Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Euro-centric and caucacentric frames of Northern Italian citizens and political fig-
ures of which Pugliese writes belie a growing heteroglossia (in this sense, contestatory
practices) and polyculturality.
During the past two decades I have listened to and observed people of African origin
od was marked by dramatic precarity when some of the most common problems in-
cluded their being in highly vulnerable positions without residence papers, being rejec-
ted time and again for jobs they were qualified to do, and paying exorbitant rents for
substandard housing. During later visits I sometimes caught them breathing sighs of re-
lief, for instance as they or members of their families found work after having been un-
employedformanymonths,theircooperativeswereawardedgrantsfromthemunicipal,
regionalgovernmentsortheEuropeanUnionforvariousworkandinterculturalprojects,
their residency permits were renewed, or they had managed to find a landlord to rent
them a reasonable apartment. At other junctures I found them upset, anxious, frustrated,
and talking about how their family members were dying in African conflicts while the
Italian and other European governments did nothing to help, they'd lost a job or hadn't
been paid by an employer, weren't making enough money to pay their rent, were ex-
periencing
and
being blamed for crime, were losing jobs to competition from Eastern
Europeans, or they were not being heard by anyone with authority in the Italian govern-
ment, trade unions, or political parties. But I have to say that until the summer of 2010 I
had never heard from my African and Italian informants such a converging and encom-
passingsenseofdespairanddesperation.The
crisi
orcrisesofunemployment,precarity
of work, and vulnerability to job loss, rising costs and lower salaries, high taxes, and
cutbacks to or erasure of government supports were constant refrains among my Italian
informants. Almost all of my African informants were either unemployed or working
part time with temporary and low paying contracts, usually in the informal economic
sector. Some talked about leaving Turin.
These stories were also expressed in the ways that people in Turin inhabited and ex-
perienced place, in what Allan Pred referred to as the “situated practices” of everyday
life that intersect with what I believe are some very dramatic transformations in Turin's
politicalculture(Pred1990,2000).Laborhistorian,FrancescoCiafalonidescribedwhat
was happening in Turin as “I think the worst situation in two hundred and fifty years,”
typified by the
rovesciamento
or capsizing of the partnership of trade unions and gov-
ernment that had worked to represent workers and protect them from exploitation.
By 2010, most of the trade union leadership had become professionalized, following
middle-class habits and ways of life, modeling themselves after managers of large firms
or heads of offices in public administration and using their positions as stepping stones
for positions of greater authority, for instance in politics (Ciafaloni 2011) These lead-
