linking racial violence to a shared culture, responsibility was generalized from the individuals who authored a racial attack to a youth subculture and, then, to an Italian American community, and even Italian Americans as an ethnic group. Overgeneralizations simplified a complex ethnic reality, an outcome facilitated by the uneven distribution of knowledge about constituent groups in multiethnic societies (Lyman and Douglas 1973: 347). Media “re-presentations” constituted an “ideological choice” in which “a particular way of seeing” was privileged; representations of Italian Americans were ideological also to the extent that “the mediated character of this construction” was concealed (Grossberg 1998: 182–183). As this media episode suggests, the “discursive reserve” of stereotypes that stigmatize Italian Americans lies just below the surface of American popular culture. Because it activated stereotypes of a “thick” and deviant ethnicity, the Bensonhurst incident may have occasioned a major setback for a mainstream identity development. Indeed, assimilated Italian Americans may have been astounded by the recrudescence of public discourse that, after all these years, portrays Italian Americans as a stigmatized other (i.e., an “underclass” that is “not yet white”). Naming Guido in the narrative of the Bensonhurst racial killing had a mainly local significance. This would be very different exactly twenty years later. Not only would the narrative be centered on consumption style, but also it came with an agenda that was commercial rather than political. In the process, Guido had moved away from Bensonhurst itself. These developments are taken up in Chapter 9.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published by McGraw-Hill/Dushkin in 2001 titled “Read All About It! Representations of Italian Americans in the Print Media in Response to the Bensonhurst Racial Killing” in Notable Selections in Race and Ethnicity, edited by A.A. Aguirre and D.V. Baker, 291–319. 2.  Tony Dapolito was the key informant for my book on the Greenwich Village Italian American community. He possessed a first-hand understanding of the structure of official and non-official power in the Italian neighborhood and its relationship to the liberal and bohemian Village and the city as a whole. For a more nuanced view of this “community

236  D. TRICARICO power broker” who did not accept the designation of local color for “the Villagers” and “artists” succeeding Italian Americans in the neighborhood, see Tricarico 1984: 123–146. 3. Gangsta Hip Hop continues to be prominently framed in the mainstream media in terms of street violence: Ever since Lionel Pickens, the rapper better known as Chinx, was gunned down in his Porsche on Queens Boulevard two and a half years ago, the riddle of his killing hashung over parts of the New York hip-hop scene. (Mueller 2017b) A salient historical example is the turn of Mexican American Pachucos to popular American culture, notably the zoot suit and swing music, to “become somebody else”. In the early 1940s, the Los Angeles police ruthlessly interpreted Zoot style as ethnic deviance in the course of an investigation into the murder of a Mexican American youth. The Los Angeles Police Department arrested Pachucos for wearing zoot suits downtown after the City Council had passed an ordinance. Pachucos in police custody for a murder charge were not allowed to get their hair cut. See video “Zoot Suit Riots” (2001). 4. The sexual assault of a female jogger (routinely identified as an “investment banker”) in Central Park in April 1989 was attributed to a “wilding” mob of Black and Hispanic teenagers (see Stein 1990; Pinderhughes 1997). This followed mounting concern with random needle attacks on pedestrians in affluent Manhattan neighborhoods. Donald Trump, with major real estate interests in Manhattan including the Plaza Hotel on the edge of Central Park, took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in the state. 5. A study by Pinderhughes (1997) of Italian American teenagers in a turf-related gang in the Kings Highway section of southern Brooklyn offers a graphic depiction of racial dynamics at street-level. While he is correct to emphasize that the gang was supported by community norms and ideology, it cannot be inferred that racism and racial violence define a dominant moral posture in the community. 6. Lizzi (2011) describes a similar dynamic in underscoring Italian nationality rather than race in “rioting” by Italian Americans in East New York in 1966 in response to the residential incursion of African Americans. Lizzi not only finds this in the local press, specifically citing the viewpoint of New York Post columnist, Pete Hammill (129), but also in the “liberal” agenda of the Lindsay administration that implicitly classified Italian Americans as not white based on the aggressive defense of their neighborhood. The recruitment of the Gallo crime family based in south Brooklyn to keep the peace on the street (133–141) evidence of urban Italian American minority group culture.

CHAPTER 9

A Party Culture Becomes a Media Spectacle

The 1989 racial killing in Bensonhurst was a flash point that revealed Guido, and the local Italian community, as a social problem. While first impressions matter, motifs of urban menace in the public discourse faded quickly. A 1997 New York Times story compiled by “a team of writers” that “set out to watch and listen in on some New York teenagers” on the night of September 19, 1997 included a “snapshot” of “Guido” taken at a cruising scene at Astoria Park (Henry 1997). On that night, Guido was allowed to be just another youth subculture bounded by style: He’s a member of the Guido…‘We’ve got the silver chains, silver earrings, tight shirts, nice jeans’.

It was perhaps no coincidence that the scene was not in Bensonhurst but in Astoria, a mixed ethnic community with a relatively small Italian population. It is also likely that the institutional agendas that framed Guido deviant in 1989 were not mobilized. Although the NYPD targeted the “Big Bad Guidos” in northeastern Queens as a “street gang” in the early 2000s, the steady decline in the city’s crime rate may have lessened the threat of youth deviance (Zimring 2013); in any case, this particular threat was localized and minor compared to powerful gangs like Crips and Latin Kings. A more credible threat was posed by “The Tanglewood Boys” based in the Bronx and Westchester County and affiliated with a Mafia family. However, they did not evince comparisons to Guido despite the notoriety brought to this group by Daily News writer © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_9

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Mike McAlary (1995, 1998). Even more notably, the 1989 racial killing was in the air in Howard Beach in 2005 when a 19-year-old Italian American male patrolling ethnic turf, attacked a Black youth with a baseball bat while using a racial slur. The persona of the perpetrator, who had a personal connection to the Gotti grandsons in Howard Beach, invited a Guido frame, but it again failed to materialize. In contrast to the Bensonhurst incident, media frames privileged race over ethnicity. The middle-class suburban character of Howard Beach may have forestalled the stigma associated with an ethnic minority culture. While the media “amnesia”, these dots could easily have been connected to Guido and, by extension, urban Italian American culture. They were, in fact, in the vernacular culture. As we have seen, Guido was not welcome in Manhattan dance clubs and was disparaged, if not vilified online. Guido responded by retreating to safe spaces like ItalChat where it constructed its own cool. More significant for subcultural development were offline scenes. After 2000, these scenes were less likely to be in the outer boroughs. Guido embraced its true “bridge and tunnel” character, this time leaving Bensonhurst for new consumption opportunities, evolving as a party culture although not without outer borough proclivities and opposition from the natives. MTV not only represented this new face of Guido, butit also branded it for sale in mainstream consumer markets. If SNF provided a road map from the minority ethnic culture of Bensonhurst to popular American culture in the late 1970s, the reality TV show Jersey Shore was, finally, its’ coming out party. This chapter traces this interrelationship between suburbanization, the ascendance of a party ethos, and commodification that defines Guido in its second generation as an American youth subculture.

Transplanting Guido The moral panic in the mass media that framed Guido in relation to a racial killing likely reinforced an external subcultural boundary. As discussed in Chapter 6, Guido was excluded from cool in Manhattan clubs into the 2000s. Internet sites like Urban Dictionary registered extraordinary vitriol toward Guido as a youth style identified with Italian Americans during this period. This may have put Guido on the defensive even more, considering that it was already committed to re-valuing a stigmatized identity. It can explain rhetorical posturing in ItalChat that pumps up ethnic and style capital. It can also explain the retreat into

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more bounded scenes like ItalChat but more importantly a turn away from Manhattan clubs evidenced in a preference for suburban outposts. This was a concomitant of ongoing suburbanization that witnessed the decline in the Italian ancestry population in Bensonhurst after 1980 (Alba et al. 1997). Bensonhurst lost half of its Italian ancestry population between 1980 and 2000; in 2015, there were 6402 foreign-born Italians in Bensonhurst compared to 43,045 Chinese (American Community Survey 2018). It is possible that the erosion of Italian American Bensonhurst was accelerated by the 1989 racial killing, affecting a communal trauma deepened by the electoral victory of David Dinkins over Rudy Giuliani and the succession of new immigrant populations. Giuliani would win the following election in 1993 but the retreat was underway. Moreover, his policies did not buttress the Italian American defended neighborhood, especially the role of the Mafia in “keeping the neighborhood safe”. In any case, he was also Mayor in Staten Italy which has absorbed much of the outflow from Bensonhurst since the Verrazano Bridge was built. A higher proportion of Americans lived in the suburbs in 1980 than either in cities or in rural areas (Jackson 1985: 4). The proportion of Italian Americans residing in the suburbs comparable to “other white Americans” was even greater (Alba 1985: 43). People claiming Italian ancestry were 27% of the total population of Long Island in 1990. They were the largest ethnic group in the two counties comprising the Island with a 3% increase between 1980 and 1990 (Milone 1994: 2). The Town of Babylon had almost 60,000 persons of Italian ancestry in 2010 which was 40% of all white residents. In 1970, there were 390,000 persons in the eight New Jersey counties closest to New York City that were either born in Italy or born to Italian-born parents (the ratio was 1:3); 91,400 resided in Bergen County, 81,000 resided in Essex, and 68,000 in Hudson (Burks 1972: 16). Italians were one-fourth of the “foreign-stock” population of the region (ibid.: 16). The next largest European ancestry group was the Poles with a total of 172,000. The Italian ancestry population in Bergen and Essex Counties outnumbered the next two largest foreign-stock populations combined. The Italian ancestry population of Staten Island is notable, numbering almost 150,000 in 2000, exceeding any other nationality group by a wide margin (American Community Survey 2018). Staten Italy can be culturally positioned between the urban minority ethnic culture of Bensonhurst across the Verrazano and the mainstream suburbs of New Jersey to

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the west just across the Outerbridge Crossing. The straight-line model makes the assumption that ethnicity has been vacated in the migration to the “crabgrass frontier”. However, the suburbs have provided another middle space for Italian Americans (Tricarico 2017). While the style identified with Italian American youth was less vibrant with the decline in outer borough Italian American population, Guido was transported suburban towns preferred by families leaving communities like Bensonhurst. Everyday scenes surfaced in south shore Long Island towns with large and dense Italian American populations like Franklin Square where “guidos…dress in ‘wife beaters’ and gold crosses” and “think they can fight anybody” (“Franklin Square”, Urban Dictionary 2004). Guido style has been staged on suburban college campuses like Hofstra University in Hempstead and Adelphi University in Garden City, where youth from the middle class and more affluent Italian American families established “Guido fraternities”. A generation after Saturday Night Fever, a suburban youth style relied on clubs and gyms in strip malls within a short driving distance of post-World War II housing subdivisions. The style does not reflect the urgency of ethnic differences distilled in a complex urban setting. In particular, the suburbs screen racialized minorities whose proximity in the city cue a stronger ethnic boundary. More privileged consumption is another factor that relaxes the value of ethnic capital for boundary construction in suburban settings. Diaspora clubs kept Guido on the “other” side of the bridges and tunnels, where they could tune out the elitism of the Manhattan scene as suggested by this entry for “Long Island” (2013) on Urban Dictionary: A big tract of suburban h*ll east of NYC. Known for its abundance of guido f*ggots who invade Manhattan on the weekends and turn formerly hot clubs like Marquee and Lotus into B&T wastelands. People who live in “the City” (i.e. Manhattan, not Brooklyn/Queens, etc.) look down on people from Long Island as uncultured suburban tools that dilute Manhattan nightlife or pretty much anything else they manage to get their hair-gel stained, grubby hands on. Long Islanders wish they could live in Manhattan, but can’t afford it so they pretend they hate Manhattan and have a lot of “Long Island Pride”.

Guido summer scenes coalesced around dance clubs most notably in the shore communities of Hampton Bays, Long Island, and Seaside

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Heights in New Jersey. The suburban/shore scene was supported by mass media like WKTU which advertised dance clubs throughout the year and promotions at the beach in the summer. In the early 2000s, the reality TV show “Growing Up Gotti” signaled the arrival of Guido in Nassau County, specifically as a nouveau riche style connected to the outer borough community of Howard Beach, Queens in the old money town of Old Westbury. The Gotti brand capitalized on business ventures that marketed the look of Guido youth style like a tanning salon in a Long Island strip mall (see below). Music videos by rappers like G Fella and JoJo Pellegrino began to be linked to other suburban venues to the outer borough Italian American youth style tradition. The Internet played a key role alongside older communications media. Suburban youth “represented” in ItalChat from 1999 to 2001 but its cultural center was in the outer boroughs and especially Bensonhurst. However, the Internet galvanized subcultural development outside the city after 2000. The website NJGuido was a consummate second-generation subcultural development. It was founded in 2001 by Anthony Moussa a self-identified Guido who is half Italian and grew up in a New Jersey suburb. It was initially a place to post digital photos after a night out partying with friends but it snowballed, attracting 11–13 thousand hits a day in 2003. An article in The Washington Post (Copeland 2003) describes a gathering noise similar to the turn to disco in the 1970s: These were the people of northern New Jersey and Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Yonkers, a bridge-and-tunnel crowd bound together more by attitude than by ancestral homeland. They were the spiritual descendants of John Travolta’s “Saturday Night Fever” character, the dim but gorgeous Tony Manero, a Brooklyn paint clerk who is truly alive only when he’s strutting on the dance floor.

NJGuido reworked the meaning of Guido in the second generation, giving new meaning to “bridge and tunnel”—that a reverse commute was necessary with New Jersey as the destination rather than Manhattan. It shifted its symbolic center from Bensonhurst to the Jersey shore, peaking in a summertime “party” scene in commercialized shore towns like Seaside Heights which The Washington Post reporter described in 2003 as “a honky-tonk town with a boardwalk of neon signs and flashing light bulbs”. An older and more affluent crowd includes twenty-something

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incubating professionals like Moussa who is a “computer consultant” and Joe C., “the ‘ultimate guido’ who studies at William Paterson University in Wayne, with hopes of becoming a gym teacher, drives a paprika-colored Mercedes Kompressor”. An Internet site helped them to network the new terrain, identifying clubs in New Jersey willing to support a Guido scene. The visual vernacular of style was familiar: Joe C., Moo, and many other guidos get their hair shaped into what Moo calls the “guido cut” - short on the sides and gelled into long spikes on top. They still favor gold chains, but their fashion is current clubwear. Moo likes Diesel, Boss by Hugo Boss, Buffalo, Ted Baker, Ben Sherman, Seven, and Dolce & Gabbana, and he buys something new every weekend. For going out, Joe C., Moo, and company like tank tops and anything else that will evidence countless gym hours spent on “pecs, abs, tris, and bis”. (Copeland 2003)

However, NJGuido anointed itself as the arbiter of a second-generation subculture tilting further toward hedonistic consumption: Like the guido, the guidettes beauty is defined in upper-body terms, but instead of muscle, her currency is breasts. Implants are popular. Cleavage is all. Her nails are pink or French manicured, her earrings are hoop, her top is tube, her tank is mesh, and she teeters on sandals with three-inch heels. Her lips are wet with lip gloss.

The summer resort has added a dimension to the Guido scene, creating a full-blown if not over the top “party culture”. It is predicated on a share in a summertime rental that both complements the scene at the club and becomes its own scene, a party that is staged before and after the club (i.e., a party from Memorial Day to Labor Day). Then the guidos head back to the house and drink. As the sun sinks, guidos prepare for partying. Some nap. Some shower. Dancing starts in the kitchen. The guys put on hats they keep above the fridge: a green, oversize foam hat with a huge brim and a shiny plastic captain’s hat that might once have belonged to the Village People.

The summer rental facilitates “the hookup culture” that was subsequently spotlighted by JS (below). However, clubbing remained the

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consummate subcultural ritual, its totemic significance documented by a string of digital photos posted on the website of routinized social media poses. The guys down Stoli vodka, licorice-flavored Jaegermeister and Goldschager, a cinnamon schnapps whose novelty is its floating 24-karat gold flakes. The guidos party till 3:20, when the lights come on in Temptations, and then they keep partying. The music stays on and the crowd stays on the dance floor. Somebody in Moo’s camp orders 48 shots of Southern Comfort and lime, and Moo’s friends pass them around… Over at the bar, a group of muscly guidos is posing for a picture. Among them is Construction Carline, looking like a deranged tree-trimming superhero in his cape and helmet. He has taken off his pants.

NJGuido elaborated the ideology of a party culture: “Basically we want to show off the crazy ass New Jersey scene!”. This ideology gradually muted Italian ethnicity in favor of “youth, beauty, and flash” (NJGuido 2008). In 2010, NJGuido was repackaged as a slick, commercialized entity called Night Life Society, “the number one nightlife website in all of New Jersey and New York”. This development formally jettisoned the Guido symbol with roots in urban Italian American culture. However, the disposition to not name Guido did not resonate across the subcultural boundary. New Jersey shore communities were chafing at the summer influx that was at odds with the vacation routines of families, specifically the party culture supported by “grouper” housing arrangements and club-centered partying into the wee hours of the morning. The police department of South Belmar, New Jersey issued an “internal police memo” for the last “fling” of summer, the Labor Day weekend: “Let’s end the summer by taking a ‘bite’ out of the remaining ‘guidos’ and have some fun while doing it” (Italian American One Voice 2002). When news of the “memo”, written by a police corporal with an Irish surname, was leaked to an Italian American anti-defamation organization, the latter lodged a protest with the town government. The town mayor, who had an Italian surname, backtracked by explaining that the term “guido” did not refer to Italian Americans but to “people from the city”, scapegoating a constituency that was too amorphous to field an anti-defamation complaint. This maneuver failed to placate an official of the Italian American anti-defamation organization because “Everyone

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in the United States knows that “Guido” is “an Italian slur”. While the South Belmar incident was an anti-defamation brushfire that anticipated the conflagration ignited by JS in 2009 (see below), it pointed to a boundary meaningfully referenced to urban Italian American neighborhood culture. The police memo identifies the offending youth culture practice with youth from “the city” reflecting a historic pattern of anti-urban nativism or “suburban resistance” (Jackson 1985: 88); in a later exchange, this was narrowed down to “people from Staten Island”. Although the memo does not explicitly name Italian Americans, the ethnic innuendo is clear. A similar dynamic is apparent in the case of a website, Get Off Our Island (2007) which I first discovered in 2004, that sounded the alarm vis-à-vis “the growing ‘Guido’ phenomenon” that “threatens” the suburban “social fabric of Long Island”. Guido is identified by a signature style that reflects a “vain and materialistic” ethos including elements such as “tanning”, “attention to muscular development”, “tacky mall attire”, “STDs” (implying sexual promiscuity), “alcohol abuse”, and “nightclubbing”. The site is festooned with photos presumably harvested from other sites of males in poses that illustrate these claims. Guido youth are seen as unmistakably “Italian” although they are regarded as betraying an ethnic culture based on family traditions; while this suggests an internecine division, images of “resistance” draw on intergroup animus for the sale of a T-shirt with a shamrock and the banner “Lucky to be Irish…Thank God I’m not a Guido”. Class culture enters the fray, linking Irish American identity with images of the preppy suburban sport of lacrosse that are invidiously distinguished from the nouveau riche consumption style of Italian Americans: “PLAY LACROSSE: don’t be a guido”. In the nativist mythology, Irish ancestry residents and other Long Islanders are facing the “invasion” of Italian Americans from the city: “Good honest people are disappearing and being replaced with Guido douche bags as this plague spreads across the island”. As with the revulsion for Guidos on the Jersey shore, a map of Long Island purports to decipher a demography of succession from “the city [that] pushes its boundaries out toward the island”. Nassau is seen as already lost to the invasion, nothing more than “an extension of Queens and Brooklyn”. “The south shore of Suffolk is another Guido stronghold” while the “Suffolk Heartland” is under pressure although not as much as “the Hampton Bay beaches” accessible to “the numerous summer dance clubs” that bear the brunt of the “Guido summer migration pattern”.

