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enjoy this writing from Michael Ceraolo in the cc&d free 2014 PDF file chapbook: an Almost-Lost World (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)

Order this writing in the book a New Pen the cc&d Jan. - June 2014 collection book		get the 394 page Jan. - June 2014 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

“una storia segreta”

Michael Ceraolo

Secret story,
or
secret history,
buried in arcane archives,
buried
in the memories of generations ended or ending
(and not talked about with their descendants)
“Italy is my mother and the United States my father”
and
Father
or Uncle (Sam)
thought there was a problem,
the problem of aliens of ‘enemy’ origin,
and
thought he knew best how to deal with it
And
here were some of the solutions to the perceived problem:

ID cards,
which included fingerprints,
which had to be carried at all times,
which was definitely not a re-registration of aliens
who had been required to register two years earlier
before the country was at war,
officially
(because
the government said it wasn’t re-registration);

forced relocation from prohibited zones:
arbitrarily declared areas that extended
a certain distance inland from the coast,
which
dry-docked many fishermen on the West Coast;
it was slightly different on the East Coast,
with searches and special passwords (probably not Swordfish)
taking the place of total exclusion
And
the creation of the exclusion areas
led to ludicrousness like people not being allowed
to cross the street because one side of the street
was in the banned zone and the other side wasn’t
(one man
was not allowed to farm his land because,
although he wasn’t forced to relocate,
his farm land was inside the restricted area
and his farm house was outside said special zone;

curfew,
from 8:00 PM to 6:00 AM,
which,
again,
prohibited them from many of the jobs they usually worked;

confiscation of what was called ‘contraband’,
which
included cameras,
flashlights,
radios with shortwave capability,
etc.

And these and other condition applied
even when the ‘aliens’ were parents of citizens,
even when they were the spouses of citizens,
even when they were the parents or spouses of soldiers,
even when they had been here
20,
30,
40 years,
‘guilty’ only of not possessing the proper papers
(for a wide variety of reasons, none of them sinister)
“Don’t those imbeciles in Washington
understand that to have American-born children
is to become an American for the rest of your life?”

And last but not least among solutions
was the bast bureaucracy of internment:
twenty-six of the then-forty-eight state had at least one permanent internment facility
Thirty such sites were run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
fifteen such sites were run by the Provost Marshal General’s Office
And that doesn’t count the temporary detention facilities
located in most major cities
People put away behind chain-link fences with barbed wire,
watched by gun-toting guards in tall towers,
taken from their families,
taken from their communities,
all
for the ‘crime’ of their ancestry
And
even being a naturalized citizen offered no protection
against the decision of kangaroo courts
(apologies in advance to the Aussie animals);
at least two American citizens,
Pasquale DeCicco and Mario Valdastri,
were interned for no good reason

Redress was unaddressed until the next millennium,
when an apology of sorts was offered,
saying
what was known even as this was happening:

“persons are at times interned
where there is considerable doubt
as to whether they are guilty
of conduct endangering the nation”

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