Lost in Translation

“Oh, no, no, no,” he says, hands on his hips. “You don’t want none of that.”

Joey may have made a tidy fortune selling one of the worst foods you could ever put in your body to the good people of Philadelphia, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about those bodies. “Cheez Whiz,” he says, spitting the words out like a curse. “It’s terrible! But everybody loves it, so I gotta sell it. And it gets worse! Some of these kids, the teenagers, they come up to the window and order a ‘heart attack ­special’ — that’s a steak wit’ Whiz, provolone and American. I tell them, ‘You’re gonna be dead by the time you’re 40!’” He shrugs. “What’ya gonna do?”

I ask him, if I am to push against the will of the masses and eschew the dreaded Whiz, what cheese is the right one to put on a steak.

“Provolone. It melts beautiful.”

Two minutes later, stuffing my provolone steak in my mouth, I have to agree: It’s miles better than the slop I usually order. Of course, I’m feeling a little giddy, too: I’ve had my cheesesteak made personally by Joey Vento! I think it must be the same feeling you get if Barry Manilow serenades you with “Mandy” and your name is Mandy.

“You see?” he says to me, a great big smile bursting out onto his crinkled, George Hamilton-y tanned face. “You gotta listen to Joey.”

Of course, not everyone does. There are plenty of folks who think Joey doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “So much of this is a gut response that’s all about law and order,” says Domenic Vitiello, a professor at Penn who’s part of the Philadelphia Migration Project, which studies immigration patterns into the region. A Vento critic, he’s also on the board of Juntos, which provides services to Mexican immigrants in South Philly. “And yes, this is a nation of laws. Yet at certain points in our history — and this is one of them — our laws don’t necessarily make a lot of sense. They don’t reflect the realities of our society and economy.”

In South Philly, the Mexican wave is a relatively new phenomenon, having really gained steam in the past six or seven years. It’s estimated that today there are anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 illegal immigrants living citywide, a large percentage of them Latino. Vitiello says the irony of the Mexican migration here is that it’s very similar in its pattern to the Italian migration of a century ago. People suffer economically, they can’t find work, they come and take low-paying jobs, they send money home, others see the opportunity and follow. And so the cycle goes. “The U.S. has always had room for people to come and speak their language,” Vitiello says. “Joey Vento’s version of history is really perverted. The fact that his grandparents didn’t speak English very well and they suffered seems to contradict what he’s saying the Mexicans should do. Statistically, Mexicans today are learning English faster than Italians a hundred years ago. Every Mexican I know in South Philadelphia wants to speak English better.”