Within and Against Racial Segregation: Notes from Italy’s Encampment Archipelago

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic brought migrant farm workers into the limelight once again, as has happened recursively in the last three decades, in Italy as in many other parts of the world. Branded as “essential,” they were the object of intersecting and sometimes conflicting discourses and interventions which ranged from the criminalizing to the victimizing and the humanitarian.¹ Yet, abandonment always lurked as the possible outcome of a governmental process intent on sorting bodies and their worthiness of attention, care, and sympathy. Here, I wish to reflect on some of the affective dynamics that sustained both the governmental operations through which these biopolitically conceived “populations” were (sought to be) managed and reactions against them. I do so from a situated perspective, as an accomplice to many of the forms of struggle that migrant farm workers have promoted in the last decade in Italy. The stage for many of these occurrences is what elsewhere I defined as the “encampment archipelago”² that many such workers, and particularly those who migrate from across West Africa, inhabit—labor or asylum-seeker camps, but also slums or isolated, derelict buildings, and various hybrid, in-between spaces among which people circulate.

Segregating Anxieties and Humanitarian Racisms

On the one hand, the “assemblages” (assembramenti³) of migrants in some city neighborhoods during the first lockdown period wreaked havoc among residents, who—often instigated by neofascist politicians perennially in search of an opportunity to gain visibility—perceived these “foreign bodies” as a health hazard. This is the case, for example, with Foggia, the capital of the second most extensive agricultural district in Italy, located in the northern part of the southeastern Apulia region. In the neighborhood adjacent to the city’s train station, a series of dedicated stores selling halal meat and specialty food from West Africa, Eastern Europe, and South Asia, as well as money-transfer, communication services and betting agencies, have flourished in the last decades. This is a reference point for migrant farm and care/sex workers who live scattered in slums, labor camps, derelict farmhouses, and other abandoned buildings outside or in the outskirts of the city. Through the years, the presence of “loitering” migrants has repeatedly attracted the hostility of a portion of the citizenry, fuelled by far-right groups, and often expressed in the biopolitical language of contamination. Periodic police and vigilante raids are one of the most pernicious effects of these anxieties and their manipulation. Likewise, the sharing of public transport from the hamlet of Borgo Mezzanone (where one of the largest slums is located) towards the city of Foggia reproduced long-brewing animosities across racial(ized) lines, exacerbated by the suddenly materialized threat of an actual viral infection.⁴

On the other hand, the living conditions of many migrants, who are confined to isolated and insanitary dwellings, made for alarms among civil-society organizations who feared an outburst of contagion in those spaces. Thus, many NGOs were prompted to organize campaigns that brought sanitizing equipment and face covers, as well as food and instructions on how to wash one’s hands, to the poor and outcast par excellence.In the month of April 2020, some of the West African dwellers of the high-security labor camp at San Ferdinando (located in the district of Reggio Calabria) reacted angrily at the spectacularized display of charity attempted by Catholic third-sector giant, Caritas. Volunteers and camera people were drawn out, and some commotion ensued in the camp management’s office.⁵

As an informal, militant group that has supported the self-organization of migrants living in such spaces for years, my comrades and I experienced a sense of impotence derived first from forced immobilization and the concomitant threat of repression (and contagion). But such feelings also combined with a mounting frustration vis-à-vis the intensifying of long-rehearsed criminalizing/victimizing/paternalistic discourses, the Janus-faced operations of othering with which we are so familiar. Those go hand-in-hand with the spectacularization of migrant farm workers (our racially-marked comrades, friends, brothers, and sisters), and their living spaces—where, meanwhile, life seemed to go on as usual. After all, neither life in emergency, nor racist quarantining or infantilization were news of any sort, and work in the farms was no less harsh, underpaid, and casualized for being suddenly cast as essential. As a matter of fact, threats to health and life itself in such spaces of containment result much more from the existential precarity structured by racism than from the global pandemic. It was rather as if, for once, the white European majority was being given a taster of what life in emergency mode feels like.

Contagion anxieties projected upon such an abject “population,” however, proved unfounded until well into the summer months. Thus, some of the most putatively authoritative news outlets in the Italian media wondered, in the aftermath of spurious declarations by eminent virologists, whether “African” (thus implicitly Black) migrants might be immune from the disease given the extremely low rate of detected cases among this group.⁶ The “durability”⁷ of discourses on racial immunity summoned the recursive, stratified temporalities of racist violence and their cavalier effects, justifying abandonment and unequal distributions of empathy, care, and sensitivity. Months later, against all evidence and supposedly defending “African migrants” as “our” future (in utilitarian terms, as workers and taxpayers), against those singling them out as disease carriers, a member of the lower chamber of Parliament reiterated the point. (African) migrants “are stronger than us,” “none of them is hospitalized with COVID-19, they do not get infected. It is a matter of genetics.” In a speech that seemed to conjure localized iterations of nineteenth-century racialist science, he continued, “I, who am from Calabria, I am stronger. I had COVID-19 but it lasted only for a day. Calabrian people are stronger because genetically more resistant, we are white Africans.”⁸ Others among those interviewed by the same radio show agreed: “they [Africans] embark upon ‘voyages of hope’ [viaggi della speranza, as migrants’ Mediterranean crossings are known in public discourse], they are stronger.” The broadcast followed up from a skirmish between the “liberal” parliament member and a neofascist counterpart, in which, besides Africans, “Romas” were also scapegoated as disease spreaders. The entire repertoire of racist and anti-migrant arguments which has characterized Italian public debate in the last decades, and which summons deeper genealogies, was rehearsed once again.⁹

