Italia 2006: oggi, ieri, domani

Blogging after 2006

2008-11-12T18:20:00.002+01:00

Since I've returned from Italy, I've realized that people still come across this blog and I am happy to see folks reading my work here.

Since 2007 I have been blogging some where else. You can follow my pieces on many different topics related to Italian and Italian American culture at: http://www.i-italy.org/bloggers/raccogli-e-passa. The larger website, i-italy.org may be of interest to you as well.

grazie!

ARRIVEDERCI

2006-07-16T00:23:00.000+02:00

We leave for the U.S. in about ten days. How do I close my blog?

I could easily write pages on multicultural issues in Europe in relation to soccer and the recent World Cup. The French team was the opposite of the Italian team in many ways. Most relevant for me was how the French team, including the now infamous Zidane, represented the new multicultural Europe, while the Italian side looked pretty much the way it looked the last time gli azzurri won the tournament. The Italians may well be the only European team in the mondiale whose players all have European backgrounds. Although Italy had two foreign-born players—Simone Perrotta (England) and Mauro Camoranesi (Argentina)—both had Italian parents.

I could tell you that here in our town, two of the three Moroccan families have left for the summer (Back to Morocco, some say; just across to the larger city of Foggia, say others). D and Z never did get to say goodbye. One family is still here (father, mother, and two school-age daughters who appeared in town on and off over the last four months but who speak next to no Italian and who were not enrolled in school). Word is that they all have tuberculosis and presumably have had some medical care. We were just told this afternoon, by various neighbors, who warned us to stay away from them and not let D play with the girls. We haven’t been able to confirm if it’s true.

Instead, let me finish with a few more details. We took a trip down to Matera (about three hours away) and I met with Dorothy Louise Zinn of the Universita’ degli Studi della Basilicata. She took me to the Associazione Tolba (see my post “HELP FOR ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS”) where I got to see a mostly-privately funded organization that seems to be doing a lot of good work for immigrants in the Matera area. They offer free Italian classes, they help people find work and housing, they assist with paperwork. Further, the actual space is open to immigrants as a hang-out spot. They publish some books and pamphlets of immigrant stories (both of their lives back home and their lives here in Italy) and they have a small library of books in languages other than Italian.

The physical space they offer (they have two such “hang-out spots” in town) are particularly valuable to domestic workers, who often meet up with other domestic workers on their days off (traditionally Thursdays and Sundays). Tolba opens up their community rooms on those days, and, especially in the hottest and coldest months, they get a lot of visitors.

The folks at Tolba also told me that they would be happy to help start a kind of immigrant center here in the area of Alta Irpinia, but that they would need a single person—an Italian, presumably—willing to look into getting space from the province or one of the towns and who would be interested in being an organizer (getting the word out, getting people there, etc.). Tolba said they’d donate books and some general know-how in order to get such a place up and running. What’s too bad is that I don’t think I can think of a person who’d be interested in volunteering to do such a thing. If only we were going to be here longer!

And so it ends. And here I close my own return migration.

ROADS PAVED WITH GOLD

2006-07-03T17:22:00.000+02:00

My blogging days are numbered since we return stateside toward the end of July. For now I’ve got a few more interviews lined up and a few more soccer matches to watch.

It’s a challenge at this point to try and come up with large, sweeping generalizations about what I’ve learned these past months—I don’t necessarily even see the point in such an exercise.

Nevertheless, I can say that migrants of all kinds are shaped in great part by various juggling acts. One is between their expectations and experiences—the balance between the two defines an individual’s life as a migrant. Another is how an individual’s identity develops through a kind of back and forth between how that individual sees himself/herself and how others see him/her. Neither of these ideas is new to migration studies, but it’s been useful for me to be reminded of them firsthand, as it were, by people’s stories.

It’s in part because of this constant exchange that the experience of young children is intriguing to me—their expectations are by definition limited and thus their experiences seem on some level less mediated. Stories recounted from this, dare I say, “innocent position” potentially reveal more directly the relationship between power, identity, and culture.

At the same time, I’ve also been fascinated by those individuals who have given some consideration to their experiences of mobility. That is, they seem to have given some thought to the effect that moving around has had on their lives, the different perspective it has afforded them. It would be a stretch to say that they’ve theorized their migrancy, but that is in a sense what they’ve done (Gramsci’s “all men are philosophers” idea works here). This goes as much for a recent immigrant from the former USSR as it does for someone who returned from Belgium thirty years ago. And unlike what you might expect, education level doesn’t seem to determine how much someone has reflected on the large historical forces that have influenced the course of his or her life.

