Puoi vedere?

My father's father was from Italy. Well, his parents and siblings were. I've never been sure if he was born in Italy or in the North End of Boston. My grandfather's siblings used to speak Italian. Of course, they rarely addressed me and didn't repeat themselves when they did, so they kept their strange northern Italian hybrid dialect mainly to themselves.

My father's mother's parents were Irish immigrants. Her father was a fireman who died three days before Christmas when my grandmother was young. She was raised in a convent after the authorities removed her and her siblings from her mother because her (then single) mother had been accused of making a living in a non-wholesome manner. And the kids lied to the cops about it. This is how the story goes at least.

Why am I telling you all this? Because the discussion about this country's more modern immigrants is disturbing to me. It has stirred up thoughts about my own family's rather recent immigrant roots and reminded me of the fact that all of us are "immigrants" here. Even the first immigrants - who have, I believe, the distinction of having been of extremely wide scale annoyance to their original countrymen. The pilgrims were what could be described nowadays as militant religious extremists who felt that living and worshipping with non-exteremists would contaminate their salvation. The legacy of the character of that first wave of immigration? A belief that relation to this particular set of immigrants granted exclusive god given rights for dominion above everything around them. That philosophy can easily be seen as a core element in a culture and belief system which eventually allowed (and promoted) the organized practice of land grabbing and genocide "real americans" euphemistically refer to as our nation's expansion and reform period.

I would not condone someone living a life of true luxury on the hard work or suffering of other people, a charge that is often brought against immigrants. But in my experience, via my family's heritage and what I see of modern immigrants to this country, these people are hardly living in luxury when they come to the US. Moreover, they KNOW that they will not live a life of luxury here. And yet they come anyhow. Despite the hardship that you can be assured of here in the US if you are not a member of the small luxury class, apparently the opportunities here are still better than those available in modern immigrants' countries of origin. That is hardly surprising. Many of them come from countries where corporate interests have used up or enslaved local resources to maintain the privileges of the luxury class here in the US (and other "first world" countries) .

From this perspective, the ire that immigrants to the US are here only to take advantage of our resources, to take jobs away from Americans (ahahahahaha!), and to increase the tax burden on the middle class would be much better (and more legitimately) directed at people who live in these zip codes or who benefited from the 2004 corporate tax break bill.

So what drives the ignorant "This is america. Speak american!" and "America. Love it or leave it!" people's immigrant-phobia? I'm not sure really. Their rhetoric has always annoyed the shit out of me. It just annoys me more so during times when the issue comes into the national debate arena.

And this is one of those times. Is it just me, or does anyone else have the strong feelingthat this issue is one of those "Look a pterodactyl!!!" kind of things? NOT that the lot of non-citizen/non-registered residents in this country is a trivial issue, not that the myriad of labor issues woven throughout the whole of the immigration one are minor. But I question the timing of this recent incarnation of the ageless Immigrant Problem, and I question the motivation for it's being thrust into the national spotlight so close to legislative elections. Oh there are so many other things we could be considering when we go to the polls.

What got me on this kick? The last straw was a news item about reaction to a spanish language version of the star spangled banner. This bothers me for two reasons:
1) Spanish speaking does not equal immigrant, immigrant does not equal hispanic. That these equivalencies are held is proof of a set of annoying stereotypes that I'd like to see dispelled.
2) According to the news story, people aren't happy about the song being sung in anything but English. Yeah. Bush was quoted as saying: "I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English. And they ought to learn to sing the anthem in English." Does "learning English" mean using grammatical sentences and real words? If so, then Bush just questioned the validity of his own claim to US citizenship.

In response to all this, I've decided to translate the US national anthem into Italian, the language of one of my family's countries of origin. The Irish, well, that's gonna be a bit harder but I do have a friend who speaks it so I'll ask her.

I'll be working on "Eh, Puoi vedere?" (a casual voice seems to have the correct tone for my intentions). I'll provide a full translation if and when I can. My reason for wanting to do it is entirely to antagonize anyone who really is already bothered by the spanish language version of the star spangled banner. It's gonna take a little thinking because I haven't used Italian in years and the song's lyrics are a bit archaic. Meanwhile, I encourage others to do their own translations.