Citation:

Interview with Diana DiMedio, History 150 Spring 2024, Conducted by Gene DiMedio, March 12, 2024.

Overview to Social Change Interview:

Originally, this interview was going to be about the Vietnam War. I assumed that because my grandma lived through that time period, she would be a fitting interviewee. It turns out that she did not have any close connections to the war. What she did have though, was connections to World War 2. I explain in the background the whole story about her father meeting her mother in the war. This resulted in my grandmother being raised by someone who was not even a citizen of the United States. This aspect followed the theme of immigration and how immigrants were treated. After the war, there was a resurgence of immigration from countries who were impacted and damaged. My great grandmother fell into that group. As an immigrant, she had to learn the language and assimilate into American culture while raising a family, which as a woman at the time, she was expected to do on her own. Furthermore, my grandmother had her own point of view in this experience which made her childhood more difficult than the others she grew up with.

I compared this interview to the other ones I saw involving immigration to America especially following World War 2. I found many similarities between these like returning to the homeland. My great grandmother would visit Italy many times because all her family remained there while she was in America. In fact, she even brought my grandmother there for five months and they felt different when they returned back to America. I saw another interview about an Italian immigrant that also struggled with the language barrier when coming to America.

Overall, this interview does a great job at putting someone in a time period that they were not alive for. Being able to compare and contrast interviews is the great thing about history.

Biography:

While the interview is with Diana DiMedio. A lot of the content involves Diana’s mother, my great grandmother. My great great grand father was a paratrooper during World War II. He would jump out of planes and then form part of a ground assault. He was stationed in Italy near the Gothic Line, which was the Axis powers southernmost line of defense in Europe.

Through this work as a paratrooper, he met his wife, my great great grandmother, who lived in northern Italy. In her wedding, she wore a dress made up of the parachute her father used in the war. Her mother actually had her older brother in Italy, but eventually moved and gave birth to her in southern New Jersey. It was a very unique situation that occurred because her mother was just as new to America as she was. Growing up, she would go to Italy a lot because her mother’s entire family still lived there. In fact, at one point, she lived in Italy for about four months straight, and recalls being more proficient in Italian than English. She went on to live her childhood the small rural town of Mickelton in southern New Jersey near the Delaware River. After high school, she tried to go to an art school in Philadelphia, but backed out when she realized it was mainly hippies who went to the school who she couldn’t identify with. She went on to graduate from a two-year university and eventually got married and raised a family in the town I live in which is Haddonfield, New Jersey.

Research:

Because this interview brushes over numerous important events, I first thought to get a background on those. First of all, I wanted to start with Italian immigration patterns. While my great grandmother had an unusual experience, her father also came from an Italian family. When Italians came to America in the early 20th century, they lived in the east coast cities specifically, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Eventually, they moved out to the suburbs which you see in examples like New Haven, Connecticut. This led me to believe that my great grandfather did this when he moved to South Jersey.

The Second important piece of this interview was my great grandfather’s military service and how he met my great grandmother. During World War II, Italy was one of the Axis Powers led by Benito Mussolini. Along with that, they were allies of the Nazis. The II corps of the United States Army planned an offensive through the Tuscan region of Italy to break through the Gothic line which was the southernmost front in Europe for the Axis Powers. This included a route that went through Sienna which was where my Great Grandmother lived. This is very likely how my great grandparents met.

I asked my grandmother about the gender rolls during her youth, and she said that her mother did not conform to them because she was new to the country. At the time, traditional gender roles were followed pretty much everywhere across the United States. This typically meant that the mother would stay home to take care of the children while the father would go out and work a 9-5 to make money and support the family. A lot of women did not go to college, and it was very rare for women to seek education beyond college. From 1940-1960, the number of families with three children doubled while the number of families with four children quadrupled. The gender roles allowed the baby boom to happen.

My grandmother completed education all the way through college, so I wanted to compare that to most women at that time. Before 1970, it was very common for women to graduate high school, but they did not perform as well statistically, and very few would go to college. In 1973, only 40% of female high school graduates were enrolled in college the following fall. On the other hand, 65% of male high school graduates were enrolled in college the following fall. So, it was very unusual that my grandmother graduated college even though she only attended a two-year university.

My grandmother made it clear that it was much more difficult for her mother to obtain American citizenship and assimilate into American culture than it is for immigrants today. Illegal immigrants are one issue, but even legal immigrants now have it easier. There are now plenty of ways to get around without knowing English and there are many ways to learn English. There are over one million legal immigrants coming into the United States every year while there were only one hundred thousand per year immediately following World War 2. That vast difference is part of the reason it was so difficult for my great grandmother.

