23 February 2006

FORZA IMMIGRATI!



I thought I’d try to post a photograph, snapped near the stadium in Avellino last week.
I first saw this billboard when we walked out of Fiumicino, the airport in Rome. Of course, I immediately thought it was startling—not to mention relevant to my work here.

The text is specific: a rough translation might be “Take as many illegal immigrants as want to come? No, thanks!” (That is, it’s not on its face a rejection of all immigrants, just the ones who come in without documents.) Nevertheless, the focus is clearly in line with Berlusconi and Forza Italia’s general anti-immigrant stance.

This position is no secret, really, and should come as no surprise to even the most casual observer of Italian politics. That a country, like Italy, with such a long history of emigration, gives broad support to an anti-immigrant platform is unsettling but perhaps not surprising (not much different than anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S., a nation of immigrants).
I won’t offer a sustained political discussion; I don’t know enough about contemporary Italian politics to do so. Nonetheless, it’s election time around here, with elections slated for April 9, and Forza Italia, in particular, is covering Italy’s billboards with this and similar messages.

22 February 2006

IL LAVORO E IL PRESEPIO

We visited San Potito Ultra, a small town right outside of Avellino the other morning, officially outside the region of my research, but just a short drive away. The town has just opened a new Museo del lavoro (Work Museum), spearheaded by the current mayor and University of Napoli professor Giuseppe Moricola.

The holdings come mainly from the personal collection of one Ezio De Felice, and as such it’s a little bit random (i.e., a huge collection of buttons and pocket watches next to a traditional Sicilian pushcart and carpenter’s tools). The work the museum documented was mainly artisan skilled labor, traditional crafts that are no longer practiced today.

I liked the historical focus of the museum, but what was needed was some reflection on what it means for the current San Potitesi, the 1400 or so who are left in town after years of emigration. Moricola explained to me that he and others aspire to make San Potito “un paese della cultura e della civilità del lavoro” (a town centered on the culture and society of work). What an interesting, and ambitious, idea. It would be good to see them incorporate the labor of new immigrants into its plans too.
One last note on the museum itself: juxtaposed next to the labor-related ephemera were these “dioramas” (for lack of a better word) that placed each particular labor sector into a real-life setting (a family butchering a pig, for instance, or, my favorite, a man “sewing” a broken ceramic bowl). Actually, Moricola called these each a presepe, (crèche); they were all made by a local artist, Sabatino Di Pietro, who normally makes presepi of the more conventional Christmas variety.

THE INTERVIEW BEGINS

Last week I recorded a handful of interviews in Bisaccia and Cairano—all women who emigrated to Switzerland and/or Belgium.

So far, no one has shared any particularly shocking or frustrating experiences she had abroad as an emigrant. In fact, one woman in her late 70s who lived in Lausanne for 30-plus years said that the only people who had bad experiences abroad were people who were lazy and didn’t want to work. She added that this is the problem with Albanians in Italy today: “They don’t come here wanting to work.”

I was afraid I’d have a hard time staying quiet when someone said something objectionable to me, but I think I’m doing a decent job at keeping my mouth shut and letting people talk. I haven’t reviewed at length any of the interviews, though, and perhaps I should. (I’m using a portable DV cam to record the interviews.)

I’ve got some other interviews lined up—with people who emigrated to Venezuela, Uruquay, and the U.S.—and more contacts to follow up on. I was hoping to find more people who have returned from the U.S., or even Canada, Argentina, Venezuela, cioe’, the Americas (rather than Northern Europe), but it’s not as easy as I thought. It makes sense, of course—the majority of the postwar emigrants from Campania moved to Northern Italy or Northern Europe (even if my personal experience is one of parents who went abroad).
On another note, next week we’ll spend time in Montemarano, Paternopoli and elsewhere to follow-up on some more potential “informants” and check out the local Carnevale celebrations . . . “D” can’t decide if he wants to be a cowboy (w/lasso, senza fucile), batman, or a piece of “pasta corta”.

14 February 2006

FILM AND EMIGRATION

We finally got a hold of, and watched, La donnaccia (dir. Silvio Siano), a film I had heard and read about, but was never able to see. It just recently came out on DVD in Italy, and M and I watched it last night on my laptop. It was filmed in Cairano (the town we’re living in) in 1962 using a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors. It clearly aspired to be a neorealist take on emigration, the poverty in the mezzogiorno, the relationship between the Church, folklore, and spiritualism, and the role of women and sexuality. The film itself kind of falls apart on the level of plot, but thematically it’s interesting and ripe for academic criticism.

The making of the film and the recent “recovery” of the film makes for an interesting story too, and I look forward to writing more about the film in the future. (It’s too bad I couldn’t incorporate it into my co-edited book with Kristi Wilson, RADICAL FANTASY: ITALIAN NEOREALISM’S AFTERLIFE IN GLOBAL CINEMA, that’s due out next fall/winter!) You can find out more information about the film, here http://www.comune.cairano.av.it/default.htm.

Paolo Speranza’s book about it, UN AVVENTURA NEOREALISTA, is great too. I’d love to get the film to the U.S., but it would take some work; as it stands, it has no subtitles and the copy, while it’s been cleaned up a bit, is pretty poor. Perhaps one could find a better original copy in France (since it starred a lot of French actors) or the U.S. There’s some great music in it too, some of which reminded me of Alan Lomax’s recordings of traditional Italian folk music.

ANCH'IO SONO STATA FUORI...