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Dire warnings for the suburban “American Dream” on Long Island from the “plague” that is “darkening our island”, a metaphor that implies a threat to whiteness, are underscored by a soundtrack that could accompany a disaster movie intended for a teenage audience.

Merchandising UnCool Youth culture not only persists in spite of opposition in the mainstream, it typically thrives (Hebdige 1977). The animus of local citizenry did not deter Guido summer scenes in the Hamptons and on the Jersey Shore. The Hamptons scene, more than seventy five miles east of New York City, bustled despite being hemmed in by the zoning laws of the wealthy town of Southampton that legislated against “grouper” housing and kept clubs at a distance from prime residential areas and beaches. However, Guido remained marginalized through the 2000s within the youth scene. Mainstream youth culture spaces on the Internet like Urban Dictionary expose a sustained groundswell of antipathy for Guido as a youth culture. Aside from the extraordinary rant of Get Off Our Island, there have been websites dedicated to trashing Guido like “Guidos Suck” (2008). An attack thread emerged in the form of a stereotype built around images of a young male with spiked hair and an orange tan with the pseudonym “Lee Hotti” (2005). The name “Hotti” which rhymes with “Gotti” (as referenced on the site) has numerous permutations which mock Guido for “homoeroticism” and has earned its own Urban Dictionary entry (“Lee Hotti” 2017). Guido remained too patently uncool to interest the “merchants of cool”. Douglas Rushkoff (The Merchants of Cool 2001) observes that the youth culture industries and youth cultures are entwined in a “feedback loop” of reciprocal influence. Rushkoff highlights the vast capabilities of MTV in understanding youth culture so it can sell it back to young people who are, in turn, monitoring arbiters of youth culture practice like MTV. Initially, MTV was almost singularly focused on a music video. Dance music did not fall under its purview, so outer borough Italian American youth culture was not on its radar, and perhaps vice versa. In the vacuum left by disinterested corporate cool merchants, there were minor efforts to package Guido that had hyperlocal meaning. The Joe Causi connection to WKTU FM spun off a recording of satirical songs by The HaYaDoin’ Boys like “The 12 Days of Guido Christmas” (2004):

246  D. TRICARICO On the twelfth day of Christmas my paesan gave to me, Twelve globs of hair gel, Eleven Sinatra CDs, Ten hand gestures, Nine balls-a-grabbing, Eight ha ya doins, Seven Piazza jerseys, Six Sergio Tacchinis, Five pinky rings! Four fresh cannolis, All tree Godfadda’s, Two guinea tees, And a ride in his IROC-Z.

An Internet site “Guidoland” (2004) marketed Guido as ethnic nostalgia and ethnic nostalgia as entertainment, like an insider parody titled “You Know You’re a Guido Of…”, for example, “You owned or drive a Mustang/IROC/Trans Am” or “You cried when Hot 97 turned to all rap”. In these developments, Guidos attempted to market themselves to other Guidos before someone else did. A more committed commercial investment occurred in 2003 when the apparel firm Guido New York merchandised Guido as a hybrid of street and club couture. On the one hand, GNY claimed the prestige of haute fashion design, dressing high-profile celebrities and flaunting notices in international fashion magazines. On the other hand, probably with Hip Hop in mind, it claimed an authentic relationship to the Italian street. Regarding the latter, advertisements on the company website featured photographs of tough posing young males on hardscrabble streets framed by elevated train tracks and warehouses marking the symbolic Guido turf of Bensonhurst and Gravesend. One ad revived the memory of the infamous 1989 racial killing: a young male in a designer tracksuit leans against a sleek automobile parked at the curb while holding a baseball bat that is a signifier of street culture not baseball. The intent to mine Guido for a “tough-guy sex appeal” in “marked contrast to the metrosexual ambiguity that has dominated the market in recent years” was taken further in the direction of Italian American street culture when one of the grandsons of John Gotti became a runway model for the 2004 collection (Guido New York 2004).

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However, GNY was unable to reconcile its many contradictions. Its 2005 collection added the warm-up suit and hoodies that were a signature of Hip Hop fashions. Further, urban street wear clichés were juxtaposed to preppy styles like classic polo shirts and tennis shorts and, even more implausibly, a swimsuit collection modeled by men with lean, “metrosexual” physiques. Perhaps the greatest contradiction was the failure to resolve the meaning of “the name ‘Guido’”, an “image” or “stereotype” that “may be perceived as negative”, “something that is less desirable” and “less than classy”. Guido New York believed it “re-contextualized and appropriated the word and not the stereotype” (Guido New York 3.20.04). In contrast to FuBu, Guido New York repudiated the subculture whose authenticity it was merchandising. The commercial franchise on Guido was still up for grabs although, at the time, it was difficult to see the value of having one. While merchandising Guido would not begin to compete with Hip Hop, and that likely rankled with insiders, it was plausible that Guido could be a marketable ethnic youth style like “Cholo” offering a version of the “inner city vibe” (LaFerla 2003a). Guido New York overlapped with the reality TV show “Growing Up Gotti” which was a serious attempt to merchandise Guido in the electronic visual media. It first aired in 2003, winding through three seasons that ended in 2005. While the show never named Guido, the three grandsons of John Gotti personified, if not exemplified, the style, including the demeanor, which explains the value of the endorsement for Guido New York. The brothers possessed Guido street cred because of the family surname and because of plot development that linked back to Howard Beach. The Gotti name was not enough to salvage the 2005 GNY fashion line but it was used to break into the Guido style market on Long Island with the opening of a tanning salon. Alongside the demise of Guido New York, the short shelf life of “Growing Up Gotti” is indicative of the limited commercial success in merchandising Guido to this point. When MTV entered the field, the resources of the premier “merchant of cool” was brought to bear on a youth culture product. Unlike “Gotti” which is really focused on family culture, and the absent family patriarch, MTV produced an unadulterated youth culture narrative (Fig. 9.1). MTV and Guido were not destined for each other. Since it began operations in 1982, MTV had a preoccupation with rock followed by Hip Hop which led it to ignore youth subcultures oriented to electronic dance music. While Guido lacked a marketable soundtrack, MTV, was

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Fig. 9.1  Growing Up Gotti disseminated Guido style in the mass media leading up to Jersey Shore (Source Growing Up Gotti: 10 Years Later: The Hair [Season 4, Episode 1], published by A + E 11.12.14, 1:51, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pAqEuGwPuk8, accessed 8.21.2018)

moving away from music which was in its media DNA. It turned out that Guido was highly suitable for the new reality format that MTV was relying on now that the Internet had changed the way young people were consuming music. MTV approached Guido gingerly. It was showing a growing interest in the Guido scene from the early 2000s with the reality TV series called “True Life” which included “I Have a Summer Share” (2004), “I’m a Jersey Shore Girl” (2004), and “I’m a Staten Island Girl” (2006). These series unequivocally recognized the Guido scene outside of Bensonhurst, and was likely read that way in the New York metropolitan area, but did not name Guido perhaps in deference to anti-defamation concerns. While the pursuit of a more “sophisticated” scene led NJGuido to renounce the Guido symbol, MTV filled the vacuum by brazenly announced plans for a reality TV show about Seaside Heights Guido. Not pulling punches this time, the show was originally to be called “Guido” (Fleming 2018). MTV appears to have been mindful of the media narrative to this point and, so, entertained the possibility of including the Gotti brothers with their established Guido credentials and fresh off a reality TV show of their own (Lear 2014).

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The casting call posted on the Internet 2.12.09 intended for a particular youth culture constituency, did not mince words: VH1 Casting hottest GUIDOS and GUIDETTES for a summer in “the shore”! It’s about freakin time they did this!!! It’s summertime at the Jersey Shore, baby! Bangin’ beats, hot bodies, icy cold booze, and boardwalk bashes … only the hottest pimps and sexiest ladies can handle the heat. Red White and Green, Killer shades, Awesome Hair, Bandanna’s and Bling! Can mean only one thing… So if you’re a loud and proud Italian, and rep the shore the fullest, we want to hear from you! Do you dominate the gym, tear up the club, pump your fist and rule the bedroom? Prove it! Doron Ofir Casting and VH1 are currently seeking the proudest GUIDOS and GUIDETTES to rep the real deal… be least 21 and appear younger than 30 to star in a long-form docu-series that will prove once and for all, who runs sh*t. Summertime at the Jersey Shore, baby, bring it the f@&% on!

MTV casted four males and four females in their twenties who were “all self-proclaimed ‘guidos and guidettes’” (Moore 2010). Cast members explicitly called attention to the identity symbol; entering a gym, DJ Pauly D exclaims “The Guidos are here!” and “I’m the number 1 Guido” (JS, Season 3, 1.16.11).1 JS also showcased a “Guidette” identity that was empowered in the style, including sexuality, in comparison to earlier representations like SNF. JS portrayed a scene that NJGuido perfected before surrendering the subcultural nomenclature. Although clubbing was the signature public ritual, JS foregrounded the “summer share” as a behind the scenes scene, primarily to showcase the “hook-up culture” that framed the evolved Guido sexual mores. The distinctive visual vernacular was in place, including spiked gelled hair for males and high hair and long painted nails for females. Brand named clothing like Ed Hardy was on display along with a sampling of designer Hip Hop fashions like baggy basketball shorts and athletic shoes. MTV recruited males representing core Guido personas: all were bodybuilders and one was a club DJ. One of the males was prone to fighting in public although the females were also inclined to brawl. None were from the outer

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boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, most notably Bensonhurst, although three were from Staten Island which is once removed from southern Brooklyn. DJ Pauly D was from Rhode Island with a regional accent in his repertoire, suggesting that Guido was already supra-local. Jersey Shore Guido style displays change and continuity within the style tradition. MTV highlighted the connection between Guido and Italian ethnicity, which was what was to be expected from the original casting call. Cast members used Guido and Italian interchangeably. In fact, ancestral purity was relaxed as a subcultural criterion as one of the females had non-Italian European ancestry and another was of Chilean (possibly Indio) origin with adoptive Italian American parents. This did not preclude recognition that Guido was (somehow) an “Italian” cultural enterprise, symbolized by the Italian flag painted on the garage door of the beach house, and a reverence for Italian ethnic capital (most notably professed by the Guidette from Chile). The series made explicit references to Italian ethnicity, not just on the surface, but by strategically underscoring ethnic family values like maternal nurturance. The selection of one of the males, Vinny, was made in part because he represented on the casting tape as “close with my family” which, to JS producer Salsano made him “the biggest guido” (Fleming 2018). Jersey Shore Guido style displays change and continuity with the style tradition. Pauly D prominently articulates Italian heritage in style performance: “I was born and raised a Guido. It’s just a life-style. It’s being Italian. It’s representing family…” (Fig. 9.2).

Settling into Popular American Culture Italian American youth had been appropriating popular American culture for years and Guido was no exception. Now, it was Guido that was being appropriated. JS exploded into the popular culture from the margins, taking Guido along. It grabbed the attention of the mainstream media with the “discovery” of Guido, indicating a vacuum of knowledge about the subject when the series debuted. Initial ratings success created a demand for more information about Guido including an explanation. In clear contrast to the 1989 media spectacle, JS opened a public conversation about the MTV version of “reality”. In the first couple of months after JS debuted, the press asked questions about the meaning of it all, in particular, “the cast’s use of the term “guido” and “guidette” (Moore 2010). The real-life Guidos and Guidettes were in a privileged position to explain, as newfound celebrities, and they reiterated the impression created on the show. Pauly D owned up that

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Fig. 9.2  Pauly D explaining the connection between Guido and being Italian (Source “Welcome to Jersey Shore”, recap season 1 episode 1 12/1/2009, 6:27, MTV, http://www.mtv.com/video-clips/8go1h7/jersey-shore-welcome-to-jersey-shore, accessed 8.21.2018)

I was born and raised a Guido. It’s just a lifestyle. It’s about being Italian. It’s representing family, friends, tanning, gel, everything. Dude I got a fucking tanning bed in my place, that’s how serious I am about being a Guido and living up to that lifestyle. (Viscusi 2010)

Appearances by cast members on national TV talk shows were informational sessions on “Guido”. Investigative stories proliferated in national publications including Time, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast. Journalists reached out to Italian American Studies scholars and some cited my 1991 article in The Journal of Ethnic Studies that was posted on my college website. Booth Moore’s article in The Chicago Tribune (2010) noted: The term [Guido] has been bandied about in academic circles for years. (You can Google QCC sociology professor Donald Tricarico’s 1991 paper ‘Guido: Fashioning an Italian American Youth Style’.)

I was invited to interview for national publications, a Philadelphia top 40 radio station, RAI TV, and MTV. I was asked in an email by a New

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York Post reporter to clarify “the new terms these kids [i.e., JS Guidos] come up with”. The pursuit of textual truth inspired “The Conference on Jersey Shore Studies” at the University of Chicago in October 2011. Organized by graduate students, the conference was called to make sense of a show that “has exposed an entire subculture, lifestyle, and personality type – the Guido – for public appraisal” and as a window on weightier subjects like “gender, ethnicity, celebrity”. With a newfound reputation as a Guidologist in the press, I was invited to present at the conference with a stipend covering travel and lodging. As reality TV, JS imparted a documentary truth to Guido. Some reporting pursued this angle in the initial round of stories in the mainstream press. The week it debuted, Joshua David Stein (2009) wrote in The Times: “MTV, the music-cum-social anthropology network, recently introduced ‘Jersey Shore’”. Booth Moore (2010) similarly observes that “‘JS’ is an introductory course in urban anthropology”. The choice of anthropology rather than sociology is perhaps telling, suggesting that to the mainstream media and its upper middle-class bias, they were encountering something exotic. As the premier merchant of cool, MTV was able to establish JS as its own truth about Guido in the popular culture regardless of the scholarship. When MTV aired the JS “reunion” in April 2018, no expert commentary was necessary. Journalistic accounts did not have to go beyond the sphere of popular culture. Guido did not require clarification and was referenced only to the original series (see Caramanica 2018; Zimmerman 2017). Italian American identity politics also sat this one out (see below). Early on, it was apparent that the truth was in the merchandising. Jersey Shore introduced what was a marginal local style to a national youth culture market as a new media product. Within a short time, Guido became ensnared in proliferating commodification. It was a valuable commodity because of ratings success of Jersey Shore that was unprecedented for the reality genre; the commercial success of the first season was leveraged into four more, spanning four consecutive years and a single episode in January 2011, season 3 had almost nine million viewers more viewers than what most network programs were attracting and “the highest-ever viewership for a MTV series” (Denhart 2011). Commercial success has produced spin-off series and has made it the masthead of a TV genre. JS has become a prototype for a “character-driven reality series” that focuses on subcultures marginal to the mainstream because of class and ethnicity. Thus, JS has inspired

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“Floribama Shore”, produced by Sally Ann Salsano, the “Long Island Italian girl” who produced JS, which “brings together a group of young partyers living together for the Summer, this time in the Florida panhandle”. Like the “iconic franchise”, it showcases a marginalized youth subculture on the “Redneck Riviera” (Angelo 2017). Branded by MTV, Guido became wholly wrapped around a commodity (i.e., a reality TV show) that sells other commodities; since Guido is oriented to commodity consumption, turnabout is fair play. Guido as a commodity sells other commodities through advertisements aired on JS. The commercial spectacle during one hour-long episode aired in 2016 included advertisements for: Pepsi, designer shoes, Toyota cars, Allstate Auto Insurance, ProActiv skin treatment, the new James Bond film “007”, Xbox 360, 4G Smart Phones, Taco Bell Steak Nachos, Target Credit Cards. Newly minted Guido celebrities accepted a range of product endorsements including hair gel and vitamin supplements. Individual brand-building has cashed in on the popularity of cast members like Snooki whose “Snooki Couture”, items like “a crocodile-shaped stuffed animal and bulbous bedroom slippers in shiny lime green or purple or zebra print” sold out during an initial promotion on the Home Shopping Network (Felder 2012). A cover photo-shoot with the four Guidos in GQ magazine for “gym fashions” like warm-up suits and athletic shoes. Three of the Guidettes did a photo-shoot for Harper’s Bazaar as a tongue-in-cheek didactic about upscale taste imparted by two blonde instructors in a classroom setting (Villareal 2010) (Fig. 9.3). The rapid transformation of Guido from a category of deviance to a popular culture “icon” with commercial appeal is worth noting. While there is a precedent for this in the case of youth subcultures like Punk and Hip Hop, Guido lacked “cool” or prestige in youth style markets. Prior to JS, Guido was not on the radar of the national media culture. MTV has the resources to add youth culture value (i.e., cool) to the content that it showcases (i.e., cool by association). Guido was amenable to branding for a mass market on a number of levels. Guido is a readymade symbol that identifies the commodity for sale, and which explains the initial preference to call the show “Guidos” rather than JS; Italian ethnicity makes the brand more salient, reinforcing a repository of meanings stored in popular American culture. Guido connects to a style tradition that is well-documented in the mass media going back to SNF and Grease. In particular, it has street culture roots—the element of urban authenticity that sells Black youth culture in the suburbs. MTV exploited

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Fig. 9.3  JS meets Pygmalion as the taste makers at Harper’s Bazaar rehabilitate Guidette style (Source “The Jersey Shore Goes to Charm School by Harper’s BAZAAR US”, Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, 4.14.2010, 2:03, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/red-carpet-dresses/a527/jersey-shore-makeover-0510/, accessed 8.18.2018)

the connection to gangsta when it casted Guido as “the hottest pimps”. This positions Guido for a suburban youth market that crosses over to Hip Hop, but not blackness. More broadly, merchandising Guido allows MTV to access a market beyond rock and Hip Hop. This is a position inhabited by diverse European-ancestry youth in metropolitan New York City not just Italians like Greeks, Russian and Bukharan Jews, and Albanians. Their consumption styles negotiate aspirations to whiteness in relation to blacks and Latinos, on one hand, and class mobility in relation to Manhattan elites and hipsters gentrifying their outer borough neighborhoods, on the other. Guido is an established youth culture paradigm followed by these more recently arrived immigrant groups as suggested in the name “Greedo” used for Greeks in Queens. As the first season Jersey Shore ended, MTV began testing for a new reality show focusing on a “Russian” youth scene in Brighton Beach nightclubs. Still parlaying Jersey Shore into another hit show, MTV debuted “Floribama” in 2017 which showcases the “Redneck Riviera” youth scene (Angelo 2017). With this formula for commercial success in mind, MTV may not welcome a Guido that is too cool and comfortable in the popular culture.

