DISCRIMINATION AND HARDSHIP TOUGHEN IIMMIGRANT WOMEN IN THE WEST
The Descendant
By Linda Stasi
(Regalo Press (Simon & Schuster)
During a difficult time of natural disasters in their native Sicily, the Barbera family is lured to America with promises of good jobs. What they get is more akin to slavery in the Colorado coal mines. Brutal retaliation to the immigrant workers attempts to better their working conditions cause the family to flee to the wilderness to escape the law. There they eke out a marginal existence while their family continues to grow. When baby Flo is born, father Mariano has become so embittered and desperate, he intends to rid the family of another mouth to feed, but a blue-eyed wolf intervenes and mother Maria begins to become the protector of her family. Through the years, the family with its fierce women as much as its men become ranchers, bootleggers and mountain Mafia.
Interview by Diane Slocum
AUTHORLINK: What gave you the idea to write a novel based on your Sicilian ancestors?
STASI: I had always thought that my mother and her sisters—first generation Italian-Americans—who grew up on a farm/ranch in Colorado were worthy of a story. They had a brute of a father but still had relationships and marriages out of their nationality, race, religion and gender. I also wanted to put the brakes on the same old stereotyped bigotry about the Italian immigration experience. Thousands of Italians helped settle the west. That story needed to be told.
AUTHORLINK: How much did you know about their story before you started and where did you go for more information if you needed it?
STASI: I knew a lot but learned so much more. I had heard about the Ludlow Massacre for example but didn’t know the horrific facts. I also knew that my ancestors were bootleggers, but I didn’t know that prohibition was declared in Colorado four years before the rest of the country. I also did not know that all immigrants in Rockefeller’s mines were indentured and were basically slaves with no way out—until they fought their way out.
AUTHORLINK: What did you do to research the historical events tied into their story?
STASI: I still had one living aunt, Marie Yervasi, and she helped me a great deal with true family stories, plus I traveled to Italy and spent three years writing and researching. As a journalist I had to make sure that I checked all the boxes and that the events—both natural and those caused by humans—were true and accurate.
AUTHORLINK: Since it is a novel, not a history, how did you weave the facts as you knew them with the fictionalized details that fleshed out the story?
STASI: It is a historical novel and after a lot of research, blood, sweat and plenty of tears, I managed to weave the events into the stories that I knew of my grandparents and their children. For example, I knew that my mother, Flo, had a wolf for a pet and that the family got caught up in the Pueblo Flood, prohibition, that they were hunted by the KKK, and the Ludlow Massacre. The stories of the siblings were cobbled together from family lore.
AUTHORLINK: Part of the Barbera story is the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants, from the time they boarded the ship, in the Colorado mines, and even in the school in Brooklyn. What do you think is the importance of including facts like these in stories as treatment similar to these are continuing even to this day?
STASI: I am desperate to put an end to what I call unconscious bigotry against Italian Americans. I wanted to show how these horrible stereotypes were started and how they continue up until today.
AUTHORLINK: Another important aspect of your story is the role of women in the west, who, along with immigrants, have not typically been given much attention in traditional stories. How does your story differ?
STASI: There were at least 30 different languages spoken among the miners and their families. The women are given short shrift because the American public likes the idea that men who looked and sounded like John Wayne alone settled the West. WRONG. Since men so outnumbered women, it was the women who worked while the men mined. They worked the farms, kept the families intact and did everything that the men did—rope, ride, chop wood, build houses, defy their husbands, plow the fields, and all the while had babies, cooked, cleaned and ran bootleg.
AUTHORLINK: Your story also involves the origin of the Mafia in the U.S. How did the Barbera’s fit into that?
STASI: My Aunt Carrie, (Cassie in the book), married Charlie Carlino whose family was connected to the Barberas. They started the Mafia in the west because after the Ludlow massacre, many were living wild in the woods. They didn’t speak the language, could not read or write in any language and were unfairly wanted by the law after the Ludlow massacre. When Prohibition hit, these Italians caught a break because they knew how to make wine and sugar beet moonshine. The DEA agents were members of the KKK and so had a license to kill Italians. Claiming that they all had stills. The Italians had to group together to protect themselves like the Mafia of the 16th century in Italy. They, however, fractured into rival families once prohibition became a national law. Charlie Carlino was killed when the rival Danna family attacked him in his car as he was crossing a bridge. (Sound familiar? Carlino/Coleone, favorite son killed by rival family crossing a bridge, father’s name Vito Carlino as opposed to Vito Corleone, etc.)
AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?
STASI: Not sure. Heading back to the Arts Workshop Int’l in Assisi this summer to start a new novel, but I don’t know yet what it will be about.
About the author: Linda Stasi wrote columns in the New York Daily News and the New York Post. She is the winner of numerous awards for her columns’ She is the author of the Mary Higgins Clark Award winning The Sixth Station, Book of Judas and five non-fiction books. Her latest novel, The Descendant, is based on her own family history of Italian women in the wild west in the early 1900s. She has hosted New York television’s “What a Week” and “Uncensored.” She is also an officer of the Museum of Civil Rights in New York City..