Alla prossima…

I BAMBINI CI GUARDANO

2006-06-13T17:15:00.000+02:00

I said in my first post that given the nature of emigration and immigration in Cairano, the town I am living in, I didn’t need to go much farther than the piazza to find material for my project. This has, in fact, been by and large true.

Having a particularly chatty three year-old along with me (D spoke Italian before we arrived) has had unexpected benefits for my project. For starters, he has helped me meet informants, mainly by acting as a kind of ice-breaker: I met immigrant nannies at a nearby park I had gone to with my son; older Italian men and women alike all stop my son to squeeze his cheeks, which has more-often-than-not turned into a conversation that has something to do with emigration; and my most successful conversations with Moroccan women (with a few words and lots of hand gestures), were all about D—is he sleeping now? does he like school?

Moreover, my son’s relationship with Z, whom I’ve talked about before—the five-year old Morocco-born girl who lives near us—has given me an interesting perspective on the relationship between returning emigrant and new immigrant. Under the description of my research, D himself is a returning emigrant (the grandchild of emigrants) and Z is a new immigrant. Neither had any choice in their current status, and yet both are affected by their parents’ itinerancy.

D’s first playmate and friend here was Z. Clearly she understood immediately that he, too, was an outsider, and she took to him, paying more attention to him than the other kids would. When we picked D up at school, the two were always together—fighting or playing—and it took weeks before D mentioned to us any other child from school. One time, at our place, Z and I were looking at a map of the world. She pointed to Morocco and told me that’s where she was from, then she asked, “E D****?” She knew he was different.

Being a good two years older than D, she has become not only his friend, but a kind of older sibling. She taught him how to draw flowers, and she’s wiped his tears when he’s fallen; just recently, in step with her older-sibling role, D sat still long enough for Z to draw colorful hearts up and down both his arms with Magic Markers (while at school, mind you).

This said, D has in the last month or so embraced the local culture enough that now, much to our disappointment, he will talk about Z not by her name but as “la marocchina,” and has commented with a nod of disapproval, as we’ve seen other adults do, when she does something she’s not supposed to. Unlike other children, whose public moments of misbehavior are overlooked, Z’s immigrant status is always invoked when she plays too rough or picks on another child.

I was told by locals that when the first Moroccan family arrived in Cairano, there were some “issues” at first. Some (Italian) parents, it seems, thought the boys (then circa 8-10 years old) were being too pushy (“prepotente” was the word they used) at the playground. I asked what happened. The town policeman visited their house, talked to the father, and, “non c’erano piu problemi” (“there weren’t any more problems”). I tried to get the other side of this story from the Moroccan family. But I learned nothing—either they don’t want to say anything bad about the townsfolk or they are so used to such experiences that they don’t remember.

Where does this leave us? Yesterday morning Z stopped by. She and D sat down at our kitchen table and ate cherries and American-style chocolate cupcakes I had made. Just the day before, one of D’s Italian-born friends had refused the same cupcake, “schifo” (“disgusting”) the little boy had said. My son, who under normal circumstances would eat himself silly with cupcakes, reacted by telling me he didn’t like cupcakes any longer. This out-of-character response surprised me almost more than his recent description of Z as “the Moroccan”—is his desire to want to fit in so strong that he’d give up his favorite treat, I wondered?

My son’s fickleness aside, the variations of D and Z’s relationship demonstrate in a very minor way how racism is as much about fitting in at the playground as it is about global politics and economics. That we notice superficial differences among ourselves is only natural, what’s worrisome is that we so quickly make moral judgments based on these differences.

A GLIMPSE AT AN INTERVIEW

2006-06-09T18:43:00.000+02:00

Most of the new immigrants I've spoken with did not want to be video or audio taped. I take lots of notes and then type them up soon afterwards. Here are some miscellaneous highlights from one interview with a Ukrainian couple. The interview took place in early April at their home. The woman did most of the talking, and, unless otherwise noted, the opinions are hers.

Passages in quotation marks have been transcribed from my handwritten notes of the conversation and translated from the Italian.

