The arrival, mostly clandestine, of non-European immigrants in Italy has
been progressively increasing in recent decades, especially in thesouthern regions, a transit and work area, where at the beginning it
maintained a certain degree of invisibility, derived from work in the
fields, but which has now become increasingly visible in urban areas.
Even if it is not an "invasion", as the local right-wing proclaims to
scare their voters, the volume of first- and second-generation
foreigners is high enough to mark city life, both in large cities and in
medium and small ones, where the phenomenon can be said to be more
recent. In fact, when it was a question of a few individuals, especially
young and male, their presence did not generally disturb urban life,
except when the difference concerned precise bodily signs such as skin
color; in fact, the recognizability of Eastern European migrants is not
so immediate, considering that their somatic features are not so
different from the Italian ones. The situation is different when
families begin to arrive, and therefore women and children, who do not
replace the flow of single men, but join them, especially considering
the existence of family networks that have favored their arrival and
settlement. This phenomenon is advanced in large cities, such as
Catania, Naples or Milan, while in small ones it is an incipient
phenomenon or that is only now becoming more visible.
The arrival of families, which expresses a certain economic and social
stability, brings with it an important change both in their lives and in
those of the historical inhabitants of the various urban contexts in
which the emigrants have settled, generally peripheral, even if this is
not so evident in small urban areas, where it is difficult to
differentiate one area from another in economic terms. The most obvious
signs of these new urban settlements, characterized by a certain ethnic
homogeneity of origin, is the progressive mutation of the context: new
spaces for socializing are created, unknown music is listened to, exotic
cooking smells are perceived and, above all, shops and small
supermarkets are born characterized by products from distant lands, but
which also sell local products, from which it follows that even
non-migrants end up frequenting them, even if often only in case of
necessity. Finally, the multiplication of emigrant families implies the
presence of children, from which the pressure on state bodies for their
medical and educational assistance.
The panorama that we have outlined did not come about from one day to
the next, but has been taking shape over the last thirty years, without
politics realizing what was happening, apart from some local urban
institutions, concerned about the existence of these new "citizens"
without social protection, especially children. The legal country, as
Bobbio would have said, coincides less and less with the real country;
and even when legislation is made, it is done on the basis of "data"
constructed ideologically and not derived from real knowledge of social
processes, as is the case with the Bossi/Fini law or, more recently, the
Cutro decree. An exquisitely psychological and, clearly, ethical problem
arises here: do politicians and their voters, who do not "see" the
Italian reality increasingly irremediably mixed with other cultural
forms of life, lie knowing they are lying or do they see reality through
the filter of its representation? The answer is obvious if we consider
the five hundred thousand people who believed and voted for Vannacci,
even if I have the impression that the general knows he is lying.
Talking about representation implies knowing how to distinguish between
"panorama" and "landscape", where the first term alludes to real spatial
processes of habitation, while the second refers to the historical
construction of significant images of the panorama carried out by human
groups. Just as undifferentiated space becomes territory when it is
given names, meanings and values, the natural panorama becomes cultural
landscape, differentiated according to social groups, one of which can
become dominant, imposed by hegemonic groups and conveyed by the media.
In the case of emigrants, the various cultural landscapes that are
produced can vary from those that deny their already stable presence and
the role they play in the country's economy (and the role they will play
in the future; see the reference to the logic of pensions), to those
that have already integrated them into the representation, especially in
popular environments, naturalizing their presence. Mirrors of this
different construction of the presence of the other can be considered
the controversies on the presence of non-white Italians in elite Italian
sports; as well as those on Salvini's statements that emphasize the skin
color or the origin of those who transgress or commit a crime, which he
does not do when the transgressor is a white and Aryan Italian!
Given that urban cultural landscapes are a group product, possibly
homogeneous not only in terms of social condition but also made up of
members who carry the same culture and speak a common language or
variants with a common origin, even the growing communities of migrants
permanently resident in Italy produce representations of the territory
that can transform themselves into cultural landscapes, tools of action
on a world that need to be controlled in some way. Of course, in this
case, we must not forget that the same decision to emigrate and travel
in terrible conditions towards Europe can be considered the result of a
largely fantastic representation, but which is strongly defined by the
contrast between wealth and poverty, something very real (even if they
then discover that the poor also exist in the rich world!). In this
sense, the old representation suffers from violent processes of
restructuring, until it conforms to a new landscape, certainly subordinate.
The production of landscapes or, if you like, representations in urban
areas implies that, faced with the panorama of houses and streets, each
social group, of local or foreign origin, has different readings; that
is, there are as many cities as there are social or ethnic groups that
inhabit them and these different images "fight" with each other to
impose themselves or, in any case, to obtain enough strength to propose
themselves as a possible option, even faced with those traditional
landscapes that try to exclude them. Hence the need for a debate on
"multiethnic landscape" or "interethnic landscape", which necessarily
passes through the same concept of integration, as we will see...
Emanuele Amodio
http://sicilialibertaria.it
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