Barolini carefully avoids the nostalgia and sentimentality that at times pervade immigrant literature. In The Dream Book, she writes, “There is a dark underside to the bright picture of the compact Italian American life so extolled by sociologists and onlookers” (16), and she is unafraid of exposing it—as unafraid as authors such as Louise DeSalvo, Rose Romano, and Mary Saracino, who have more recently offered unflinching depictions of Italian American family life, where nurturance and violence, tolerance and prejudice, go hand in hand. Referring to the racism suffered by the early Italian immigrants, but also to their subsequent assimilation into “whiteness,” Barolini foregrounds the ties between race and class oppression. Thus Marguerite reacts to her parents’ racism by thinking that her “folks can’t remember when their own folks were Negroes” (204).15 Barolini’s fiction examines the interconnections between class and race that are central to the current debate on the construction of whiteness. “If the legal and social history of Jim Crow often turned on the question ‘Who was Black?’” writes David Roediger, “the legal and social history of immigration often turned on the question ‘Who was White?’” (182). Umbertina sheds light on the class transition and the process of cultural assimilation that made it possible for the so-called white ethnics, such as the Italians (or the Irish), to become white.16

Umbertina is a fictional account of the lives of working-class people and their middle-class descendants. Working-class literature is, in general, less interested in the self-contained story of the solitary individual struggling against, and overcoming, adversity than in the subtle ways in which the stories of individuals are interwoven with the stories of communities and their cultures. Working-class writers like Dorothy Allison, Tina De Rosa, Esmeralda Santiago, and Janet Zandy have written of the high price, in terms of cultural loss, that upward mobility requires of working-class people.17 “My parents, like most working-class parents, wanted a better life for their children,” Zandy writes. “But they did not wish a better life that extracted as its cost familial and historic memory” (Liberating Memory 1). Umbertina tells of the pains of class migration: it is a story of simultaneous acquisition and loss, pride and shame, mobility and paralysis, victory and defeat—a story that, while specifically Italian American, cuts across the ethnic divide in its concern with gender and class.