A DIFFERENT STORY

It does not take a Fulbright grant to realize that in the towns of Alta Irpinia (and well beyond) there is little economic development, the towns are shrinking in population, and that there are few steady fulltime jobs.

At the same time, there are more and more foreign-born workers who live and work here. They work as in-home caregivers, construction workers, street vendors, farm workers, and factory workers. The work is often “al nero”—precarious and under the table. Laborers are often overworked and underpaid. A lot of this work is similar in kind to the kinds of labor that once commonly employed Italian emigrants, regardless of where they emigrated to.

Perhaps it will seem obvious, but when an Italian (of any age) tells me there’s no work in this part of the country, s/he’s talking about white-collar work, or at least pink-collar work. Of course there’s work here—it’s just not the kind of work that most young Italians want to do any longer.

While the overall population of the towns here is declining, the population of new immigrants is growing. Before leaving the U.S. I studied the latest Italian census figures, and they support this observation. A village like Cairano, where I’m living, has fewer than 500 residents today (down from about 1500 half a century ago ago), and that number keeps diminishing; yet, even while we’ve been here, the number of new immigrants in town has increased.

Yesterday a former emigrant told me a different story, one that confirmed my own conclusions. She’s in her early 50s, lived in the U.S. for 13 years in the 70s and 80s, and now makes a living as a housecleaner—making her one of few Italian-born domestic workers here. She told me: “The immigrants take the jobs that no young Italian will do, since the young Italians all live off the fruit of their parents’ labor. Or the young Italians have been to school, and when they go looking for a job in a bank and can’t find one, they don’t just go clean houses or work in a factory. They won’t do that.”

When I asked her what she thought would happen to these towns, she said, “One day these foreigners will populate the towns, because they still live as we lived before I left for America”.

You might think, Come on, she left in the 70s—how uncomfortable could her life have been here? This is Europe, after all! Well, life in much of rural Italy (especially the South) during the 70s was still such that most people had only fireplaces to warm their houses, and when this woman called her mother from the U.S., she had to call the town operator and make an appointment for her mother at the telephone station. But really, to understand, you need to have a better sense of what the towns of Alta Irpinia are and were like, a story best left for another post.