"We are in need of nothing. We have everything we need, but still, something is missing"

"We have many Italian acquaintances and friends, but not real friends that you hang out with/socialize with, have over for parties, celebrations, etc. Everyone has their families and their own ways of doing things. If Italians come here, and I serve them some Russian salad, they say, oh yuck, mayonnaise. Then I feel bad that they haven't eaten and it ruins the party. It's not a party if people don't eat your food and they [Italians] don't have an open enough minds. We are more open. The only person we are friends with who isn't like that is an older gentleman, in his 60s, who is single. He lived in Holland for 40 years, and he understands, he says, he was like us. He eats and tries everything too, and he comes to our celebrations and parties, since he has no family. Otherwise, we just socialize with other Ukrainians or sometimes Poles or Russians.

On the topic of life in the Ukraine versus life here:

"Yes, things have improved there [in the Ukraine], but life is still expensive and difficult. The cost of living is lower but so are the salaries and there's nothing to buy and nothing to buy it with. You buy a banana (she picks up a banana from the bowl of fruit in front of her) for your child and you watch how they weigh it and make sure they don't rip you off. You cut the banana up and you feed it carefully to your child, and that's it. That's it for fruit. The same for meat. Here we can have meat every day and fresh fruit. It's amazing, it's not fair what we can have here."

"My mother, as you know, was sick (she had previously told me her mother, who came to Italy for a visit a few years ago, ended up staying for a year, because she became ill. And she didn't pay anything for her hospital bills.). She now needs help. I can't go there and help her, but I can afford to pay two women to take turns taking care of her. I buy her all her medicines and send them to her."

"It's not right. It's not my fault that the situation is like this. It's the fault of the politicians [she's referring in part to the post-communist era in the former USSR, she had been critiquing earlier], and us, the general public don't have anything to do with it. It's the fault of the economic situation. It's always the fault of economics."

She goes on, emotionally talking about the fact that she has to be in Italy in order to have a comfortable, middle-class existence.

"I have everything here, a house a car, my license. I got my license here, I would never even thought to get it back home, because when would I ever have a car? Now we have two. My daughter has everything she wants, just like teenagers here. She has a 1000 euro fancy computer, she has to have that. Life goes forward. That's progress. I'm not like one of those old people who say, 'I lived perfectly well without anything, so my daughter doesn't need anything either.' No, why shouldn't my daughter have things? She needs them to succeed, it's right that I can give her these things. But it's not right that I have to be here in order to do it."

The conversation moves in many directions. We talk a long time about the lack of jobs in this part of Italy and the antagonism they say sometimes exists between immigrants and Italians-especially young Italians, they say, who don't have a steady job. At a certain point, the husband, who has, by and large remained quiet and only nodded approvingly or not at what his wife has been saying, brings up the immigrant situation in the U.S. Pointing to their television he mentions the immigrant rallies and discussions of stronger border controls in the U.S. that he sees on the news, and he asks me, "Isn't this the same as what happens there?" His wife chimes in, before I can respond, addressing me rather than her husband: "it's [the situation in Italy is] the same as America, those poor people who pick your fruit and are treated so badly. Why should they be sent to jail? It's not right. I see that on the news and I feel pity, I sympathize, because that could be us too."

OVERLAPPING STORIES

2006-06-08T01:15:00.000+02:00

I had a long conversation with the vice-mayor of Cairano today. We talked about a lot of different things related to this area and my research.

We talked about new immigrants in town and why they would chose to move here. He thinks they decide to move here because they find “condizioni favorevoli” (favorable conditions): people are “tolerant” and “sympathetic” due to the “sensibilita’ di questa vita ancora contadina” (sensibility of the peasant way of life that still exists here). Further, he suggested they move here because they can find simple, inexpensive housing, and they can make some money through the “mercato povero” (the low-cost, simple markets). He also said that “integrazione” (integration or, what we might more easily call, assimilation) is key and that he, as both vice-mayor and former mayor, has been involved in helping new immigrants integrate. Of course, for him, as a city official, integration has for the most part to do with following the law.

He told me about helping Ukrainian women, on at least two occasions, fill out their resident papers in order to get their permesso di soggiorno. (There goes my bubble; I thought I had been special—see my very first post.) Also, he suggested that one of the surest ways to guarantee a family’s success at integration in a town is to have their children attend school.

