Clandestini in the Orange Towns: Migrations and Racisms in Calabria's Agriculture

Abstract

This article analyzes migrations to the rural areas of Calabria, a region in southern Italy, illustrating the combination of factors and elements that makes extremely complex the composition of migrations and their participation in the local economic and social process of transformation. The analysis cannot move without considering changes in migration policies, at the national as well as the European level, since the 1990s, developing together with the transformations of policies and organizational models in the agrarian sector. These processes have produced a segmentation of the economy and a differentiation in labor and mobility, due to ethnicization, hierarchization, and racialization. The article is organized into three sections. The first synthesizes the evolution of migration policies in Europe and specifically in Italy and the effects produced in terms of clandestinization and hierarchization inside the migrant population. The second section illustrates the conditions of insertion and reproduction of migrations in the agriculture of southern Italy, with particular emphasis on the oranges' sector in Calabria. The third section analyzes the Africans' riots of 7 January 2010 in Rosarno, a rural village in the Gioia Tauro Plain, where the combination of "institutional racism," "mafia racism," and "social racism" has played a fundamental role.