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The common currency of this commodified subcultural equivalence is the “party culture”. Whereas American Bandstand sanitized greaser in the 1960s to fit into mainstream youth culture, hooking up is central to the current script. Although reality TV specializes in the depiction of subcultures that seem to invite the disdain of a mainstream audience, MTV presents a version of Guido that is more or less aligned mainstream moral conventions. A party culture, including practices like sexual promiscuity, is within the parameters of mainstream youth culture in particular on college campuses. JS places at the center of Italian American youth culture a “hookup culture” which Wade (2017: 49) defines as “a drunken sexual encounter with ambiguous content” as “what you should be doing” (the epicenter of this culture for Wade is the college campus not summer rentals). Risky sex may be a counterpart to risky investments by late capitalist financial institutions too big to fail. While American Bandstand sanitized greaser in the 1960s, JS imprints Guido with an MTV brand defined by sexualization and commodified consumption. However, the commercial success of the media spectacle goes one step further by establishing the credential of Guido as a pop culture commodity; in particular, young Italian American bodies are the latest addition to the inventory of sexualized images exploited in the expansion of youth markets in advanced capitalism. The chief difference with other party cultures is more in conventions of taste than morality which varies with class and ethnicity; this seems to be what MTV has done with “Floribama Shore”, with a title that infers a lineage with JS. The JS case suggests the likelihood that audiences can identify with youth others if the chemistry is right. Guido and other youth subcultures with ethnic working-class roots imprint on the party culture theme more with the sexual objectification of women, and where the latter are “hit on” and occasionally hit (Zimmerman 2018). The 2011 JS season filmed in Florence allowed Italian audiences to relate the hooking up culture to the sexual narratives in the sensational murder trial of the American exchange student Amanda Knox that was then taking place in Perugia, not to mention the bombastic sexual exploits (“bunga bunga”) of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. As a “merchant of cool”, MTV could ignore Guido because it was uncool as MTV defined it, a performance referenced to rock and, then, Hip Hop. Guido was not cool, in part, because since 1982 MTV never bestowed cool on it. Reality TV specializes in the depiction of cultures that invite the disdain of ranking constituencies of taste. This was evident in the early media response to JS: “People don’t watch these shows to

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engage in a genuine way. They watch so they look down on those people who make unfortunate choices” (McBride 2010; see also Denhart 2011). While this was construed as “class pornography” (McBride 2010), Italian American organizations preferred a narrative rooted in ethnic bias—that MTV is selling Guido to invite people to “look down” on people with an “unfortunate” ethnicity. MTV has been showcasing marginal youth cultures since True Life in the early 2000s. The True Life Jersey shore episodes were auditions for JS. To this extent, Jersey Shore does not present Guido as a “cool” style but is selling Guido as uncool to cool kids everywhere. It is a good bet that its brand can make uncool cool. By marketing uncool as well as cool, MTV is hedging its bet. MTV crafted a Guido strategy by incorporating a vernacular understanding of a stylebased youth subculture recognizable to those knowledgeable in the local scene. It was packaged by a producer, Sally Ann Salsano, who not only has roots in the New York City metropolitan area but claims to have been a Guidette which allows her to reject the view expressed that MTV is inviting its core audience to magnify its cool by looking down on Guidos: It’s not something that I’m embarrassed of. I was those kids. I was Snooki. I woke up and was like, “Oh, that was a crazy night.” That’s what you do. (Denhart 2011)

Salsano and MTV may have cultivating oppositional youth culture cred in the name of a marginalized audience not to mention loyalty to its “iconic franchise”. The mainstream popular culture initially regarded Guido with ambivalence. The New York Times Magazine wryly composed “The ‘Jersey Shore’ Handbook” the week after the show debuted that counted “heavy tanning, muscular definition, a labor-intensive toiletry regimen, family, and hooking up” among core Guido “values” (Stein 2009). A commercial agenda quickly prevailed in light of rating success that marketed a sardonic take. The I-Phone app “Jersify” assembled “How to be a Guido: The Definitive Guido Guide” featuring a repertoire of commodified poses that fail to conceal the satire: THE GYM: You wanna be juiced with a hard-muscled toned body? Well, goombah, that ain’t gonna just happen with you eatin’ all of your Mama’s pasta.

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THE CROSS: Gold, silver or filled with stones, it don’t matter. As long as it’s a cross and its worn on a heavy chain around your neck, you’re good to go. (Jersify, The App 2017) While the style has gained recognition MTV reserves the right to be cynical about Guido. A tongue in cheek approach allows consumers to adopt a Guido pose provisionally, say for Halloween when poses are de rigeur. In 2010 JS inspired one of the most popular costume choices among American college students: “Campuses everywhere will have no shortage of faux ‘Guidettes’ and ‘Juice Heads’ fist pumping the night away” (College Marketing Tactics and Trends 2010). There is an opportunity, here, not only for parody but to appropriate a JS “party” sensibility bounded by a social “time-out”, the provisional appropriation of a poached identity for sensory gratification. The pose is not normative when time is back in, every other day of the week or year. The Guido costume may be construed as a form of “slumming”, in this case performing “the other” for fun and pleasure, costumed in leopard skin tops and gelled hair. Festive role play appropriates the culture on the surface without internalizing identity, so precluding a commitment to that culture and even denigrating it like “Blackface”, the appetite of middle-class “beats” and “hippies” for lower-class Black culture (Mailer 1957). JS Guido merchandises an Italian American “Blackface” that can be appropriated on the surfaces of style (Ewen 1988). Although JS more than satisfied the demand of a marginal culture for recognition, respect does not necessarily follow. Guido difference is manifest in a dubious performance style. An article in a New Jersey newspaper citing Arnold Toynbee for a paradigm of civilizational “decline” buttressed by Charles Murray’s warning about a slide toward “underclass” values (Goldberg 2009) recapitulated the moral panic surrounding the Bensonhurst racial killing. In addition to Internet sites like Get Off Our Island and Lee Hotti that cast Guido as beyond the pale, their orange tans and bare muscled torsos making them menacing and inhuman, Guido as youth culture outlier is a Netflix film titled “Vinny the Chin” which is a play on the nickname of former Genovese family head Vincenzo Gigante (“Chin” does not refer to a distinctive facial feature but is a corruption of “cenzo” within Italian neighborhood culture). The film has a backstory referenced to JS, beaten to the punch by MTV which may explain the perverse story that it tells, centered on a

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33-year-old Italian American, a self-professed Guido, who lives with his mom in a suburban tract house on the south shore of Long Island. His life is aimless except for the Guido party culture centered on the summer gathering in Hampton Bays and a mirror image of Seaside Heights. The depiction of Vinnie’s stunted moral development as a Guido is most painfully realized in a ruse to steal animal steroids from a veterinarian’s office under the pretext of rescuing an abandoned dog so Vinny can “juice” for the Memorial Day weekend. Vinny may be a caricature but he is recognizably Guido. JS alludes to these practices but stops short of portraying them. Vinny is beyond unruly; it dehumanizes Guido and makes it morally repugnant. It may even represent collective self-loathing. JS takes Guido down that road but manages to stop short. It is not American Bandstand but it is also not the 1950s and MTV arguably represents the contemporary mainstream especially in regard to youth culture. It keeps JS entertaining and leaves “Vinny” dark—the dark side of Guido—too dark for JS. Vinny picks up the thread that connects Guido party culture to social pathology and the 1989 Bensonhurst moral panic. It reinvigorates the external boundary that tends to blur when JS Guido ventures into the mainstream. This occurs for Vinny even though his Guido eschews ethnicity altogether, notably as symbolic capital. Vinny may remain the pretender as long as MTV holds the franchise to sell the Guido narrative in the popular culture. JS offers a body of work that has become institutionalized as a pop culture text, and this includes a franchise on Guido.

JS and Subcultural Ideology If Guido is a franchise on popular American culture for a style of consumption in the name of ethnicity, it can be asked if JS is “empowering” for the subcultural agenda (see Kellner 1995: 3). Appropriation as a mass media commodity by a subsidiary of the global communications conglomerate Viacom is an overarching event in any subcultural trajectory (see “Merchants of Cool”). JS validates the hedonistic turn taken outside the outer boroughs and, specifically, the emergence of summer resort scenes at the Jersey and Long Island shores. In particular, it reconciles a local vernacular youth subculture with a global brand of hedonistic youth culture consumption. Credentialed by MTV, JS now fits in the commercial mainstream with youth culture programming of Spring

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Break and newly released music videos. Guido’s arrival at the shore during the summer is the pop culture credential for youth who are not living the “college experience” (as pitched by high school college advisers) called “Spring Break” and a staple televised by MTV. While recognition by what is arguably the main arbiter of commercial youth popular culture can be empowering, respect is another matter and, as we have seen, the reviews are mixed. Guido is not about to please upscale, upper middle-class arbiters of adult taste like the New York Times. It is possible that Guido can accept the ambivalence of MTV that is built into a genre that merchandises unruly subcultures with dubious taste. The MTV brand secures a veritable franchise on the youth subculture which, in turn, effectively exercises a franchise on Italian American youth culture. However, validation can be found elsewhere in the popular culture. The October 2010 GQ cover shoot suggested that Guido had made it, and in their own terms as well. GQ was their “fashion bible” in the late 1980s and now it had created something idolatrous of Guido. This feedback loop was closed. Never mind that New York Guido was a bust. Guidos never wore their fashions anyway. More broadly, Guido was formed around a commitment to a popular culture that has become increasingly commodified. Its commodification is enhanced to the extent that it can appropriate its own commodified symbols like GQ fashions endorsed by Jersey Shore Guido celebrities. Guido has become a pop culture trend in its own right, comparable to disco. SNF ushered in the “disco movement” within the mainstream but JS did that for Guido. We have already seen that Guido imprinted on the American institution of Halloween. The mainstream pop culture institution TV Guide deployed JS Guido to recommend “love tips” for readers on Valentine’s Day (Silberman 2012). The branding of Guido by MTV provides Guido with highly visible style leaders who can figure in commercial endorsements for commodities appropriated by youth themselves like Armani Exchange and Ed Hardy T-shirts. Celebrities are enlisted to sell signature styles to young people who identify with the brands irrespective of the organic connections to ethnicity, class, and place. Merchandising contributes to the blurring of subcultural boundaries. While this is anathema to youth preoccupied with the distinction of insider membership, it might be expected that a subculture that historically wished for incorporation into the commercial popular culture is prepared to consume images of

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itself as a late capitalist commodity. Commodified Guido consumption, endorsed by JS, has set a new bar for the subcultural pose that requires increased discretionary spending. Commodities are visual signifiers that can be readily marked in identity transactions; this makes it possible to read a Guido label into style surfaces. JS brought notoriety to Guido style including a “backlash” against signature designer brands like Ed Hardy and Affliction: “If It’s On The Jersey Shore, It’s Not Coming In the Door” (Lambert 2010). Is a “backlash” possible by “self-proclaimed Guidos and Guidettes”, turning against a commodified style that is merchandised to “everyone” by MTV and other (un)cool merchants? Echoing Douglas Rushkoff in “The Merchants of Cool”, Kathryn Watson (2018) argues that JS “killed the aesthetic” by bringing Guido in from the margins, affecting the “complete fashion assimilation of the working-class kids in the outer-rim of Manhattan”. At the same time, Watson entertains the possibility of opposition to JS Guido predicated on the acceptance of “what MTV sold it to us as (an exaggerated mockery of the flawed culture that we existed in)”. She argues that Guidos and Guidettes eventually read between the lines and repudiated JS: “Nobody wanted to look like that anymore” (Watson 2018). Watson is making this case for those, like herself, who aged out of youth culture and possess the cultural and economic capitals to choose a “gentrified” style of consumption. However, she does not allow for the possibility that youth can turn against JS to reclaim the authenticity of an expressive youth culture. Watson similarly does not address the role of ethnicity among “the urban un-elite”. However, if Guido is subject to “mockery” because it is “flawed” as a youth style identified with Italian ethnicity, subcultural difference is possible. Guido can still “struggle for recognition and respect” in the space created by the tension between “mockery” and mainstream commercial success. Jersey Shore as media text also displaces Guido in relation to ethnic neighborhood culture, specifically Bensonhurst, which is stereotyped in ways that inhibit merchandising to mainstream markets (for instance, as a racist community). Staten Island, once removed from Bensonhurst, is as close as JS gets because it is the home of three of the cast members. Now that Guido is a second-generation style, with ethnicity thinning, Bensonhurst is not necessary as a source of symbolic ethnic capital. In the present, moreover, the quintessential “home of the Italians” is dealing with ethnic succession. Historically, the symbolism of Bensonhurst

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Guido articulates unacceptable ethnic difference and older forms of prejudice; mass media accounts in response to the Bensonhurst “racial killing” imputed the moral qualities of the “dago”, which overshadowed a consumption culture. Outfitted in contemporary consumption styles, Guido can still symbolize unacceptable Italian American difference further into the mainstream; a connection to historical epithets is evident in the appropriation—and symbolic reversal—of “guinea” by Guido youth. Excessive youth culture hedonism portrayed on MTV (hooking up, binge drinking) elicited moral panic in the mainstream press, which can serve to activate embedded ethnic prejudice. The MTV business model managed the noise of unacceptable Italian American difference in the interest of hedonistic consumption. JS has unleashed a spectacle of style that threatens to overwhelm meaningful ethnic difference. Italian ethnicity is salient in Jersey Shore in order to authenticate the “reality” of a style outside the mainstream. However, this is a minimalist ethnicity that frames Guido less by ancestry and culture than by “looking Italian”. A regimen of “gym, tan, and laundry” produces surface differences that explain how non-Italian Americans can also “look Italian” and authentic ancestry takes a back seat to consumption style. JS Guido celebrities intimate that ethnicity can be equated with, not just symbolized by, consumption. Because being Italian is about the fun of consuming, they cannot take ethnic difference seriously; perhaps above all the dominant motif of sexualization effectively trivializes ethnic differences indexed to traditional family values. It is also noteworthy that JS Guido does not insist on Italian ancestry for invidious distinction, a status claim that complicates the building of an inclusive brand name. There may be an alternate subcultural narrative for Guido, providing a contrast with the hegemony of JS, in the Hip Hop of rappers like Jojo Pellegrino and GFella. They are potential style leaders who have not been co-opted by celebrity commercialism although they are trying (see Sciorra 2011: 43). They also contribute to the media record that purports to narrate Italian American difference, rather than assimilation, in the suburbs (see “Mob Wives”, “Staten Island Hustle”, “Real Housewives of New Jersey” and re-runs of “Growing Up Gotti”). Each rapper narrates explicit ethnic difference built into local cultures with roots in ethnic minority culture; the Mafia is foregrounded as an idiom of Italian American neighborhood culture and as a bridge to gangsta Hip

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Hop. Thus, Jojo drops the names of Tupac and Biggie in a conversation with “Uncle Frank” who uses the vernacular speech of the street (“fugedaboudid”, the title of the song published 10.13.08) and can help him get back into “the game” where there is “real money”. Jojo’s homies are more Hip Hop in style featuring oversized shorts and Nike shoes with baseball caps and chains over muscle shirts (guinea tees?) (Fig. 9.4). Neither is grotesque, and therefore easy to dismiss, like Vinny the Chin. Jojo is notable since he speaks about and for Staten Island and its Italian American majority (“Staten Italy”) including 3 of the JS cast members. In “Where I’m From Part 2” (1.9.12) adapts gangsta Hip Hop narrative to Staten Island, suggesting a number of observations about Guido youth culture that is inextricably tied to the ethnic minority group culture of Bensonhurst. Although JS is not mentioned, Staten Island is portrayed as a place “where the Guidos are on steroids” and there are “people bumpin’ to freestyle music like we’re in the 80s”; there are images of guinea-tees and baseball bats. Whereas GFella projects a tongue in cheek confidence, falling short of satire, about Italian American culture Jojo sounds a morally decadent note. He depicts a gilded ghetto where there are mini-mansions with backyard pools,

Fig. 9.4  Jojo and his Staten Italy Homies (Source “Jojo Pellegrino – Where I’m From Part 2”, 5:43, published on YouTube by JojoPellegrinoVEVO on Jan. 9, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlNbAaqWtG0, accessed 8.21.2018)

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“Prada, Gucci, and Fendi” and kids driving “luxury cars” (i.e., spoiled by consumption). Just below the surface “It seems like everybody is on pills in my neighborhood…where I’m from” and Italian kids dealing to get rich quick (see Del Real 2017). GFella is sanguine about suburban Guido and, in contrast to Jojo, prominently identifies (“I’m a Guido!”), embracing the materialism and the underground economy that abets it (“I gotta a guy”). Adorned in designer tracksuits and shades, GFella projects a Guido that converges with a Mafia persona that is third generation and suburban (Fig. 9.5). The “Hip Hop” (Sciorra 2011) of Jojo Pellegrino and Gfella restores the connection of Guido at a late stage of assimilation/mobility to an urban street culture. Guido is more than a party culture performed in on MTV and in club spaces on the Jersey shore and the Hamptons. There is continuity with the urban Italian American neighborhood—one step removed from places like the South Village and Bensonhurst and, thus, the possibility of authentic Italian ethnicity. With the diaspora out of southern Brooklyn across the Verrazano, Staten Island in particular is the new “home of the Italians” (i.e., “Staten Italy”) and the epicenter of a new Guido newly credentialed by JS.