I certainly wanted to hear more about this idea, and so I asked what he meant.

He described to me a series of conversations that he and a police officer had with one Moroccan man whose children were not attending school. I asked how the father took the news that he had to send his children to school. Not well, he said: “We had to be a little ‘cruel’—the police had to go there and, with some sense of authority, tell them that the children had to go to school. Not with any violence, of course. Just using the authority that the police give. The kids had to go to school. We couldn’t have that here. In the bigger urban areas they get lost, but that can’t happen here.”

We all know what the questions are here (don’t forget what happened in France over the past year!):

What’s gained by such attempts at stability?
Does integration of immigrants happen through institutional means?
Does it require other elements as well?

These stories (from this post and the last) of authorities telling immigrants they had to send their children to school have reminded me of a similar story I heard during one of the first interviews I did. Back in February, I spoke with an Italian woman from the town of Bisaccia who had lived in Switzerland for over thirty years.

She told me that when she was pregnant with her first daughter she was working in a pantyhose factory and renting a furnished room in a house, until authorities came and told her that she and her family had to live in a larger place if they had children. I paste below the translation/transcription of what she said. (She was speaking rather freely and moving around topics loosely. She said she found life to be quite nice in Switzerland and that the Swiss were very pleasant towards Italians.)

Sure, you always find some Italian who does something he’s not supposed to do, and then, someone says, “Oh that guy did that because he’s Italian,” but then even they realize that everywhere you find honest people and people who are [trails off]…no, I have a good memory of my life there. Although everything was always in order. I see, these immigrants who come here [to Italy] today—poor things, even they live in places that are very, well, uncomfortable [trails off]…. Instead, there, no, you went with a work contract in order. For instance, when I was married, we rented a furnished room in an apartment. Then, the next year, my daughter was to be born. That is, the police…they, they tell you, “You, can’t live in this room with a baby,” and so you have to look for an apartment with at least two rooms. Because you had to live right, like they lived.

MOROCCANS AND ITALIANS—THE BASICS

2006-06-07T16:35:00.000+02:00

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

FROM CASABLANCA TO CALITRI

2006-06-06T16:52:00.000+02:00

With summer quickly approaching, my research days are numbered. Nonetheless, I’ve been continuing to gather lots of interesting material.

I finally met with some Moroccan families a few times, though I haven’t been able to get very close to any women. The Moroccan women I’ve been able to meet in this area have not learned enough Italian to communicate much, and my Arabic can’t get me past a simple greeting.
The older men, the heads of the households, are friendly but aren’t really interested in giving me their time. Instead, it’s the eldest sons—who in some cases are currently in Italian schools and in all cases speak the best Italian—whom I’ve been talking with.

For the most part, I have learned nothing I didn’t already know from reading academic articles, fiction, and journalistic pieces about North African immigrants in Italy. I have, though, finally confirmed my hunch as to why people would move to such a rural part of Italy when the urban centers have more jobs and more services for immigrants—not to mention greater access to food and goods from the immigrants’ home countries. They live here because it’s cheaper—plain and simple.

On first consideration, even factoring in the relatively low-cost of living, the choice still seems odd for the North African immigrants who make money as traveling street vendors. It makes more sense for people who have local factory jobs or work in people’s homes (see some of my earlier posts, e.g., “One Woman’s Experience” and “Em/immigration”).

As I’ve noted, the Moroccan men I’ve met (or have heard about from others) all work as street vendors, moving from outdoor market to outdoor market, and in some cases from door to door, selling their goods. They have to drive to Naples (1-2 hours away), where they buy their goods from Italians or other immigrants (mostly Chinese). Cars are expensive here, mostly because gasoline costs about three times as much as in the U.S. So while the cost of housing is relatively low, it still is somewhat surprising that Moroccan families would choose to move here given the mobility their jobs demand. Also, I’ve been told that it’s a challenge during the winter months for street vendors to make much money, and so some men leave their families in these smaller towns and spend 1-2 weeks away at a time, living with friends/relatives in larger cities in Italy (even going as far a way as Perugia in Northern Italy). This seasonal migration again adds an expense to their overall living arrangement, but one that must be financially worthwhile.

Italo-Argentines—immigrants or returning emigrants?

2006-05-14T18:39:00.000+02:00

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.

