From The Los Angeles Times…
State apologizes for mistreatment of Italian residents during WWII
Legislature passes resolution expressing ‘deepest regret’ for the wartime internment, curfews, confiscations and other indignities that thousands of Italian and Italian American families faced.
By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Monterey — When Mike Maiorana was a boy during World War II, his family was like a lot of others in his Monterey neighborhood.
In 1942, his mother was declared an “enemy alien,” along with 600,000 other Italians and half a million Germans and Japanese who weren’t U.S. citizens. More than once, men in suits searched the Maiorana house for guns, flashlights, cameras, shortwave radios — anything that could be used to signal the enemy.
Like 10,000 others up and down the California coast, the family was suddenly forced to uproot. At their new place in Salinas, they had to be home by 8 p.m. or face arrest. And when the government seized fishing boats for the war effort, Maiorana’s dad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, saw his livelihood go down the drain.
“He was on the skids for the rest of his life,” said Maiorana, 75, who owns a boatyard and marina on the harbor where his father’s boat — as well as those of his uncles and several dozen other Italian fishermen — were confiscated.
Families like the Maioranas last week received a formal acknowledgement from California. A measure that swiftly made its way through the Legislature expresses the state’s “deepest regrets” over the mistreatment of Italians and Italian Americans during World War II. Not nearly as severe or long-lasting as the internment of Japanese Americans, the wartime restrictions are still little-known throughout California, where they were the most heavily enforced.
The resolution was the brainchild of a 79-year-old San Jose man who entered a legislator’s annual “There Oughta Be a Law” contest.
“The treatment Italians received in California was horrible,” said Chet Campanella, who recalled his father hiding a radio in a backyard chicken coop. “There wasn’t one tiny bit of evidence that any Italian was responsible for spying, sabotage, or doing anything else to hinder the war effort.”
Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) sponsored a bill based on Campanella’s idea.
“I was wholly unaware of the circumstances he described,” Simitian said. “Somehow this story had passed me by.”
Simitian, an attorney and former Palo Alto mayor, said he saw “contemporary importance” in the effort: “We’re at war on the other side of the world, and I think it’s important to remember that there are millions of Americans who are ethnic Arabs or Muslim by faith, and that they’re good Americans.”
Read the full story here.
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