Community Metadata

Briar Hill is the old Italian ghetto on the North Side of Youngstown, Oh. Most Italians in Youngstown either grew up there or are related to someone who grew up there. Brier is aptly named since it is in fact a hill. A fairly large hill. Most of the Italians live below St. Anthony's Parish, and most children who grew up there went to parish school with the mean Italian nuns. For those unfamiliar with Italian nuns, the stereotype is true across the board. At the bottom of the Hill are the mills. If you don't mind my romanticism, God and Steel pretty much define these people.

Must have been the water.

The reason I mention this background is because the people of the Hill can't be talked about as a community without talking the institution that inspired its geography. "Institutions are people; they are the systems by which people act collectively, whether you call that system a school, a particular corporation, or a community literacy program" (Grabill, 2001). An institution are not ambiguous, but they are not clear either. Institutions are not visible, but their shadows are everywhere. Institutions are nothing more than metadata. And their shadows appear when that data is queried and used.

This institution identifies these people as Italian, Working-Class Catholics, and that Metadata gets recalled in their literate actions like in naming and praying. For instance, I have more than one relative who is named either Anthony or Antonio. Whenever I lost my stuffed dolphin as a child, my mother (a student of St. Anthony's Catholic School) told me to say the prayer of St. Anthony, patron Saint of all things lost: Dear St. Anthony please come down. Something is lost and cannot be found.

This mainly refers to souls but it works on stuffed dolphins as well.

The interesting thing about this community is that there has been a mass exodus. But, the institution has carried over as with the Prayer of St. Anthony or saying Salute when toasting to a drink or saying Boun Natale instead of Merry Christmas.

Delanty's reflection on transnational communities works on two levels here. 1. Italian immigrants move to Youngstown. 2. Italian Americans move from Youngstown to the Suburbs. Some followed the jobs. Some fell in love with muggles (non Italian types). Others ran out of room for their kids. "In many ways the original homeland is a very distant memory, especially for the second and third generation who may no longer speak the primary language of the ethic community" (Delanty, 2004). My father once told me I wasn't Italian, I was American. I also have a degree in the Humanities. Talk about falling far from the tree. Do you think anyone in my family has ever said Metadata.