The Portal: An Introduction
Dipping a toe into the ancestral portal of Southern Italy.
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This is the introductory essay to the blog series I’m calling The Portal. I’m writing to people who have Southern Italian ancestry, as well as other people who experience white skin privilege, in particular in the United States.
I’m looking to connect to people who check in the box “White” on forms, yet never felt quite comfortable with that. I write to people who want to reclaim their ethnic identity with the understanding that this process can be hard yet therapeutic. Specifically, people who identify as anti-racist and want to understand how their identity intersects with their values and the responsibility to un-do whiteness.* People who want to undo the deep racial and class harm that has been perpetrated from our ancestors -- and us -- by accepting to be part of a homogeneous “White” identity.
*New to this idea? See resources at the end of this essay.
From my perspective as an energetic herbalist, whiteness is a dis-ease. It’s an imbalance that has infiltrated physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies. It has shaped institutions, cities, communities, and the world. Whiteness, or “white supremacy culture” (there’s nothing supreme about it) has been a huge part of the development of the United States from Day 1.
When our ancestors fled famine and economic instability, when we walked off the farm and came to the United States, we eventually gave up our ethnic identities. The traditions of our villages, communities, the connection to land, and the plants. In time, we traded this in for white privilege, to gain access to work, land, respect, money, etc. Assuming the homogenous identity of whiteness was a way to gain at the expense of harming others, specifically along the lines of darker skin color, or what humans have created as a “race” and racism.
Fast forward to today, one to five, or perhaps for non Italian-Americans, many, many generations later:
Us, here, now. If we want to heal, we must look this all in the eye and be open to healing on physical, emotional and spiritual levels. We must do the work on our own or in small groups and we must be willing to change, give up, move up/move back in order to make this change happen.
The Portal, like the opening of a tunnel, is similar to the energy of herbs that connect the spiritual to the physical -- I think of the popular understanding of the herb, Mugwort; one foot in this world and one in the other. Weaving together the physical and the spirit realms.
The physical portal I most often think of is the light rail train tunnel portal, called West Portal, where the train leaves (or enters) the tunnel that runs through Twin Peaks. You get on and vooom! You’ve been transported to the Castro, or Downtown San Francisco. Other portals that come to mind are The Golden Gate, the airport, a doorway, a garden’s gate. What is waiting on the other side?
[To my dear reader: I wonder what you know about your family’s ethnic identity? I wonder if you know when your family let go of their ethnic identity? I wonder why? I welcome you to be curious about this. To sit with it, to ask questions of your elders and to learn more about your family’s cultural histories, or lack thereof. Does this exploration feel like a portal to something? To where?]
I write this series to deepen my own understanding of my cultural and ethnic identity, and to inspire others to do the same, despite the risk of it being painful or worse, wrong (Read the prologue Everything Makes Sense Now).
I have a strong feeling that if I better understand the legacy of my lineage, I am better able to understand who I am and how I want to show up with this one precious life. I believe I must do this work to become a well ancestor.
My trip was a portal.
There were times when I was transported across time and place. Through the connection to plants that grow both here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a mediterranean climate, and the Italian peninsula, in the Mediterranean!
During my trip, I often felt pulled between my ancestral connection to plants in front of me and my lived experience of working closely with plants as an herbalist in California. So many of them were familiar to me, and it has been hard to decipher if this was my personal familiarity with them, or an ancestral one. Both?
The plants were a portal.
At the sight of Elder, or Saint John's Wort, even introduced Prickly Pear Cactus, I instantly felt deeply connected to the land that my family had not known for 120 years since my great-grandmother boarded on a boat from Naples in 1905.
As the first person in my family to return to her town over 120 years after her departure (curious about this, read the prequel, Where Bones Belong to the Earth), I allowed myself to wander the streets, and geographical region, letting my mind wonder about the generations of people who may have reached for these plants in times of need. I could feel the herbalists and wort-cunners of my lineage at my back.
To my spirit, to my practice of herbalism, to the way that I relate to my identity and show up in the world as a community and family member, this trip has transformed me - and that’s The Portal I’d like to share here with you.
Thanks for reading.
Curious to read more? I invite you to join my newsletter to follow this series and receive weekly tips for holistic wellbeing, event announcements and local herbal resources. 🐋
*A few anti-racist resources for White people
Seeing White (Podcast)
Undoing Whiteness (Academic article)
Are Italians White (Book)
White Fragility (Book)
My Grandmother’s Hands (Book)
** I’m also Irish and Croatian American, but those are stories for another time.
Special thanks to Quai Nystrom, Stella Lawless, Sam Blancato, Frown Towners.
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