Lost in Translation

But as time passed, Joey found himself troubled. Not as a businessman, but as an American. He felt, in a way that you sense is very real and very personal, that the America he loved was slipping away. People didn’t look out for each other. Criminals caught all the breaks, the cops caught all the grief. Everybody played the victim card. Christ, you couldn’t even find people who spoke English anymore.

It was this last bit of revelation that changed Joey Vento’s life. During what he terms a “shoot the shit” discussion with some vendors two years ago, he found himself ranting that he was suddenly getting the wrong deliveries, that the wrong things were going to the wrong places, that when he called customer service he couldn’t find anyone who spoke decent English. He was also becoming frustrated at his ordering window; South Philly was seeing a huge influx of immigrants from Mexico, and many of them didn’t speak English. It wasn’t right, he felt. It wasn’t right.

Joey can’t remember when, exactly, he came up with the idea for the sign, which he posted in the fall of ’05. He says it was a goof, a way to let off a little patriotic steam, a fuck-you to the PC crowd. Others, like City Councilman Jim Kenney, saw it as a Molotov cocktail thrown into the country’s increasingly difficult conversation about immigration policy. “It seemed to me more bullying than helpful,” Kenney says. “I just don’t think, for an icon of Philadelphia, it should be sending that kind of message.”

The fact is, no one was paying much attention to Joey Vento or his sign until Kenney went onto the Council chamber floor in May 2006 and denounced it. Local media picked up the story, many depicting the sign as a racist slap at the new Latino immigrants. This, from a column by the Inquirer’s Rick Nichols, was typical: “Most of the Mexican newcomers are sequestered in the less-visible precincts of the food business — peeling and dishwashing and swabbing the floor — though in the block north of Geno’s flag-­waving fortress at 9th and Passyunk, some have opened cheery groceries and music-filled taquerias in storefronts abandoned and left to decay by the sons of the sons of Italy. How a Spanish-only-speaker might be expected to read Geno’s English-only instructions is, well, self-answering: That’s their problem, pal.”

While Kenney believes Geno’s was within its legal rights to post the sign, he sees it as a 21st-century take on the “No Irish Need Apply” versions his ancestors faced. “People have to understand that the immigrant face they see today is the same immigrant face — although it may be brown, and the eyes may be a different shape. They’re the same immigrant experience that we are,” he says. “If you can’t identify with that, then you’ve lost what it is that this country stands for, which is opportunity.”

When the Commission on Human Relations jumped in the following month, Joey Vento, Citizen of America, was born. Riled up, ranting and ruthlessly politically incorrect, Joey found knights in shining cable more than happy to air his case: Fox News Channel, whose hosts were giddy to put him on the air, and CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who has made illegal immigration a personal crusade.

By the time a rally titled “Voice of the People” was held in Harrisburg this past September, Joey had been elevated to keynote speaker, igniting the faithful with his barroom rhetoric that the country was being overrun by illegal immigrants who were accountable to no one, who were bleeding our social services and stealing our jobs, and who were defiant in resisting the assimilation that Europeans embraced as part of the American Dream a century ago. One of the lines that got the biggest applause in Harrisburg was when Joey said, “You come here, you pop a baby, pick it up and take it back to Mexico!”