MOVING NORTH?

I’ve had some technical difficulties so the last post went up about a week late. Cairano has no DSL service, nor the capability for it (it was completely bypassed when the greater area was made wireless-ready), and we have no land line in our house. We connect our laptop to the web via our cell phone—it makes for a slow and clunky connection.

A few days ago I met a number of people in a larger town, St. Angelo dei Lombardi (about 4,000 people). I was shown around the town by a local medical doctor who spent his teen years in New York, where his family fled following the 1980 earthquake. There is a relatively large Italo-Argentine population in this town; in each of the last few years, it turns out, somewhere between five and ten former emigrants (or children of emigrants) have returned from Argentina. This number may appear low, but when you consider the size of the town and the low employment rate of the area, it seems more significant.

I was about to jump in my car and return to Cairano, my notebook full of new names and phone numbers that I needed to follow up on, when my guide received a call from a friend about a demonstration that was happening at a local factory. The factory, just outside of the town of Morra De Sanctis (renamed in the 1930s for its most famous son, the Italian literary critic and politician Francesco De Sanctis), was about to be closed, and about fifty people were going to lose their jobs. It seems that the factory, which makes parts for kitchen appliances, was to be moved to Torino (and you thought I was going to say China!).

A minute after the phone call, an old VW bug, painted red with the logo of the Rifondazione Comunista party painted on the side, drove up in order to take my guide to the demonstration. I jumped in as well.

Trucks had started to come down from the North to begin taking away the machinery; there had been a strike for a few days already. The picket line successfully stopped the trucks from entering and may have even opened up some discussion between the union (the national CGIL) and the plant managers. The owner of the factory lives “al nord.” The move has been put on hold, at least until next week. The local chapter of the Rifondazione is organizing, believe it or not, an “American-style picnic” at the picket lines for May Day, next Monday.

Those attending the demonstration included workers and their families and maybe eight carabinieri. Based on what I heard and saw, there appeared to be no immigrants there, only native Italians. The women passed around salami, bread, and cookies. Most workers make about 1,000 euros a month, and at least one 36-year-old man I spoke to also works at night in a restaurant to help support his three children.

EMIGRANTS AND THE ELECTION

The elections turned out a little tighter than I originally thought (see last post). It seems, though, that due in great part to the “voto all’estero” (the vote from abroad), the center-left coalition headed by Romano Prodi won. Prodi now has the near-impossible job of trying to form a government out of an almost-equally divided house and senate—never mind trying to lead an almost-equally divided electorate.

We just came back from spending a week in Rome. We arrived the day after the elections and already the city was plastered with posters from all political parties, each claiming victory and thanking Italians (and in the case of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, people from the Lazio region) for their votes. Here are some of the slogans:

“Forza Lazio! Forza Italia! Più voti nel Lazio! Più voti nell’Italia!”
(From Berlsuconi’s party’s poster. Berlusconi’s claim here that he has more votes—più voti--and then his public demand for a recount eerily reminded us of Bush-Gore in 2000.)

“Grazie a tutte e tutti” (The Rifondazione Comunista poster, noteworthy for its emphasis on using both the masculine and feminine form of “tutti” — everyone. It’s grammatically unnecessary, but a nice feminist touch.)

“Oggi è un’altro giorno...grazie” ( “Today is another day…thanks, ” La Margherita”, the party headed by Francesco Rutelli and most closely aligned with Prodi.)

Back in Campania, Prodi's coalition won, though it was close (2%). Interestingly, Prodi carried the province of Avellino by a wider margin (8%). In Cairano, Berlusconi's coalition won, though again, only by a few votes. It should be pointed out that Berlusconi’s coalition includes the separatist Lega Nord party, well known for its racist comments about southerners


The ”voto all’estero” is an important and unexpected twist in the election. Berlusconi’s government fought the last few years to give Italian citizens living abroad the right to vote for special representation (absentee voting is otherwise not allowed). The general consensus among pundits and journalists was that these votes would go to Berlusconi’s coalition because, it was thought, the majority of Italians abroad are conservative politically and since it was Berlusconi who changed the law.

