“Luigi Mangione,” a friend texted me on December 9. This pal is a fellow East Coast, Italian-American queer I had met in Seattle. We had schemed once, but not gotten very far, under the name RAGU: Radical Action Guidos United. The text interrupted the article I was skimming about Pope Francis wrapping baby Jesus in a kuffiyeh.
“Is this my new name?” I flirtatiously and innocently texted back.
Then she sent the link: “A suspect in the shooting of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson on December 4 had been caught in a McDonalds in Pennsylvania.”
The five days between the shooting and the suspect’s capture had been a special and delightful time on the internet. Even solidly centrist people got why he did it and apolitical people endorsed it. A common sentiment seemed to be that it was wrong but health insurance is broken in this country! When all we had was a pretty smile and sparkly eyes from the HI New York City Hostel’s security camera, the internet was rife with jokes with the sentiment, “no one, I mean no one, has seen this man.” He was hot but then we found out he was actually like, really, really hot. And — allegedly — Italian!
“This is a good day for Italian Americans,” I typed.
“Paisan,” she responded.
It just so happened that another East Coast Italian transplant was using my hot tub to date two femmes who lived next door. (Seattle can at times be a queer’s dream come true.) I busted out the back door to announce the shooter was — allegedly — one Luigi Mangione.
“One of us!” Nico said, popping up from between her dates.
“And the Pope wrapped baby Jesus in a kuffiyeh. It’s a good news day for Italian Americans and for Rome.”
“A very good news day,” she said. “Italian Americans don’t get many of those.”
The comedienne Lauren LoGiudice wrote that Italian Americans are the clowns of white people. The stereotype is straight out of Jersey Shore: a macho man with a gold chain, abs for days, and a love of his overbearing mother’s sausage and peppers, and a big-haired, often conservative femme counterpart with big tits, a firm ass in Juicy Couture, and conflicting desires to party and get married. They’re dopes with hearts of gold and conservative, patriotic parents that live in nice, new developments.
I am also an Italian American from the Jersey Shore, but I’m the light-in-the-loafers version. Growing up, I was too smart for my own good, too sensitive, and unable to perform the Italian-American gender even as I saw versions of it within my family. One Halloween I dressed like a boy but did it fantastically: a big pasted-on mustache and an androgynous flamboyance, lots of jewelry. I didn’t really know what I was doing or the kind of masculinity I was attempting, but when my neighbor asked what I was, I said, with all seriousness, “a guido.” I was surprised by how hard he laughed.
The masculinity I was struggling to find maybe had more in common with an almost-forgotten early twentieth-century stereotype of the radical flamboyant Italian anarchist, reviled by the general public and the media almost as much as the hypermasculine patriotic buffoon that was later embraced. Those born and raised in Italy may find more familiarity with the former; the latter is a particularly Americanized creation, one that Italian citizens are quick to deny commonality with. I first understood the difference during a dance piece by Alice Goste, who uses the hyphenated “Italian-American” to mean a different thing — that she has an Italian parent and an American parent and spent portions of her life in both places. During the piece she expressed the anger she felt when someone asked her in college if she made good meatballs. This was not a concern I shared. There were a lot of things that I grew up not being offended by; the ability to be the butt of a joke is a great survival strategy and it’s what makes a successful clown, and a successful Italian.
Though both sides of my family were Italian, one was lighter complexioned and from the North and the other was darker and from the South. Both had been laborers but the Southern side carried with them the pain of forced sharecropping under the thumb of Northern Italy. My Northern Italian side stopped being Jewish and assimilated the name from Manzella to Manning. One grandma had the fashion of a starlet with dyed platinum blond hair. The Southern Italian side played up the clownishness, encouraged us to date other Italian Americans, had beautiful post-church Sunday dinners, and reluctantly included some “American” foods at Thanksgiving while saying things like “fuhgeddaboudit.” They liked to sing “Shaddap You Face” by Joe Dolce and complained into the 90s about anti-Italian discrimination.