I’ve started talking to more and more people about my project and have started lining up potential interviewees. In fact, practically every Italian in the area at some point emigrated—it’s such a non-story to these folks. When I tell them why I’m here, most are just like, “si, anch’io sono stata fuori—in Germania per cinque anni, e poi la Svizzera per tre,” (yeah, I was away—five years in Germany and then three in Switzerland). These remarks come from people casually and matter-of-factly, as though they were telling me the time of day or how many kids they have.

But on at least one occasion, this information seemed almost a special little secret. Only after three days of visits to a telephone-electronics store in Calitri where the same young woman was helping us with our insanely complicated Internet-via-cell phone connection did she whisper to us: “Anch’io ho uno di questi” (I have one of theses too), pointing to my U.S. passport. Then the details started coming out: her mother emigrated to the U.S. for 7 years, she was born there (Connecticut); then they moved back to Italy some 15 years ago. When I asked her if her mother would be interested in being interviewed, she said, probably, but that I should be ready to hear her say how much she hates being in Italy. Another young woman we met in Bisaccia told us she was born in Switzerland under similar circumstances, and that if I interviewed her grandmother, I should be ready to hear her say unpleasant things about Moroccan and Albanian immigrants. She explained that her grandmother always comments on the fact that at the border Italian immigrants had their health screened and that today such screening isn’t done: “ci hanno pigliato pure lu sangue pe vedé se era bbuono” (they even took our blood to see if it was good), she’d probably tell me, according to her granddaughter.
As far as the other side of the project, again with the help of a family friend, I’ve met one woman from the Ukraine who is eager to talk to me about her four years here. She’s also told me she’ll introduce me to other women, all of whom work as “badanti”—in-house nurses/maids who take care of (mainly) retired men. She is exactly the kind of contact I need in order to meet more recent immigrants. It’s harder, however, to set up interviews with the Moroccan or other North African immigrants. I’ve met two women and some children; however, neither of the women speak Italian. The children speak Italian and could play translator for me, but I have little confidence in the kind of exchange we’d have. I haven’t been able to meet any of the Moroccan men, but hope that with the help of some of the people I’ve already met, I’ll be able to do so.

03 February 2006

HERE GOES...

My research project is a kind of ethnographic project—to gather interviews with various people on the subject of im/emigration in the small hill towns in the province of Avellino (the Alta Irpinia area exactly). My plan is to interview recent immigrants to Italy (in this part of Italy they appear to be mainly from the Ukraine, Romania, Albania, and Morocco) and former emigrants who have returned to their home towns (temporarily or permanently). I’m here with my husband, “M,” and our (almost) three-year-old son, “D.” For now we’re just trying to get settled into our new home in Cairano.

We’ve been in Cairano for about 4 days.

D has already started attending preschool, and is happy to be around other kids. The free public preschool in town (about a three-minute walk from our house) runs from 8:30-1:30 M-F. He’s one of seven children in the preschool, and he’s one of two “extra-comunitari”—the other non-Italian is a Moroccan girl (one of three Moroccan families in town). One of his two teachers told us that last week two little girls from Australia went back home; they had been attending the school for two months while their parents, originally from Cairano, were visiting. It seems, in fact, I don’t even need to leave Cairano to complete my project.

Two days ago we went to the questura in Avellino to register and to get our residency papers (permesso di soggiorno)—the Fulbright requires us to get a visa and to go through this process (what I mean by that is that in order to be legal residents here, we need to go through this process; the Fulbright actually requires that I prove I've gone through the steps, other wise, I'm not sure anyone would necessarily know). We had obtained visas from the San Francisco office of the Italian consulate before leaving (a typical Italian bureaucratic moment in and of itself). Due to some family contacts, we were able to get an appointment with a high-level officer at the questura and were accompanied there by the mayor of Andretta and the vice-mayor of Cairano (I’m still not sure why they both came, but I very much appreciated that they stayed with us the entire 1.5 hours). We started on the sixth floor and slowly wound our way down and through the police station’s multiple buildings, stopping at various offices to confer with different people along the way. It seems even more than a cliché to suggest that we were in some version of Dante’s Inferno, but it did cross my mind. (And having just seen Sandow Birk’s contemporary version of the Divine Comedy made me think he would have been better off placing the Inferno in Avellino instead of Los Angeles.)

I ended up behind a glassed-in area, while M and D waited with one of our guides, on the other side. The amount of paperwork was ridiculous, and neither I nor the high-ranking questura fellow understood how to fill them out. (It goes without saying that it would be insanely challenging for the average non-Italian-speaking immigrant to fill out the same forms.) The woman who took charge of our papers, and eventually filled them all out for me, was not happy with any of the documents I had from the Italian or U.S. Fulbright Commission. (For instance, she wanted proof that I had more money than just the grant money; when I offered to show her my bank accounts online, or proof that I owned a house in the U.S., she pooh-poohed the idea. Then, 15 minutes later, she rather randomly asked me if I had a credit card, and that was that.) All the while, I watched outside as men, women, and children from all parts of the globe appeared to be nervously waiting their turn. I overheard one Romanian man being told he had five days to leave Italy and he couldn’t return for five years! These folks were all waiting while I was being taken care of by at least three different officials.

Later we were led to yet another office, where we cut in line again, in order to get our hands and fingers “fingerprinted.” In fact, normally we would have been called back in 2-4 days to be finger/hand printed. (That the fingerprinting method was hilariously outdated and that they had only paper to clean our hands also goes without saying.) So, here I was, in and out of the questura in under two hours, due to my U.S. passport, my Fulbright grant, and probably most of all—the people I knew who had gone out of their way to help me through the system faster. All the while, the people perhaps most inconvenienced (the people I cut in front of) were some of the people that make up my whole reason for being here (the immigrants themselves). Ironic? Yes, I suppose. Did I feel guilty? Sure. Did I do anything about it? Nope.