This chapter views the Italian American youth culture known as “Guido” as a collective ethnic adaptation by young people whose immigrant parents settled in New York City, most notably Bensonhurst, after 1945. The ethnogenesis of second-generation youth blended thick Italian ethnicity with styles referenced to popular American culture like disco. New second-generation youth identity constitutes an ethnic agency according to a constructionist model of ethnicity that cannot be subsumed within the narrative of assimilation keyed to the older, mass immigration. Instead, a pronounced turn to consumption style invites a comparison to the new second generation children of post-1965 immigration from outside Europe featured in segmented assimilation theory which recognizes variable patterns as ethnic groups assimilate into different segments of a highly stratified society.