BEYOND BURMA

2006-05-08T17:06:00.000+02:00

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”.

MOVING NORTH?

2006-04-26T18:09:00.000+02:00

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

2006-04-19T23:23:00.000+02:00

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

2006-04-10T17:24:00.000+02:00

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

2006-04-10T06:14:00.000+02:00

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

2006-04-08T17:30:00.000+02:00

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?

2006-04-07T17:13:00.000+02:00

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.

ORAL HISTORIES

2006-03-28T18:18:00.000+02:00

Thanks, Audrey, for reminding me of these important perspectives about the difference between text-based and oral histories. I heard Portelli speak last November (at the AIHA conference in LA), where he elaborated on some of the ideas suggested in these quotes. Indeed, there’s no reason why I should be expecting any particular sort of story from the people I interview; in fact, it will be more interesting if no one tells me what I’m expecting or hoping to hear.

My father, also responding to my reaction to the interviews, recently made some insightful comments to me via email. I hope he doesn’t mind if I quote some of them here.

A returning emigrant of sorts himself he commented on my frustration with some of the returning emigrants’ stories of their experiences abroad. (He and my mother, both retired, now return annually from the U.S. to Italy.) He echoes their statements (referring to my terms, “exploited, discriminated, etc.”):

"If you had interviewed us, we would be among those who came here [to the US] 40+ years ago, and would probably give you the type of answers that you got. With very, very few exceptions, we were not exploited, discriminated or made to feel outsiders. It has not been a pleasant holiday, but we cannot complain. Actually, we feel that the American experience has been and is a plus for us. Yet, if you kids were not here, we would have gone back to Italy when we retired."

In commenting on the trend of the returning emigrants to speak unkindly about recent immigrants to Italy, he said something that I hadn’t thought of before:

"As for what they say about the emigrants to Italy, it simply means that they [the Italian emigrant] did not know what the Americans thought of them when they arrived in America. "

In fact, just yesterday, a woman who spent ten years in Venezuela told me that she and her family were not mistreated by native Venezuelans, but then she clarified, almost under her breath, that what she meant is if they did look down on her or treat her badly she didn’t realize it or recognize it as such.

Tomorrow: we’re off to Naples for a few days.

HELP FOR ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS?

2006-03-27T18:04:00.000+02:00

Talking with different folks I learned about an immigrant advocacy group, Associazione Tolba, near Matera. I’m familiar with similar types of nonprofit groups from my graduate school days in Bologna in the mid-1990s, and I had looked around unsuccessfully for one of them in this area. The immigrants I’ve talked to never mentioned any such help but some had gotten a hand from CARITAS, a Catholic organization, when they first arrived in Avellino (the large city, the seat of the province, west of us).

Two weeks ago, at the weekly outdoor market in Cairano M and I started talking to one of the African street vendors. Sure enough, “A” (who has been in Italy for twenty years) pulls out a little photocopied flier for ANOLF (Associazione Nazionale Oltre Le Frontiere—National Association Beyond the Borders, or something like that)—an international organization supported by one of Italy’s largest unions. It just so happens, A told us, that he is a representative for the organization for the entire province of Avellino. The organization’s mission statement: “La diversità culturale è ricchezza, sconfiggere l’intolleranza ed il razzismo è civiltà” (Cultural diversity is wealth, defeating racism and intolerance is civilization). The flyer he gave me has contact information for him, but no one else.

A quick Google search and then a few conversations, both with immigrants and with Italian academics, has made me doubt the organization’s effectiveness. One academic told me “in many parts of Italy it’s just a sham. They receive tons of money and do nothing with it.” Then an immigrant from the former Soviet Union told me a disheartening story, the gist being that she was taken for 110 euro by this organization and didn’t even get the help she had gone looking for.

I hope these stories are either untrue or just anomalous, but I’ll have to see for my self.

A DIFFERENT STORY

2006-03-10T00:48:00.000+01:00

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.

NON C'È LAVORO QUA - there is no work here

2006-03-10T00:45:00.000+01:00

Everything that comes to mind when someone tells you “I’m spending six months in Italy” has kept me from blogging. Carnevale was memorable—dancing Montemarano’s version of the tarantella and walking around Cairano with everyone in town under 60, trick-or-treating for wine, sausage, and eggs. Daytrips to Naples and Salerno weren’t too bad, either.