To come from an Italian family who emigrated in the early twentieth century is to be of an ethnicity that froze in time culturally at the exact moment they full-throttle bought into American white supremacy. They lived through the Red Scare that overtook the United States after World War I when another Luigi — Luigi Galleani, the anarchist who popularized “the propaganda of the deed” — was the source of nationalistic American fear. These ancestors were not in Italy for World War II, but fought against their “own cousins” and received letters of what they missed — like when one sister wrote to my grandma Corinna about hiding from the Germans and watching them steal everything, even her underwear; how she had to go up to “our mountains” and dig holes in the dirt to hide in. She interrupts this story to speak of my Uncle Dominic, “I hear about your son Dominic becoming a soldier and we hope he’s not getting sent to the war in Korea because he’s so young and wars uselessly murder people.” In another leap, she asked when they would move back: “There are many beautiful things in Italy that the thirsty man can have and know.”
“There are many beautiful things in italy that the thirsty man can have and know.”
Luigi Mangione, whose last name means “one who eats a lot,” comes from a family that immigrated during the era of thirst, quenching it with the promises of whiteness. His great-grandfather Louis, from Enna, Sicily, likely traveled from one poverty to another in Baltimore, dying young after catching pneumonia from working a water main break. But, somehow, Luigi is the kind of Italian American who is rich and I am the kind of Italian American who is not. Nico — from the threesome above — and I once embarked on a thought experiment: What did our families do wrong to not end up rich? They fought in wars on the American side. Her family owned a deli, mine a laundromat. Both of our families kept a low profile and followed the rules. There are many beautiful things in Italy, but are any more beautiful than the dream of the American middle class?
Luigi’s grandfather Nicholas, who watched his father work hard and die, was thirstier. If we were on The Sopranos he would be Tony’s next door neighbor — a wealthy doctor who loathes the bad name the Sopranos give to good Italian Americans like him. Nicholas Mangione was the type of Italian American that state representatives remember fondly. “He was a guy I admired greatly,” said former U.S. Representative Helen Delich Bentley, per an obituary in the Baltimore Sun. “He was a conservative person and a hard worker.”
The trajectory is this: paper route and grocery delivery boy, to accounts payable clerk, to the Navy, to two decades of government contracting, to buying his partner out of his share, to buying his first nursing home. The Mangione family now owns nursing homes, a talk radio station, office buildings, hospitals, and a country club. When he bought the country club in the ’70s the white members paused, wondering “where an Italian could get the money for a five-million-dollar project?” Nicholas recognized this prejudice in a Baltimore county milieu that didn’t have many Italians: “It’s because I was an Italian, plain and simple.”
He was Italian by ancestry, but by the end of his life, he’d become an Italian with a country club — an Italian American with a buy-in to corporate American power. He was a father to ten children and is remembered to be warm and generous — until you brought up government bureaucracy, then his muscles became rigid and his face red with anger. I think this body we find in Italian-American men, like erstwhile Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo — who bombed the Black liberation group, MOVE, in West Philadelphia — and our old friend Rudi Giuliani, is haunted by contradicting stereotypes. Ultimately, they embody Benito Mussolini’s dream of the new Italian man pledging allegiance to whiteness.
The kind of American dream that Nicholas Mangione achieved, along with this family’s legendary good-looking genes, couldn’t have been possible without Mussolini. He was broad chested, charismatic, and sexually enticing when he founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919. Fascism was remarkable in uniting Italians across class lines with its promise of Italian supremacy and an imperialist extraction agenda focused on Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Americans, especially nativists, approved of Mussolini because they were impressed by his machismo, his national pride, and his exertion of power; but also because he was keeping the Italians in Italy. Short stories and essays lauded Mussolini’s political brilliance and power from the Saturday Evening Post to McCall’s. However, the truest fans of Mussolini were the children of the Italian fabric workers, now the first generation born in the U.S., gripping onto the coattails of Italian fascism as a way into American legitimacy.
