From Saturday Night Fever to Jersey Shore Italian American youth in New York City have
appropriated-and been appropriated by-popular American culture. Here Donald Tricarico
investigates how Italian ethnicity has been used to fashion Guido as a distinct youth style
that signals inclusion in popular American culture and simultaneously the making of a new
ethnic subject. Emerging from a wave of Italian immigration after World War II in outer borough
neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst the story of the Guido is an Italian American story
symbolizing the negotiation of a negatively privileged ethnicity within American society.
Tricarico takes up questions about the definition of Guido the role of disco and the identity
politics of Jersey Shore in order to reconsider the significance of Guido for the study of
Italian American ethnicity.