I’ve conducted a few more interviews, some with recent immigrants, others with former emigrants back from the Americas. I’m intrigued by a common motif in the comments of many former emigrants.

Most of the people I talk to who went abroad for anywhere from 10 to 40 years speak about their time away in entirely positive terms. They had work, they had food, they had good company. They were not exploited, discriminated against, nor made to feel as outsiders. In fact, most of my interviewees have made emigration sound like a pleasant holiday.

This is not to say that everyone has been so upbeat about their emigration experience, but the majority have. What’s nagging me about these comments is, I don’t quite believe them. What are they leaving out? Am I not spending enough time with them? Could I be asking better questions?

After reviewing the interviews I’ve come to the conclusion that what I’m hearing is in part sentimental musings about youth, in part bella figura, and in part an articulation of the possibility that life abroad, however hard it may have been, was always better than life before emigrating. (Otherwise, one would have to admit regret in having left in the first place, no?)

Nevertheless, I remain a bit “delusa” by these interviews. And something else is bothering me: the same people who offer such starry-eyed pictures have all—without exception—commented disparagingly about contemporary immigrants to Italy. (“They come here not wanting to work; their women come here sick and pregnant; there are no jobs here for our children and they come to take our few jobs, etc.”)

FORZA IMMIGRATI!

2006-02-23T18:08:00.000+01:00

I thought I’d try to post a photograph, snapped near the stadium in Avellino last week.
I first saw this billboard when we walked out of Fiumicino, the airport in Rome. Of course, I immediately thought it was startling—not to mention relevant to my work here.

The text is specific: a rough translation might be “Take as many illegal immigrants as want to come? No, thanks!” (That is, it’s not on its face a rejection of all immigrants, just the ones who come in without documents.) Nevertheless, the focus is clearly in line with Berlusconi and Forza Italia’s general anti-immigrant stance.

This position is no secret, really, and should come as no surprise to even the most casual observer of Italian politics. That a country, like Italy, with such a long history of emigration, gives broad support to an anti-immigrant platform is unsettling but perhaps not surprising (not much different than anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S., a nation of immigrants).
I won’t offer a sustained political discussion; I don’t know enough about contemporary Italian politics to do so. Nonetheless, it’s election time around here, with elections slated for April 9, and Forza Italia, in particular, is covering Italy’s billboards with this and similar messages.

IL LAVORO E IL PRESEPIO

2006-02-22T22:00:00.000+01:00

We visited San Potito Ultra, a small town right outside of Avellino the other morning, officially outside the region of my research, but just a short drive away. The town has just opened a new Museo del lavoro (Work Museum), spearheaded by the current mayor and University of Napoli professor Giuseppe Moricola.

The holdings come mainly from the personal collection of one Ezio De Felice, and as such it’s a little bit random (i.e., a huge collection of buttons and pocket watches next to a traditional Sicilian pushcart and carpenter’s tools). The work the museum documented was mainly artisan skilled labor, traditional crafts that are no longer practiced today.

I liked the historical focus of the museum, but what was needed was some reflection on what it means for the current San Potitesi, the 1400 or so who are left in town after years of emigration. Moricola explained to me that he and others aspire to make San Potito “un paese della cultura e della civilità del lavoro” (a town centered on the culture and society of work). What an interesting, and ambitious, idea. It would be good to see them incorporate the labor of new immigrants into its plans too.
One last note on the museum itself: juxtaposed next to the labor-related ephemera were these “dioramas” (for lack of a better word) that placed each particular labor sector into a real-life setting (a family butchering a pig, for instance, or, my favorite, a man “sewing” a broken ceramic bowl). Actually, Moricola called these each a presepe, (crèche); they were all made by a local artist, Sabatino Di Pietro, who normally makes presepi of the more conventional Christmas variety.

THE INTERVIEW BEGINS

2006-02-22T21:58:00.000+01:00

Last week I recorded a handful of interviews in Bisaccia and Cairano—all women who emigrated to Switzerland and/or Belgium.

So far, no one has shared any particularly shocking or frustrating experiences she had abroad as an emigrant. In fact, one woman in her late 70s who lived in Lausanne for 30-plus years said that the only people who had bad experiences abroad were people who were lazy and didn’t want to work. She added that this is the problem with Albanians in Italy today: “They don’t come here wanting to work.”

