Perhaps the first thing one must emphasize in talking about the Italian diaspora in the United States is that East Coast Italians are very much their own race of people now, entirely separate from Italians themselves (the real ones that arrived in the 1880s for the first wave of immigration). And they certainly seem to like it that way—are even proud of the “standalone” “culture” they’ve started (regardless of the fact that most people still tend to lump them in with/consider them an accurate representation of real Italians). If one wants to call “culture” consistently finding new and heinous ways to bastardize the original language and cuisine. As New York and New Jersey “Italians” are particularly fond of doing.
That brings us to West Coast Italians, their own unique breed as well, albeit, let’s face it, a more sophisticated one. And maybe that stems from the fact that the Italians who settled “out west,” primarily in California, seemed to have had a greater preoccupation with education. This made apparent from the outset of “The Great Arrival,” when Father Giovanni Nobili and Father Michele Accolti, two Jesuit priests, settled during the Gold Rush years and founded Santa Clara College (now Santa Clara University). Soon after, St. Ignatius College—now better known as University of San Francisco—would also be founded, with the strong Italian presence in the Bay Area amplifying with the first Gold Rush-based wave of immigration.
Another factor in the noticeably greater sophistication of West Coast Italians can be traced to, per San Francisco’s Museo Italo Americano, how “they did have… some advantages over their countrymen who had settled on the Eastern seaboard. They arrived relatively early in the development of the state when land and businesses still needed to be developed. They found a California economy that was very diversified, at the beginning relying on agriculture, fishing and mining, then expanding to logging, railroad construction, food processing and manufacturing. This provided Italians with several employment options, not confining them, as in the East and Midwest, to construction and factory work.”
In other words, West Coast Italians weren’t destined to help cultivate the kind of “plumber” and “in construction” stereotypes that would lead to pop cultural phenomena like Super Mario Bros. and The Sopranos. But while some would assume that East Coast Italians were more naturally discriminated against because of being looked upon as “baser than”/“cruder than,” therefore having a “harder time” than West Coast Italians, the thing is, at the very least, the East Coast ilk had an automatically built-in community upon arrival. The same can’t necessarily be said of the West Coast immigrants (especially those that went to Oregon or Washington), who, although they benefited from “getting in on the ground floor” of California, didn’t always seem to find themselves instantly embraced into an enclave.
In this regard (and so many others), there is a price to pay for being more complex and intelligent, more of an “adventurous” spirit willing to take a gamble on the kind of land and social environment that isn’t guaranteed to be so “welcoming” (not to mention even more far-flung than the East Coast, ergo rendering an Italian immigrant more disconnected and removed from their family back home). And that is the crux of what Chiara Barzini’s debut novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, relates to (and yes, it’s autobiographical). Especially in the sense of being an Italian immigrating to California. For even in the 1990s, when the book takes place, it wasn’t as if Italians were exactly “burgeoning” out west enough for them to be “fully integrated” into a major city like Los Angeles in the same way that they were in New York City. It is with this in mind that one must “receive” Eugenia’s coming-of-age story. For, as a fifteen-year-old plucked from her comparatively idyllic existence in Rome so that her parents, Ettore and Serena, can pursue their dreams of becoming Hollywood filmmakers, Eugenia is in for way more of a culture shock than she could have ever bargained for.
Not least of which is because it isn’t even, say, Westwood or San Pedro (where a higher concentration of Italians live) that Eugenia’s parents move them to, but San Fernando Valley. A total antithesis to Italy. A cultural wasteland—and noticeably so in 1992, when the post-1980s decay set in. In fact, this is precisely why Barzini chooses to commence the book with the following Norman Mailer quote,
One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child. One knows that if the cities of the world were destroyed by a new war, the architecture of the rebuilding would create a landscape which looked, subject to specification of climate, exactly and entirely like the San Fernando Valley.”
Upon moving to that very milieu just a few months after the Rodney King riots that tore Los Angeles asunder, Eugenia finds little to like about the city, least of all “SFV.” She has that in common with Mailer, who, in another part of the essay that the abovementioned quote hails from (“Superman Comes to the Supermarket”), also snarkily says (in typical self-superior East Coast fashion), “It is not that Los Angeles is altogether hideous, it is even by degrees pleasant, but for an Easterner there is never any salt in the wind…” And, technically, being from Italy makes Eugenia an “Easterner” as well…that is, when traveling to this westernmost point. Hence, like someone from the “east,” the customs of California life not only make no sense to her, but are totally anathema to her culture.
Take, for example, a snafu that occurs early on in the novel, when Eugenia and her younger brother, Timoteo, are at a Malibu beach with their parents and grandmother, Celeste (who came along to help them with the move, but has yet return to Italy). The adults are all sunbathing without clothes on, acting as if America isn’t the tightest and most prudish country when it comes to anything deemed “sexual” (and always has been). And that’s when Eugenia, who has been talking and praying to the Virgin Mary ever since they arrived (“Being away from the motherland called for motherly reassurance”), initially assumes, “She was coming for me. She was going to take me away.” But no, as it turns out, “It was the sound of a helicopter, floating above the beach where my parents were reading out yard-sale listings. From the loudspeakers came the voice of God. It said, ‘Put your bathing suits back on. I repeat, put your bathing suits back on! You are committing a felony. Ma’am put your top back on.’”
