Emigranti
Immigrants are a rising part of America’s population, and as I am an immigrant myself, from Italy, I have decided to create this series of images and words to give representation to our local population of first generation Italian immigrants.
My title for the series, “Emigranti,” (“One who leaves his own country to reside in another” https://english.stackexchange.com) places the accent on what is left behind rather than what one comes to. Italian immigrants today, as opposed to people coming from countries ravaged by war, extreme poverty, autocratic regimes, and chronic unemployment, or even to the Italians of previous generations, typically leave Italy under less trying circumstances. Yet still, we share some of the same feeling of longing, of yearning for what we left behind. One common struggle for us immigrants is language, the accent we carry, which those of us who moved here as adults, we will never fully lose. In the beautiful words of writer NonViolet Bulawayo “we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men.”
Being an immigrant makes us both an outsider and insider in two (or more) lands and cultures. We are those who live their lives split between the before and the after, the there and the here.
Nowadays there is so much talk about those who come from elsewhere, what I want to explore instead with this series, starting from my own experience, is our humanity and our history.
My title for the series, “Emigranti,” (“One who leaves his own country to reside in another” https://english.stackexchange.com) places the accent on what is left behind rather than what one comes to. Italian immigrants today, as opposed to people coming from countries ravaged by war, extreme poverty, autocratic regimes, and chronic unemployment, or even to the Italians of previous generations, typically leave Italy under less trying circumstances. Yet still, we share some of the same feeling of longing, of yearning for what we left behind. One common struggle for us immigrants is language, the accent we carry, which those of us who moved here as adults, we will never fully lose. In the beautiful words of writer NonViolet Bulawayo “we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men.”
Being an immigrant makes us both an outsider and insider in two (or more) lands and cultures. We are those who live their lives split between the before and the after, the there and the here.
Nowadays there is so much talk about those who come from elsewhere, what I want to explore instead with this series, starting from my own experience, is our humanity and our history.