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(en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: Amodio - Multiethnic urban landscapes (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Tue, 1 Oct 2024 08:32:43 +0300


The arrival, mostly clandestine, of non-European immigrants in Italy has been progressively increasing in recent decades, especially in the southern 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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