Looking Back for a Future

Half a century ago, the Caronna family bade farewell to Italy. Estela Caronna and her three children packed into a bus in Acerenza, a hillside town in Potenza province, and traveled by boat to a South American country whose very name was to them synonymous with affluence. None of them ever returned.

Today, in an Argentina that every day becomes poorer and more violent, Caronna’s granddaughter dreams of that village she’s never seen. She imagines a country of opportunity on the other side of the Atlantic, a place called Italy.

“I need to get a new start on my life,” said Analia Caronna, 19. “Far away from here.” In Italy, she hopes to find “romantic cities and people” and a “magical” country that offers plenty of jobs.

As Argentina’s once-bountiful economy crashes around them, an untold number of its people are seeking to flee. Thousands have applied in recent weeks to claim the European citizenship of their parents and grandparents.

In Buenos Aires, the capital, long lines form most mornings at the consulates of Italy, Spain, Poland and other countries that, for much of the 20th century, sent hundreds of thousands of citizens to Argentina. Many Argentine Jews, the descendants of European immigrants, are seeking Israeli citizenship under that country’s “law of return.”

For the approximately 10 million Argentines of Italian descent, the long lines that begin forming before dawn outside the Italian Consulate represent the closing of a historical circle.

A century of Italian immigration left its mark on this country in a national penchant for excitability, a tendency to speak with the hands, and architectural masterpieces such as the Teatro Colon opera house. Italian Argentines created the Buenos Aires street slang known as lunfardo.

“The Italians who came here found a type of promised land,” said Felix Luna, a leading Argentine historian. “People are leaving now because they’ve stopped believing in the country.”

One in five workers is unemployed, and many banks are on the verge of collapse, the fruit of a four-year recession, rampant government corruption and a horribly mismanaged economy.

The crisis is taking on a new dimension today as the government allows the national currency to float on the open market. Fear that the value of the peso will fall precipitously has led to a week of hoarding and of shortages at Argentine markets.

It is perhaps understandable, then, that many Argentines--more than a third, according to a recent poll--long for greener pastures elsewhere.

At the Polish Consulate, long lines began forming in January at about the same time Argentina devalued its currency and imposed new restrictions on bank withdrawals.

Those willing to risk deportation from the United States travel to Miami and other cities on tourist visas and stay to find work. Others apply for citizenship at the Spanish Consulate, where lines are the longest--most people here can claim some ancestor from Spain. Even neighboring Uruguay has reported an increase in the number of Argentines seeking permanent residency.

At the Italian Consulate, the waiting list for citizenship is 17,000 names long. Some claim citizenship rights based on relatives who came to Argentina as long ago as the 19th century. Those who apply today might have to wait two years to become citizens.

“We’re working under a lot of pressure here,” said Vicenzo Palladino, the consul general of Italy in Buenos Aires. “We’re going to have to hire five new people to handle the load.”

In the face of televised images of the crowds outside the consulate in Buenos Aires, an Italian senator and a government minister have called for measures to speed up the return of Italian Argentines to Europe.

Although unemployment in Italy, at 8%, is high by European standards, it is still less than half the official 22% rate in Argentina. More important, an Italian passport grants its holder the right to seek work throughout the European Union.

For the Caronna family, the likely return of granddaughter Analia to Italy represents the latest chapter in a saga that began in the aftermath of World War II, when the family patriarch, a bricklayer named Antonio, first planned a new life in Argentina.

Antonio traveled to South America in 1947, then sent for Estela and their children two years later. Their youngest son--Analia’s father--was born in Argentina.

Much of the family settled in Jose Leon Suarez, a Buenos Aires suburb that is home to a sizable Italian Argentine community. A banner hanging over a thoroughfare here proclaims “Italian Citizenship!” and offers help with the complex application process.

“There is nothing here, nothing, nothing,” said Rafaela Caronna, Analia’s aunt and Antonio’s daughter. Her last memory of the town in southern Italy she left at age 9 is of a neighbor weeping as the bus pulled away.

Today, Rafaela’s son is contemplating a new start in Europe.

“He’s a smart young man,” she said. “He went to college, and still he hasn’t been able to find work.”

Analia has just begun her veterinary studies at the University of Buenos Aires. Since she got the idea that Italy holds the best promise for her future, she has pursued Italian citizenship with a quiet determination and may leave before graduation.

“My father didn’t want to let me go at first,” Analia said. “He said he didn’t want the family to be divided. He was very stubborn about it.”