Transcript process:

This interview was recorded on my iPhone. After recording, I emailed the audio file to myself and downloaded it on my laptop. I want to note that the recording cut off during the interview and did not record the last 2-3 minutes of the interview.

GD: I’m here with my grand mom, and video. And I will be interviewing her about certain questions that affected the course that occurred during the course of her life and her thoughts on them. So you can introduce yourself.

DD: Hello, I’m Diana DiMedio genius, my grandson, Gene.

GD: So, what was it like growing up? Obviously, I know your mother came over with your father after the war from Italy? What was it like growing up to someone who is new to the country? How was that like, kinda affect your childhood?

DD: That’s a very good question. It is very, it’s very different. When you don’t have an American American is a mother, or a mother that has been born in this country. So you almost become sort of a European kind of way of thought, as opposed to an American way of thought. It was a very good way of living. And the standards in the morals were were very nice.

So yeah, you spent a couple of months in Italy as child, you went back for a couple of months. 

GD: What was that like? And how did it affect your childhood.

DD: So my brother was born in Italy. Before my mother came here, she was born there, he was born there. They came here when he was six, six months old. I was born in this country. And then when I turned three and a half, my mother took me back to Italy, and like my brother here with my grandmother, and father for four to six months. I don’t really remember that much of it at that time. But I do know, there was a lot of love, there was a lot of family oriented, things that were you know, that were embracing us as a family. And my mother was was more of she was she was starting to be a little bit of American as and so everybody appreciated the fact that we came from America. I then spoke Italian very fluently, coming here. And then when I did come back, my brother could not understand me, because I just spoke fluent Italian. You pick the language up very quickly, when you’re little. I know it was all about family, it was all and that’s really what the Italian heritage was about.

GD: So obviously, you came from Italian heritage, was that similar to the people in your community growing up? Did you feel like you were different from them? 

DD: Yes, you did has a main cause. Um, I know that well, coming from Northern Italy is a little bit different than being born here and coming from migrating as a poor immigrant coming over to America. So it was a little bit different for me because of that factor. And that the, the immigrants, the Italian immigrants had a different way of doing things. So a northern Italian will we just kind of came here with my mother being a newly American. It was just it was, it was different for me because I felt like I really didn’t belong with the group. When I say and I wasn’t really a groupie, because of it.

GD: So growing up obviously grew up in like the 50s and 60s and at the time, the social and gender roles were so strongly implemented into society, with it with men going out to work, women staying home. Did you feel like your family kind of followed those rules? Yeah.

DD: My mother did not. My mother was when she came here to America. The one thing that she focused in on was going to school to learn the English language. Normally, you would think of a child being read to at night, no one ever read to me. Cause she could she couldn’t read English. So my father was working so much that he was not concentrating on being with children. So probably Marilee I grew up. Today everybody’s reading to their kids at night and all of that. That didn’t happen with me. So it was kind of it was just a natural way of doing she was more learning herself to be an American to be in this country. She’s not she was not like the an immigrant coming here and now we learn. We’re transitioning to their language. No, that did not happen. They transitioned to the American way of living. I’m that’s how we’ll chiffon functioned.

GD: So how do you think her experience as an immigrant was different than those today?

 DD: Exactly that the image, it all depends upon which immigrants you’re taught speaking up, the immigrants that came over illegally are the ones that came over illegally,

GD: I’d say legally, legally.

DD: Okay, um, I would say it’s very similar to that. So I would, I would identify with them as coming over as you know, I’m learning whatever it is that you want to learn loving the country and all of that, learning the language. It was very similar to that coming over for her.

Bibliography:

(2003, June 19). Mrs. America: Women’s Roles in the 1950s. PBS. Retrieved March 6, 2024, from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-mrs-america-womens-roles-1950s/

Palomba, Asia L. “A Brief History of Italian Immigration to the United States Post World War II.” America Domani, 3 Aug. 2023, americadomani.com/a-brief-history-of-italian-immigration-to-the-united-states-post-world-war-ii/.

Zueuhlke, Mark. “Battle of the Gothic Line.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 19 Apr. 2017, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/battle-of-the-gothic-line.

“Legal Immigration to the United States, 1820-Present.” Migrationpolicy.Org, 16 Oct. 2023, www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annual-Number-of-US-Legal-Permanent-Residents.