Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers

The Watts Towers is as much a story about Italians in Southern California as it is about Simon Rodia, the Italian immigrant who built them. Forestiere’s solitary life and Underground Gardens in many respects contrasted with the communal lives of Fresno Italians at the time. Rodia’s life and towers, on the other hand, more positively reflect the immigrant experience in Southern California and ultimately the experiences of most Italian immigrants throughout America at mid-century. Though the immigrant assimilation process was often presented as problematic in the works of such Italian American writers as Pascal D’Angelo, Antonia Pola, and Pietro Di Donato, western Italian American writers such as Angelo Pellegrini, Jo Pagano, and John Fante generally expressed hope and optimism in their works. The dramatization of immigrants’ and their offspring’s pursuit of the American Dream in Italian American literature contrasted with the theme of alienation expressed by those members of the Lost Generation of the 1920s and 1930s who had exiled themselves to Europe out of protest over what they perceived to be the parochialism of American culture. In fact, Pagano in Golden Wedding, parodied the “fatuous, over-indulged prima donnas” of the 1920s, including, presumably, their anti-democratic, caustic oracle, H. L. Mencken.33 Looking back to the pre-World War period, Angelo Pellegrini wrote that for many immigrants “economic gain is no more than marginal relevance” in their struggle for success. For him in Seattle, Washington, throughout the twenties and thirties the American dream was “the inalienable right to seek happiness in self-realization.”34 Similarly, for both Pagano and Fante, California was not the terminus, geographical or otherwise, of the American Dream.35 In Golden Wedding Pagano’s characters are on quest that takes them beyond the traditional concepts of the family and gender roles. As a Southern California writer, Pagano tells us that his characters’ experiences were “a part of that glittering, reckless world of the future, a world whose history was a history of light.”36 Rodia’s towers reflect this same optimistic spirit that is expressed by the writers of the period, including a very creative use of sunlight.