Fig. 9.5  G Fella proclaims “I’m a Guido” in the suburbs (Source “Guido – G Fella (Members Only)”, published by Gfella on July 22, 2016, 4:16, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA_KGprJv7k, accessed 8.21.2018)

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JS and Ethnic Ideology JS tendered a pop culture credential that Guido craved in contrast to oppositional youth subcultures like Punk and Grunge. Even if youth culture “cool” was still in doubt, another identity crisis surfaced regarding the other “discourse” that historically furnished subcultural “distinction”: ethnicity. Guido was so successful at the appropriation of ethnicity that it exercised a virtual monopoly in local youth style markets. However, this symbiotic relationship between youth style and Italian ethnicity was challenged by the media spectacle engendered by JS. When MTV named Guido into the popular culture, it sparked a public discourse about Italian American group identity and historic ethnic prejudice that erupted in the popular culture itself. It was not allowed to penetrate the main narrative of youth culture hedonism unfolding in the series, preserving the view for the core audience of youth that the stylized performances occur in a pop culture bubble. However, the reaction of Italian American organizations preoccupied with an anti-defamation agenda was swift and sure. A UNICO spokesperson was out front on this, interviewed in numerous news outlets including MTV News, thus, becoming part of the backstory that fueled the media spectacle engulfing the debut of the show in late 2009. The anti-defamation position was terse and unwavering, that Guido was an ethnic slur and therefore a category of prejudice, not an Italian American culture. The anti-defamation reaction was consistent with previous positions taken in reference to offending mass media texts like The Sopranos. The “NIAF Official Statement on ‘Jersey Shore’” (2010) maintained that “the deliberate association between Italian American identity and the term ‘guidos’ persisted through the season and was unmistakable in the program’s branding and marketing”. While it was problematic that JS presented Guido as “representative of the Italian American community”, the NIAF complaint focused on the symbol itself. UNICO National spokesperson Andrew DiMino stressed an equivalence with “the n-word” (Rohrer 2010). This meaning of Guido is interpreted as a smear on the good name of Italian Americans, “a positive image” referenced to “contributions” to mainstream American life notably “business, government, entertainment, education, science, medicine, and law” (ibid.). “Rather than being a manifestation of Italian identity, it is a youthful expression and lifestyle predominantly visible in the Northeast”, “laden with promiscuity, debauchery, and violence”, that “transcends ethnic

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lines”. The theme of style as moral decay, however, was overshadowed by charges of ethnic prejudice. NIAF and UNICO National made Guido matter on the level of ethnicity, but by denying an organic connection to Italian American culture. Thus, JS was just the latest episode of negative stereotyping of Italian Americans in the mass media. This time, it was not a “police memo” but a major gateway to the popular culture. Ironically, while MTV and other merchants of cool want to mute the moral qualities of the “dago” which overshadow a consumption culture, Italian American organizations pursued an opposite tack. The anti-defamation position separates the word, which is historically an ethnic slur, from the youth culture practice that reverses the meaning of that slur as a collective identity symbol. By holding on to a definition of Guido informed by ethnic prejudice, the anti-defamation position precludes the recognition of an Italian American “common culture” that, ironically, opposes a “negatively privileged ethnicity”. Italian American organizations weaponized their protest by pressuring advertisers to “pull out” which is what Domino’s Pizza did as the first season was about to begin (Fleming 2018). JS completely blew the cover off the secret that underlies the anti-defamation interpretation: that there is a youth subculture that calls itself Guido that not only claims to perform Italian ethnicity but to be “taking pride” in it (Hyman 2009). Jersey Shore Guido is too immersed in the party culture to directly respond to anti-defamation politics. Even in interviews (Eliscu 2011) cast members sidestepped the issue by embracing their core ethos: Rolling Stone: Some people have said that JS paints an unflattering portrait of Italian Americans. Mike (The Situation): I love to hear that, because we’re just a bunch of twentysomethings, living, working and partying together. Speaking about the protests of Italian American organizations on a nationally syndicated talk show, Snooki explained that “Guidos and Guidettes are good-looking people that, you know, like to make a scene and be the center of attention and just take care of themselves” (Viscusi 2010). There were occasions where cast members staked a claim to authentic ethnicity in published interviews. Vinny presents Guido as “someone who likes to party”, sure, but “who’s 100% Italian, someone who has good family morals”, referring to traditional gender roles in

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which women “cook, they clean, and its just natural to them” (Eliscu 2011). A number of interviews put cast members on the defensive about the issue of ethnic insults but they did not directly refute anti-defamation charges that Guido was an ethnic slur and MTV was “racist”. However, this was defiantly repudiated by the show’s producer, Sally Ann Salsano, by invoking the identity “an Italian girl from Long Island” and a seminal ethnic family culture: “my Dad worked in sanitation, both my parents drive Cadillacs, my dad wears a DIAMOND-ENCRUSTED Yankee symbol around his neck” (Denhart 2011). Salsano later put her finger on the problem, however inadvertently, when she claimed: “It wasn’t like we were out to ruin the guido. We were celebrating it” (Fleming 2018). Salsano, here, misses the point. It was the anti-defamation organizations that were “out to ruin the guido”, or at least erase any trace of its ethnic Italian ancestry. The anti-defamation claim that JS Guido is a construct of ethnicity that does not fit the “‘reality’ of Italian Americans” (NIAF 2010) is easier to make than in the 1989 Bensonhurst “racial killing”. The roots of Italian neighborhood culture were more transparent in the latter narrative. This may explain why official Italian American organizations were on the sidelines, not weighing in on the mass media’s characterizations of “Guidoville” in a manner comparable to the response to JS. In particular, there was no official Italian American response in the Op-Ed section of The New York Times that addressed the ethnic stereotypes of Guido and deflected the moral panic targeting the Bensonhurst community. As I argue in the previous chapter, media bias and ethnic prejudice co-existed with the “reality” of vernacular ethnic formations. The Bensonhurst incident was further problematized because the media labeled an Italian American community deviant, not just a youth subculture. In one of the few cases where an official Italian American position was represented in The New York Times, the director of the Calandra Institute at the time endorsed the “white underclass” scenario articulated in the mainstream media to justify an affirmative action program to remedy educational inequality in Italian American communities in the city (Lee 1990). Although it does not reduce the issue to media bias, this endorsement of the deviance interpretation fails to appreciate the complexity of urban Italian American culture. These ethnic entrepreneurs have been unable to recognize local Italian American youth style. Guido and the “new” Italian ethnicity galvanized by political activism both coalesced in the 1970s. They largely

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occupied parallel universes; although not politicized, expressive youth may have been inspired by the raised consciousness of ethnic assertion and pride both in the mainstream and in the local community (Tricarico 1989). Collective consumption furnished a more meaningful alternative to local political mobilizations of “the new pluralism” manifest in voluntary associations such as The Italian American Civil Rights League, The Congress of Italian American Organizations, and even The Calandra Institute which reached out to youth but with a discourse that privileged formal education. In contrast, Guido deploys a cultural politics that buys into the American Dream of consumption as a path to happiness and self-respect. It is an ethnic mobilization because it mined a shared ancestry for symbolic capital but in relation to certain consumer markets. Local Italian American organizations eschewed an interest in expressive youth culture consumption and, thus, did not engage Guido. Internal cultural differences (i.e., age and class) are evident in the failure of official Italian American organizations to publicly own or at least explain what Guido meant in the context of the Bensonhurst “racial killing” in 1989 and to flatly deny its ethnic cultural character on the Jersey shore in 2009. A different tack was followed by The Calandra Institute in response to the Guido controversy sparked by JS in 2009. Guido entered the wider public discourse this time because of MTV. And, it was greatly expanded by the Internet. The ethnic identity politics of Guido became part of the media spectacle. MTV mined the public controversy, which included an alleged death threat, to publicize the first season. MTV met with anti-defamation officials. With the fur flying, I received a personal email in February 2010 from a producer of MTV News to weigh in on “the controversy surrounding our show ‘Jersey Shore’”. I declined when I recognized the likelihood that my contribution would be refracted by the self-referential truth of the media spectacle on the one hand and anti-defamation fervor on the other. Because the public conversation was joined by Italian American studies scholars interviewed by journalists, views that acknowledged Guido as an Italian American youth subculture stoked the passions of the anti-defamation position. I was in the crosshairs especially because of published research going back to 1991 circulating on the Internet and mentioned in the press. One blogger launched a strident personal attack: “Meet Donald Tricarico who regardless of his ancestry does not deserve to be called an Italian American”. Like Guido, my ethnic credential was

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revoked but in this case for writing about it. Official Italian American organizations failed to initiate a discussion about the spiraling controversy. This was left to The Calandra Institute which hastily held a conference, “Guido: An Italian American Youth Style”, in January 2010 as the controversy was still unfolding. Referring to Guido as “a phenomenon that demands attention”, Robert Viscusi (2010) framed Guido in the context of a variety of Italian American ethnicities, in particular “our working class roots”. I addressed JS in the context of a “feedback loop” of appropriation and re-appropriation between youth culture actors and the mass media. Instead of reducing Guido to a slur against Italian ethnicity, I argued that it can be viewed as “ethnogenesis” which Roosens (1989) conceptualizes as “the development and public presentation of a self-conscious ethnic group” that entails a re-evaluation of ethnicity. Following a constructionist approach to ethnic groups, Guido youth were depicted as “active agents” capable of “remaking” their own identities. The conference was also caught up in the JS media spectacle. Most notably, a New York Times reporter (Cohen 2010) assigned to cover the event trivialized the scholarly study of Guido, mocking the panel comprised of an academic researcher (yours truly) and a “self-professed Guido” with a blog called “Cugine Corner” as “Margaret Mead and a Samoan”. Establishment Italian American organizations are ideologically incompatible with youth subcultures like Guido that are informally produced from the bottom, combining an ethnic minority group culture with new forms of ethnic agency. The former seek to engineer popular support from the top with a mainstream political strategy and a “symbolic ethnicity” compatible with upper middle-class adults (Tricarico 1989). The NIAF, in particular, privileges an upper middle-class culture agenda based on higher learning and the mainstream professions and corporate business. While the NIAF agenda privileges high-brow culture (for example, Italian opera rather than electronic dance music like techno), mainstream popular culture is referred to in the form of the contributions of Italian American performers and is thus more a culture of production and work than consumption and pleasure. References to a traditional heritage including fluency in the Italian language, which can be studied at Italian universities, are another way that elite culture is identified with adults rather than the interests of young people. The response of Italian American elites was echoed in the term “tamarri” that the Italian press used to translate “Guido” when Florence became

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the backdrop of JS for the fourth season and the low-brow mass culture tastes of Italian American “tamarri” were on display when a tanning salon took precedence in the itinerary over the Uffizi Gallery (Latza Nadeau 2011). Elite ideology is predicated on a class culture that marginalizes Guido as unacceptable ethnic difference—a style identified with Italian Americans with visible roots in ethnic neighborhood culture that has not attained educational and occupational status markers associated with the middle and upper middle classes. The agenda of Italian American organizations is heavily imprinted by the historical record of prejudice and discrimination. As discussed above, JS was read as corrosive of fundamental American as well as traditional Italian values. Excessive youth culture hedonism portrayed on MTV including hooking up and binge drinking elicited moral panic in the mainstream press, which can serve to activate embedded ethnic prejudice. Anti-defamation protests from Italian American organizations plausibly anticipated this scenario. From this perspective, JS can incubate harmful stereotypes that can derail the “struggle for recognition and respect” for Italian Americans as a group. Outfitted in youth consumption styles, Guido can symbolize unacceptable Italian American difference further into the mainstream. While these Italian American organizations employ a construct of ethnicity that is unable to recognize an “Italian American youth subculture” let alone accord it respect, Guido was never asking for either including validation for an ethnic credential. The response of JS cast members makes it clear that they construct ethnicity as a youth culture pose, oriented to fun and pleasure especially now that it is further along the route to mainstream consumption. However, refusing to own Guido as an Italian American story, the anti-defamation position ironically preempts an ethnic agency that opposes prejudice and a contaminated ethnicity. Guido has been a highly contested identity from the outset. MTV seems to have settled the matter for now, leveraging anti-defamation protest into publicity and establishing a franchise in the popular culture. Attached to the MTV brand, JS, Guido can be read as a party culture for a segment of working and lower middle class, a consumption style that expresses the fundamental hedonism of a mainstream youth culture now in its second generation and centered outside Bensonhurst. Indeed, JS now anchors a genre of reality TV that showcases variations on this theme, broadening the entertainment mainstream to incorporate subcultures hitherto marginalized by ethnicity and class, now unified by

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commodified fun and pleasure. A target audience may be youth from the margins themselves, buying into the cool that MTV manufactures and merchandises. Also looking in are youth that are too cool to accept, with a wink from the cool merchant, that styles from the margin can be cool. When a “reunion” aired in April 2018, portraying cast members, now in their thirties, as entertainment celebrities who have by no means entirely aged out of the style, notably the partying as well as the visual vernacular, the public discourse was noticeably without acrimonious ethnic protest. Guido was named without any fanfare by a New York Times reviewer implying a level of familiarity that obviates the need for an explanation (Caramanica 2018). The smoke cleared and JS Guido was standing secure in the popular culture.

Note 1. Pauly D. claimed that he was “still” the “No. 1 guido” when MTV aired the JS “reunion” in April 2018: “Killing it, and never fell off” (Caramanica 2018).

CHAPTER 10

Rethinking Italian American Ethnicity: A Middle Space

One assimilation model does not fit all. Straight-line assimilation theory is suited to explain the long-term trajectory for the descendants of immigrants from Italy in the broadest brush strokes. The dominant explanatory paradigm, for all European ancestry groups, posits a “decline” in ethnicity from the immigrant generation onward. However, the assumption of a “decline” in ethnicity entails a theoretical sleight of hand that equates ethnicity with traditional culture. This affords a base line that guarantees a short shelf life, reaching the third generation only as “symbolic ethnicity”, a “feeling” for the past that does not reach to the level of culture and social structure (Gans 1979). Any departure from a traditional heritage is dismissed as “inauthentic” (Steinberg 1981). A straight-line perspective precludes a variable and adaptive ethnic culture as a middle space between immigration and full assimilation. This is a major flaw in the case of New York City which is important because of the size and density of Italian immigration, not only as the “great wave” between 1880 and 1924, but the resumption of immigration after 1945. It is unable to explain let alone acknowledge the distinctive ways that the city’s Italian immigrant communities established before 1924 had become Italian American communities. First settlement Manhattan neighborhoods including the South Village, East Harlem, and Mulberry Street/Little Italy were restructured and absorbed cultural change. Notwithstanding population decline due to the end of mass immigration and out-migration, there were institutional changes reflecting © The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7_10

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the collective adaptation of the second and third generation to the city (Tricarico 1984). A straight-line approach pegged to a historically-specific timeline also underestimates or neglects the post-1945 immigration (Ruperto and Sciorra 2017). The replenishment of Italian American population through new immigration contributed to the expansion of outer borough communities like Bensonhurst with 100,000 persons of Italian ancestry in 1980. However, this cannot be characterized merely by “a pluralism on the margins in which small ethnic flourishes, minor variations in life-style are accepted into the American core” (Alba 1985: 173) when the Bensonhurst community became the focus of moral panic in the mainstream media. Its eye trained on the endgame of assimilation, straight-line theory just starts the clock over for these newcomers (Alba et al. 1997). It is unwilling and unable to assess the significance of the post-1945 immigration for the ongoing development of Italian American culture in New York City. If straight-line theory cannot explain urban Italian American culture, it follows that it cannot explain urban Italian American youth culture since both are products of ethnic agency and change.

Being Italian in Youth Culture Practice The emergence of a bounded Italian American youth subculture in the 1970s and 1980s in the outer boroughs of New York City is a collective response to American popular culture by an age fraction, a segment within a segment. A careful reading requires an appreciation for subject positions within the ethnic group created by intersections with social identities such as age, class, gender that intersect within a locality at a particular historical juncture. Youth growing up in Italian American communities like Bensonhurst at the end of the twentieth century cultivated a desire for popular American culture which had to be reconciled with an ethnic culture. This project is predicated on the coalescence of “institutions” or “sets of relationships” committed to instrumental and expressive purposes within certain “construction sites” (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: xvii). Joane Nagel (1998: 5) similarly underscores the role of agency in the “creative choices of individuals and groups as they define themselves and others in ethnic ways”, specifically in “transactions” across a boundary. In this scenario, ethnicity is “not something fixed and coherent, but something constructed and always in the process

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of becoming”, a narrative of about “routes” as well as “roots”, and therefore always “incomplete” and “contradictory” (Storey 1999: 135). Into the present, Guido is at the nexus of these contradictions, an outcome of ethnic agency and youth agency, “at one and the same time calling attention to ethnic differences and demonstrating how they might be transcended” (Lipsitz 1994a: 119). Nagel situates ethnic “choices” in the unequal competition for scarce rewards and the related establishment of “resource niches” (Nagel: 10; also see Royce 1982: 1–3). New “construction sites” emerge as ethnic groups adapt to mainstream culture and local institutions (Bucholtz 2002). Straight-line theory is unable to accommodate the contradictions of an assimilation strategy that is simultaneously an ethnic strategy. Youth popular culture has historically been a space for “strategic assimilation” (Lacy 2004), not just in terms of reconciling cultural differences (Maira 2003) but as a strategy of empowerment within an ethnic minority culture. In particular, ethnicity can be “mobilized” for “collective action” when there are shared “grievances” (Fong and Berry 2017: 53). Mexican American youth in the 1940s turned to the zoot suit as a symbol of insubordination vis-a-vis a system of ethnic stratification that discriminated against Chicanos (Alvarez 2005). Hip Hop is an expressive culture that mounts “an oppositional form of identity” for a “collective struggle” against the racial domination built into American society (Hagedorn 2011: 96). Redressing ethnic grievances has focused on a “history of disenfranchisement from consumer society” (Zukin 2004: 173). Zoot suiters dared to dress in clothing that symbolized leisured consumption while Hip Hop has appropriated designer fashions like Polo and Timberland, provoking fraught responses from the corporate brands (Gordon 2017; Caramanica 2016). Guido likewise fashions style as a “solution” to the “structural problems” associated with minority group ethnicity as well as age and class status (Hebdige 1977: 73–86; Brake 1985: 8–26). Guido refuses the “invisibility” of a “dominated ethnicity” (Scott 1992) in “a struggle for recognition and respect” centered on inclusion in the popular culture in a manner similar to Mexican American zoot suiters (Lipsitz 1994: 121). Italian American youth have called attention to themselves as collective ethnic subjects by dressing for disco (instead of greasy labor), driving American cars with the biggest tail fins, wearing heavy gold chains with an “Italian horn” and cultivating a bodily regimen of “narcissistic perfection”.

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Guido is fully present when claims for a cool consumption style are joined by a discourse of ethnic distinction: “You tell ‘em you’re Italian!” Like Pachuco and Hip Hop, Guido opposes the symbolic annihilation of minority group identity but not ethnicity in the arena of mainstream cultural capital: “So everywhere you go you tell ‘em you’re a Guido!” In contrast to Pachuco and Hip Hop, style claims are not a response to a history of racial oppression (Hagendorn 2007; Alvarez 2005). However, as late as 1989 when Guido was in full flower, it was introduced into the public discourse as a threat to social order, “civic ostracism” that defined an ethnic group that is “unassimilable” in their present state (FloresGonzales 2017: 83). Although Guido initially represented as an ethnic formation like Hip Hop and Pachuco, it has evolved from a local youth style boldly asserting a franchise in popular American culture to a pop culture youth style category, commodified by one of the leading merchants of cool. The development of a youth subculture into the present period has further impacted on the evolution of a stereotype that has become the dominant ethnic insult for Italian Americans in the popular culture. JS Guido has become the governing motif indicating, once again, the critical role of the mainstream media as an “external boundary” for the construction of Italian American difference. The existence of a youth subculture that calls itself Guido means that this dynamic cannot be explained only by the intransigence of ethnic stereotypes.

