— Anonymous
Its reasonable to say that one point everyone has felt out of place feeling isolated from others. Through out my life this has been a big issue constantly thinking of ways to lie to satisfy those around me. While reading “ Clash of Civilization Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio” topics of immigration, racism, stereotypes and identity are brought up. Its sad to say but its and ongoing problem that we still face. At a young age I was ashamed of being an “immigrant” I kept on saying what they wanted to hear. Over the years I have met people and heard many successful stories of immigrants who made it in America which gave me hope to one day fulfill the American dream. What makes this great work is that the immigrant community can relate to this work. For example, my whole family has been living a lie working under fake social security numbers and fake ID’s just to able to work and pay taxes. I sense fear in my family constantly trying to stay out of trouble because one mistake is one hundred times worse coming from an immigrant. Being young and just being Mexican was hard enough, I got called a wetback, beaner and cant forget the best line where’s your green card? This made me insecure I always had to think carefully on what to say because at any point the conversations of are you born here? Could be brought up. Comparing myself to Amedeo who we later find out his real name is Ahmed Salmi is trying to get away of his past in Algeria and trying to start a new life in Rome. The way I saw things was that if I lied and told everybody what
they wanted to hear all of these questions might be avoided. At times I just wanted to be honest but I just felt that I couldn’t. It was until later on as a started to grow up and became aware of the sacrifices my family made just to put me in the position I am in today. Am I the only one going through this? NO! I am not alone many immigrant families and citizens go through racist experiences and feeling that’s something is missing until they truly find it. That’s what makes this great; we have various people trying to help those who need help as they go through different events in their lives, while others only have negative comments to make.
