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.