Column: Vandalize an Italian American museum during an immigration protest? Bad move
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The latest act in the play that’s life in downtown Los Angeles greeted me when I parked at a Chinatown lot Wednesday afternoon:
Students protesting Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant policies.
A group of about 60 were marching up Spring Street before taking a right on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue toward Olvera Street, chanting and blowing horns and cheering any time a car honked in approval. They waved Mexican flags and Salvadoran and Venezuelan ones, with nary an Old Glory in sight.
I wasn’t there to cover the kids, though: I wanted to look at graffiti. On Monday, during a “Day Without an Immigrant” rally, people tagged all over El Pueblo, the city’s birthplace.
They defaced the Chinese American Museum and a tour office. The Pico House and the first fire station in the city. Interpretive signs that ring the Old Plaza. Businesses across the street from Cielito Lindo. The parking lot for LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.
The placas were almost all the same, referencing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the president: “F— ICE.” “F— Donald Trump.”
Protests against Trump’s immigration crackdown continued for a third day in downtown Los Angeles, with hundreds of students walking out of class to join.
The place that got it the worst was the two-story Italian Hall. A brick wall that faced Cesar E. Chavez was a palimpsest of scrawls — the anti-Trump and anti-ICE tags, “ICE Out of LA” with L.A. in the style of the Dodgers logo, a heart with initials inside, a ghostly red “Viva la Raza,” a “Viva Mexico.”
The historic structure, built in 1908, houses the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles. Back in the day, the hall hosted the very kind of radical politics the students were espousing in this week’s protests, with legendary figures like Emma Goldman and the Flores Magón brothers addressing crowds in English, Spanish, Italian and other languages. Defacing a shrine to immigrants of the past while fighting for the immigrants of today — it was a sad irony I wanted to discuss with the museum’s executive director and co-founder, Marianna Gatto.
Dressed in all black with a warm smile, she took me on a short tour. A permanent exhibit told the history of L.A.’s Italian American community, which Gatto says is the fifth-largest in the country. Display cases held mementos famous — a Tommy Lasorda jersey, an empty can of StarKist Tuna, which was founded in San Pedro and provided many Italian immigrants with jobs — and personal, like folk dresses and civic club badges. The free museum hosts over 300,000 visitors a year, the majority not of Italian heritage.
“You can’t tell the story of what’s happening right now without the story of what happened in the past,” Gatto said. We were in front of what she said is the museum’s most popular display: artifacts from when Italian Americans were the despised immigrants of the day. In her hands were 19th century cartoons depicting Italians as mustachioed rats swimming onto American shores. Before us was a photo of two Italian men who had been lynched, hanging from a tree.
“When I watch visitors here stay and read everything, I find it encouraging,” Gatto said.
Earlier in the day, the museum had hosted a group of students from Baker Elementary in El Monte. “You see them making connections to what happened to Italian Americans in the past to their own stories,” she said.
The problem, as evidenced by the graffiti outside, is that not enough people are doing that.
Ethnic studies is in vogue in California and set to become a graduation requirement for high schoolers in 2030. But the Italian American experience rarely figures here, unlike on the East Coast or in the Midwest.
Although the California Legislature apologized in 2010 for the state’s mistreatment of Italian immigrants and Italian Americans during World War II, Italians barely merit a mention in the ethnic studies model curriculum. They’re acknowledged as one of many European immigrant groups, with the longest section a proposed assignment on whether Christopher Columbus was a “hero or criminal.”
Omissions like this lead to the type of vandalism that happened at the Italian American Museum, said Cal State Fullerton Chicano studies professor Alexandro José Gradilla. He muttered “híjole” (Oh no!) when I told him about the graffiti there and in other parts of El Pueblo.
“The failure is not with the young people [who tagged]. It’s with us as adult activists,” Gradilla said. “We haven’t showed them the history we should be giving them — that all the successful civil rights movements happened as coalitions. Tagging up other people‘s places is not the way.”
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Gatto was more charitable about the lack of knowledge about Italian American history, especially in Los Angeles.
“L.A. history is not known,” she said as we continued our tour. “Ask the average person, ‘How did Los Angeles begin?’ and they’ll probably say ‘Hollywood.’”