I was afraid I’d have a hard time staying quiet when someone said something objectionable to me, but I think I’m doing a decent job at keeping my mouth shut and letting people talk. I haven’t reviewed at length any of the interviews, though, and perhaps I should. (I’m using a portable DV cam to record the interviews.)

I’ve got some other interviews lined up—with people who emigrated to Venezuela, Uruquay, and the U.S.—and more contacts to follow up on. I was hoping to find more people who have returned from the U.S., or even Canada, Argentina, Venezuela, cioe’, the Americas (rather than Northern Europe), but it’s not as easy as I thought. It makes sense, of course—the majority of the postwar emigrants from Campania moved to Northern Italy or Northern Europe (even if my personal experience is one of parents who went abroad).
On another note, next week we’ll spend time in Montemarano, Paternopoli and elsewhere to follow-up on some more potential “informants” and check out the local Carnevale celebrations . . . “D” can’t decide if he wants to be a cowboy (w/lasso, senza fucile), batman, or a piece of “pasta corta”.

FILM AND EMIGRATION

2006-02-14T17:12:00.000+01:00

We finally got a hold of, and watched, La donnaccia (dir. Silvio Siano), a film I had heard and read about, but was never able to see. It just recently came out on DVD in Italy, and M and I watched it last night on my laptop. It was filmed in Cairano (the town we’re living in) in 1962 using a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors. It clearly aspired to be a neorealist take on emigration, the poverty in the mezzogiorno, the relationship between the Church, folklore, and spiritualism, and the role of women and sexuality. The film itself kind of falls apart on the level of plot, but thematically it’s interesting and ripe for academic criticism.

The making of the film and the recent “recovery” of the film makes for an interesting story too, and I look forward to writing more about the film in the future. (It’s too bad I couldn’t incorporate it into my co-edited book with Kristi Wilson, RADICAL FANTASY: ITALIAN NEOREALISM’S AFTERLIFE IN GLOBAL CINEMA, that’s due out next fall/winter!) You can find out more information about the film, here http://www.comune.cairano.av.it/default.htm.

Paolo Speranza’s book about it, UN AVVENTURA NEOREALISTA, is great too. I’d love to get the film to the U.S., but it would take some work; as it stands, it has no subtitles and the copy, while it’s been cleaned up a bit, is pretty poor. Perhaps one could find a better original copy in France (since it starred a lot of French actors) or the U.S. There’s some great music in it too, some of which reminded me of Alan Lomax’s recordings of traditional Italian folk music.

ANCH'IO SONO STATA FUORI...

2006-02-14T17:08:00.000+01:00

I’ve started talking to more and more people about my project and have started lining up potential interviewees. In fact, practically every Italian in the area at some point emigrated—it’s such a non-story to these folks. When I tell them why I’m here, most are just like, “si, anch’io sono stata fuori—in Germania per cinque anni, e poi la Svizzera per tre,” (yeah, I was away—five years in Germany and then three in Switzerland). These remarks come from people casually and matter-of-factly, as though they were telling me the time of day or how many kids they have.

But on at least one occasion, this information seemed almost a special little secret. Only after three days of visits to a telephone-electronics store in Calitri where the same young woman was helping us with our insanely complicated Internet-via-cell phone connection did she whisper to us: “Anch’io ho uno di questi” (I have one of theses too), pointing to my U.S. passport. Then the details started coming out: her mother emigrated to the U.S. for 7 years, she was born there (Connecticut); then they moved back to Italy some 15 years ago. When I asked her if her mother would be interested in being interviewed, she said, probably, but that I should be ready to hear her say how much she hates being in Italy. Another young woman we met in Bisaccia told us she was born in Switzerland under similar circumstances, and that if I interviewed her grandmother, I should be ready to hear her say unpleasant things about Moroccan and Albanian immigrants. She explained that her grandmother always comments on the fact that at the border Italian immigrants had their health screened and that today such screening isn’t done: “ci hanno pigliato pure lu sangue pe vedé se era bbuono” (they even took our blood to see if it was good), she’d probably tell me, according to her granddaughter.
As far as the other side of the project, again with the help of a family friend, I’ve met one woman from the Ukraine who is eager to talk to me about her four years here. She’s also told me she’ll introduce me to other women, all of whom work as “badanti”—in-house nurses/maids who take care of (mainly) retired men. She is exactly the kind of contact I need in order to meet more recent immigrants. It’s harder, however, to set up interviews with the Moroccan or other North African immigrants. I’ve met two women and some children; however, neither of the women speak Italian. The children speak Italian and could play translator for me, but I have little confidence in the kind of exchange we’d have. I haven’t been able to meet any of the Moroccan men, but hope that with the help of some of the people I’ve already met, I’ll be able to do so.

