Meet the D’Angelo Family in Gina’s premier novel. (Coming soon!)
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Ecco Nonna D'Angelo, Stella's guiding light
Born in 1904 in Santa Teresa, Sicily, Nonna is an emmigrant determined to preserve her family’s heritage in America. Secretly studying Italian and English at home (women were forbidden to be literate), she was determined that Ellis Island processors would spell her family’s names without Americanizing them for convenience. Nonna also resolved to become a legal citizen. Widowed at twenty-six, barely a year after arriving in America, she supported herself and her son Salvo by working 12-hour shifts in New York’s garment district and living in a Bronx 5th-floor walk-up. She salvanged discarded scrap material to sew clothes for her and son. Nonna had a ready smile and quick wit that made every day brighter, especially after a a glass of Marsala.
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Questo è Dom Pesci, Salvo's best friend
Domenico is a fisherman by trade, devoted to his high-school sweetheart and wife Viviana, their five sons, and extended family- and enough grandchildren to fill a school bus. Maybe two. Four generations of Pescis live on one residential block- just like his ancestors and relatives still in Messina, Sicily.
Before every sea voyage, he steers the SS Stella Mare to Pier 1 for Father Cantanzano’s Blessing of the Fleet. Attendance is mandatory for Stella Mare deckhands, or they’re fired for the season. When the six-month Alaskan fishing season ends, Dom hosts a salmon barbeque celebrating his crew’s safe return home.
His non-English-speaking mother, Donna, is Nonna’s best friend- like Dom and Salvo. -
Io sono Stella, Salvo and Maria's daughter
Born in America to Sicilian immigrants, Stella wonders every day why her parents ever left Italy. Stella loves Italian traditions and feels at home in Little Italy by the sea but can't find her place among her American high school peers. She's dual enrolled in the local junior college as a high school junior with a 3.7 GPA, loves the arts, performs in Shakespearean plays, tutors trigonometry and statistics on campus, and rides her bike 12 miles a day.
Stella loses herself in the sights and sounds of ocean waves crashing against the rocky Pacific coastline and longs to be a marine biologist. But can she? Or will Salvo decide not to fund Stella’s college education because, “it’s not worth it”? After all, "she's just a girl." -
About the Book
You're in American Now centers around the D’Angelo Family, a multi-generational Italian household living under one roof in central coast California during the 1970s. It's a small home bustling with drop-in friends and surviving on bartering among immigrant peers. With daily cultural clashes, Salvo D’Angelo sets out to Americanize his high school daughter, Stella, or so he says. His mother, Stella's Nonna, disagrees with Salvo's master plan and passes down Italian traditions to Stella at every opportunity.
Now a junior in high school, Stella finds out that her father questions the ‘rate of return’ on sending a daughter to college. Hurt and confused, Stella confides to Nonna her vision of becoming a marine biologist. Nonna understands the family dynamics and plainly teaches- in broken English- what Stella must do. Stella must point out the discrepancy between Papa’s plan to Americanize her while simultaneously planning her arranged marriage and denying her a college education. Stella must fight for what she wants. But Salvo is the only family member legally entitled to owning a bank account- and signing student loans.
Sensing her son’s scheming, Nonna informs daughter-in-law Maria of Stella’s aspirations and Salvo’s “è stupido” response. A home-fought battle of cultures ensues. Mamma Maria posts Billy Jean King's victory picture from the Battle of the Sexes on the living room wall- right next to the Pope's gold-framed, signed photograph. More immediately, how can the D’Angelo women thwart Salvo from colluding with an arranged marriage proposal- with Stella as the bride? Chaos and comedy ensue, proving the D’Angelos to be an infectiously resilient and prickly outspoken Italian-American famiglia.
From the author: When I saw photos of Sicily recovering from the 1908 earthquake, my grandmother processing through Ellis Island, the Bronx tenements, the sweatshops in Manhattan’s garment district, my illiterate grandmother crossing picket lines two weeks after getting hired, my dad’s WWII dog tags, my Mom’s painstaking efforts to preserve history in the making, and Dad’s concentration camp photos, I knew their stories had to be told. Though photos may fade, what remains indelible is the irrepressible joy of our ancestors, even in poverty and uncertainty. And so began “You’re In America Now.” The novel’s central characters, the D’Angelo Family, are based on scrapbook photos discovered in my family’s 100-year history.
