Boreas,
We're in the same boat. I was born in one country, but spend most of my time in another one, although that will change when I get older. I hold dual citizenship. Sometimes, I'm not quite sure where I "fit". When I'm in Italy I sometimes feel very American. Here, after all this time, I still feel very Italian. If I were a young man and for some reason there was a conflict between Italy and the U.S. I would be very torn.
It's totally different for second and third generation Italian-Americans like my husband and all the Italian-Americans I know. When I met him he spoke not one word of Italian, had never been there, and everything he knew of its culture and history he learned in a few classes in general European history in high school. Even what was cooked in his home was strange, and I don't mean only because it was southern Italian cooking. The Neapolitan cooking his grandmother had taught his mother had changed because of the lack of availability of certain ingredients and even the changing tastes of her children. There's no question where his loyalties lie in terms of serving his country. His "country" is the U.S. The same is true of my own children. That doesn't mean that he isn't extraordinarily proud of his ancestry, because he is. Of course, if people here in the U.S. ask him, "What are you?", he's going to say "Italian". This is a kind of exchange that is quite common here. The American is a given. He's not conflicted about any of this; he's very comfortable in his own skin, as are his relatives. It just adds richness to his life. I'm the only conflicted one.
The ties get looser and looser with intermarriage. The rates are extraordinarily high for Italian Americans. Not one of his cousins married someone of Italian ancestry. A few in my family did, but I have 34 first cousins, so that just goes with the odds. Yes, my "half" Italian relatives still primarily identify as "Italian-Americans". They still cook and eat Italian to some extent, come to family reunions every year and play bocce, a few know a bit of the language, but that's because their "Italian" parent came to America pretty recently. Pretty soon, "full" Italian-Americans are going to be as rare as unicorns.
I'll go on record: I don't believe there's an Italian-Canadian or Italian-American anywhere, second or third generation, without a word of Italian, who would say I'm not Canadian or American, I'm Italian. Not unless he has a mental disorder.
Anyone who says such a thing is probably a fake, as are some of these results. First they're Nat Geo results whom staff say are average for southern Italians. When the name of the staff person is requested, all of a sudden the "proof" is someone running a project at FTDNA, someone whose only knowledge of the ancestry of the project members is what they tell him. Then, we have two posters here, Patrizio and Azzuro, who have very similar yDna (claimed to be a "Semitic" J1 clade), and mtDna, and strangely, a Patrizio posts the same data, in almost the same words, making the same arguments, on anthrogenica that Azzuro posts here. If you hear hooves, it's a horse. As soon as I get a chance I'm going to find the exact posts at anthrogenica and see how they compare to those of Azzuro and Patrizio here. If it looks like they're all the same person, both of them are going to be banned. In case it has skipped everyone's mind, you don't get to post under two names here. NO SOCKS ALLOWED! Clear?
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened to me. Someone claiming to be half Italian and half German or something, who looked completely Levantine to me, and seemed to know nothing of Italy, when questioned, sent me a photo shopped picture of himself pasted onto a tourist picture of Italy. You can't make this stuff up.
You know, people, if you're going to play these games, you have to get better at it.
@Binx,
Maybe French Canadians are a little different? After all, they're still native French speakers, even if it's a dialect. I think with them that insisting on their "French-ness" has something to do with their political identity in a country where they're a minority.
@Pax Augusta,
There's no point in bickering about it. Let it go. It's clear what's going on. Someone who speaks to his grandparents in Italian who writes "azzuro" and "securo"? Someone who says these bizarre things for an Italian-Canadian? I don't think so.