Gatto, who gave her age as “late 40s,” said she grew up in an era when Italian Americans celebrated the “good” ones among them — politicians, judges, Frank Sinatra — and not the hardships they suffered. “They were once this,” she said, referring to the anti-Italian hate display, “and didn’t want to be that, so they ran away from that.”
But during her childhood in Silver Lake and Los Feliz, Gatto said, the white kids didn’t think of her as white, and “the Mexican and Filipino kids were like, ‘Why are you hanging out with us?’”
The descendant of immigrants from Sicily and Calabria gained her passion for Italian American history after visiting the then-boarded-up Italian Hall as an undergrad at UCLA and Cal State Los Angeles and telling herself, “This needs to be a museum, and I need to be the director.”
The museum did come to pass, after local Italian Americans fought to save Italian Hall. In 2010, after working as a high school teacher and a curator for the city of Los Angeles, Gatto became head of the Italian American Museum, which moved into the hall in 2016.
“For me, this isn’t a matter of ethnic pride, but the story of Los Angeles,” she said.
Lincoln Heights, one of L.A.’s traditional Italian American neighborhoods, “was split in half” by the construction of the 5 Freeway shortly after Gatto’s father’s family moved there in the late 1940s. She said some Italian Americans look skeptically on the immigrants of today: “They’ll say, ‘We came over legally,’ and I tell them it was different back then, and we need to listen to the immigrants of today.”
I asked about the vandalism outside. Gatto stressed that she wasn’t conflating the protests with the graffiti.
“We’re immensely supportive of everyone’s rights to free speech,” she replied. “We’re hoping people will just respect what’s here and be more thoughtful of how it impacts us.”
Sadly, vandalism has become fairly routine at the Italian American Museum.
People have repeatedly broken the vestibule windows. Someone once tried to set the building on fire. This past weekend, a woman entered a temporary exhibit about Italian American inventors, stripped naked and stole a plastic mouse. Workers have removed some of the graffiti from the “Day Without an Immigrant” protest, but some was written with a type of spray paint that requires a more extensive — and expensive — removal.
The pandemic eviscerated the Italian American Museum’s finances, which have yet to rebound. Some board members lost their homes and businesses in the recent fires.
“Let’s say we get damage of $10,000,” Gatto said as we stood near a small replica of a Zamboni ice resurfacing machine, invented in the city of Paramount by Italian American Frank Zamboni. “Do you know how many kids’ workshops that funds? We serve people who don’t go to the Getty. They don’t feel welcome at the Getty. At other places, $10,000 won’t get you a napkin.”
She offered a tired smile. “When we’re fighting constant vandalism, it takes away from our resources to do the stuff that’s more important.”
I asked if she was going to seek criminal charges against whoever tagged up the museum on the day of the protest. Gatto immediately shook her head no.
“As an educator, I’d like to see this as an opportunity to educate. It’s a scary time for a lot of people, and it’s going to get harder and harder,” she said. “Prosecution isn’t the answer, but let’s discuss what happens when you do deface property. It’s a blemish to what you fight for. I love to see young people participate, but let’s do that the right way.”
We said our farewells, and I walked down the stairs back to Main Street. A man was urinating three doors down, in front of Sepulveda House.
I strolled around El Pueblo one final time before returning to the Old Plaza. Honks and yells were audible in the distance. Another evening of protests was launching.
Esteban Barrientos, a Guatemalan immigrant, was sitting on a bench, waiting for a friend to arrive at Union Station.
Moderates have always feared that Latinos waving the flags of Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela and other ancestral countries is political suicide — that it taps into the part of the American psyche that believes Latinos will never assimilate.
“It’s not good,” the 64-year-old said of the vandalism. “I’m not against the messages, but you have to give respect to history. I hope that they [students] learn.”
Nearby was 17-year-old Janelle V., who marched in the protest I encountered earlier that day. The Orange County resident only gave her last initial because she had ditched a school field trip in favor of the protest. She said the experience was “empowering and gives me more motivation to join more.”
I asked about the graffiti all around us. She looked at the Mexican flag in her hand.
“It’s sad,” she finally replied, “but that’s what comes with protests.”
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