In the case of migrant farm workers, among whom the West African component is rather large¹⁰, living conditions structurally akin to quarantine, together with slum/camp dwellers’ age-old experience in observing strict hygiene rules in dire conditions,¹¹ might help understand how the pandemic was initially staved off. Indeed, the different “camp forms”¹²to which their inhabitants are confined can be seen to respond to the three interrelated logics which Marc Bernardot¹³ identified as subtending to such apparatuses of capture: the fear of invasion, of subversion, and of contamination. Here, the protection of external borders and of internal cohesion is associated with the preservation of the healthy body of the nation. Historically, spaces of quarantine were juxtaposed with, and helped bring forth, the modern structures of sovereignty and migration management. If epidemics played a foundational role in the construction of modern states, since at least the nineteenth century the quarantining of migrants (at departure and/or destination) formed a core procedure in the selection of able and “safe” bodies to put to work, and of others to abandon to their fate as excess populations. From a health-risk management tool, the camp became a wide-ranging prevention device, imposing a generalized quarantine for the sorting of individuals. The biopolitics of population government thus found in the camp one of its central architectural and juridical props. In the words of Bernardot:

Foreigners’ camps are inscribed on the one hand in the tradition of the lazaretto and of leprosy, and on the other in that of maritime quarantine. They are their modern form, to the extent that they partake of their preventive function in health matters, but extend it in repressive fashion . . . to other types of risk, notably demographic and political. This goal is most often articulated to others, for the management of crises and migrations. Camps thus function as a decontamination or confinement chamber in exceptional circumstances, whilst health posts (which have replaced quarantines and lazarettos) are integrated into the healthcare and border protection systems.¹⁴

In the contexts I am concerned with, spatial devices compound with juridical and symbolic-affective dispositifs to contain foreign bodies: socio-physical separation is not engineered only through formalized camp structures. Formal and informal spaces of segregation, and their legal underpinnings, are also produced through discriminatory migration policies that create differential access to citizenship rights along a continuum (up until total banishment), reinforced by racist prejudice. Even those documented West African migrants who might afford it face difficulties renting houses in city and town centers, and often prefer to live in slums where they can rely on their community for the kind of support and conviviality that hardly comes from those who do not identify with them (many Italians but also migrants from other parts of the world). Slums are, furthermore, spaces where organization and resistance (as much as exploitation and a range of forms of negative reciprocity) can take shape. For this reason, they are feared by institutional apparatuses which periodically proceed to their dismantlement, “sanitization,” and/or regimentation into formalized camps with their attendant rules and restrictions. Yet, a perfectly reined in labour camp is really only a fantasy of power: architectures, infrastructures, and limitations to dwellers’ freedom are ordinarily tampered with, and protest as well as trespassing are a constant potential in such spaces. 

Refusals and Reversals of Containment

Indeed, the whole carceral archipelago—of which labor camps are a part—has been intermittently on fire since the spring of 2020. Prisons became the stage of some of the earliest, most significant, dramatic, and even, sadly, tragic protests against the restrictive measures ostensibly implemented to contain the spread of the virus inside detention facilities, and against the actual disregard for inmates’ health which such provisions concealed. Inmates of migrant detention centres, as well as asylum seekers housed in reception facilities and in quarantine ships reserved for incoming migrants, were also among the first to rise up, later followed by migrant farm laborers, whether homeless and precariously housed or contained in camps and slums.

Whilst segregation-as-usual and immobility characterized the first phase of the pandemic, as the summer harvests approached the requirements of agroindustrial production, and the vulnerability of the workers on which it relies to guarantee profits, pushed many seasonal laborers to move between enclaves across the country, as in previous years. In the northwestern district of Saluzzo (part of the province of Cuneo, Piedmont), where the multimillion fruit industry employs thousands of (mostly migrant) casual workers, institutions at all levels erected barriers against the provision of safe accommodation for those workers (once again, mainly West African) who were already in the country, much to the concern of farmers who were already alarmed by the lack of laborers due to mobility restrictions. Publicly managed labor camps in many cases did not open, ostensibly for fear of contagion. Pushed to seek work after many months of near standstill, migrant workers faced fines and charges for having violated restrictions, and were prevented even from erecting the informal tent camp (tellingly nicknamed “Guantanamo”) they had relied on in previous years. Army effectives were deployed to such an end. Incoming job seekers were thus forced to sleep in public parks, on curbs and in abandoned buildings, being careful not to be spotted in groups of more than three, lest they be fined and even expelled from the district by administrative fiat. The luckier ones found accommodation within farms—far from an ideal arrangement, given the isolation, the typically poor conditions of lodging, and the chances it affords employers for increased control and the intensification of working rhythms.

