Pascal D’Angelo and Francesco Ventresca were among the many Italians who passed through Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th Century, and wrote about their experience in the autobiographies "Son of Italy" (1924) and "Personal Reminiscences" (1936). Cynthia Wong underlines that in those same years the phenomenon of ethnic autobiographies began. The ‘autobiographies of Americanisation’ were written by emigrants to reaffirm their identities while showing at the same time the struggle to reconcile the need to preserve one’s heritage with the desire to assimilate into the mainstream American culture. Both authors hail from the village of Introdacqua in Abruzzo, and both follow a linear path in their text: the life before emigration, the travel to America, and the conflict between the life the emigrants hoped for and reality.
The essay examines the two narratives by following their similar approaches towards a shared history of loss, voyage, hard work, disillusionment, difficulties, but especially (and differently from other emigrants) of desire to be acknowledged in their openness towards ‘alterity’, trying, as both authors are, to acquire the new language, its poetics and culture. Both autobiographies become then the expression of a real cultural transition and of the capability of their authors to build bridges between different cultures and different versions of themselves.