However, in the end the foreign vote went mainly to Prodi’s coalition, for both the Senate and the Camera. In the Camera, 7 seats went to the left and 4 to the right. In the North and Central America precinct, which includes the U.S. and Canada, the left and right split the two available Camera seats (the right won in the U.S., but the left won in Canada and elsewhere). Four of the six extra-Italian senators went to Prodi’s coalition, one to Berlusconi’s (the other, from Argentina, went independent thus far, but is expected to clarify his position any moment now).


Finally, this was the first election where immigrants’ rights issues in Italy were a focal point of the campaign (Prodi claiming he would make it easier for immigrants to become Italian citizens; Berlusconi pushing for firmer border policies, for instance). And it was Italian emigrants with their first chance to vote from abroad who made the difference.

ELECTIONS IN CAIRANO

5pm in Italy, a small but not insignificant victory for the more immigrant-friendly party seems to be taking shape. A shot of the ballot counters at the Cairano (AV) polling station, with 70 votes for Forza Italia and 92 for La Margherita.

ONE WOMAN'S EXPERIENCE

I had a long talk last night with a Russian woman and her Ukrainian husband in their house in Calitri. I met her a few weeks ago through another Ukrainian woman, and have been hanging out with her more and more.

They both had much to say; here are a few highlights:

“You don’t have to talk to anyone else,” she told me. “All our stories are the same.” She’s been in Italy 11 years, the first two in Naples, the last nine in Calitri. She came alone, and her husband and their young daughter followed later. In the Ukraine she worked as a speech therapist.

Now they own a house in Calitiri, and they both have steady jobs (she takes care of old people or children, he works in one of the aforementioned battery factories). Their 16-year-old-daughter attends high school and hopes to move to Naples or Rome to attend university in a few years.

When asked about how living in a small town compares to Naples, she said that the people of this area, with their simple lives and peasant (“contadini”) backgrounds, are very nice. “Le persone di citta’ sono piu dure, non capiscono le nostre difficolta” (“City people are tougher, they don’t understand our hardships”).

I asked her if she would like to one day work as a speech therapist again, and she said that it would be too hard to have her degree transfer here. Plus, she said, in an Italian more colloquial than mine, that her Italian isn’t good enough to work as a speech therapist. She also reminded me that there’s not work for Italians with degrees, and so she’d have a hard time finding that kind of work even if she was qualified. She went on to tell me that when her daughter complains about having to study, the teenager says, “Tu ti sei laureata e’ adesso lavi il sedere di qualche vecchietta” (“You have a university degree and now you clean some old lady’s butt”). She ended by trying to explain: “I’m not ashamed of my work, it’s not right that I have to leave my country and my family just to have enough money to live. It’s not right that I can be here and that my husband and child do not lack for anything, but back home, in the Ukraine, we would starve. There I would work all month to buy a pair of boots for my child, I would scrimp and save every cent for those boots. That’s all I could buy that month. Here, it’s not like that, we have everything we could need or want.”

This week I spent some time at an Italian class for foreigners, taught at a high school in Calitri, but meant for foreigners from the entire region. It’s the second year such a class has been offered. There are mainly Ukrainians, but also a few Albanians, Poles, and one man from Burma (who claims to be one of 30 Burmese in all of Italy—including nuns and priests, he said…).

And the elections? I’m writing this at 10pm Sunday night, Italian time. The polls just closed for the day and will be open tomorrow until 3pm. No exit poll news nationally, but there’s a lot of energy here in town, especially where we are. The polling station is about 100 yards from our house, set up in an old school house, and there have been carabinieri stationed in and outside since last night. We’ve been told we can go watch the first count at 3pm tomorrow, before the ballots get sent to Avellino.

EMIGRATION/IMMIGRATION

Here are a few recent observations regarding the theme of my research.

Emigration continues from this area. While Italians once left hoping to find blue-collar work, now they leave hoping to land office jobs or professional positions. The young Italians here who have decided to stay (those with or without university degrees), seem to shrug and accept their future life here. They know they can live here—comfortably enough, near their family, even without much work (their families own land and homes and the cost of living is low). But they can’t really go far beyond what they already have (I’m speaking mainly in material terms). Not that getting ahead financially is the only measure of a person’s happiness; but in talking to young Italians here there seems to be a widespread sense of apathy. (I find this different than, for instance, the young people I teach in the community college in Berkeley/Oakland—kids who, whatever their goals, seem to be thinking towards a future different than their present.)

