Concetta Orlando, female, 91
great-grandmother/housewife
Italian-born, Italian-Sicilian-Albanian-English-speaking
Richmond, CA
Oct. 14, 2001
The Story of St Joseph in the American Desert
Concetta, or “Connie” Orlando was born in 1910 in the village of Piana digli Albanesi, in Sicily, Italy. She arrived in New York in 1930, when she was 20, to meet her new husband.
Connie was a child bride, betrothed at 13. “He sent his parents to my parents to approve.” She described her wedding dress, a traditional costume in red satin with floral designs in gold thread. She said it took her years to embroider it and it weighed a ton. The bodice was in gold, and she wore a big gold belt buckle.
She said, “There was no honeymoon, I came to America [alone]. But I had to prove he married me before I came. Paperwork! We marry in June. I come in October, by boat, from Palermo to Napoli. We lived in Bronx, now is no good. Then to Tarrytown 5 years, and to California.” Her husband, an Italian American by birth, was also an Italian citizen, and so had to serve in Mussolini’s army, it was a long time before they were reunited in America.
Connie speaks English, but Italian and Albanian are her native languages. In Italy, her father was a caretaker on the Baroni estate, she had six sisters and a brother; three grandparents lived with them. (I forgot to ask what her maiden name was.)
She says her ancestors settled in Piana digli Albanesi in 1492, when the village, the Plain of the Albanians, was founded by Albanian refugees fleeing from the Ottoman Turks for religious reasons. The village was called Piana al Greci, but Mussolini changed the name as the villagers weren’t Greek. Connie said that a cousin (she meant a distant relation), a priest, who lived in a village in the Pelopponneses—in what is now Greece, formerly Albania —came to Italy when the Turks invaded. She said “They all got into a boat and came to Sicily.”
Connie relates, “It was 1936, we were here [in America] for six years.” Vito (her son) was six months old. (Vito, age 65) takes over a portion of the story. “My father worked for General Motors. There was a bulletin board, a notice for California. It was during the Depression...” (Notice there’s a slight discrepancy of the date)
Connie speaks, “We wanted to go to California. We had a Model A. We left from Tarrytown, Westchester County. We didn’t have much money so we came in the Model T...”(Vito says: “A, Mom!”). “There was danger. We was in the desert, the southern route. You didn’t see nothing. All a sudden I saw a man that was all covered up with a cloak. I turned to my husband, ‘Should we pick him up?’ He turn around, nobody there. That was St. Joseph. That’s the way he was walking."
"St.Joseph, a big saint of our village. He was a protector of the Holy Family. My husband had an uncle in LA [with a house]. We rent the house, that was when my husband started working at the General Motors assembly plant.”
St. Joseph is the patron saint of family and household needs; they were in need, and because he was their village saint, it was plausible to Connie that he should appear in the desert to look after them.
UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes
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