Littwin: Wopburger story reaches into immigration's past

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published May 22, 2007 at midnight

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The wopburger has been saved. And, with its rescue, the dark forces of political correctness have been dealt a serious blow.

Word comes from Louisville that the Blue Parrot, an Italian restaurant, has resisted pressure to rename the wopburger, a delicacy on its menu for 88 years, named, by its Italian owners, for an Italian slur.

Who knows why? I'd like to think it was an inside joke, an inside-the-family commentary on anti-Italian prejudice. But whatever the wopburger's derivation, this decision makes the world safe for . . .

Well, you may not want to think too deeply about that. Or it won't be long until someone suggests we're now free to have appropriate slur-burgers for Jewish delicatessens and appropriate slur-burgers for soul-food restaurants and you can guess the name for Mexican restaurants and for Vietnamese restaurants and, well, you get the idea.

Personally, I couldn't care less about the wopburger. In the 21st century, we're long past the time when the word wop is used as a pejorative. There are other ethnic groups to pick on now.

But what you might find interesting is that when wop was commonly used, a lot of people thought it stood for "without papers" - to describe, uh, undocumented Italian immigrants. (Apparently it comes from the Italian word guappo, which means ruffian.)

And yet, if you trust my e-mail, you'd think there were no without-paper Italians or, for that matter, Irish or Poles or Germans. Nothing I write about gets more e-mail than illegal immigration. And letters often begin the same way: "My grandfather (or great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather) came here legally. What part of legal don't you understand?"

Of course, the writer generally has little idea how his forebears got here, or the legality involved. And probably has almost no idea about the immigration laws of the time. I mean, who does? Or about the prejudice many immigrants and their children faced, or the 1924 immigration laws written to keep more Italians, and many others, from our shores.

As you may have heard, the Senate has put off the latest immigration debate until next month. The Senate voted first to continue debate and then decided that the bill couldn't withstand too much debate just yet. Labor doesn't like the guest-worker package. Many conservatives don't like any part of the package.

Earlier that day, I had an e-mail exchange with a correspondent who wrote: "I'm 3rd generation Italian. My grandfather was a LEGAL immigrant. Legal."

You don't have to read much about the Italian immigrant experience to find parallels with the Mexican immigrant experience. Italians were seen as immigrants with dark skin, who brought with them a strange language and a different culture. And I don't have to remind you that the Italian stereotype doesn't always include legal activity.

Originally, most Italian immigrants were young males who wanted to work and then return to Italy. As many as 30 percent did. But most immigrants stayed. They came through Ellis Island, where almost everyone was admitted. There weren't even passports until 1918. There was chain immigration - and families grew. A Little Italy would form, a city within a city, with its own institutions and newspapers.

Many immigrants were desperately poor and lived in desperate conditions. Look up Jacob Riis, a New York Tribune reporter who wrote an 1890 book about tenements called How the Other Half Lives. He describes "one room 12x12 with five families living in it, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds, without partitions, screen, chair or table."

That was long ago. Not quite as long ago, but long before political correctness hit our shores, Life magazine did a cover story on Joe DiMaggio, the great Yankee center fielder, whose father was an Italian immigrant in San Francisco.

In 1939, Life showed DiMaggio in a photo with Joe Louis. The caption read: "Like Heavyweight champion Louis, DiMaggio is lazy, shy and inarticulate."

You could not be more in the mainstream than Life. It had the reach of television today. And the anti-Italian bigotry dripped right off the page. Here's an excerpt: "Although he learned Italian first, Joe, now 24, speaks English without an accent and is otherwise well adapted to U.S. mores. Instead of smelly bear grease, he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti."

In 1924, the National Origins Act was passed. It severely restricted immigration from southern Europe and Asia. The country apparently needed fewer Joe DiMaggios. The law would stand until 1965.

A co-sponsor of the bill would say that "our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood . . . "

The aliens are different today. But at least we have this: Despite our differences, we all live in a land, where anyone - regardless of race, creed or natural origin - can partake in a wopburger.

littwinm@rockymountainnews.com. Read Littwin's blog at blogs.RockyMoun tainNews.com/denver/littwin/

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