The incident is the first of many that will find this Italian family at odds with the “culture” of the U.S. in general and Los Angeles in particular. With the police officer “explaining,” “You’re in Los Angeles now, and if you are going to lay naked on a beach, you have to take responsibility for things that might happen.” Eugenia’s father tries to level with the officer by asking, “But what’s the worst thing that can happen, sir? Nudity is only natural.” The officer gets even blunter by replying, “The worst thing that might happen, sir, is that a maniac could be standing right on top of that cliff looking at you naked people, masturbating, and traumatizing children and civilians.”
By the end of the occasionally tense (and frequently embarrassing to Eugenia) encounter, her father concludes, “These people are fascists.” An assessment that many Italian immigrants have made over the years and centuries that they’ve descended upon “the land of opportunity.” Just ask Sacco and Vanzetti. And things don’t much seem to improve for the family’s “assimilation” from there. Indeed, from the very first day of school, it’s obvious that Eugenia is not going to find an “Italian clique.” For San Fernando Valley High School is composed mostly of Latino and Persian students. It’s Arash, one of the Persians in her class, that takes a liking to Eugenia, even though he would never make it known to his friends.
After a while, Eugenia doesn’t much care about being his “dirty little secret,” going with him to an abandoned junior high on many an afternoon and giving him a blow job without expecting any pleasure from him in return (in fact, this is one of the many instances of Eugenia treating sex and sexual acts with men so rotely and dispassionately that will serve as an indication of something bigger when it comes to who she is). To be sure, Arash is part of her “sexual rampage” phase of finding an identity, of finding, in a sense, what it means to be “the American version” of herself. This after losing her virginity to a violent type named Alo while the family is on a Serena-helmed “pilgrimage” to the Wounded Knee burial ground in South Dakota, with Serena taking a vested interest in paying respect to the Native Americans who were ousted from the country they now live in.
It is while they’re all back at the cheap hotel where they’re staying that Eugenia decides to run away, encountering the half-white, half-Native American Alo and deciding to go with him in his truck. And, although she wants to have sex with him (with anyone, really—just to “get it over with”), the way it plays out makes that initial lust dissipate entirely. However, once it’s all over, the experience seems to make her ready for more, which is how she ends up not only giving BJs to Arash during school hours, but also having sex with Robert, the “goth” and mentally unstable co-writer that Ettore has been working with on film project.
Her parents find out about her “tryst” with Robert when Eugenia’s English teacher calls them in a scandalized fury about an essay she wrote. One that offers gory details like, “If one is to have meaningless sex, one should at least pick people with admirable physical qualities.” And yet, she herself does the opposite, adding, “Sex with pretty, stupid men is never as fun as sex with ugly, stupid men.” Max, the “bigwig” and friend that has “guided” Ettore and Serena during their transition period, urges them to ground Eugenia immediately, warning them that she’s “turning into a nymphomaniac.” Naturally, they take his advice and try grounding her (since she has nothing worth taking away—no phone and no TV). After all, Max is cited as “a big reason why we had moved to L.A.”
Alas, they’ll learn the hard way that Max is a huckster who has ingratiated himself as some kind of oracle to Ettore. Some sort of all-knowing expert on, well, just about everything. Especially the entertainment business, since he claims to be friends with Phil Collins, as well as the person who wrote the lyrics to “Another Day in Paradise.” But one thing Max does turn out to be good for is telling Eugenia that, “The magic of this city is not in the mansions but in the smell of the cedar trees that are planted in front of them. It’s not in the beautifully tiled pools but in the way the sunlight reflects on the water in them. It’s what keeps people here. The luminous unseen.”
Max is then sure to add the caveat, “Remember Eugenia, if you look too hard it disappears.” Sometimes, like the very city itself. Or at least parts of it. For anyone that knows about L.A. history will be aware of what’s coming based on the book’s title and the year that the book initially begins. For it was two years later that the horrific Northridge earthquake transpired on January 17, 1994, remaining the largest recorded one in San Fernando Valley’s history. And while it of course sounds narcissistic, it seems that all of the events in Eugenia’s life are building up to their own kind of implosion, almost as if manifesting in the form of this earthquake.
Before which point, the road to knowing herself—even if it’s a self that would have never existed without this move to California—is a long and often painful one. And when she does return to Italy (specifically, one of the small Aeolian islands off Sicily) during the first summer after moving away, she finds it no longer “quite fits.” And that, more surprising still, she realizes it’s just as savage as the U.S. in its own way (on a related note, for those who are sensitive to animal abuse, beware the story that unfolds with an innocent donkey named Angelina—for it is sure to haunt and stay with any reader). A savagery she’s exposed to repeatedly as she deals with the fallout of gang violence (being at a peak in early and mid-90s L.A.), being hassled at customs when she and her brother try to emerge from LAX after their visit to Sicily, reckoning with her sexuality upon befriending a fellow student who lives in Topanga Canyon, going through her first fight with a best friend named Henry—and so many other things that are not only part and parcel of the teenage experience, but the human one.
But maybe the most significant revelation that Eugenia has as the novel unfurls is the one that so many immigrants do after spending too much time away from their homeland: they no longer quite “fit” there anymore. Something about them has been too fundamentally changed while living within a different culture (even if America is “anti-culture”). And so, in effect, they’ve cast themselves out by boldly daring to detach from their roots. An act that remains, to this day, in direct conflict with everything most Italians still believe—or have been conditioned over centuries to believe—about staying planted in their own soil, amongst their own kind. Which is why the West Coast Italians in particular are so unique. For they flung themselves into a true abyss far more than the East Coast ones. And that’s part of why the difference between the two “sects” is perennially noticeable.