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.