Analia needed her father’s help: Argentine-born offspring of Italian immigrants can apply for citizenship in their parents’ homeland and become dual citizens. Once accepted, they can seek to naturalize their own children. Those born in Italy have automatic citizenship.

Her father eventually warmed to the idea of her emigrating. He and Analia spent hours sifting through old boxes filled with dusty family pictures and heirlooms. They found a collection of pipes belonging to her late grandfather and her grandmother Estela’s Italian birth certificate, a slip of paper now worth Analia’s escape from Argentina.

On a sweltering January morning, with that document in hand, Analia went to the Italian Consulate to join the block-long line to get applications for herself and her father. She stood with many others who were hoping to reclaim a distant tie to a land their families left in the 1940s and ‘50s.

“We’re going to leave and see how things go for us over there,” Gabriela Musolino, an unemployed mother, said as her young child played on the sidewalk. Musolino’s father left the Calabria region of southern Italy during World War II, in a boat that arrived in Buenos Aires via Africa.

“I have to find a place to raise my son,” Musolino said. She was considering traveling to the U.S., but her only relative there would not sponsor her. Italy was an easier choice.

When the consular officials gave Musolino forms to fill out, she stared at them perplexedly. They were all in Italian, which might as well be Greek to her.

Nearby, Lucia Ordonez sought an application for her two adult children. Ordonez was born in Italy but left at age 3. Ask her why she would help her children move to a country that is only a distant memory to her, and she will tell you the sad story of the family business.

“What it took us a lifetime to build fell apart in just a year,” said Ordonez, 55.

The company, which provided maintenance for office equipment and air conditioners, once had 14 employees. All have been laid off. The leftover tools and air conditioners from the failed business fill a room in the Ordonez home.

“It’s very sad for a mother to tell their children they have to leave,” she said. “I would like for them to have another chance in life.”

Italy has become an obsession for Ordonez. Recently she rushed to the consulate after hearing that the Italian government would pay the plane fare home for wayward citizens, even those who left decades ago. The rumor was false.

The decision to emigrate is not an easy one for Argentines, who preserve a strong sense of family unity. Many know that if they leave their country for a land across the sea, they might be gone forever.

“Our grandparents lived it, they tell how it was,” said Ordonez’s 24-year-old daughter, Andrea. “They never returned [to Italy]. They stayed here, they had children.”

Andrea is not certain she will leave for Europe once she gets her Italian passport. She recently spent two months in Miami working odd jobs, then returned to Buenos Aires, feeling a bit homesick.

Like most members of her generation, she has been assimilated into Argentine society. Family snapshots show her being honored in her high schools as an abanderada, carrying the blue-and-white Argentine flag as the best student in her class.

“I love my country, and I would like to stay and fight for it,” she said.

A year ago, one of Andrea’s friends moved to Milan, Italy, and quickly found work and friends in a growing Argentine community.

Gabriel Provenzano, 27, moved to Florence a few years ago and spends much time answering e-mail messages from people back home who wonder what life is like in Italy.

“How it goes for you [in Italy] depends on how close you are to your people, your culture,” Provenzano wrote on the Argentine Emigrant Network, a Web site. “I know a lot of Argentines here. Some are very, very happy. But there are others who think about going back, in spite of the crisis.”

But against the love of family and country, there is a palpable sense that Argentina is doomed. Andrea, an architecture student at the University of Buenos Aires, recently worked a year for a magazine that went bankrupt. The company owes her three months’ back pay.

“Here you study to become an architect so that you can get a job at a gas station or driving a taxi,” she said. “To me, that’s denigrating. . . . All the people who have something important to give to the country, the intellectual class, are leaving.”

Today’s grim reality stands in sharp contrast to the country that drew millions of Italians to its shores in waves between 1900 and 1950.

Rafaela Caronna remembers being mesmerized by Buenos Aires five decades ago. Her mother and father took her to see the holiday parades that featured the motorcade of President Juan Peron and his glamorous wife, Eva.

Rafaela’s father, who had a third-grade education, made a small fortune in the construction business. He died of a heart attack at the age of 60.

“We were lucky enough to live during those good years,” Rafaela said. “There were jobs for everyone. You never were in need of anything, and you lived with a sense of security. Everyone bought their own house.”

The Argentina of today is another world. Her husband’s construction business hasn’t had any work in a year.

“Everything has gone bad here,” Rafaela said. “I don’t know what Analia is going to do.” She pauses to consider the position of the family’s youngest generation, and added, “If I could go, I would.”