I remember watching the season finale of the first series of Mob Wives, VH1’s hit reality show featuring four Staten Island women with husbands or fathers connected to the mob, most of which are imprisoned.
As the title sequence played, depicting the women strutting in unison along the New York Harbor clad in long, expensive furs, I turned to my girlfriend and said, “I know how this will end.” Just like the rest of the episodes: an ill-conceived get-together will degenerate into a hair-pulling, nail-scratching brawl. The only aspect that even felt remotely like suspense was the question of who would be coming to blows this time. The episode did finish with a fight, which turned out to be between Drita D’Avanzo and Karen Gravano, the daughter of Sammy “The Bull” Gravanzo, the mobster and informant that brought down John Gotti. Yawn. And then the season ended, with no further resolution. Well, that’s the last I’d be seeing of the Mob Wives, I thought. Certainly this thing won’t be back for another season!
Not so. The series returned for a second season on Jan. 1, promising “New Year. New War.” Two new cast members were added, including Ramona Rizzo, whose Grandfather “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero was depicted by Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco. However, far from presenting viewers with a new war, the latest season continues the tried-and-true formula of the previous one—trivial political alliances between the mob wives degenerate into fights, with few exceptions. (One such plot twist occurred at the end of a recent episode where—gasp!—the women got together and worked out their differences—get this—without fighting!)
With Mob Wives’ growing success, I finally realized that the show had amassed some sort of palpable cultural capital. But, like shows such as Jersey Shore before it, Mob Wives accumulates its popularity by exploiting Italian-American stereotypes. It’s perhaps the main one: that Italians are all mobsters, and that successful Italian-Americans must have mob connections. As offensive as I found Jersey Shore to Italian-Americans (as well as brain-cells everywhere), it at least advanced the Italian-American image meagerly when compared to what came before: we were vain, brain-dead morons instead of criminals. At least being an idiot isn’t a crime. But, alas! With Mob Wives, it seems that we’re criminals again.
I resist the notion that a show like Mob Wives doesn’t represent Italian-Americans, because the show seems to go out of its way to seem “Italian.” In one of the latest episodes, Ramona Rizzo bashes Drita D’Avanzo, who is of Albanian ancestry, for “marrying into” the mob lifestyle. In other words, the show explicitly equates the “mob lifestyle” with Italian ancestry. Camera shots of Staten Island between scenes often focus in on streets with Italian names, and the characters themselves recycle the old stereotypical “Omerta” ethics in non-Mafia-related contexts.
“You gonna go to war with me, and you don’t want to go to war with me,” Karen Gravano sneers over and over via recent Mob Wives promos. Indeed, the mob wives “go to war” so often that it’s easy to forget they’re not the heads of the Five Families.
It could be argued that shows like Mob Wives don’t represent Italian-Americans if there existed other kinds of depictions of Italian-American characters in American pop culture. Instead, Italian-Americans are overwhelmingly depicted as Goombas or Guidos. The Italic Institute of America, in a study conducted between 1996-2002, found that since 1928, 69 percent of Italian-related Hollywood films “portray Italians in a negative light.” The study also added that in mob movies released during the same time period, “only 12% are based on real-life criminals.” That means stereotypical “Italian” archetypes account for the rest.
Don’t get me wrong. The Sopranos was a quality show. Hell, I was named after The Godfather’s Michael Corleone. Not every mob movie is stereotypical in and of itself. The problem is that very few alternative depictions of an entire American ethnic group exist, and that absence represents a form of ethnic marginalization.
Sure, the underworld that the mob wives represent is a real one. Recently, in late-January, the father of Mob Wives’ Renee Graziano was charged in connection with four arrests of alleged members of the Bonanno crime family. Or, as shown in a recent episode, Karen Gravano appears increasingly worried over her daughter’s safety in New York given their family connection to the mob (which also begs the question: Why put her on TV, then?)
The legacy of the mob undoubtedly includes many Italian-American figures. But it’s a legacy that does not define the entire Italian-American culture—a culture decimated by World War II-era prejudice. During the war, 600,000 Italian-Americans were considered “enemy aliens.”
A famous World War II-era propaganda poster discouraging the study of Italian, German or Japanese languages read: “Don’t speak the enemy’s language! Speak American!” Is it any wonder, then, that the Italian language is all but gone as a minority language in the United States, despite a significant minority of Americans claiming Italian ancestry: nearly 18 million people?
Mob Wives is the latest heir of this history of prejudice and stereotyping. Unless this history is recognized, I fear Mob Wives won’t be the last show to slur Italian-Americans.
Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michaelangelorumore@gmail.com.