Just as Italy joined the ranks of European powers through a colonial project in Africa, Italian Americans asserted their status by positioning themselves against people of color, particularly Black communities. Young Italian Americans took to the streets in support of the fascist state, distributing propaganda through the Order of Sons of Italy of America, an organization sustained by grants from Mussolini himself. Some held public ceremonies donating their wedding bands to Il Duce. To be Italian American as an identity was to promise nationalism to both Italy and to the United States by way of signing on to white supremacy.
To be Italian American as an identity was to promise nationalism to both Italy and to the United States by way of signing on to white supremacy.
Before the Mussolini machismo took over, Italians were lazy, criminal, sexually irresponsible, and emotionally volatile. In the early twentieth century, the reigning stereotypes were illiterate organ-grinders, criminal drunks, and bomb-throwing anarchists. The most famous embodiment of the latter were the Galleanists, followers of the anarchist Luigi Galleani.
Galleani was Italian-born, objectively attractive in his youth, and feared among government officials worldwide. After escaping Italian custody (for anarchist activities, naturally), he ended up in Patterson, New Jersey, in 1901 where he became involved with the labor uprisings in the city’s factories. He published the popular anarchist Italian-language newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) out of Barre, Vermont until the government forced its closure in 1918. Through the paper, Galleani called for community protection against racist attacks, asserted the need for collectivism, and incited strikes and other labor actions. Its most famous piece published was a bomb-making manual called “La Salute è en vol!” (“Health Is In You!”). Galleani’s followers were thought to be responsible for the 1919 bombing of anti-immigration Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home, which led to Galleani’s deportation. Undeterred by that, his supporters — allegedly — bombed Wall Street in 1920, killing 40 people and wounding dozens more.
Galleani, my great grandparents, and Luigi’s all came from the same era: They were hungry and angry, from southern villages in Italy screwed over by the forced unification of 1861. They came from systems of community aid, where distrusting authority also meant taking action against mafia groups who worked as a middlemen between the crooks in power and the peasants. Most Italian migrants in the United States weren’t holding loyalties to either Italy or America. My great-grandfather Natelli famously spit on Italy as the ship took off for America. But though they didn’t have national pride, these migrants, called Americani in Italy, often had the plan to go back at some point. When the Great Depression hit, my friend Nico’s family had said, “if we are going to be poor, let’s be poor at home.”
When Americani found work in New York and New Jersey, the conditions were often no better, and in some cases worse, than what they had access to at home. Many of these workers were already politicized and radicalized from uprisings in response to how the Italian state treated them as workers and as peasants. Here they were oppressed again, now under the thumb of an anti-immigration United States government that didn’t want them and bosses who were happy to work them to death. No wonder they started throwing bombs.
Italian radicalism was just as pervasive as Italian migration in the early twentieth century. Women on the factory floor conducted wildcat labor actions, relying on their neighborhood and kinship networks even as they lacked formal organization. In 1910 Anna Valenti was inspired by how her family rebelled in her village in Italy and led a walk-out at the NYC garment shop she worked in after hearing women complain that they couldn’t feed their families. The action resulted in some success, such as an increase in wages, lower hours, and hiring back of striking workers. By 1913, Italian women’s militancy was legendary and the newspapers chronicled their daily disturbances in the garment factories. In Patterson, where Galleani first arrived in the US, textile workers were forcing mill owners to meet their demands.
Of Maria Roda, one of these famed Patterson organizers, Emma Goldman wrote that she “was the most exquisite creature I have ever seen … Maria proved a veritable ray of sunlight to me.” I get it, Emma, because, for how many of us, wasn’t Luigi’s — alleged — targeting of the health care industry a ray of sunlight?