At the same time, more and more people are moving here. I asked one Ukrainian man last week why he stays in Calitiri and not in a bigger city that might offer a better paying job and more aid for immigrants. He said he’s happy to have ended up in such a calm place, a place with little crime and a slow pace of life. It makes being a foreigner easier, he thought. It means there are fewer worries for him and his family.

Then we talked about the way Italians complain about the lack of work even as immigrants flock here to make a living. He’s been in the area for eight years (he works in a factory), his wife and children five years (she takes care of an elderly woman). He said, “Yes, the Italians keep on leaving, even in the time I’ve been here, and we keep on coming.”

One short note: the elections are this Sunday and Monday. The campaigning stopped on Friday, the opinion polls have been prohibited by Italian law for the last two weeks, but British odds makers have Prodi as a solid favorite.

DOVE SONO?

I’d like to describe the area I’m living in and studying; below is what I’ve come up with. It’s more just a series of impressions rather than a coherent description.

Last month I read a small collection of essays on the 1980 earthquake, which was centered very near where I am currently living. It was one of the worst natural disasters Italy has ever seen, with thousands losing their lives, thousands more losing their homes. Author Leonardo Sciascia called these towns “paesi-presepi” (crèche, or nativity scene towns), a description that some locals regard, fairly enough, as patronizing.

Let me list a few details of everyday life in the two towns I’ve gotten to know best, Cairano and Calitri. We live in Cairano and go to Calitri at least three times a week. The towns sit on neighboring hilltops, and they’re quite close as the crow flies; by car the only way to go from one town to the other is to drive down one windy road, across a larger connecting road, and up another windy road. The trip takes about 15 minutes in my Peugeot, now that I know the road, and along the way I pass farmland, a few shepherds with flocks, old folks tending to their small vineyards, two battery factories, heaps of garbage, and even, if I’m lucky, an old man on a donkey with bundles of kindling on their backs.

Both towns’ architectural style is medieval—narrow streets, cobblestones, stairways that lead nowhere, castle ruins. Cairano has fewer than 500 people, Calitri a little over 5000 (in the 1940s, Cairano had close to 2000, Calitri close to 8000).

Calitri is small but sustains dozens of shops, two hotels, a franchise from a large supermarket chain, a few pizzerias, pastry shops, delis, bars, and three high schools.

Cairano has four stores, two bars, a baker, and a tabaccaio (run out of the entryway of a man’s house). The barista of the main bar in town is also the man who delivers and installs your gas tanks (for cooking and heat); if you run out of flour, you can buy it at the baker (along with eggs or fresh ricotta that his mother-in-law makes); if you need matches you can only buy them at the tabaccaio, etc. You cannot buy a newspaper in Cairano, but you can buy minutes for your cell.

As another point of comparison: all the towns in the region have a weekly outdoor market; they vary in size according to the size of the town and the weather. This time of year Cairano’s market tends to feature between two and four stalls, Calitri’s around 25.

Cairano has a school that only goes up to fifth grade. From D’s preschool to fifth grade there are a total of 20 children (21 now that D is here). The kids are split into three classrooms: preschool, 1st -3rd, and 4th-5th, but it’s more of an old-fashioned one-room school house set-up. It’s not unlikely for us to find D in the first grade classroom hanging out; all the kids snack together and take their gymnastics class together once a week. One appealing part about the setup is that D knows every child under 13 in Cairano; that is, he in fact knows more people than we do in town.

There are very few young people here. When I said earlier that we went “trick or treating” at Carnevale with everyone in town (with only some exaggeration) who was under 60, that meant about 40 people. There are few jobs in the area, and young Italians with college degrees have few professional options. A 26-year-old neighbor with a college degree tells me she’s the only one from her graduating class who is still in Cairano—and she’s here mainly because her family told her not to bother looking for work in Napoli or another big city and pushed her to come back after college.