Confetti For Gino Analysis

In the 1950s, San Diego’s Little Italy consisted of more than 6,000 Italian families who toiled to build San Diego into the center of the world’s tuna industry. From the 19th century through the 1970s, people from Italy led the enterprise in boat building, and as a result, found the American tuna fishing fleet and canning industry based in San Diego, the "tuna capital" of Western United States. Confetti for Gino takes place in the booming fishing market of San Diego’s Little Italy and primarily following the lives of the DeMarino family. The book focuses in on the main character Gino DeMarino as he strives to find wife. The novel suggests that Italian family values and kinship proved more deeply rooted than the temptations of assimilating into American culture of the time. At the beginning of the novel Gino is deeply in love with an American waitress named Vicky. Gino struggles to purse his …show more content…
Gino later learns that Vicky had lied to him and is married but separated with a child of her own. Gino had to give up on his dreams of marrying Vicky and assimilating into the American culture. Subsequently, he came to terms with his Italian identity and his community’s ideals. As Gino gathers what his future may hold he proclaims,”His home and future lay with the Italian colony and tuna fishing. Only a dumb wop like he was would fail to realize that! Home and future… the two were linked. And his future home called for a wife. Not Vicky…Maybe, for example, if she’d been Italian. Like Teresa”(Madalena 837). Gino even though he was revolting against his own cultural values saw that his future and heritage coincide together. Gino decides to give Teresa a serious chance at being his wife. Symbolically, this decision to give Teresa a chance represents Gino acceptance of his heritage and inadvertently goes against assimilating into the American