On Valentine’s Day 1920 in Patterson, five months after the Galleanisti Wall Street Bombing, the homes, schools, and halls of Italian organizers were infiltrated by 100 federal agents assisted by volunteers from the American Legion. The agents arrested whoever they could find and brought them to Ellis Island for possible deportation. Shortly after, in a rising tide of nativism, the Immigration Act of 1924 set the annual quota of immigrants to a meager 6,000. Many of the once militant communities went quiet, the result of the deportation of labor and activist leaders and the subsequent in-fighting and division between militants and moderates in the Industrial Workers of the World. Repression made it clear that Italian immigrant admission to the U.S. required their rejection of anarchism and any other ideologies that opposed capitalism and white supremacy. To assimilate is to accommodate these two systems.
To not assimilate is to be deported or worse. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italians successfully tried for murder relating to a robbery. They were executed in 1927, only a few years after Galleani had been deported to Italy. Though both Sacco and Vanzetti subscribed to Galleani’s ideas, there was no evidence of any participation in militant activities — they were likely innocent patsies. During the years of Sacco and Vanzetti’s imprisonment, communists and anarchists held mass rallies — and in one instance a bombing — in their honor. When my grandfather Bernardo petitioned for naturalization in 1927, shortly after their execution, he certified, with a beautiful signature, that he wasn’t an anarchist or a polygamist … “So help me God.”
Luigi may be today’s Galleani, or he is a Sacco and Vanzetti: He is an inheritor of the real sexiness and political spirit of the bomb-throwing Italian anarchists, or maybe he’s just a fall guy. We see the echoes of the Red Scare of the past in the way the media, the NYPD, and Mayor Eric Adams assume his guilt. It’s evidenced by the shackles Luigi was made to wear in the courtroom in February. His counsel, Karen Friedman Agnifilo (whose Italian last name means “friend of the lamb”) brought this point forward in her February 21 statement, along with the fact that there are three separate prosecutions and no indictment: “Luigi’s right to a fair trial is being infringed upon because he is being publicly treated as guilty.”
His guilt, whether real or not, is appealing because his alleged act speaks to a sort of Robin Hood sensibility. We all know it is on purpose that Luigi disappeared from the news cycle for a while during the winter. I tore through the Sunday New York Times after his court appearance on February 21 and didn’t find a mention. According to his fundraising site, hundreds of reels in support of him have been removed from TikTok. Etsy and GoFundMe are taking down products and support sites. Each of these actions fan the flames of his sainthood, a depiction of which was recently painted on the side of a building in Lower Manhattan along with the words “Free Luigi.” Despite the censorship, the government cannot take away Luigi’s appeal to the people. He is to the people, like Maria Roda to Emma Goldman, an exquisite creature. The dusty, forgotten Italian stereotype of the bomb-thrower becomes a potentially viable and sexy identity for those of us who thirst for something.
His guilt, whether real or not, is appealing because his alleged act speaks to a sort of Robin Hood sensibility.
Because: What’s beautiful here? What’s better here? What quenches my thirst here? What is a dream when a corporation decides whether you live or die and puts so many people in bankruptcy that sometimes the only option is to choose death? We are dying, and faster, here.
Immigrants may be a potent group to potentially organize, but those of us who have assimilated — accommodated — white supremacy and fascism for generations are the hardest to mobilize. This is why the idea of Luigi Mangione is a fucking miracle. Here he comes, with the macho bod (Mussolini, eat your heart out) and an unassimilated name and an accusation of an anarchist act bridging all the stereotypes of Italian immigrants and Italian Americans into someone easy to exalt. Mamma mia, he’s bisexual too? I can almost forgive his libertarian vibes. Othered, but still white, the dreamy eyebrows and American Dream abs.
White supremacy and fascism are the parents of a clownish Italian-American identity, but there is a radical cousin saying “trick or treat,” twirling her mustache, and carving philosophy into bullets. Italian Americans are a hot mess but also a hot myth — what’s better here? We thirsted for Luigi long before we saw him.
Corinne Manning is the author of the story collection We Had No Rules (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Their book reviews and criticism have been published widely. Corinne’s novel Dirty Joke — a retelling of Dante’s Inferno featuring Italian Americans in hell — is forthcoming in 2027.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.