The apparent promise held by the nationalists who had fought to expel foreign rulers and unify Italy came to nothing for impoverished Southern Italians like the peasants of Castagna. While Umbertina is considered Italian when she comes to the United States, she is one of many Southern Italian immigrants who had been baffled by the Italian citizenship thrust upon them in 1860, the year in which she was born. In any case, her new status as a citizen would have made little difference in her life, for the newly born Italian government failed to deliver “the poor of the earth” from their oppression and suffering.

[It was a] thieving government . . . that took everything and gave back nothing—not a road, a school, or a sewer. . . . The ladro governo taxed the poor man’s working mule but not the rich man’s carriage horse. The ladro governo had sent Garibaldi into exile and made land distribution available only to those rich enough to buy great quantities. (29)

It is no wonder that Umbertina and many of her fellow immigrants feel no allegiance to the new Italian nation, with the exception of the socialist Domenico Saccà, a character who testifies to the fact that people left Italy for political as well as economic reasons.27 While in her youth she despises Domenico’s beliefs and idealism, as an old woman, Umbertina misses Domenico’s “haranguing” and imagines what he would say: “You call this success, Tinuzza, but in Italy there’s a different benessere and the word is more gracious, not so materialistic. Well-being of the total person—not just money, but spirit, too” (145).

Not even her doubts, however, prompt Umbertina to regret her pursuit of “well-being.” If Umbertina shows little understanding of politics, she understands that the lives of people like her are of little value in the world, whether in the archaic Calabrian countryside or in the aggressively modern New World. With the intuition of one who has experienced exploitation, she does not fail to recognize the similarity between the oppression suffered in Calabria at the hands of the baron’s fattore and that perpetrated by the American padroni, who hire the newcomers for little money, both “living and getting rich off the labor of others by taking from them part of what they worked for” (59).