Theorizing Italian American Difference The social construction of ethnicity is predicated on structural conditions and historical circumstances (Cornell and Hartmann 2007). This larger context is brought into sharper focus through the lens of segmented assimilation theory which recognizes variable patterns as ethnic groups assimilate into different segments of a highly stratified society (Portes and Zhou 1993; Zhou and Bankston 2016). In contrast to “single destination assimilation” of straight-line theory, this allows for the construction of ethnicity in the course of “strategic assimilation” (Lacy 2004: 909–910; also Jiminez and Horowitz 2013). Like constructionism, the segmented assimilation model has not been recommended for Italian Americans and other European ancestry groups that have been folded into a “dominant group” (i.e., White) ethnicity by the third generation (Doane 1998; Hollinger 1999). I argue, however, that a segmented assimilation perspective offers an explanatory scheme

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that is suited to an understanding of Guido and, more generally, Italian American culture in New York City. New York City has been the destination for a mass immigration from Italy for an extended period of time. Entering the city at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, dense settlements were created that absorbed social and cultural change inside the ethnic boundary (Tricarico 1984). While first settlement tenement neighborhoods in Manhattan were in eclipse in the 1980s, outer borough Italian American communities were expanding. Their settlement was an outcome of segmented mobility, as large numbers of Italian Americans relocated to better residential areas within a framework determined by class, race, and religion intersecting with ethnicity. These outer borough neighborhoods were a step closer to the Long Island and New Jersey suburbs which were favored destinations after World War II (Tricarico 1984: 72–83; 2017). New immigration after World War II not only replenished the population of outer borough neighborhoods, especially Bensonhurst, it refreshed a “thick” ethnic culture and activated a dynamic inside the ethnic boundary that had status implications. The impact of this new immigration on New York City is impressive compared to other European nationalities with a pre-1924 presence. It added to already sizeable and dense local communities, so that Bensonhurst and other Italian American communities in the outer boroughs were formidable enough to compare to the neighborhood presence of newer racialized immigrant groups in particular Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and the Chinese. They were the largest “white ethnic” presence in the city which explains the frequency of turf conflicts with Black communities into the present period (Bird 1972; Smothers 1972; Lowenstein 1988; Roberts 1989). Italian Americans were positioned in unique ways by the “ordered segmentation” of the city in the second half of the twentieth century, an older immigrant group but with a new cohort under the radar of mainstream sociology (Ruperto and Sciorra 2017). Renewed immigration from Italy after 1945, with as many as 150,000 Italians arriving by 1973, contributed a “thick ethnicity” (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 173) that internally differentiated Italian American communities in the outer boroughs by immigrant cohort and class. It reinforced a minority group ethnicity, including a “defended neighborhood” (Suttles 1968), at the moment when initial Italian immigrant settlements were in eclipse.

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With 100,000 persons of Italian ancestry in 1980, Bensonhurst became a platform for ethnic youth agency in the outer boroughs. The children of these post-1945 immigrants are strategically important as the agents of youth culture practices coalescing as a bounded Italian American style in the late 1970s and 1980s. Their ethnicity was not as “thick” as the parental first generation which reflects a greater opening to popular American culture. At the same time, it was “thicker” than third-generation youth and thick enough to set them apart. Guido symbolized a new second-generation style as foreign (“just off the boat” Italians) rooted in a minority group culture going back to the mass immigration—a system of ethnic stratification marked by the unequal distribution of scarce social resources (See Marger 2012: 27–48). The development of a bounded youth subculture set the stage for a new collective Italian American subject in the city and, then, in popular American culture. Guido positions the new second generation in the outer boroughs on an assimilation trajectory, in-between a new immigrant first generation, or “real Italians”, and pre-1924 cohorts. A thick(er) ethnicity draws a boundary inside the ethnic boundary: Italian American ethnicity was invoked against itself. Segmented assimilation inside the ethnic boundary marked an inferior status as well as a cultural identity for “real Italians” relative to Italian Americans; being “just off the boat” positioned them closer to racialized post-1965 immigrants. Guido emerges from these insider transactions doubly disparaged, corroborating ethnic stigma from across the ethnic boundary. Internal differentiation does not preclude boundary crossing including assimilation into local Italian American culture including youth style traditions. The new second generation also displays differences inside the ethnic boundary. They may have been more comfortable with ethnic assertion because they, in fact, had a more authentic connection. They were also less likely to internalize ethnic stigma than earlier cohorts (Child 1943) and may have hitchhiked on the ethnic assertion associated with the “new pluralism” ideology at the time. They also had the example of other groups notably Black and some post-1965 immigrant youth who asserted a privileged ethnicity linked to style. More recent immigrants arrived with some background in a consumer culture, thanks to Italy’s post-war “economic miracle”. Although a visible thread connects it to greaser and Doo Wop, Guido stands out vis-à-vis previous iterations of the local youth style tradition for an expanded engagement with popular American culture and, in

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particular, the commodified consumption of late capitalism (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). American popular culture became a “context of articulation” (Storey 1999: 135) earlier in the timeline of assimilation for the new immigration, early enough to be absorbed within ethnic neighborhood culture and to be performed in the name of ethnicity. An ethnic boundary creates a “parallel social organization” for youth culture practice comparable to “ethnic churches, schools, and even churches” (Fong and Berry 2017: 49). It is another dimension of the “institutionalized completeness” of localized ethnic communities, transmitting American culture but also filtering it in ways that can hamper participation by the second generation (ibid.: 94). It is important to point out that urban Italian American youth culture has strategically incorporated ethnicity, negotiating with traditional institutions headed by adults (see Maira 2002).1 A bounded youth culture provided a relatively “safe space” to “work within and across traditional fault lines” of ethnic identity (Fine et al. 1998: 253). Appropriation of popular culture in the name of a de-contextualized and re-worked ethnicity demonstrates the ability of youth to create their own readings in the absence of effective adult surveillance. Discursive resources occasioned the elaboration of ethnicity for a subcultural ideology that reconciles Italian ethnicity with “the new symbolic economy of fashion, entertainment, and media” (Zukin 2004: 173) including “the promise of consumer desire” (Lipsitz 1994: 5–7). At the same time, although more open to new cultural meanings, ethnicity is invoked by youth to “constrain what they could become” (McCrae 2003: 57). This reflects the contradiction of ethnic youth subcultures “at one and the same time calling attention to ethnic differences and demonstrating how they might be transcended” (Lipsitz 1994: 135). Ethnic boundaries make it possible to appropriate and poach symbols without surrendering difference. Italian American “bricoleurs” meld Italian and English, (Black) gangsta and (Mafia) gangster jargon, “wife-beater shirts” and baggy pants, rap and freestyle music genres. Clear ethnic boundaries are an attempt to temper if not avoid the “fluidity” of symbols and membership characteristic of “postmodern culture” (Maffessoli 1996; Muggleton 2000). ItalChat, for example, suggests that youth turn to ethnicity to delimit a “safe space” to navigate the “postmodern adventure” (Kellner 2003: 10). But, subcultural boundaries also delimit a “safe space” by deflecting status putdowns on the level of style and ethnicity; ethnic difference is read into stylized performances by

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rivals and antagonists. Guido, then, is a contested discourse across internal and external boundaries about simultaneous and overlapping status claims: the possibility of Italian cool/cool Italians. Stylized presentations that constitute Guido simultaneously identify new positions inside the ethnic boundary and in local youth style markets. Ethnic boundaries have structural integrity in the segmented assimilation model which is attributed to negative class and racial privilege. Mass Italian immigration was framed by economic hardships and social exclusion comparable to the post-1965 immigrant experience, shaping local Italian American culture in New York City into the second half of the twentieth century (Tricarico 1984). The post-1945 Italian immigration reproduced a minority group culture in New York City that is similar to the post-1965 immigrant settlement on a number of levels. Although assertions of an Italian American “underclass” were exaggerated, shared structural problems attributed to the continued erosion of the city’s blue-collar labor market are evident in youth unemployment rates and high school dropout rates into the 1980s (Milone 1994; Stone 1989). While teenage unemployment rates were comparable to Black and Latino youth, effects have likely been mitigated in ethnic niche businesses like pizzerias, private contracting, and auto body shops. These are livelihoods rooted in the social and cultural capital of working-class ethnic communities, demonstrating a strong work ethic within small businesses that are often family-owned in a manner similar to east Asians. In contrast to the latter, there are variable differences in relation to strategies favoring higher education and professional careers. While European Americans do not presently face racial barriers to assimilation, Italian ethnicity has historically been racially suspected in the United States. Suspicion of dubious racial origins is hardly confined to private wonderings. Following the 2005 racial attack on a Black man in Howard Beach by a 21 year old Italian American male, The New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore (2005) observed that some of the local Italian American youth “have hair kinky enough to need” the “hairpicks” held in place by their designer headbands. The “moral panic” in the mainstream media in response to the 1989 Bensonhurst “racial killing” ironically framed Italian American youth in racially ambiguous terms—darkened by a predilection toward street violence and community institutions that are deviant if not oppositional like organized crime syndicates and street gangs. Racialization marked an unacceptable ethnic

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difference for European ancestry groups that became “white” by leaving the inner city and by jettisoning an ethnic minority culture. The darkening of neighborhood Italians did not, ultimately, make them nonwhite if only because they were also framed by white racism. However, it did perpetuate an identity crisis “in-between” whites and blacks. The moral panic suggests that this racial ambiguity pivots on the perception that urban Italian neighborhoods are not in alignment with basic civic values, thus as unassimilable ethnic minority cultures (Flores-Gonzales 2017: 83). The “underclass” label re-presented urban Italian American in terms of social pathology reserved for nonwhites. It marked an unacceptable ethnic difference for European ancestry groups that became “white” by leaving the inner city and by jettisoning a culture opposed to mainstream lifestyles. The intimation of nonwhite identity which intensified minority group status put Italians in their place in an urban culture that was increasingly being shaped by global elites, on the one hand, and racial minorities, on the other. In the maelstrom, Guido acutely performed the anomalous character of Italian American minority group culture on the public stage as well as in straight-line theory. The moral panic in the press may have revealed Italian Bensonhurst as something of a surprise to the urban middle class centered on Manhattan and expanding to the outer boroughs. Did not the historical “landmarking” of the Mulberry Street neighborhood as “Little Italy” in 1977 imply that a lived ethnic minority culture was gone? These questions also reverberated for JS. Segmented assimilation theory underscores the diverse and segmented structure of American society especially in global cities like New York (Warikoo 2011). The Italian ancestry population in the city is positioned for assimilation in ways that contrasted with the cohorts linked to the mass immigration before 1924. In 1990, when the population of Bensonhurst was over 80,000, 57% of the population of the city was Black, Hispanic and Asian, rising to 67% in 2007 (Zimring 2013: 60). The Black presence in the city, especially culturally and politically, has been more relevant for the post-1945 Italian immigration and especially the new second generation. Late twentieth diversity was further complicated with youth moving about the city for leisure styles oriented to dance clubs. Invoking an Italian American identity has been a way to navigate these complex divisions. I argue that Guido identity—the shared sense of a youth space bounded by Italian ethnicity—was invoked by new second generation Italian youth to navigate a system of ethnic

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stratification intersected by wider class and racial divides. In these interactions, ethnicity drew a boundary that had more immediacy than whiteness which conferred no street value and was still up for grabs. Close encounters with Manhattan club culture compromised the class floor under whiteness. Inflating the value of ethnic capital changed the discourse focused on race and class; it supplied status distinction for a population that was at the bottom rungs of class and racial hierarchies. Segmented Italian ethnicity has a complex relationship to the post1965 immigration on the level of race. Outer borough Italian neighborhoods including southern Brooklyn were in direct line with new immigration residential patterns. In Bensonhurst, there was a tense response to a Chinese influx in the late 1980s and 1990s; in south Queens areas like Ozone Park, racialized ethnicity drew a line against Guyanese of south Asian extraction. While ethnicity had to do heavier status lifting given the extra weight of race, more porous boundaries separated Greeks in Astoria and Albanians in the Belmont section of the Bronx. Greeks and Italians created alliances across a boundary that was reinforced by religion although softened by the growing recognition of a shared regional heritage; the new identity symbol “Greedo” adumbrates a “new ethnicity” pattern. Albanian Muslims had more of a street presence manifest in competition within organized crime. Although many Albanians were Italianized prior to settlement in America which may have influenced the decision to follow an Italian assimilation trajectory, including entering an ethnic niche business of pizzerias (in addition to organized crime), there was more skirmishing along that boundary than with Greeks. It is noteworthy that formative intergroup transactions that historically shaped Italian American identity in the city linked to mass immigration, notably Irish Catholics and Askenazi Jews, have a diminished role in this scenario. The segmented assimilation model worries about the vulnerability of new second-generation youth to urban Black youth culture without an ethnic buffer, resulting in downward mobility (Portes and Zhou 1993; Gans 1998). Urban Italian American youth culture has historically demonstrated an affinity for Black styles and poached them for their own style. An established youth style made it possible to selectively appropriate a “ghettocentric youth culture” (Rivera 2003) rising in the city and, then, in the commercial mainstream in the late 1980s. Oppositional Black youth culture was filtered by an oppositional Italian American

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youth culture centered on the Mafia although the latter inhibited certain delinquent youth patterns (e.g., street gangs) while supporting core ethnic values. Despite the characterization of an “underclass” comparable to Black and Latino youth, crime rates were markedly lower for Italian American youth (Stone 1989). The stylized Italian gangster codes of outer borough youth may have diluted if not deflected the appeal of gangsta Hip Hop. This included adopting clothing fashions like leisure suits and Italian “bling” and performance affectations ranging from street jargon to nonverbal gestures. The erosion of local Mafia control may have contributed to increases in violent street crime and drug use among youth in Italian neighborhoods into the present. The media narrative of the 1989 Bensonhurst racial killing exposed the contradictions of the Italian American position in the city at the end of the twentieth century. Racial ambiguity is suggested in allusions to Bensonhurst Italian Americans as the “white tribe” (George 1989) and “the other white New York” (Stone 1989). Bensonhurst Italian Americans were following a historical script for racial inclusion as “inbetween” black and white, “borderline whites” that qualify for whiteness by demonstrating hostility toward nonwhites (Orsi 1993; Barrett and Roediger 1999). This time, the storyline included a cruel twist. It was disconcerting enough to be censured as “racists” for doing the dirty work of whiteness in “the larger American racial discourse” (Brodkin 1998: 151). Racial belligerence resulted in having their racial credentials questioned. Italian American teenagers were actually portrayed as having crossed over the racial boundary. As “white homeboys” (George 1989) and “feral youth” (Roberts 1990), they were slotted into categories that were applied to Black and Latino youth. The conferring of an “underclass” status further solidified a nonwhite profile, referencing Italian American teenagers to the stereotypes of urban fear and danger typically reserved for African Americans and Latinos. The darkening of Italian Americans suggests that authentic whites in the city have assimilated the universal values necessary for civic integration at the expense of tribal morality. Late summer of 1989 made apparent that demographic shifts had eroded the position of Italian Americans in the city, especially the local neighborhood which historically has strategic significance for the group’s cultural adaptation to the city (Tricarico 1984). A tenuous residential position compounded by the ongoing erosion of the city’s blue-collar

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economy fueled a growing political alienation through the 1990s accompanying the rise of the African American community. The “moral panic” directed at neighborhood Italian Americans by the city’s establishment print media in response to the Bensonhurst “racial killing” may have stoked ethnic resentment, vented not only at African Americans but also the city’s political leadership. Sharpton was stabbed by a young Italian American man while leading a protest march through Bensonhurst shortly after the killing; Sharpton drew extremely hostile remarks in ItalChat: “They should have killed him”. Although Giuliani may have been a source of ethnic pride, his mayoralty nurtured the revival of Manhattan as part of a global economy at the expense of ethnic neighborhood culture. The moral panic occasioned by the Bensonhurst incident, and revisited in muted form by the JS crisis, is conditional for a particular expression of Italian American ethnicity, the defended neighborhood culture of the urban enclave. An artifact of second generation adaptation to the city, Italian American neighborhood culture has social and moral features that are incompatible with mainstream “liberal” culture (Rieder 1985). In this form, ethnicity is less “symbolic” and “optional” (Waters 1990) than “primordial” and “thick” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 77). More to the point, Bensonhurst was framed as an Italian American “minority group” culture in the mainstream media (Marger 2012: 27–35). Ethnic minorities have historically been stigmatized as “culturally deficient” and even pathological (Brodkin 1998: 150). Guido is a transaction about the contaminated ethnicity hitherto symbolized by the historical slurs “dago”, “wop”, and “guinea”. Marger (2012: 35) argues that ethnic minorities “find themselves particularly vulnerable to out-group hostility”, including “scapegoating”, “(i)n times of stress”. And, it is difficult to find a parallel for other European ethnic groups although it compares to the moral panic directed at Black street crime in the city. On a more pragmatic level, Italian Americans were depicted as outside the liberal compact between affluent whites and Blacks that elected the city’s first Black Mayor by defeating an Italian American candidate. More fundamentally, the “insular” character of Italian neighborhood culture became problematic in a globalizing city. Youth with a possessive investment in Italian neighborhood culture (i.e., minority group status) threatened the new market peace—the rhythm of the real estate market that corresponds to demographic shifts in the new version of the global city. The latter wants only

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the symbolism of Italian neighborhood culture, and in ways that can be commercialized (e.g., turf as real estate, ethnic culture as entertainment). This is evident in the effort to preserve the character of the South Village in the face of large development projects now that it was, like the official “Little Italy”, without an organic Italian community. Italian American neighborhood culture as a particular ethnic cultural form and the crux of minority group ethnicity became a threat to the current configuration of the city. Gentrification spreading outward from lower Manhattan continues “to attract a young and trendsetting clientele of artists and professionals”; with upscale newcomers poised to inherit the neighborhood, an article in The New York Times real estate section described the residual Italian American population as a residential amenity in Little Italy (Cohen 1998). Although historic downtown neighborhoods have been stripped of Italian Americans, restaurants and media imagery now stand in for a neighborhood culture. It is worth considering whether the exodus of 40,000 persons of Italian ancestry from Bensonhurst between 1990 and 2000 can be attributed to the fact that the writing was on the wall (i.e., moral censure of the Italian American community in the city’s print media). While the perception of a threat to “core” American values draws a surer boundary for thick ethnic identity (Cornell and Hartmann 2007: 74–77), Bensonhurst Italian Americans left for more mainstream settings. It is likely that, with the upheaval in the streets and the moral pressure alongside the increasing succession by post-1965 immigrants, many left for settings like Staten Island and the south shore of Long Island impacted by Italian Americans from the outer boroughs. A segmented assimilation perspective is helpful in understanding the dissemination of Guido to the suburbs, notably the Italian American “ethnoburbs” that are destinations once removed from the outer borough communities like Bensonhurst. Links back to the city provide an authenticity for a style that is in the pop culture inventory since JS. Guido has become a visible and even dominant youth style in the denser Italian American ethnoburbs like Franklin Square and suburbanized areas of Staten Island. And, of course, it is anchored to a party scene beyond the residential suburbs in the shore resorts in New Jersey and the Hamptons. New locations outside the outer boroughs slot Guido into the “ordered segmentation” of leisure in the inner and outer suburban landscape along lines of class and race as well as ethnicity (Wen et al. 2009).

