The Immigrant Experience Theme Analysis

Throughout Looking for Alibrandi, 17-year-old Josie vacillates between loving and resenting her Italian heritage. She acknowledges her Italian heritage makes her who she is, gives her a support system, and offers a number of traditions that she loves and finds meaningful—but she also can’t escape the slurs that her Australian classmates use, or the fact that some of her family’s more traditional ideas seem wildly outdated. Caught between her Italian home life and her modern Australian life at school, Josie feels somewhat out of place no matter where she goes. But as Josie grows closer to her grandmother, Nonna, over the course of the novel, she comes to realize that she’s not the first member of the family to find herself caught between cultures, be the victim of prejudice, or feel unsure of how to balance her desire to celebrate her Italian identity alongside the fact that she’s also a proud Australian. Through Josie and her family, the novel shows how being an immigrant can make a person vulnerable to racism and painful feelings of unbelonging. But the novel also suggests—as in Josie’s case—that having ties to multiple places can actually widen a person’s community and strengthen their connection to both cultures.

Throughout the novel, Josie’s Italian heritage is something she both appreciates and resents: it sets her apart, but it also gives her a source of belonging. Josie focuses more on the negative aspects of being Italian than she does on the positives, in part because the negative parts make her so miserable. At one point, Josie recounts going to school as a child and having Australian girls ask if her if she was Italian. When Josie said she was, the girls informed her she was Australian—but the next day, when the girls asked Josie if she was Australian, they informed her she was Italian. Instances like this made Josie feel from an early age that because she’s Italian, she’s not as welcome in Australia as her classmates. And throughout Josie’s life, her white Australian classmates have regularly referred to her with slurs and made fun of her for being Italian. Indeed, at St. Martha’s, Josie initially feels like she’s not popular primarily because she’s Italian. But at home, Josie takes pride in many Italian traditions. Though she finds Tomato Day, the day on which she and her family members make and can spaghetti sauce, somewhat embarrassing, she also tells readers that it’s a tradition she’ll never stop observing. And Josie also leans heavily on her Italian Catholic faith and the ways in which that guides her conduct, such as by not having sex before marriage.

Josie believes that her struggle to balance two cultures is unique to her, as a third-generation Italian immigrant—but Nonna’s stories make it clear that immigrants have had to deal with the same difficulties for generations. Indeed, Nonna’s stories help explain to Josie why she experiences the racism and prejudice she does, three generations on. Nonna explains, for instance, that Italian immigrants of her generation don’t speak English well because when they first arrived in Australia, few Australians would speak with them and help them learn. And even back then, Nonna says that the few Italian immigrants formed their own communities and, in part because they couldn’t integrate into white Australian society, became very insular. For Josie, this helps illuminate why her classmates think she lives so differently from them—the Italian Australian community is historically insular. And because of this separation between the white Australians and the Italian immigrants, the two groups haven’t had many opportunities to learn about each other, reevaluate their prejudices, and create a kinder, more generous relationship.

Getting to know someone of a different ethnic group, the novel shows, can help broaden people’s worldview and dismantle any prejudices about certain ethnicities for everyone involved. Looking for Alibrandi showcases two relationships involving people of different ethnicities: Nonna and Marcus Sandford in the 1940s and 50s, and Josie and Jacob in the novel’s present. Though Josie and Jacob struggle throughout their relationship because of their cultural differences and even some moments of outright racism on Jacob’s part, Jacob eventually finds that dating Josie opens his eyes to different ways of living and different priorities. Spending so much time with someone who’s so culturally different causes him to, in Josie’s opinion, become far more ambitious—and perhaps even more importantly, shows Jacob the value in spending time with people who are different from him. Though the novel ends with Josie feeling more comfortable in her Italian identity while still able to take pride in being Australian, it nevertheless doesn’t tie up neatly when it comes to racism and immigration. Some of this has to do with the fact that Josie is well aware that Australia is still plagued by racism and prejudice, though she believes it’s improving. But she suggests that, as Jacob’s and Marcus Sandford’s relationships with Italian women highlighted, getting to know someone from a different cultural background is something worth striving for—it makes life more interesting, and it makes Australian culture on the whole richer.