MOROCCANS AND ITALIANS—THE BASICS

I’ve talked about housing before (see the above post about returning Argentine emigrants). There I put the cost of a standard two-bedroom apartment at less than $450 a month. In fact, though, the houses that the Moroccan families are living in are even cheaper. They are the houses that weren’t updated or repaired after the 1980 earthquake; most lack heating and are in a state that would probably seem uninhabitable to most people reading this blog. In the U.S. we’d likely call the people who collect rent on such places slum lords; having not met any of the owners of the rentals here, I’ll refrain from name-calling for the time being.

When I ask local Italians, former emigrants or not, about the housing situation of Moroccan families, the most common answer is, “Well, who knows how they were living back home” or “They live differently from us—it doesn’t matter to them.” These are unsatisfying answers for lots of reasons. Many people, it would seem, even in Alta Irpinia’s small towns, would rather look the other way and ignore the state of some of their neighbors. Unlike the Eastern European immigrants, the Moroccan families I’ve met haven’t got much help from their Italian neighbors. The Ukrainians as well as the returning Argentines all told me about how generous their new Italian neighbors were when they moved into their places (Many people they didn’t know brought them “used but clean” linens, second-hand kitchen supplies and furniture—everything to make a house livable). This was not the case for the Moroccans. As in the rest of Europe, a bias against North African Arabs—and perhaps against Muslims generally— exists here.

It’s interesting to see how this racism works itself out with respect to immigrants’ daily lives. While locals may be less generous in certain respects, they seem to be particularly sympathetic to children, regardless of where they come from. A personal example: one of our neighbors, a retired woman (a former emigrant herself, having spent many years working in France), feeds Z, my son’s friend, at least a few times a week. “What can I do?” she tells me. “She comes over around lunch time, she knows when we eat, and she’s hungry. I can’t let her go home hungry.” This woman is also sensitive to the fact that Z should not be eating pork, and has tried—rather unsuccessfully, she tells me—to tell Z she can’t eat the pasta with sauce on it on the days she uses pork to make it: “But she’s hungry, and even when I tell her that her mother said no, she eats it anyway. I walked over to her house with a piece of pork to ask her mother. I made myself understood. And her mother shook her head and said no. That’s clear in any language. But what am I going to do?”

On a more institutional level, I’ve heard about assistance for children. But it’s not clear that the Moroccan families necessarily see the benefit of the help. The idea that there may be benefits to sending children to school seems to be a challenging point to get across to (at least these) Moroccan families. I’ve found that immigrants who live in larger cities (i.e., outside of this area), easily keep their kids from school. Why? I can only guess.

In the smaller towns of Irpinia, though, a new family, especially from a foreign country, immediately stands out. And, for instance, one 18-year old I spoke with told me he spent his first three years in Italy (from 10-13) working as a street vendor with his father in the city of Foggia, about an hour away. It wasn’t until they moved to Alta Irpinia that the town police came to his house and told his father that he had to send his son to school. Unfortunately, he’s not alone with this kind of story.

While it might seem extreme to have the police knocking on your door to tell you that you have to send your son to school, it’s good to know that some people in the town were trying to take care of its newest residents. A country needs some social infrastructure, a way to let people know first what the rules are and second how to follow them. (I don’t know the real motivation behind the police’s actions, but in many ways, it doesn’t matter.)

What I really want to know is something I haven’t been able to find out because I’ve spoken mostly to sons and not parents. That is, I’d like to know if the Moroccan families see the long-term benefits in sending their kids to school. (I’m not talking about an Ivy League education here, just basic literacy.) I also can’t help but be reminded of many immigrant stories in the U.S. of families who do not/did not understand the benefit of sending their kids to school when first arriving in the U.S