August 14, 2025

My grandfather’s brother Vincenzo came to the US in 1911. He was 17. When my grandfather officially entered the US, he was 31. But in stories, grandpa came here multiple times before going back, marrying his sweetheart, having a daughter, and returning to settle in Yonkers.
His earliest voyage from home would have been 1905, when at the age of 13 he worked a freighter on its way to Argentina. Stories tell he joined the Black Hand in order to get work, and once caught a guy cheating at cards, got in a fight, and bit off the end of his nose. I don’t know how much of that is true, but I love thinking of my quiet, mild mannered grandpa as a young tough, duking it out in the dockyards of Buenos Aires.
I don’t know much about Vincenzo, in fact I never heard his name until I started this project. But a brief mention to my cousin led him to recall that aunt Jean once mentioned an uncle Vincenzo. Thanks to genealogy websites and other’s family trees, I was able to find him.
Like my grandfather, he’s listed in documents as a fruit peddler. On their alien registration cards for WWII, there’s a section called Complexion, Vincenzo is marked as “Dark,” my grandfather as “Ruddy.” I wonder how that distinction was made. The 1930 census has Vincenzo living in a four story walkup in the Nodine Hill section of Yonkers, an area known for housing Eastern and Southern Europeans. The City of Yonkers Public Bath No.3 is just down the block. The building is Second Renaissance Revival style with a pool and showers. On hot days, I like to think that the brothers would have a family pool day where my dad could have a cool summer swim with his sisters and cousins.
During the war, the FBI went house to house to register aliens and unearth enemies in the neighborhood. My father told the story of the day they came. My grandma saw them coming down the street and quickly handed him a shoebox containing a handgun. He was instructed to bury it in the back, far from the house. They interviewed my grandparents for over two hours before declaring them safe. Had they found a gun in the house they would likely have shipped them off to a camp in Montana, Fort Missoula, until the end of the war.