A Necessary Context: Italian American Immigration

 “Caught in perpetual ambivalence, the Italian school masters struggled to strike a balance between two dynamics central to their schools’ existence…If they assimilated to American culture to excess, they argued, that heritage would be diluted and lost.  On the other hand, too much emphasis on the past would isolate the schools from American society and culture" (Mckevitt). 

Navigating assimilation and family conflict was a common issue for Italian-American immigrant families. Renowned novelist John Fante’s described similar experiences of being bullied due to is Italian roots in “The Odyssey of a Wop,” A child’s mind is especially vulnerable, and to call them slurs and make them feel ashamed of their family’s culture is vastly confusing and detrimental in so many ways to their educational experience and their feeling of belonging. It creates an internal struggle that many Italian-Americans face between their desire to “fit in” but also to retain their cultural identity. This problem dates back to the nineteenth century when Italian immigration to the United States first boomed. The issues of education, immigration, and maintaining two cultural identities for Italian-American immigrants are bound together.
During the first boom of Italian immigration to the United States, Italian schoolmasters often struggled to balance the maintenance of their Italian culture with the assimilation into the new American culture. Tied to many aspects of the time, the most prevalent being the occurrence of The Revolution, there was intense change occurring at all times, especially within education. The boom of Italian immigration to the U.S. during the revolution is part of what makes the Jesuit education system so unique because it seeks to balance the cultures that headmasters had to maintain. This conflict between two cultures is a common theme during this time period of immigration (McKevitt). This only goes to show the lasting and prominent issue of the struggle of assimilation being applied both to education and the social lives of Italian Americans, and  Savio admits this influenced his views of and involvement in politics (Cohen 21). Oppression was familiar to him. He and his family felt it, and he did not want others to experience that same feeling.