CASA ITALIANA TEACHER DISCUSSES HER “GENEALOGICAL MEMOIR” AT APRIL 9 MEETING
On April 9, 2017, a beautiful spring day which also happened to be Palm Sunday, 67 AMHS members and guests enjoyed a very interesting and informative talk by Ceil Lucas, a sociolinguist and a prolific author who also teaches at the Casa Italiana Language School. Since immigration is really a topic of interest right now, we thought it would be a great idea to hear from someone who has thought a lot about what it means to be “from here.
” What 4 makes a person feel they are “from here” or “not from here”? When does a person feel they are truly “home”? So we were very happy when AMHS member Joe Lupo, the Director of the Casa Italiana Language School, suggested Ms. Lucas for our speaker at our second program of the year. Ms. Lucas talked to us about her expatriate upbringing. She was born here in the U.S., in Phoenix, Arizona, but spent her formative years ages 5 – 9 growing up in Guatemala City during a politically tumultuous time and then in Rome, from ages 9 – 21. Her years in Rome were the economic boom times followed by the “years of lead” and terrorism. Finally, she came back to America, and she has been teaching Italian since 1973, including the last 16 years at the Casa Italiana Language School.
Speaking about her years in Rome, she noted she arrived in Rome in 1960, the day after the Olympics, when her father began his assignment for a United Nations agency. She said she plunged headfirst into learning Italian, “verbs and all.” Then, during her summer vacations in Sardegna, she said she “nailed down the congiuntivo and passato remoto.” She described some of her childhood influences, especially the woman she called Quinta—the dedicated, hard-working woman who rode a bus 2 hours each way, every day, to clean houses, and who was a role model of what it means to be kind and to have a strong work ethic.
Ms. Lucas also told us about her time in school in Rome during the period of the great flood in Florence in November 1966 when her class helped to painstakingly clean books damaged by the floodwaters and mud. She described how they worked one book at a time, using paper towels and plastic cards.
Ms. Lucas told us that when she returned to Italy over the years, she came to realize that there is a deaf community in the big cities of Italy, although this was not apparent during her childhood years there because it was largely hidden from public view. In fact, the first deaf center was in Padova, which she became aware of after she became interested in learning sign language and taught at Gallaudet University. Ms. Lucas told us that in writing her book, “How I Got Here: A Memoir,” which she calls a “genealogical memoir,” she traced her ancestors’ histories about coming here from Scotland and England beginning in 1654, and learned some of their stories which included some episodes in our nation’s history that “were not pretty.” She shared with us some of the surprising things she learned and how her ancestors’ stories have become her own. She said she began to think more about what it means to be “from here” and she concluded that “home” is the territory of memory.
After her talk, a lot of attendees had comments and questions which our speaker graciously answered in detail. By the way, Ms. Lucas knows five languages - English, Italian, Spanish, French, Irish and Sign Language. Pretty impressive!! Before the program began, we enjoyed a delicious lunch catered by Fontina Grille. Afterwards, we had a raffle with some wonderful prizes and collected $148 for our ongoing efforts to help victims of the earthquake and natural disasters in Abruzzo.