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Rethinking the Role of Consumption for Italian American Ethnicity Consumption is at the center of contemporary youth cultures. It is also at the center of “symbolic ethnicity” which complements a straight-line assimilation approach. Symbolic ethnicity relies on consumption to mediate “nostalgia” or “feelings” for an ethnic past, which are available in mainstream, upper middle-class taste cultures such as ethnic art and cuisine (Gans 1979). Ethnic youth subcultures use consumption as a construction site for “objective” rather than “symbolic” ethnic difference. This meaning-making can be explained by segmented assimilation theory. In fact, symbolic ethnicity represents a segmented assimilation especially to the extent that it entails a consumption strategy that suits the taste of upper-middle-class adults. Taste is a salient marker of social class status in consumer societies (Bourdieu 1984). The intersection of uppermiddle-class taste and Italian American identity demarcated the market segment for the coffee table magazine Attenzione in the 1980s (Tricarico 1989). Guido enlists consumption in a cultural project that combines ethnic agency and youth agency. Style-based youth subcultures are products of the post–World War II development of consumer culture referenced to the mass media. The concept of youth culture elaborated by the cultural studies perspective stresses the role of symbolic repertoires (i.e., culture) produced or performed by young people as an attempt to create identities linked to commodities like fashion and music. Contemporary youth subcultures exhibit a vulnerability to “the power of commodities” that “inevitably shapes the contours of personal and collective identity” (Lipsitz 1994: 26). Stunted or truncated opportunities for commodity consumption referenced to popular American culture that defined previous iterations of urban Italian American youth culture like greaser were less in evidence and even transcended in the late 1970s when disco was embraced. Guido taste culture is more closely tied to the outer boroughs and newly arrived in the suburbs on a timeline set by the new immigration. Discos, not Little Italy, became a “cathedral of consumption” that led outer borough youth down a path of expanding hedonism. Perhaps more fundamentally, Guido symbolized this new Italian American subject was dressed for commodified, leisured consumption without severing the thread that connected them to ethnic neighborhood culture and the local youth style tradition. Youth culture consumption style furnished a

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new contradictory set of ethnic signifiers like clubbing and being tanned, authenticating a mainstream status credential. Rather than use consumption to reflect the attainment of a higher class status, Guido uses consumer desire as well as consumption to escape the lower class as a signifier of a “negatively privileged ethnicity” (Scott 1992). As a “core” value in American society, consumptions redeem the value (i.e., status) of Italian Americans in the mainstream. Consumption in the name of ethnicity represents a claim on “authenticity” in American consumer culture; this continues to be a compelling dynamic of social worth for a group whose ethnicity has historically been embedded in a lower class culture. Privileging a dubious ethnicity pivots on consumption, an ethnogenesis that entails an escape from class. Guido does not “oppose” mainstream values like the spectacular youth subcultures Punk and Teddy Boys (Hebdige 1977); it is opposed to mainstream American culture only to the extent that it excludes them as Italian Americans. Indeed, it has largely bought into consumption as an assimilation strategy but also as a strategy that constructs being Italian. Consumption oriented to popular American culture is used to become a somebody who is Italian and, thus, more similar to Hip Hop and Pachuco (Alvarez 2005). Guido simultaneously celebrates both discourses, consumption and Italian ethnicity. In any case, the problem of “authenticity” is framed as a matter of enfranchisement in consumer capitalism rather than recovering a meaningful ethnic heritage. An assimilation strategy that “buys into” a certain culture of consumption as the cornerstone of their “aspirations for happiness and community” (Lipsitz 1994b: 70) marks an “arriviste” status group (Bensman and Vidich 1971: 121; see also Ogersby 1999). Ethnic groups moving up the class ladder have to acquire the requisite economic and cultural capital to escape class and, at the very least, rework ethnicity. We have seen how a shortfall of cultural as well as economic capital marginalized outer borough Italian American youth in the club culture hierarchy; “real” Italians were further marginalized as “F.O.B.” inside the ethnic boundary. Arriviste consumption typically compensates for the lack of cultural capital or “taste” with volume, and closely monitors the accepted arbiters of style in the mainstream media and the status group ranked immediately above it (Bensman and Vidich 1971). Thus, Guido plunders mainstream markets for new symbols of conspicuous commodity consumption like designer fashions, tanning, health clubs, summer resorts, and tourism. Although this repudiates a contaminated ethnicity

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disenfranchised in the mainstream consumer culture, Guido is still identified with “lowbrow” mass consumption. For this reason, “recognition” and “respect” for a consumption style has been a “struggle” for Guido which reinforces a subcultural boundary. The suburbs have become a new “context of articulation” (Storey 1999: 135) for Italian American consumption. Although suburbanization is widely accepted as a signifier of assimilation, the concentrations of Italian Americans in the suburbs of New York City have significance as a “structurally defined stage” of ethnic adaptation (Wen et al. 2009: 453). Persons claiming Italian ancestry were 27% of the total population of Long Island in 1990, the largest ethnic group in the two counties comprising the Island with a 3% increase between 1980 and 1990 (Milione 1994). Massapequa on the border of Nassau and Suffolk Counties has an Italian ancestry population of 46% that has supplanted an Ashkenazi Jewish ethnoburb informally referred to as “Matzapequa” (Statistical Atlas 2018). The south shore Suffolk County Town of Babylon (2014) has almost 60,000 persons claiming Italian ancestry in 2010 which is 40% of all white residents. These middle- and upper-middle-class communities can be likened to the “ethnoburbs” formed by post-1965 immigrant groups like South Asian Indians in Syosset and Herricks, and Taiwanese in Lake Success. Ethnic segmentation correlates with class differences in income, occupational status, and education. The town of Massapequa which had a median household income of $107,059 in 2009 presents as a middle-class Italian American suburb (City Data 2018). There is a historical precedent for Italian American consumption culture. In a study of Italian immigrant community in East Harlem, Robert A. Orsi (1985) frames consumption within the family as a sacred ritual involving food prepared in the kitchen. Danielle Battisti (2014: 149–150) points out that Italian American organizations advocated “the American way” of consumerism as a strategy to combat the stigma attached to Italian immigration since the 1924 quota laws. Lizabeth Cohen (2000: 125) maintains that after World War mass consumption had become central to “the American way of life” unfolding in burgeoning middle-class suburban developments. Italian Americans disproportionately opted for post-war consumerist suburban lifestyles that pivoted on home ownership (Tricarico 2017). Affluent Italian American families in the metropolitan diaspora can allocate increased economic capital in the domus and family cohesion,

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strategies suggesting that consumption is not just driven by the acquisition of mainstream status symbols but in the service of traditional family values. In a “food-involved” culture, more economic capital has been invested in meals as a focal point of family solidarity (Cinotto 2014: 10). Increased, and perhaps disproportionate, expenditure is also allocated to home upkeep and improvement. This is seen not only in additions to the house itself, but the transformation of yard space to upgrade the domicile with material amenities as a setting for family gatherings, as with patios and outdoor furniture, pools and decks, and privacy fences. It can also explain the acquisition of second homes in area resorts. Elaborate Christmas decorations in the Italian American diaspora have become a seasonal showcase for the consumption-enhanced “domus” culture (“Dyker Lights” 2014). Expenditures that make sense within a framework of traditional ethnic values can appear excessive especially across the ethnic boundary. A backyard patio and pool intended to add a dimension to family gatherings in the summer was “overdone”, according to one Massapequa neighbor. There is a reputation for conspicuous consumption among the nouveau riche, for example in the outdoor marble and brick work and the backyard wood ovens (for pizza) imported from Italy and the backyard kitchens protected by pergolas.2 Although Guido does not locate consumption in the domus and is self-centered and hedonistic, it dovetails with domestic consumption. An Italian American restauranteur on Long Island that I interviewed abides by the rule that children need to be rewarded with consumption for “staying close to the family”. The cost of family cohesion in the mainstream subsidizes a youth culture agenda when children receive spending money, clothes, jewelry, and automobiles as gifts. In return for an active role in the family business while still in college, the restauranteur bought his son a new BMW. It is common to hear that these youth are “spoiled” by consumption. Thus, one informant characterized a “Howard Beach girls” stereotype: “Daddy, can you buy me a brand new BMW? Sure, princess, anything you want?” What the restauranteur hesitates to say is that the younger generation may be staying close because of the material rewards. With parents cast in the roles of producers and providers, children are designated as specialized consumers within this new Italian American family culture. When the child “spoiled by consumption” is female, there is resonance with the anti-Semitic slur, “Jewish American Princess”, which stereotypes an ethnic category by conspicuous consumption and leisure style; Long Island, specifically Great Neck, is the

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epicenter of this gendered ethnic stereotype in the popular culture, issuing in a reality TV show “Long Island Princess” that cross-fertilized with comparable vehicles for suburban Italian Americans (see below). At the crux of this ethnic animus is resentment for an arriviste minority group that threatens to upset the status rank order. As an arriviste group in middle-class white suburbs with visible roots in the city, Italian Americans continue to struggle with the authenticity of a consumption style (Vidich and Bensman 1971: 121). They may no longer be at the back end of the immigrant queue, but are still recently enfranchised arrivals in an invidious status system—just at a higher rank. Rising class consumption compounded by minority group identity can also present status dilemmas inside the ethnic boundary for more recently arrived “real Italians”. Guido has become the stereotype of minority group consumption, “real Italian” style in the suburbs. Its proliferation in the suburbs magnifies Italian American suburbanization, in the process identifying it with an urban minority group. Italian American consumption becomes unruly for the status quo idealized by Get off Our Island which vilifies Guido for vulgar, contaminated consumption. A nativist rant with an older moneyed, upper-middle-class inflection can be read at the intersection of status resentment and ethnic prejudice for a rising tide of Italian American arrivals. Guido is a lightning rod for an arriviste ethnic minority that clashes with a post-ethnic white suburban way of life. While Get off Our Island is a fringe response, Italian American difference in the suburbs continues to reflect a structure of opportunities including market opportunities and constraints (Tricarico 2017).

Identity Motifs and the Media Boundary In contrast to the non-transactional vacuum in which symbolic ethnicity happens, ethnic identity is not always available “how and when it suits” the individual (Royce 1982: 3). Ethnic identity can be invoked by powerful others; ethnic meanings can be elaborated to “suit” their purposes, which may include stigmatization. “Post-modern” ethnicity appears to be “contested terrain”, promoted by media images and discourses that have a tacit ideological character (Kellner 1995: 2–3). Representations in the mainstream media reveal that the “ways in which a person is, or wishes to be, known by certain others” can become highly politicized under certain kinds of “circumstances” (Cohen 1993: 195–197).

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While social actors “may resist the dominant meanings and messages… and use their culture to empower themselves and to invent their own meanings, identities, and forms of life” (Kellner: 3). Nevertheless, media representations remain “part of the world they encounter, part of what others say they are, and therefore part of the weight they carry” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 184). In particular, the media have the power to effect the “reproduction” of existing prejudices and stereotypes in the popular culture (Ferguson 1998: 61). Confounding straight-line assumptions, the mass media has prominently labeled Italian-American youth identity and style into the present, creating a repository of images in the popular culture. Lower-class street culture is the dominant motif for pre-Guido greaser and disco youth in the films The Lords of Flatbush and Saturday Night Fever. Guido is all but named in the films Spike of Bensonhurst (1988) and Cookie (1989). As late as 1989, the Bensonhurst “media spectacle” exposed an “external boundary” (Royce 1982: 2–5) of invidious cultural and moral distinctions that “pathologized” urban Italian American community not just local youth culture, tapping into a “discursive reserve” stored in the popular mass media culture. JS sublimates the motif of urban pathology with an overlay of hedonistic youthful consumption. This is in line with SNF’s portrayal of Tony Manero who can fight as well as dance; both “Spike” and “Cookie” move in local Mafia orbits. The signature dance move of Jersey Shore Guidos, the fist-pump, suggests that dancing is a stylized performance of fighting. Whereas mass media representations in response to the 1989 racial killing framed Guido as an “underclass” youth culture, JS represents Guido as “rising class” (Ogersby 1999). Bensman and Vidich (1971: 121) identify an “arriviste” pattern of consumption among rising class groups that lags behind standards of taste legislated by established “arbiters of taste”, and therefore vulgar, with the propensity to overcompensate by a conspicuous display of what is trendy. JS offers a commercial pop culture narrative of conspicuous nouveaux-riche taste: hair that is too high and slick, too much muscle mass and definition (too “juiced”), too much designer branding, too tan, lips that are too pouty, and so forth. Arriviste Guido taste collided with ethnic heritage during the JS season in Florence when the routinized dependence on tanning salons and the gym preempted a tour of the Uffizi Gallery. While a rising class betrays status insecurity, which issues in overconsumption and overdependence on mass media trends for the cultivation of taste preferences

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that “are not organic” (ibid.: 121), JS Guidos and Guidettes were not self-conscious and were the new pop culture fad. The arbiters of elite taste waste little time in putting lowbrow consumption upstarts back in their place. Mass media characterizations of JS Guidos as possessing “dubious intelligence and accomplishment” imply a shortfall of uppermiddle-class cultural capital to detract from status claims based on a mass consumption style (Genzlinger 2010). Status inferiority was underscored by the detection of an accent and jargon that marked a lower-class regional culture (Heffernan 2010: 20–21). Nancy Franklin (2010) suggested to readers of the New Yorker that invidious status distinction was an acceptable response to the Jersey shore “jetsam”. Although not explicit, there was more than a trace of ethnic innuendo. Rising class consumption may have intensified the anti-defamation response to JS. The NIAF, in particular, privileges an upper-middle-class culture agenda based on higher learning and the mainstream professions and corporate business. It accentuates an identity motif that features high Italian culture like Renaissance art and historical treasures like the Uffizi Gallery which registered indifference from the Guidos and Guidettes during the season filmed in Florence. While the NIAF agenda privileges high-brow culture (for example, Italian opera rather than electronic dance music like techno), mainstream popular culture is acknowledged in the form of the contributions of Italian American performers and is thus more a culture of production and work than consumption and pleasure. References to a traditional heritage including fluency in the Italian language, which can be studied at Italian universities, are another way that elite culture is identified with adult values rather than the interests of young people. An ethnic ideology is predicated on a class culture that marginalizes Guido as unacceptable ethnic difference—a style identified with Italian Americans with visible roots in ethnic neighborhood culture that have not attained educational and occupational status markers associated with the middle and upper middle classes (Bensman and Vidich 1971). The charge of “media bias” because “Guido” is an “ethnic slur” skirts the issue of internal status differentiation and a vulgar Italian American consumption culture. In the heated identity politics ignited by JS, the symbol and lowbrow pop culture meaning became inseparable. In contrast to Italian American organizations, an explicit connection was made by the Italian press which translated Guido as tamarri, a term synonymous with cafoni which mocks boorish, lower-taste behavior (Latza Nadeau 2011). This nomenclature resonates for the racialized two-tier

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divide between Northern “alt’Italiani” and Southern “bass’Italiani” that structured Italian immigrant community in the United States and continues to imprint contemporary Italian society. The Italian press framed Guido as Italian American rather than Italian and, of course, Italian Americans are the descendants of immigrants that were predominantly from the south. Social class and ethnicity, then, are tangled up in Guido and class is signified more than race. Guido echoes the British label of contempt for working class people, “chav”, framed by the linkage of vulgar consumption and antisocial behavior. Although class is underscored, chav identity has a regional profile, marking working-class youth in the northeast of England and echoing youth subcultures in the 1960s like the Teddy Boys. This regional connection makes “chav” interchangeable with “Geordies – a term for people from the Tyneside region of Northeast England” (Rosenberg 2011). MTV apparently saw fundamental parallels leading to a “spinoff” called “Geordie Shore” in the midst of season four of JS (ibid.). The comparison with this British youth culture is instructive. Class difference is muted and even masked in the transaction of Guido, including JS and Italian American anti-defamation organizations. It is also not clear whether “chav” and “Geordie” are the nomenclature of a bounded youth culture like Guido and Teddy Boys. It is also not clear, at least from “Geordie Shore”, that class is manipulated as symbolic capital the way Guido uses ethnicity. Guido implicitly recognizes class within an ethnic strategy for social mobility, referenced to consumption, uncoupling the historical relationship between Italian ethnicity and lower-class status. This does not assign value to traditional working-class culture in the manner of the Teds (Cross 2007). As the following section shows, the Guido stereotype has accommodated a rising class consumption culture.

Updating Stereotypes Italian American organizations like NIAF are not wrong to claim that Guido is an ethnic slur. In fact, it has arguably become the definitive insult replacing dago, wop, and guinea (“The Racial Slur Database: Italians” 2018). The Guido identity symbol has become more pronounced as it has been represented and disseminated in the mainstream media, notably by the JS spectacle. It has always referenced ethnic meanings beyond youth popular culture. Deviant motifs that inform

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the substance of historic slurs like guinea and dago can be read in the mainstream media response to the 1989 Bensonhurst racial killing which named Guido into the public discourse for the first time around themes of cultural insularity, racism, and criminality. JS submerged a concern with moral panic associated with Bensonhurst Guido while validating a pop culture credential in relation to a style of hedonistic consumption. Guido was detached from the urban minority group culture, specifically Bensonhurst, although there were references to suburban Staten Island which has been mined for reality TV shows including MTV’s True Life series “Staten Island Girl” and more recently “Staten Island Hustle” by CNBC. Since “Staten Italy” is once removed from Bensonhurst, these media texts offer a pop culture reading of strategic Italian American assimilation. JS significantly contributes to an ethnic stereotype of Italian Americans that has been under development in the popular culture for some time. Indeed, it complements a media narrative of an Italian American culture dominated by a distinctive style of consumption. Entire families spoiled by consumption are showcased by successful commercial media productions such as The Sopranos and Goodfellas; vulgar consumption is caricatured in Married to the Mob. Pellegrino D’Acierno (1999: 647) points out that American gangster films have historically framed Italian Americans by “the tacky world of vulgar consumerism”. References to the Mafia, an arriviste status group in its own right, underscores the morally dubious character of minority group ethnicity. Consumption that is “pathologized” turns ethnic difference into otherness. Mafia media stereotypes link arriviste consumption to a discourse of ethnic prejudice. Gangster innuendo is present for the Italian American families that assiduously pursue consumption on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, although this marks them as exceptions to the immigrant Italian work ethnic let alone the American Protestant version. The reality cable TV show Growing Up Gotti directly links ruthless arriviste consumption with the Mafia. The Gottis were framed by an inferior taste culture that clashed with their new residence in a mansion in Old Westbury made famous by old-money WASP families like the Vanderbilts and Posts. Representing establishment taste, Allessandra Stanley in the Times (2004) went for the status jugular: “The house is filled with marble, leopard-skin throw pillows and oil portraits and framed photographs of John Gotti”.

