Honoring the true heroes of our immigration story

Since retiring as mayor six and a half years ago and after nearly 30 years in public life, I have stayed away from public comment, figuring that I had my say for long enough and that it was time to let other voices be heard. I am certain that this has been a wise choice, just as I am equally certain that some large number of my fellow residents have been pleased with that decision. However, today I do have something to say.

I did not grow up in Wooster Square. Nor did I attend St. Michael’s Church or School. My parents were not active in any of the Italian American religious societies or civic organizations. Mostly my parents went to work at multiple jobs, saw that my sisters and I had everything we needed and lived their lives with every expectation that we, their children, would lead lives of greater opportunity and possibility than they had experienced. And their hard work and faith in that expectation has indeed come to pass for their children and grandchildren.

That said, my sisters and I did carry with us certain advantages on our journey. Advantages such as family, our Catholic faith, work and, most crucially, hope. Hope that in America that if you worked hard, followed the rules and treated others as you wanted to be treated, that you and yours would do better. That did not come to my family from Christopher Columbus. It came from

Bartolomeo and Lena DeStefano and Raphael and Madeline Cusano, my grandparents, who immigrated to New Haven in the years before World War I. Like so many others, my grandparents came with nothing, but also with everything. Nothing financially, but everything in terms of family, faith, work, hope and courage.

You see they, and those like so many other immigrants, are the heroes. It is their traditions, their values, their accomplishments and their willingness to risk everything that are foundational to the Italian American experience here in New Haven and across the United States. Just as it is so for so many other groups that came to this country and built it.

Christopher Columbus, like all men and women, is to be judged on the spectrum and sum of choices they made in their lives. And all of us, in the time of our own lives, make good choices and bad choices. Just as each of us in our own lives and deep down in moments of regret and joy know which is which.

Christopher Columbus was a brilliant navigator, and also a man who chose to subjugate, torture and enslave fellow human beings. Honestly, compared to the immigrant generations of Americans there is no doubt who the hero is and whose lives are to be honored. And to not do justice to that distinction in life choices is a betrayal to those who sacrificed everything for us, so that we could see something more in our lives. And to not act on that distinction should make us ashamed.

Statues are symbols. They are not life choices rooted in our values and enduring truths. If we want to be true to those whose shoulders we stand upon, it is meaningless to worry about the symbols. Rather we, in our time, do justice to the life choices of our heritage by the life choices we make in our time.

So yes. Let us honor our traditions and our heroes by the choices we make. Let us build monuments of good choices, just as they did.

To honor our heritage, let us support the kind of robust immigration that our grandparents were able to take advantage of. To honor our grandparent’s hard work, let us insist on making sure that everyone is prepared to work and that work pays wages that other’s futures can be built upon. To honor our grandparents’ faith, let’s treat others the way we want to be treated and change how we police, what we criminalize and open doors that have been closed for too many for too long.

Yes. Let us move diligently with a true representation of our heritage on the now-vacant pedestal in Wooster Square. But more meaningfully let us honor the faith, hope and courage of those architects of our own lives, by the choices we make today in building the kind of city and nation that we hope for all our children and grandchildren for tomorrow.