Umbertina By Helena Barolini Analysis

The book, “Umbertina” by Helena Barolini is one that captures the experiences of immigration from Italy to America. It is a story of how an Italian family moved from poverty to poverty and finally to riches through sheer hard work and determination from Umbertina. The story is one that traverses through three generations of women in one family and is a tale of family strength, heritage and culture that moves through three generations of an Italian-American family struggling to get rich enough to be recognized as well as struggling to find their identity as either Americans or Italians. The story opens with Umbertina as a goat herder in Calabria and living in perpetual poverty. Eventually she was sold off by her father to the man that became …show more content…
The quality of life in this slum was quite pathetic but the slum mainly comprised of Italian immigrants. These people were languishing in poverty in the new world where they hoped that their poverty would end. This shows that the Italian-American experience was not always favorable to the immigrants. The Italian-American experience is also one that is depicted as a sort of “light at the end of the tunnel” scenario. Umbertina had hopes for her family, dreams even. Of living a better life in a better house and having a better bank account. This dream was somewhat derailed, delayed even, but with hard work she was able to accomplish it. This is proof of the existence of the American dream for the Italians but the dream was one that involved plenty of hard labor as well as strife. The Italian-American experience is one that is filled with plenty of identity crisis. The generations following Umbertina and her children were ones that exhibited plenty of confusion as to where they belonged and what their place was both as Italian Americans and as women. They were not sure whether they belonged among the Americans in their new home, or among the Italians in the home their ancestors left behind in pursuit of a better life. Umbertina’s grandchild, Marguerite, was faced by a crisis in that she felt neither her American husband nor her Italian family could …show more content…
The main function of memory is to offset the popular, yet completely wrong myths of Italy and immigration as well. It showed how the Italians of that generation could proudly boast of the numerous glories that Rome had and the heritages of other places while Umbertina recalls home as a poor place where she had very little except her determination and her hope. She only came to the United States as a means of escaping the poverty back home that was mostly insufferable. The story, “Umbertina”, also dispels the popular notion among immigrants of from rags to riches. Helena Barolini found out that most of the uneducated Italians thought of the United States as a wonderful land where one immigrated into and immediately rose to riches. The slum in downtown Manhattan, where Umbertina lived with a her family at first, is an example of how many Italians migrated to the new world with plenty of hope for getting hugely rich but ended up spending the rest of their lives in the slum as poor as they were before they came to the new