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The children in Mafia families spoiled by consumption receive special notice. Tony Soprano’s children were indulged with arriviste status symbols including expensive jewelry and new vehicles. When introduced by his daughter to a fellow student at Columbia as European nobility, Tony replied with affectionate sarcasm that “Meadow” was “an Italian American Princess”. While Meadow Soprano featured a preppie look, Growing Up Gotti confounds Mafia consumption with a Guido consumption style that includes spiked hair and sculpted eyebrows. Both The Sopranos and Growing Up Gotti juxtapose motifs of spoiled Italian American children to the corrosion of a traditional ethnic culture. While there is an inchoate sense that traditional childrearing patterns that once made sense are spoiled, mild parental disapproval does not dampen the conspicuous consumption of the commodities and practices that comprise youth culture fun.3 JS feeds a media stereotype that transcends youth culture, depicting a consumption style rooted in minority Italian American ethnicity. It is now prominently joined by a string of reality TV shows, which now occupies the corner of the mass media with the greatest potential for ethnic stereotyping of Italian Americans. In these shows, Italian Americans are cast as culturally “mafia” (Mafia by innuendo or inference) if not having a formal affiliation with an organized crime family, “the Mafia”. In this genre-based ethnic stereotype, Italian Americans are Guidos because the Mafia is embedded in the ethnic culture. JS Guidos consume like Mafiosi and Guidettes like mob wives. Consumption may not be ruthless, but it is unruly with partying interspersed with frequent altercations involving Guidettes as well as Guidos. Guido coalesces at this juncture as the reigning stereotype of Italian Americans. Nouveau riche gangster consumption frames the Guido label applied to Anthony Scaramucci following a brief stint in the Trump administration in July 2017. A Harvard Law School graduate and a wealthy hedge fund manager who appears on TV wearing expensive suits, Scaramucci earned the sobriquet as well as explicit identification as Italian American for a “foul-mouthed tirade” likened to “gangster talk”, which caused him to “go full guido” (EOR Podcast 2017). Scaramucci’s status profile did not preclude “the time-worn stereotype that Italians are thuggish and coarse and feel comfortable with the language of the underworld” (Vennocchi 2017). The Scaramucci Guido appears to belie the view that a “lower class” stereotype is in effect (D’Acierno 1999: 689). I would argue, however, that the stereotype is intended as a status

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putdown, reminding Italian Americans like Scaramucci that they were, in fact, “lower class” a short time ago and that their rise in class is tenuous and reversible, even deserving. The vulgar speech style that marks Scaramucci as a Guido resonates with the longstanding stereotype of “dubious intelligence” that surfaced in the initial response to JS in the mainstream media (Franklin 2010). George Will (1993) referred to “Dumb Guys Named Guido” in a Washington Post column to belittle affirmative action for Italian Americans at the City University of New York. Notwithstanding impressive academic and professional credentials, it only took a brief episode to frame Scaramucci in terms of “ethnic buffoonery” (Vennochi 2017). “Guido” was not actually mentioned when a skit on the HBO show “Real Time” (4.20.2018) delivered by comic/social commentator Bill Maher parodied beleaguered Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen, framed during the episode as incompetent and criminal, for “an Italian attitude”. Former Congressman Michael Grimm of Staten Island who served seven months in prison for tax evasion and is running for re-election under the Trump umbrella is framed as a “Guido congressman” in a local blog (Lion of the Blogosphere 2014 and 2016). Grimm is on video for threatening a local TV reporter with personal violence: “I’ll throw you off this ____ing balcony” (O’Neal 2014). It is difficult to disconnect from JS from the consolidation of Guido as an all-purpose stereotype intended to slur; in case you had not heard, JS tells the world about Guido which can be overgeneralized to an ethnic category, picking up and magnifying salient threads of existing stereotypes fitted to new developments like youth style and dubious consumption. So, well-dressed and well-educated Scaramucci becomes “tacky” and “thuggish”. Guido has evolved as more encompassing ethnic stereotyping, reworking older versions to incorporate new versions of Italian Americans. Guido can be absorbed as an ethnic identity, transcending youth identity and agency. It can label an entire ethnic category—not just urban neighborhood corner boys but upwardly mobile Italian Americans in mainstream settings. Invariably, a Scaramucci scare grounded in Guido innuendo reverberated in Italian American anti-defamation circles (Fredericks 2017). The anti-defamation protests call attention to the role of the mass media in popular stereotypes but a satisfying explanation is elusive. Chapter 8 attempted to explain the structural conditions for a moral panic that labeled Bensonhurst Italian Americans deviant, an explanation

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that aligns with a segmented assimilation perspective in pointing out the economic and political vulnerabilities of Italian American neighborhood culture in the city at a particular historical juncture. Media narratives clearly pick up the thread of embedded stereotypes. The 1992 SNL skit “The Bensonhurst Dating Game” which parodied race relations in Bensonhurst dramatized by the 1989 racial killing” but also more recently referenced to Spike Lee’s 1991 film “Jungle Fever” set in Bensonhusrt as a response to the killing. The skit casts a gum-chewing Guidette in tight-fitting leopard skin top and oversized earrings, high hair; the implicitly Guido game show host speaks ungrammatically: “I’m aksing youse” and is menacing in a street way, quick to threaten baseball bat violence, and racist: “Ya stinkin’ lowlife!” To accentuate the Mafia connection, the actor Joe Pesce who has played Mafioso roles in Goodfellas and Casino is cast as the game show host. The racist frame is prominent, with African American comedian Chris Rock as a bachelor contestant who wins the game, but loses when the local Bensonhurst rules kick in, promising a “Jungle Fever” outcome. Twenty years later, the 2012 Funny or Die parody “Bensonhurst Spelling Bee” (3.27.12), featuring two actors from The Sopranos to lend (movie) Mafia credentials, portrayed a seamless fit between local community and the Mafia. Produced during JS’s successful run it, the skit nevertheless returned to Bensonhurst for a laugh (or else die, Mafia style?). These parodies invite laughter at Guido and the urban Italian American community but also mainstream loathing and fear for an ethnic minority culture. Guido has evolved as a proxy and lightning rod for this Italian American difference. It is a moral category that designates all of those things that are objectionable about Italian Americans. These themes were discerned in Chapter 8, specifically referring to provinciality, social disorganization, and criminality and they were represented as in their ethnic cultural and perhaps biological make-up. JS did not promulgate this deviance schema but nevertheless represents Guido in a dubious moral light pivoting on unruly behavior that has the potential to erupt into episodes of public brawling consistent with wider perceptions of deviance labeling; one of the JS Guidos pleaded guilty to tax evasion, a white-collar crime used to convict Mafiosi (and Goomba Johnny) under Federal RICO statutes, after the series ran its course (Erb 2018). Among observers with a conservative value compass, moral judgement turns on representation of excessive hedonism like hooking up.

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This moral language reveals Guido as transgressive, the archetype of Italian American otherness. It is in this sense that the Guido is the new dago and guinea: there are good and bad Italian Americans in the pop culture imaginary and Guido is threatening to all that is civil and virtuous—a dark side that is the antithesis of “symbolic ethnicity”. As the new dago or guinea, the symbol is reformulated to take into account a new Italian American subject with a nouveau riche style of consumption. This new ethnic route is seen as rooted in an ethnic minority culture, urban communities like Bensonhurst. An organic connection to the city is prominent in labeling Guido deviant. Bensonhurst was pathologized as a “ghetto” culture in the moral panic that first introduced Guido into the public discourse in 1989, “insular” and “disorganized” and spawning “wilding” youth although paradoxically racist toward Blacks. As Guido moved toward the periphery, inner city origins accentuated ethnic deviance in the stereotyping of Italian American youth culture by police officers in South Belmar and the nativist website Get Off Our Island. Guido is also a moral outsider inside the ethnic boundary. This was present at the outset insofar as Guido named the F.O.B. Italian with a “thick” ethnicity. It is underscored in the moral outrage of Italian American anti-defamation protest directed at JS Guido hedonism. Moral repudiation of Guido parallels the invidious distinction elaborated by comedian Chris Rock (1996) in the stand-up routine “Niggas vs. Black People”. However, the moral censure of Guido is overshadowed by censure for the mass media which Rock decries as a cop out.4 The use of “tamarri” by the Italian press to characterize JS Guido suggests a moral boundary that historically racializes southern difference as “Africani” and “Morrocani”. Ostensibly, ethnic groups can invite “expressive depreciation” although instrumental exploitation may no longer be prevalent (SuarezOrozco 1987). However, this is premature in the case of Italian Americans. Although Italian immigrants are no longer exploited as “dago” labor, there are still occasions where an ethnic card can be played in the competition for scarce resources. Stereotyping Italian Americans in the Bensonhurst racial killing points to a confluence of local institutional and personal agendas. The George Will essay “Dumb Guys Named Guido” (1993) was written to discredit a new affirmative action program for Italian American students and faculty at the City University of New

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York. The underrepresentation of Italian Americans in higher education is the outcome of structural conditions as well as ethnic discrimination. More recently arrived Italian immigrants are particularly disadvantaged in the competition for scarce resources with racialized minorities entitled to affirmative action. If Guido is an ethnic stereotype then Italian Americans experience instrumental disadvantage because it is easier to exclude “dumb guys” from an admission process that interrupts ostensibly meritocratic standards for an ethnic credential. Discernible Italian American difference can tap into historical antipathy and the concomitant language and imagery of ethnic prejudice and discrimination. That difference is real or objective but there are also fictional representations that make it seem more real like the 2017 Subway commercial for an “Italian sandwich” that imagines a neighborhood culture replete with the customary signifiers: locals on the stoop, a woman in a housedress espying the street from her window, and a sullen and cryptic Mafioso. Although the Italian neighborhood is in eclipse, the media culture continues to invent it; to that point, it is likely that JS overstates the subcultural integrity of Guido. Marketable ethnic difference (e.g., Italian Americans as Mafia or Guido) sustained by real and textual references continues to be profitable. Mafia narratives and representations like “Vinny the Chin” make Italian American difference, specifically Guido, seem morally dangerous. The new mass media environment contributes to the persistence of these images long past their origin. This specifically refers to Internet availability on corporate websites, for example, where MTV features access to past JS episodes, or when uploaded to Youtube and cannibalized for social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram; The Bensonhurst Spelling Bee (2012) had 1,078,012 views on Youtube when accessed on 4.12.2018. Streaming video platforms like Netflix and the Internet accommodate representations like “Vinny the Chin” with smaller, niche audiences. It is an assumption of this book that Italian American culture has eluded the understanding of academic sociology. Italian American organizations are similarly inclined in the interest of identity politics. It is particularly noteworthy that rank and file Italian Americans fashion an ethnic identity around narratives that elites find offensive. Guido youth, of course, have always mined Mafia movie imagery

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for symbolic capital. Like JS Guido, it is not implausible that Italian Americans identify with a common ethnicity in relation to satires like “Bensonhurst Spelling Bee” (2012). Without regard to the intended meaning of the producers, the overwhelming majority of the 371 comments posted on the Youtube site on 4.25.2018 extracted positive ethnic value: Anyone whose offended by this, didn’t grow up in any of the boroughs. funny, but you dont cook madanade for 4 hrs, more like 30 min. Stoonade! I am of Italian descent and i cried the first time my mother showed this to me. and i still crack up when i watch it… My parents are from Bensonhurst and my mother talks like that. I dont find this offensive at all. I am proud of my culture and i will always be proud of it. Good job on the video! i Liked it alot! Its a good laugh.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani embraced Mafia movie culture, specifically the phrase, “hit by a thunderbolt”, uttered by Michael Corleone in The Godfather referring to his initial encounter with Appolonia in the Sicilian countryside to describe a similar experience with his new wife (La Ferla 2003b). Former Mayor Giuliani supported actors in The Sopranos marching in the 2002 Columbus Day Parade: “I urge Italian Americans to be less sensitive. You could spend your entire life wanting to be insulted. Why? Why do you want to be insulted?” The line appears to be thin, however. Earlier, Mayor Giuliani issued a complaint at a news conference about “a pattern” of anti-Italian American slurs which was followed by a challenge: “Italian Americans have to stand up, they have to say they’re not going to put up with this” (Lambert 1998). This apparent contradiction can be resolved by the moral boundary that separates insiders from outsiders. Guido, like the “N Word”, is a prerogative of authentic ethnic group membership. JS caused agita(tion) for Italian Americans. NIAF maintained that Guido “sends a harmful message that permeates pop culture, damaging the image and sensibilities of Italian Americans as a group” (NIAF 2010: 2). Now that Guido has entered popular American culture and has been pushed to the front and center of Italian American identity politics, it may be expected to figure prominently as a negative reference in the transaction of everyday Italian American identity as well as. Consider Rosemary Serra’s recent work (2017: 196–199):

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Today’s definition of being Italian American has been somewhat besmirched by negative portrayal in the media with TV shows like The Jersey Shore… It is important to keep things alive and show the culture of America that is NOT Italian American that we are not like the people on Jersey Shore.

However, this position is closed to the possibility that Guido can be a collective ethnic subject that opposes a prejudice dynamic rooted in a minority group status. This not only pertains to contemporary youth culture. Guido is a motif of Italian American identity for an older generation that has aged out of youth culture. The Facebook group “Guidos and Guidettes that made/make up the Bensonhurst Borough of Brooklyn” is centered on youth culture nostalgia. Guido nostalgia has become a local cottage industry. Michael Franco III, a comic who performs under the name “Brooklyn Cuzo” (2017), produces Youtube vignettes that are insider satires of Guido style including “cruising 86th Street” and the passion for “freestyle music”. “Brooklyn’s Own” DJ Joe Causi orchestrates “oldies” performances by 1970s and 1980s “disco divas”. The fiftieth anniversary of SNF celebrated at the former site of the 2001 Space Odyssey evoked wistful memories of a disco-centered youth (Mays 2017). Sixty-one-year-old Elizabeth Curcio, a retired hospitality worker, who appeared as an extra in the movie’s dance scenes, said “It was all about dancing for us and getting a new outfit every week”; her brother, aged 58 and another extra on the dance floor, recalled that “They juiced up the sex in the cars, though”. Guido nostalgia is saturated with ethnic content. “Guido comics” known as “The Hayadoin’ Boys” present an insider parody of the Guido subculture in the 1980s called “You know You’re a Guido If…”. For example, You owned or drive a Mustang/IROC/Trans Am You cried when Hot 97 Turned to all rap

Curiously, Guido is generalized as ethnic identity when the exact same items circulate under the heading “You Know you’re Italian If…”, underscoring the connection between youth culture and ethnic culture. It also raises the question whether the “good old days” were about being young or being “more Italian”. On the one hand, it can be said that it

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is possible to age out to an “adult” way of being Italian, perhaps along more traditional lines. Youth culture nostalgia, aging performers covering “oldies” in the present, is briskly marketed in the popular culture. Guido nostalgia suggests a spin on “symbolic ethnicity” whereby feelings for the past center not on an idealized Italian cultural heritage but an Italian American moment in popular American culture. In this example, youth culture is appropriated as a tradition which is a complement to an ethnicity that is appropriated as style (Bjurstrom 1997: 44–50). A “symbolic ethnicity” referenced to Guido is simultaneously referenced to a mainstream culture that has incorporated JS. A meaningful connection to an Italian American youth style moves beyond nostalgia when Pastels, a popular Bay Ridge disco in the 1980s that closed in 1997 reopened in 2017 but this time in Staten (Italy) Island to accommodate “the 40 and over crowd” (Priola 2018).

Whither Guido Youth Culture? More than 35 years after SNF, which put Italian American youth culture in southern Brooklyn on the pop culture radar, Guido mutates further away from the organic, vernacular context of urban Italian American culture. The new ground zero of the new Guido is not Bensonhurst but MTV itself. It has transferred the cachet of a prestigious corporate brand, underscoring the close connection between culture and power (Hall 1996; Bourdieu 1984). As JS repackages historical motifs of Guido difference in the idioms of late capitalist consumption, its commercial success vindicates the subculture’s protracted quest for commodity consumption at the cost of becoming a commodity. Although JS accentuates Italian ethnicity after it had been abandoned on the Jersey shore by NJGuido, a grassroots cool merchant, it aligns Guido and Italian ethnicity with a “postmodern culture” that is “open” and “unstable” (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). Commercialization has created a free-floating style that can be appropriated without authentic ethnic credentials. This was foreshadowed in 2002 when “Yo Frankie Productions” at www. guidoland.com claimed that “Being a Guido or a Guidette is less about ethnicity and more a way of life. Whether you’re African American, Irish, Jewish, Asian, Latino, or any other ethnicity, you can be a Guido!” With the success of JS, Guido has become an identity that is managed on the surface, especially as a “visual vernacular” (Ewen 1988). Guido and Guidette have become “costumes” that are interchangeable with

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other commodified identities like “emo” except that the costumes themselves are customized according to whim, blurring identity boundaries (Quenqua 2011). Here, Guido is a style template that other identities can be grafted onto; Urban Dictionary (2018) lists variations on the “Guido” theme such as “Quido” for “gay Guidos” and a “Guidneck” for a white southern hybrid. Guido has become a “fraternity stereotype” with a “reputation” for “working out” and “taking steroids” (PledgeMaster 2018). As Guido evolves in a second generation, “traditional cultural forms” continue to erode in the relationship with “new youth based styles and practices” (Buchholz 2002). The decline in Bensonhurst’s Italian ancestry population suggests a resolution in the direction of whiteness and the middle class. However, the regrouping of Italian Americans outside the Italian neighborhood suggests that “post-ethnic” whiteness is only one option. One step removed from the outer boroughs, there is still a reserve of Italian American difference to draw on in the new suburban settings and in the popular culture. An ethnic discourse may be in order to celebrate their arrival in this “American Dream” of being middle class and white (Roediger 1994). It may also be an attempt to convince themselves and others that Italians have, in fact, arrived. To the extent that the suburbs remain a site for segmented assimilation, ethnicity is still able to position youth in leisure scenes. On Long Island, Guido negotiates class and racial difference, as well as ethnicity, with other youth subcultures. Whiteness appears far too broad and vague to define residential identities let alone a viable leisure space. Guido, then, does not “float free” of “modernist concerns” like ethnicity, class, and race (Rattansi and Phoenix 1997). Fortified by a pop culture presence, Guido presents an alternative youth culture identity in relation to ethnic styles like Hip Hop, on the one hand, and “post-ethnic” and “post-modern” hipster styles like Rave and Rock that lack any semblance of a street pose. There also seems to be a broader appeal among other European ancestry youth in stratified outer borough and suburban settings, an ethnic “crossover” within a category that is not yet comfortable with whiteness. Even when Italian ethnicity is muted, Guido still offers a bounded contrast with “post-subcultural youth” who “do not typically regard themselves in collective terms” (Bose 2003: 176).5 Commodification may be a fitting place for a cultural practice consumed with consumption to end (Muggleton and Weinzerl 2003: 8). However, “common cultures” do not go quietly and Guido still draws

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on local cultures of difference (Willis 1990; Back 1994). In outer borough locales that have experienced kaleidoscopic changes not only in Bensonhurst but in Ozone Park, Hip Hop is creating social as well as cultural bridges between Italian American and new immigrant youth from the Caribbean. Becoming too Hip Hop, however, complicates a minority ethnic group agenda prescribing assimilation into white society. Notwithstanding the appropriation of Hip Hop styles that “their parents feared” (Confessore 2006), Howard Beach youth self-consciously perform ethnic difference within hip hop fashion codes. In a Queens shopping mall one afternoon in Spring 2007, a young man registered on my Guido radar wearing baggy basketball shorts, designer sneakers, a baseball cap, and a stud earring emphatically alters hip-hop codes by displaying a heavy gold chain and cross over a blue (Azzurro) athletic jersey celebrating Italy’s 2006 World Cup soccer championship. On Staten Island, Hip Hop is blended into a youth culture narrative (i.e., Hip Wop) that is an alternative to the deracinated commercial portrayal surrounding JS. There is also the repository of mass media images that continues to tell Italian American stories. The evolution of hybrid Italian American identity and culture continues in the middle space between immigration and complete assimilation.