It was in such a scenario that one of the first protests was staged, in June 2020 (see figure 1). Defying police and government restrictions on their right to demonstrate (yet another ostensible measure of health protection), homeless casual workers displayed a staggering determination. First, they flouted institutional and farmers’ representatives, who, summoned to an urgency meeting, had responded to workers’ demands with a well-rehearsed repertoire of indifference, vagueness, and even open hostility. Protesters then reassembled into a parade that crossed the wealthy and mostly ill-disposed town of Saluzzo, repeatedly bringing traffic to a halt. And finally they (we) reached the site where, in previous years, a hostel had been made available to seasonal workers. Here, some proceeded to climb the tall concrete, barbed wire-topped wall surrounding the edifice, hands clasping the skin-tearing metal, under the vigilant eye of police cameras. Others caught hold of a stone and sought to smash the iron door open, to no avail. A police charge followed.¹⁵ Those of us, accomplices and solidary, who were present could not but admire the power of this collective statement of existence and resistance, and be dismayed by the callousness of the institutional response. Days later civil-society organizations issued statements demanding a solution to the housing issue faced by farm laborers, without ever acknowledging the migrants’ protest—a reiteration of epistemic violence that is no news but always a blow. And yet, despite the total lack of overt recognition, the protest led to the opening of several facilities for migrant farm workers. Police checks, deportations, expulsion orders, and the more general criminalization of some of those who participated in the protest accompanied this process, although police measures were partially overturned by courts. The living arrangements provided by local and state authorities often consisted of container boxes and small tents. As usual, it was a very partial and hard-won result.

Together with the protest in San Ferdinando mentioned earlier, this event inaugurated a period of tensions which would last until the end of the harvest season in November, during which migrants contested their surplus of segregation, implemented on “preventive” grounds but inflected with racialized differentiation. A few days after the protest in Saluzzo, in the town of Mondragone (on the Domitian littoral, north of Naples), another moment of much spectacularized, protracted protest broke out, this time involving Bulgarian farm workers, in overt conflict with some hostile locals and national-level politicians.¹⁶ Episodes of open confrontation later took place in Saluzzo, Palazzo San Gervasio (district of Potenza, Basilicata region, see Figure 2), Foggia, and San Ferdinando.¹⁷ These events entailed the refusal of hospitalization or isolation for “asymptomatic virus carriers” or the rejection of medical staff and health personnel performing tests and sharing information on the pandemic in the slums. Protests also broke out against the cordoning off of whole camps once COVID cases were detected, and against the delay in the opening of other camps because authorities had not adapted the facilities in compliance with preventive measures. Across the spectrum, an underlying exceptionalism was being contested, which assigned migrants to a different biopolitical category, unworthy of the forms of care, information, and attention devoted to citizens. Those diagnosed with the virus were kept in isolation together with healthy and COVID-negative people; communication was scanty and inaccurate; “COVID hotels” for asymptomatic patients were barred to (racialized) non-citizens, who could count at best on dedicated container boxes, that predictably were not appreciated as solutions. In this scenario, people who felt healthy and strong demanded to be allowed to work to support themselves and their relatives, affines, and others to whom obligations and affection are felt back in their countries of origin and beyond. And indeed, law enforcement agents often turned a blind eye to migrants eluding quarantine to go work in the farms. The contradictions between the racialized systems of biopolitical containment and those of labor extraction surfaced in all their sharpness, but were ultimately resolved in forms of carelessness and abandonment. To date, no reliable and generalized provisions have been made to allow those not in possession of a national health insurance code (who may be otherwise documented or not, given the bureaucratic maze in which migrants are stuck by virtue of immigration policies) to get vaccinated and obtain the “green pass” that is now compulsory for long-distance travel and work.

Among African migrants stuck in the encampment archipelago, belief in racial immunity is widespread and concerns and conspiracy theories about the inflating of positive diagnoses for the purpose of profit on the part of health authorities, or about medical staff being responsible for the spread of the virus in the slums and camps abound. As a result, some migrants broke away from quarantine, while others refused to be tested or to reveal their contacts for the purposes of tracing. Whilst these inclinations might resonate with reactionary forms of denialism, the position from which they were aired grants for further consideration. As scholars, we have learned to understand conspiracy theories and rumor as political commentaries, which have often manifested among racialized and oppressed groups¹⁸ and in connection with the biopolitical management and prevention of disease.¹⁹ As militant accomplices, in the past year and a half many of us have faced the challenge of how to relate to such affectively laden manifestations of dissent beyond their truth value and to dispel the frustrations inherent in any such exercise of communication across epistemological barriers. Whilst not a definitive answer, witnessing, solidarity, complicity, and co-presence are the first, essential ingredients.

Acknowledgements

Most of the research and analysis for this piece was carried out within the ERC Advanced Grant project “The Colour of Labour: The Racialised Lives of Migrants” (grant no. 695573, PI Cristiana Bastos). The author is currently funded by a grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), grant no. 2020.01002.CEECIND/CP1615/CT0009.