14 May 2006

Italo-Argentines—immigrants or returning emigrants?

Last week I met with various Italo-Argentines. Some were born in Italy, some in Argentina, and all of them spoke a mix of Italian and Spanish. Their descriptions of their lives here over the last three or four years consistently include hardship, culture shock, and a general feeling of not belonging.

On paper these “new Italians” would appear to have pretty decent lives. Due to the peculiarities of Italy’s citizenship laws, they all have their Italian citizenship now, even if they once renounced it. Even those who were not born in Italy but whose parents were, in most cases, can get their citizenship papers. Gaining citizenship means access to certain social services and other economic incentives denied other immigrants. For example, due to Italy’s precarious population—excluding children of immigrants, Italy’s birth rate has hovered around zero for decades—the Italian government gives families a one-time 1500 euro bonus (almost $2000 U.S.) for each new child. (Italy’s liberal social services policies extend, in many cases, even to extra-comuntari: we are here as resident extra-comuntari and still have access to free preschools and free medical care, for instance.)

In addition, certain cities (Lioni and Saint Angelo dei Lombardi, from what I’ve learned) have developed services earmarked just for returning Italo-Argentines—services developed in the wake of the economic collapse in Argentina some five years ago. Take housing, for example. Returning Italo-Argentines can apply for a two-year program in which the city pays their rent, assuming they can demonstrate a financial need. Two years free rent! Now, compared to Northern California standards, housing is cheap; in one of the larger towns in the area, Lioni (circa 6000 people), a two-bedroom apartment, maybe 800 square feet, might run about 250-350 euros a month (under $450 US). Nonetheless, having a comfortable place to live remains a sometimes difficult goal for any new immigrant. All the immigrants I’ve spoken with have spent a lot of time describing the difficulties they went through to find a clean, comfortable and inexpensive place to live. Many lived in (or still live in) small, old apartments owned by factories or in houses that have never been repaired after the 1980 earthquake.

And yet the Italo-Argentines I’ve met are not happy here. They still struggle to find work—without a raccomandazione, basically a complicated form of Italian nepotism, it’s almost impossible to find permanent work. Many are no longer at home with rural Italian everyday culture: they’re not comfortable speaking Italian (their children often do not speak it at all), they miss the city life of Buenos Aires, they feel detached from family members whom they have not seen in decades, and, interestingly, they miss Argentine food, their grass-fed beef especially. The other townsfolk comment constantly on their foreignness. One Argentina-born Italian tried to explain this to me, by telling me that her daughter’s preschool teacher continues to introduce her daughter not by her first name, but as “la straniera” (“the foreigner”). (We, in fact, witnessed a similar phenomenon here in Cairano when we brought D to preschool the first day. His teacher introduced us to all the children by their first name, until we got to Z, who was introduced only as “la marocchina, ” ‘the Moroccan girl’).

I’ve also met a few Italians who spent a decade or more in Argentina in the 1950s-1960s. One particularly interesting story came from a man who sang in Buenos Aires nightclubs. These older people, for the most part, seem to have returned to Italy with a certain level of financial comfort—able to become shopkeepers and businesspeople back in their Italian hometowns. Their experiences are very different from the recent Italo-Argentine ritornati, who were driven back due to Argentina’s economic instability. The more recent returning immigrants have more in common, it seems, with recent immigrants from Eastern Europe or North Africa.

Here is a recent piece from the New York Times regarding Italian "mom and pop" factories and the effects of globalization.

08 May 2006

BEYOND BURMA

Last week I finally talked to the Burmese man whom I had met at the Italian-for-Foreigners class. He convinced me, among other things, that he is one of only about 30 people from Burma in Italy. He’s been in Italy for about 12 years, working at a hotel/restaurant in Calitri (he’s the only immigrant who works there). His wife and daughter came to Italy four years ago. They live near Torino—his daughter attends the university there and her mother cleans houses.

He feels at once that Italy is his home (“I plan to get my citizenship papers as soon as I can”), but that he can never be part of the culture (“my spirit is not Italian”).

He’s an attorney and practiced law in Burma for about four years before deciding he could make more money working in a small, rural village in Southern Italy. When I asked him what the difference was between small-town and big-city Italian life, his first response was purely in economic terms. It’s less expensive in small towns, he said: “I work like an animal, but I can save almost all the money I make and send it to my family.”

The downside of small-town life is living alone, “isolated,” as he put it. And a practical consequence of this isolation is that he has yet to learn much Italian. In fact, I conducted the interview entirely in English, and he seemed quite relieved when he realized he could speak English to me instead of Italian.

And the factory strike (see my last post)? It seems that another company has stepped in, and production at the factory will continue, though under a different name and with different equipment. It’s not clear to me (or others) if this is a short-term or long-term fix. On the other hand, the May Day picnic was fun, at least until it started to rain.

And what about the Moroccans I mentioned earlier? I have yet to make much progress with any Moroccan man or woman I’ve met. While I interact with at least one Moroccan family almost daily (D’s closest friend at preschool is Z, a young girl from Morocco, and they play after school all the time), it’s a somewhat strained relationship. The family lives right around the corner from us, the father is rarely around, and the mother speaks no Italian. D’s five-year-old playmate is allowed to wander around the town by herself and she tends to come to our house hungry and, until spring hit, cold. I should explain that now that it’s warmer; most people in town, ourselves included, leave their doors open with those now-trendy beads hanging in the doorway, so Z can literally just walk into our house unannounced. Maybe I’ll try and explain at some point why, in fact, I call the relationship “strained”.