Notes 1. Stanley Thangaraj (2015: 204–205) shows the use of south Asian ethnicity in “Indo-Pak basketball” to clear a space to defend status honor, in this case, the “street cred” of “brown” youth vis-a-vis black youth on the playground and on TV, while maintaining solidarity with an ethnic community and a traditional kinship culture. 2. The suburbs, thus, are a critical “construction site” for constructing Italian American ethnicity. While the post-war suburbs may have been scripted for “a white house” (Roediger 2005: 159–177), families that left the urban neighborhood also exercised ethnic agency to build a home-centered ethnic culture: an Italian American house rooted in the primordial social and emotional concept of “the domus” (Orsi 1985). Home ownership is key, according to Cinotto (2014: 9), “rooted in the rural background” of Italian immigrants because it enhanced the family’s “autonomy” and “security”. The suburbs provided a setting for the quintessential Italian American house because it afforded the family enhanced privacy (if not the promise of autonomy). This strategy is consistent with the desire to position the family favorably

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in relation to consumer markets as well as mainstream institutions, notably relatively privileged school systems (Tricarico 2017). 3. A generation gap in childrearing values is revealed in a video tape of a visit to John Gotti in prison by Victoria and one of her sons, who is 10 years old at the time. Brusquely dismissing the child’s aspirations to become a basketball or baseball player, grandpa threatens physical punishment and tells the grandson “You’re spoiled goddam-rotten”. Gotti’s daughter, the mother of the “spoiled” child, is traditionally obedient. See “Gotti Goes Off on Grandson”, accessed 1.23.18. 4. Rock uses characteristically “ghetto” vernacular to castigate “Black people” for scapegoating the media: And I see some black people lookin’ at me! Man! Why you gotta say that? It ain’t us, it’s the media. The media has distorted our image to make us look bad! Why must you come down on us like that Brotha’? It ain’t us, it’s the media. Please cut the fuckin’ shit! Okay?! Okay?! Okay?! (ibid.). There are parallels in the way Italian American organizations are reluctant to acknowledge Guido as an Italian American culture, preferring to blame media stereotyping. 5.  The success of JS prompted Night Life Society to reclaim Guido: “NJGuido.com is the original Guido site, the site that famed [sic] Guido, the site that started and promoted Guido”. www.njguido.com (accessed 5.28.2018). Claims to Guido authenticity reference a party culture attached to particular club venues clustered in the local metropolitan area but with no connection to Italian ethnicity and the style tradition more generally. The web site, “NJGuido.com Social Network for Nightlife”, reinforces a bounded scene within a free-floating style referenced to JS.

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Index

A Alba, Richard, 7, 9, 12, 13, 21, 23, 89, 93, 239, 272 Anti-defamation protest, 3, 269, 294, 296 Calandra Institute, 113, 266–268 National Italian American Foundation (NIAF), 264 Assimilation, 2, 4, 5, 7, 13–16, 19, 21–26, 28–30, 33, 37, 52, 60, 61, 110, 158, 171, 205, 232, 260, 261, 263, 271–274, 276–280, 283–286, 292, 295, 301, 302 segmented assimilation theory, 21, 274, 279, 284 straight-line assimilation theory, 5, 7, 271 B Bensonhurst racial killing, 225, 234, 235, 257, 281, 292, 296

labeling Italian Americans deviant, 207, 230 the local context of moral panic, 11, 62, 207 motifs of moral panic in the mass media, 2, 238 C Commercializing Guido, 65, 241, 243, 261, 300 Growing Up Gotti, 138, 156 Guido New York, 156 Jersey Shore, 12, 241, 300 NJ Guido, 241, 243, 300 Cornell, Steven, 14, 16, 17, 21, 52, 105, 143, 147, 160, 164, 173, 192, 225, 228, 234, 272, 274, 275, 282, 283, 289 Cugine, 75, 96–99, 101, 104, 107, 109, 110, 132, 152, 175, 216, 268 identity and style, 99 relationship to Guido, 122

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 D. Tricarico, Guido Culture and Italian American Youth, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03293-7

327

328  Index D Disco clubbing, 26, 58, 87, 123, 126, 128, 131, 207 electronic dance music, 12, 51, 56, 62, 110, 116, 179, 180 Manhattan clubs, 56, 65, 68, 106, 124, 185 the turn by Italian American youth, 25, 53, 61, 207 Doo Wop American Bandstand, 37, 38, 45, 46 Cinotto, Simone, 38, 39, 44 Dion and the Belmonts, 38, 51 E Ethnic(icty) and boundaries, 8, 17, 25, 39, 81, 127, 146, 147, 152, 168, 170, 172–174, 177, 178, 184, 187, 189, 192, 193, 204, 277, 278, 280 and change, 6–8, 14–17, 25, 52, 155, 171, 275 constructionist approach, 16, 17, 173, 268 and culture, 2–8, 10, 11, 13–30, 33–35, 37, 39, 40, 45, 47, 48, 50–52, 55, 60, 61, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 81, 83, 84, 88, 90, 92–97, 99–102, 104–106, 109, 111, 112, 117, 123, 124, 128, 136, 138, 143, 144, 146–155, 159–161, 163–166, 168, 170, 171, 174, 176, 177, 179–181, 184, 185, 188, 191–193, 195, 203, 204, 208, 211, 216, 217, 224, 228, 231, 235, 236, 238, 239, 243, 244, 253, 255, 258, 260–262, 264–269, 271–280, 282–285,

287, 288, 290, 291, 293, 296, 299–302 and identity, 3–5, 11, 13, 15, 17, 23–25, 27, 28, 30, 45, 69, 84, 88, 93, 94, 98, 99, 102, 107–109, 111, 147–150, 153, 161, 164, 165, 169, 170, 173, 174, 183–185, 202–204, 208, 212, 228, 238, 264, 265, 267, 273, 276, 277, 279, 280, 288, 291, 294, 297, 299, 301 Italian Americans, 4, 5, 11, 14, 15, 17, 23, 25, 40, 64, 102, 112, 158, 167, 179, 184, 195, 204, 208, 210, 214, 217, 228–232, 234, 235, 239, 244, 261, 265, 269, 274, 276, 282, 286, 288, 290, 292–298, 301 new second generation ethnicity, 13, 22, 95, 151, 168, 276, 279 objective ethnicity, 15 and social institutions, 6, 14 and stratification, 4, 5, 15, 23, 88, 102, 103, 107, 167, 231, 273, 276 and style, 16, 99, 143, 146, 197, 208, 238 as subcultural distinction, 28, 112, 138, 164, 184 symbolic ethnicity, 5, 7, 14–17, 25, 30, 95, 107, 209, 268, 284, 288, 296 and youth culture, 2–5, 10, 16–20, 22–28, 33, 37, 39–41, 45, 48, 49, 55, 60, 61, 69, 74, 81, 84, 93–97, 99–102, 104, 106, 109, 111, 112, 124, 138, 143, 144, 146–149, 152, 164, 166, 168, 171, 174, 178, 183–185, 191–193, 195, 203, 216, 224, 244, 262, 264, 265, 267–269, 272, 276, 277, 280, 281, 284, 291, 293, 296, 299, 301

Index

G Gans, Herbert, 5–8, 15, 21, 33, 36, 44, 271, 280, 284 Gotti, John, 44, 75, 77, 138, 155– 158, 160, 163, 168, 183, 225, 246, 247, 292, 293, 303 Greaser, 26, 28, 37, 38, 40–51, 53, 55, 57, 62, 67, 68, 82, 96, 101, 102, 106, 120, 128, 130, 177, 184, 207, 255, 276, 284, 289 as ethnic youth identity, 45 and local Italian American youth style tradition, 31, 176 The Guido MCs, 63, 71, 72, 99, 119, 125, 130, 144, 145, 182, 183 Guido(s) as commodity, 4, 12, 25, 29, 62, 126, 127, 253, 260, 285, 300 and deviance, 23, 27–29, 34, 105, 208, 224, 229, 234, 253, 295, 296 as dominant Italian American stereotype, 23 and Gino, 101, 109, 110 Guidette, 94, 99, 108, 118, 122, 133, 136, 137, 147, 153, 175, 186, 192, 242, 249, 250, 256, 260, 265, 290, 293, 295, 299, 300 hedonistic consumption, 28, 139, 242, 261, 292 as identity symbol, 23, 87, 96, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 110, 137, 149, 249 Jersey Shore and subcultural ideology, 188, 258 and local youth style tradition, 12, 26, 31, 39, 40, 75, 95, 100, 107, 117, 127, 284 party culture, 1, 29, 237, 238, 242, 243, 255, 258, 263, 269, 303 as pejorative, 102, 103, 107 as style, 27, 99, 122, 300

  329

struggling for recognition and respect, 23, 25, 30, 260, 269, 273 suburbanization, 238, 239, 288 symbolic reversal, 4, 111, 261 tamarri, 103, 105, 268, 269, 290, 296 H Hartmann, Douglas, 14, 16, 17, 21, 52, 105, 143, 147, 160, 164, 170, 173, 192, 226, 228, 234, 272, 274, 275, 282, 283, 289 Hip Hop, 2, 20, 22, 38–40, 74, 81, 87, 99, 116, 119, 121, 123, 124, 128, 130, 136–140, 150, 151, 154, 160–163, 166, 169, 172, 175, 177, 180, 183–186, 188, 189, 191, 194, 195, 198, 202, 204, 207, 236, 246, 247, 249, 253–255, 261–263, 273, 274, 281, 285, 301, 302 African American youth culture, 184 poaching by Italian American youth, 22, 87, 138, 160, 172, 188, 281 Hip Wop, 38, 39, 160, 172, 302 GFella, 39 Jojo Pellegrino, 39 Sciorra, Joseph, 38, 172 I Immigration, 4–7, 9, 13–15, 19, 21, 22, 27, 30, 35, 52, 88, 89, 92, 93, 103, 107, 110, 151, 154, 167, 173, 181, 184, 232, 271, 272, 275–280, 284, 286, 302 Italian, 4, 6, 7, 9, 13, 15, 22, 27, 52, 74, 89, 92, 107, 151, 154, 232, 271, 272, 275, 276, 280, 286, 302

330  Index post-1945, 15, 22, 27, 103, 110, 272, 278, 279 post-1965, 21, 22, 89, 278, 280 ItalChat, 78–81, 84, 85, 108, 109, 134–139, 147–149, 152–154, 156, 157, 159–162, 164, 165, 167–169, 189, 190, 192–204, 238, 239, 241, 277, 282 as Italian American youth cyber culture, 78, 134 offline relationships, 79, 147 Italian American(s) and class, 30, 73, 193, 267, 275, 291 and consumption, 61, 69 demography, 11, 244 ethnicity, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11–15, 17, 20–23, 25, 26, 28, 30, 35, 37, 42, 47, 56, 64, 71, 73, 76, 81, 87, 88, 91, 100, 104, 105, 107, 110–112, 123, 140, 144, 146, 149, 159–161, 163, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 179, 208, 210, 223, 225, 227, 228, 232, 235, 261, 265, 266, 269, 274–276, 282, 283, 285, 293, 296, 300, 302 identity and stereotypes, 118 neighborhood culture, 7, 11, 13, 38, 47, 50, 110, 154, 155, 200, 204, 233, 244, 261, 266, 269, 282–284, 290, 295, 297 and race, 5, 23, 283 and suburbanization, 286, 288 youth in the literature, 26 M Mafia and Bensonhurst racial killing, 225, 281 and Guido style, 44, 130 and Italian American neighborhood culture, 7, 11, 154, 261, 295

ruthless consumption, 292, 293 Mass media and Italian American youth culture, 3, 40, 207 MTV, 2, 3 Saturday Night Fever, 3, 289 minority group culture, 5, 15, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 61, 68, 110, 176, 178, 236, 262, 268, 276, 278, 279, 292 N Nagel, Joane, 16, 17, 143, 150, 152, 170, 187, 192, 197, 200, 203, 204, 208, 225, 229, 272, 273 New York City Bensonhurst, 2, 210, 233, 239 Bronx, 12, 38, 50 Brooklyn, 2, 48, 52, 55, 74, 149, 154 Greenwich Village, 6 Howard Beach, 2, 11 Little Italy, 9, 232, 271 Manhattan, 9, 52, 56, 232 outer boroughs, 5, 9, 10, 34, 52, 272 Queens, 71 Staten Island, 239 O Online youth culture, 81, 146–148, 168, 189 Get Off Our Island, 244, 257 ItalChat, 79–81, 148, 168 NJ Guido, 241 Urban Dictionary, 188 P Pachuco, 20, 22, 41, 87, 103, 107, 111, 132, 169, 185, 207, 236, 274, 285

Index

Popular culture, 4, 11, 12, 14, 17–20, 24–26, 29–31, 33–35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 57, 60, 62, 64, 66, 69, 77, 79, 82, 83, 91, 93, 94, 102–104, 106, 109, 111, 115, 129, 134, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 160, 169, 171, 181, 182, 187, 188, 203, 221, 228, 235, 250, 252–254, 256, 258, 259, 264, 265, 268–270, 272–274, 277, 288–292, 300, 301 Guido as pop culture category, 77, 106, 143, 258, 259, 264, 274, 292 mass media representations of Italian Americans, 12, 102, 265 turn to, 26, 27, 31, 60, 77, 134, 146 R Race, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18, 23, 28, 39, 45, 71, 73, 77, 101, 124, 164, 167, 203, 214, 217, 228, 229, 232, 234–236, 238, 275, 280, 291, 295, 301 Italian Americans and whiteness, 46 managing the boundary with blackness, 39 Relationships with other youth subcultures African Americans, 197, 236 Albanians, 177, 195, 280 Greeks, 254, 280 Latinos, 71, 106, 281 Manhattan club culture (bridge and tunnel), 73, 185 Research and data collection, 84 ethnographic methodology, 84 S Scaramucci, Anthony, 293, 294 Social class, 5, 9, 11, 212, 284, 291

  331

Status capital(s), 24, 28, 41, 44, 61, 83, 97, 107, 110, 112, 128, 143, 166, 185, 190, 204, 280, 285–287, 290, 291 competition, 24, 28, 83, 101, 105, 122, 143, 173, 174, 176, 190, 204, 280 distinction, 28, 46, 73, 103, 105, 111, 112, 146, 167, 175, 176, 190, 199, 232, 261, 280, 290 and ethnicity, 5, 11, 20, 24, 27, 28, 34, 35, 68, 73, 92, 97, 101, 104, 108, 111, 112, 128, 143, 144, 165–167, 175, 185, 190, 191, 229, 232, 273, 276, 277, 280, 285, 291, 302 and peer group, 33, 133, 144, 174, 176 power, 28, 60, 104, 144, 166, 167, 169, 173 Style commodification, 24, 252, 301 consumption, 2, 12, 15, 18, 24–29, 34, 40, 44, 46–48, 50, 58, 61, 62, 67–69, 83, 84, 93, 102– 105, 108, 111, 112, 117, 120, 121, 123–127, 131, 136, 143, 155, 156, 161–163, 166, 169, 171, 172, 174–177, 187, 192, 195, 197, 208, 223, 235, 240, 244, 254, 258, 260, 261, 263, 267, 269, 274, 277, 284–288, 290, 292–294, 300 hybridity, 19, 24, 27, 145, 170, 178 leisure, 15, 18–20, 26, 27, 32, 37, 41, 42, 44, 46–48, 52, 53, 61–63, 67, 68, 72, 84, 103, 115, 124, 129, 136, 143, 155, 168, 179, 180, 208, 279, 283, 284, 287 spectacle, 2, 46, 69, 100, 103, 105, 111, 115, 126, 131, 170, 173, 185, 203, 213, 261, 264, 289

332  Index stylized presentations, 87, 115, 135, 278 as subcultural distinction, 28, 110, 112, 116, 118, 138, 164, 175 Suburbs, 2, 13, 24, 27, 72, 110, 131, 163, 171, 178, 184, 240, 253, 261, 283, 286, 288 ethnoburbs, 283 and segmented assimilation, 21, 276, 278, 283 U Urban code of the street, 43, 62, 128, 181 defended neighborhood, 34, 176, 232 minority culture, 23, 29, 105, 184, 238, 279, 295, 296 neighborhood culture, 7, 38, 154, 155, 162, 244, 277, 282 ordered segmentation of leisure, 74 W WKTU FM, 2, 66, 74, 154, 179, 193, 245 Goomba Johnny, 154 Joe Causi, 65, 74, 154, 245 Y Youth agency, 2, 5, 14, 16–19, 22, 26, 27, 35, 41, 46, 48, 51, 52, 63, 69, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 116–118, 120, 122, 144, 174,

189, 268, 269, 272, 273, 276, 284, 294 the concept in the literature, 83 culture, 1–5, 9–12, 14–34, 36–41, 43–53, 55–58, 60–63, 65, 68–70, 72–74, 77–81, 83, 84, 93–104, 106, 108–110, 112, 116, 118, 122–125, 129, 130, 133–136, 138, 139, 143–149, 152, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 168, 170–176, 178, 181–185, 187–191, 193, 195, 203, 204, 207, 216, 224, 244, 245, 247, 249, 252–262, 264, 265, 267–269, 272, 276, 277, 280, 284, 287, 289, 291, 293, 296, 299, 300 and ethnicity, 4, 25, 27, 28, 71, 88, 108, 175, 189, 190, 252, 255, 277, 291 formations, 28, 51, 52, 69, 78, 81, 187, 266 Italian Americans in New York City, 9 and style, 16, 99, 143, 146, 238, 289 subculture, 1–3, 10, 14, 16, 20, 22–26, 28–30, 33, 34, 37, 45, 46, 49, 52, 53, 64, 67, 77, 79, 81–84, 87, 88, 92, 96–101, 106, 113, 115, 116, 118, 134, 149, 153, 166, 170, 171, 173, 176, 181, 184, 185, 188, 192, 234, 235, 237, 238, 247, 253, 256, 258, 259, 265–267, 269, 272, 274, 276