We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amanda Pascali a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Amanda, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Currently, I am Palermo, Sicily; Italy’s southernmost region, halfway between Europe and Africa. I’m here as a Fulbright Fellow, translating and revitalizing the songs of Rosa Balistreri, one of the first Italian women to publicly denounce social inequality through music.
Her iconic, hoarse voice brought songs about Sicily’s jarring poverty in the 20th century to the forefront of Italian folk music in the 1960’s. A blue-collar worker for most of her life, Rosa Balistreri learned to read and write at the age of 32, and to play the guitar at the age of 40. She is a universal symbol of the working class who in addition to singing songs of revolt and rebellion, protested social injustice in one of the bravest ways of her time period: with a voice and a guitar.
As part of this project, I will highlight the seldom documented perspective of Sicilian women as well as that of under-represented groups such as ethnic and religious minorities in Sicily on class issues, imprisonment, inequality, immigration, national identity, and gender roles; the fundamental themes behind the songs sung by Rosa Balistreri. Interviews with community members, working class individuals, musicians, and family members of Rosa Balistreri will be recorded and edited, and shared in a documentary style.
In addition, I will translate the songs to be sung in English so that they may be preserved in the future. These songs, which have never been translated into English before, will then be performed in collaboration with contemporary Italian musicians in an effort to preserve the melodies and meanings conveyed in Sicilian; declared a “vulnerable” language by UNESCO on the UNESCO endangered languages list. Based on current trends, only a third of the population on the island will speak Sicilian at the end of the 21st century (Coluzzi, 2008). This collaborative storytelling initiative aims to capture a snapshot of Balistreri’s legacy and preserve the words she sung as they are still relevant over half a century later, all over the world.
The project, called “To Sing and Recount” shows how the legacy of Rosa Balistreri is carried on by the new Italian working class through cultural diffusion. As of January 2015, there were 5,047,028 documented foreign nationals in Italy, an increase of 92,352 since 2014 and an increase of 4,647,028 since Balistreri’s time in the year 1960 (macrotrends.net). Because the face of Italy’s working class is changing, it is statistically inaccurate to discuss the significance of Balistreri’s songs without including the perspective of those who belong to Italy’s new working class. This project uses multimedia content (videos, photos, and recordings) to conduct interviews in a musically-driven documentary style to share stories and experiences from Sicilian communities who grapple today with many of the same universal issues, although different on the surface, that were sung about in Balistreri’s songs over half a century ago.
Amanda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
It is because of revolt and rebellion that I am alive. If my father would have never spoken out against the dictatorship in his home country and fled to the U.S. as a refugee where he met and fell in love with my mother, I would have never been born. As the daughter of two immigrants, a Romanian with Sicilian heritage, and an Egyptian immigrant by way of France, I felt from a young age that I was born to be a messenger; not only of my family’s story and diaspora but of all the unconventional working-class stories that fall outside the boundaries of Hollywoodesque storytelling. When I was 12, I picked up a guitar and decided that the best medium through which to tell those stories, was music; the world’s universal language.
By the age of 18, I was a touring musician throughout the U.S. By 22, I had released award-winning music and toured internationally from packed houses in Italy and Romania to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. And by 23, I was voted “Best Musician of 2021” by the largest newspaper in Texas. Music was nothing more than a medium for me, however. I was an activist, a messenger, and my tools were a voice and a guitar.
My greatest musical influence has always been the music of the working class. The first time I heard Sicilian folk music, I was struck by the passion and pain conveyed in the harsh tones of the Sicilian language accompanied by an old, out-of-tune acoustic guitar. Similar to American blues music, Sicilian folk represents the raw emotions and experiences that characterize life in blue-collar communities. Upon hearing the voice of folk singer, Rosa Balistreri, Sicily’s most iconic voice of the 20th century, I immediately heard the story of my father; a soldier, an immigrant, and a refrigerator factory worker in New York City. “I am not a musician, but an activist with a guitar,” she said famously before she died. I promised myself I would find out everything there was to know about her; the woman who shook Italy with just a voice and a guitar.
I financially supported myself through university by playing music and working as a research assistant. In addition to going to school and performing, I partnered with a music-activism non-profit started by Noel Paul Stookey of the famous 1960s band Peter, Paul and Mary in 2019. With his support, I put on several benefit concerts to raise money for local organizations that provide transitional housing and aid to new immigrants and refugees in Houston. In 2020, I was awarded a grant from the mayor and city of Houston to develop an asynchronous ESL curriculum designed to teach English through music to immigrants whose ESL classes transitioned online as a result of COVID-19.
As a 24-year-old singer/songwriter and community change-maker who travels the world with a guitar on my back, I am constantly inspired by the “everyday person” both in the U.S. and in Italy; fishermen, miners, nuns, taxi drivers, musicians. They are the inspiration for my songs. While seemingly extraordinary on the surface, the story of my family is statistically quite ordinary. With over one million immigrants entering the U.S. every year, my family’s story falls among a plethora of others; pieces of a centuries-old puzzle. Had I not decided to pick up a guitar when I was 12, set music to their story, and build a platform upon which to tell that story as I grew older, it may have been forgotten. How many stories and experiences from working-class communities in Sicily, a place where I have hereditary roots and where music has held great historical importance, would disappear if not documented?
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I was driven from a young age to be a messenger of my family’s stories and diaspora. Although I am living in Italy right now, and I was born in New York, Houston is my hometown; a city full of immigrants and first-gen Americans. Whenever children of immigrants, millennials and gen z’s tell me they can relate to my music, that always pushes me to keep doing what I am doing, the realization that I am living a relatable story, and sharing it not only for myself but for others as well.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I was driven from a young age to be a messenger of my family’s stories and diaspora. Although I am living in Italy right now, and I was born in New York, Houston is my hometown; a city full of immigrants and first-gen Americans. Whenever children of immigrants, millennials and gen z’s tell me they can relate to my music, that always pushes me to keep doing what I am doing, the realization that I am living a relatable story, and sharing it not only for myself but for others as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: amandapascali.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/amandinapascali
- Facebook: facebook.com/amandinapascali
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-pascali-git-b4299b189/
- Twitter: twitter.com/amandinapascali
- Youtube: youtube.com/amandapascali
- Other: patreon.com/amandapascali
Image Credits
Desert photo in white dress: Jessica Castro Concert photos: Ana Tejeda