The children of those former Brooklynites are part of a new generation that makes its home in the only borough of New York City that votes solidly Republican. Like all islands, Staten Island has a distinct island culture, one that breeds suspicion of outsiders. And some of its more upscale Italian-American residents smugly look down on their blue-collar counterparts across the Narrows, with their habit of covering furniture in plastic slipcovers, not to speak of their habit of voting Democratic. They are increasingly joined on the island by newer moneyed immigrants, including Koreans and Russians, who take well to the grand Italian-American sensibility.

As I ride around the island with Joann, I see that other groups are more visible than they've ever been. The Willowbrook section of the island is home to a large Orthodox Jewish community, and a group of Hasidim have bought a large piece of undeveloped land on the West Shore. The Albanian Islamic Cultural Center on Victory Boulevard is the city's second-largest mosque. The largest Liberian community outside the African nation resides here, too. And many Indian professionals have settled on the island in recent years. One Indian physician who lives on Todt Hill, Dr. Mukund Mody, often entertains the prime minister of India. Atal Bihari Vajpayee -- the guy who last year tested the nuclear bomb -- was spotted this year making an excursion to the Staten Island Mall.

Each group retains its traditions, as it also assimilates into the larger culture. And on Staten Island, the larger culture isn't American culture but Italian-American culture. Growing up on the predominantly white South Shore, I honestly believed that most of the country was Catholic and Italian-American (or Irish, who were plentiful on the island). I knew there were blacks, but I saw them mostly on television, often on the news, in civil-rights protests. Or they lived in Brooklyn.

I also knew there were Jews -- a few even lived on our block -- but they seemed like a tiny minority that did not really affect the city. Incredibly, I had not even heard of the term Wasp until I went away to college, to Syracuse University.

Almost 80 percent of Staten Island is white, and about half of those white people are Italian-Americans. Republican U.S. representative Vito Fossella's district (formerly Susan Molinari's), which includes all of Staten Island and the western edge of Brooklyn, is the most Italian-American congressional district in the United States.

Even the political movements that emerge on the island seem to have grown organically out of the Italian tradition. The infamous secession movement of a few years ago, for example, which culminated with Staten Islanders' overwhelmingly voting in 1993 to break from the city, seemed to have roots in Italian culture going back hundreds of years. The isolationist Southern Italians, from whom most Italian-Americans are descended, maintained a centuries-long suspicion of Rome. So it's perhaps not surprising that the leading secessionists in Staten Island were the Italian-American politicians, such as Borough President Guy V. Molinari, Susan's dad, and that the movement took on such momentum among Staten Islanders, who felt cheated by the city and suspicious of city government. Manhattan had become their new Rome, and the Molinaris their own family dynasty to ward off the Romans.

"The secession movement was all about 'We are our own family,' " says Maureen Seaberg, a columnist for the Advance, which was a major proponent of secession. "It was very Italian in that way, saying, 'We can take care of our own family."

Seaberg jokes that she is "probably one of the few Staten Islanders who can't claim any Italian blood" but notes that "it took going away to school in Pennsylvania, to college, to realize how much I'd picked up Italian culture right down to the foods and the way people speak. I was very different from everyone. People made fun of my hand gestures, and they thought I was Italian."

Even the local rap-group superstars, Wu-Tang Clan, whose members come from the largely black Park Hill housing project, play off of the Italian atmosphere. Singer Darryl Hill has been alternately known as Cappadonna, Cappuchino, Cappa, and the Don. In the New Springville section of the island, young Asian men cruise around in their Lincoln Town Cars, slung low behind the wheel, sporting their Guido haircuts and wearing lots of gold jewelry. The Christmas lights on the homes of the Indian families and the Russian families moving to the island now rival those of the Italians, long known for stringing up thousands of multicolored bulbs on their homes and erecting light-up Nativity sets galore on their lawns. "It's like nothing I've ever seen -- the competition over the lights," Seaberg observes. "It started with the Italians, but now everyone does it."