Longtime Petaluman's book celebrates Italian roots

<p>The Italian-American experience is not just about high profile entertainers, athletes, winemakers and crime celebrities. It's about regular folk doing ordinary tasks well.</p><p>Which is why former Petaluman Vincenza Scarpaci has made it her quest to invigorate interest in where Italian-American families came from and how they contributed to their adopted country.</p><p>“My work is dedicated to the toil and labor of those who built America,” Scarpaci said after a recent lecture at the Sonoma County Museum. She was promoting her latest book, “The Journey of the Italians in America,” which includes photos of two Sonoma County families.</p><p>The Northern Italians came to California early, during the Mexican era," Scarpaci said. In Sonoma County, they were stonecutters and chicken farmers as well as Swiss-Italian dairymen.</p><p>Italians of that era were agriculturalists who made a living by trading the products they grew for the goods their neighbors made or sold. No money was exchanged, and most farmers were sharecroppers.</p><p>"Owning land was an Italian obsession," Scarpaci said. Half the Italians who came to the Americas went back home after raising cash to buy land, pay for dowries and buy goods they couldn't acquire through barter.</p><p>Those who stayed brought Italian culture, high and low, and changed the American palate, she said.</p><p>They made bricks in Connecticut, farmed strawberries in Louisiana, rolled cigars in Florida and extracted minerals in Montana.</p><p>In the cities, they formed Little Italys. In smaller towns, they shared neighborhoods, boarding houses and gardens.</p><p>Even those with non-agricultural jobs, Scarpaci recounts, maintained small plots of land and grew peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, artichokes, asparagus, zucchini and grapes. Excess produce and homemade wine were often peddled to raise cash.</p><p>Maria Gromo of Healdsburg, pictured in Scarpaci's book, "worked picking tomatoes and gradually used family earnings to purchase parcels of land ... including three acres of grapes, a grocery store with apartments above and homes with good-size lots for all three boys."</p><p>Sonoma winemaker Samuele Sebastiani arrived penniless in San Francisco and began his career hauling cobblestones. But, asks Scarpaci, how many know that his first land purchase was the quarry from which the stones had come?</p><p>Scarpaci grew up in Brooklyn in a Sicilian-American family. Her well-developed sense of tradition led to a B.A. in history from Hofstra University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Italian-American studies from Rutgers University.</p><p>At a time when ethnic slurs and racial epithets were everyday parts of speech, she practiced the new discipline of immigration history.</p><p>"I learned how my family and other immigrants fit into the larger pattern of immigration, and how each group met the challenges of becoming American according to their transported culture and values."</p><p>Her wide-angle view includes the way Italians and other marginalized groups worked together to achieve full participation in the American system: with Jews in the Atlantic states, blacks in the south, Native Americans in the mid-west and Irish in the far west.</p><p>All her books and articles serve to expose ethnic roots to all immigrant Americans who have lost sight of their heritage, Scarpaci said. “After the third generation, the interest in family history wanes.”</p><p>And after three years of criss-crossing the country, Scarpaci is winding down the promotion phase of her most wide-ranging book and is anxious to resume writing specifically about the Italians of Walla Walla, Washington.</p><p>She returns this fall to speak in San Rafael and Petaluma, where she spent seven years. Colleagues and adversaries may remember her as a bit of a rabblerouser.</p><p>Scarpaci was active in the local academic and historical circles in the 1980s and ‘90s, and also in political, cultural and land-use issues.</p><p>She and husband Peter Rodda were among those who fought against the outlet mall and the auto plaza marquee, and they frequently weighed in on the appropriate use of Lafferty Ranch.</p><p>In addition to teaching at Sonoma State University, Scarpaci wrote a monthly political column for the Argus-Courier and helped create an exhibit at the Petaluma Historical Museum on the history of Petaluma's planning process.</p><p>Now living in Eugene, Oregon, she plays the same role as teacher, author and director of various cultural and environmental interests.</p>