HERE GOES...

2006-02-03T15:00:00.000+01:00

My research project is a kind of ethnographic project—to gather interviews with various people on the subject of im/emigration in the small hill towns in the province of Avellino (the Alta Irpinia area exactly). My plan is to interview recent immigrants to Italy (in this part of Italy they appear to be mainly from the Ukraine, Romania, Albania, and Morocco) and former emigrants who have returned to their home towns (temporarily or permanently). I’m here with my husband, “M,” and our (almost) three-year-old son, “D.” For now we’re just trying to get settled into our new home in Cairano.

We’ve been in Cairano for about 4 days.

D has already started attending preschool, and is happy to be around other kids. The free public preschool in town (about a three-minute walk from our house) runs from 8:30-1:30 M-F. He’s one of seven children in the preschool, and he’s one of two “extra-comunitari”—the other non-Italian is a Moroccan girl (one of three Moroccan families in town). One of his two teachers told us that last week two little girls from Australia went back home; they had been attending the school for two months while their parents, originally from Cairano, were visiting. It seems, in fact, I don’t even need to leave Cairano to complete my project.

Two days ago we went to the questura in Avellino to register and to get our residency papers (permesso di soggiorno)—the Fulbright requires us to get a visa and to go through this process (what I mean by that is that in order to be legal residents here, we need to go through this process; the Fulbright actually requires that I prove I've gone through the steps, other wise, I'm not sure anyone would necessarily know). We had obtained visas from the San Francisco office of the Italian consulate before leaving (a typical Italian bureaucratic moment in and of itself). Due to some family contacts, we were able to get an appointment with a high-level officer at the questura and were accompanied there by the mayor of Andretta and the vice-mayor of Cairano (I’m still not sure why they both came, but I very much appreciated that they stayed with us the entire 1.5 hours). We started on the sixth floor and slowly wound our way down and through the police station’s multiple buildings, stopping at various offices to confer with different people along the way. It seems even more than a cliché to suggest that we were in some version of Dante’s Inferno, but it did cross my mind. (And having just seen Sandow Birk’s contemporary version of the Divine Comedy made me think he would have been better off placing the Inferno in Avellino instead of Los Angeles.)

I ended up behind a glassed-in area, while M and D waited with one of our guides, on the other side. The amount of paperwork was ridiculous, and neither I nor the high-ranking questura fellow understood how to fill them out. (It goes without saying that it would be insanely challenging for the average non-Italian-speaking immigrant to fill out the same forms.) The woman who took charge of our papers, and eventually filled them all out for me, was not happy with any of the documents I had from the Italian or U.S. Fulbright Commission. (For instance, she wanted proof that I had more money than just the grant money; when I offered to show her my bank accounts online, or proof that I owned a house in the U.S., she pooh-poohed the idea. Then, 15 minutes later, she rather randomly asked me if I had a credit card, and that was that.) All the while, I watched outside as men, women, and children from all parts of the globe appeared to be nervously waiting their turn. I overheard one Romanian man being told he had five days to leave Italy and he couldn’t return for five years! These folks were all waiting while I was being taken care of by at least three different officials.

Later we were led to yet another office, where we cut in line again, in order to get our hands and fingers “fingerprinted.” In fact, normally we would have been called back in 2-4 days to be finger/hand printed. (That the fingerprinting method was hilariously outdated and that they had only paper to clean our hands also goes without saying.) So, here I was, in and out of the questura in under two hours, due to my U.S. passport, my Fulbright grant, and probably most of all—the people I knew who had gone out of their way to help me through the system faster. All the while, the people perhaps most inconvenienced (the people I cut in front of) were some of the people that make up my whole reason for being here (the immigrants themselves). Ironic? Yes, I suppose. Did I feel guilty? Sure. Did I do anything about it? Nope.