[Picture from the same article
- copyright opendemocracy.net, 9/11/2012 - Demotix/Fernandino Piezzi. All rights reserved.]
In 2010 and 2011 migrants behaved like activist citizens throughout Italy,
initiating a new cycle of struggles in the crisis of neoliberalism. Their
contestation of an exclusionary, racialized and competitive model of society
could become a goal shared by migrants and nationals alike.
08.11.2012. ‘We will be remembered’; whoever wrote this on the wall of an
abandoned industrial site near Rosarno, in the southern Italian region of
Calabria, did not know how right he would be. The anonymous writer was one of
the hundreds of migrants from many African countries working in this region as
orange-pickers during the winter. Year after year, they transformed an old
olive oil factory into a highly precarious and uncomfortable shelter.
The sentence on the wall appears like a message in a bottle, sent before
the authorities removed almost all Africans from the town ‘for their own
security’. It refers to the tumult that exploded on 7 January 2010 in Rosarno,
where hundreds of migrants rebelled after two of them were injured by three
Italian youngsters in a drive-by shooting. The rioting workers set on fire
rubbish bins, destroyed shop windows and cars, engaged in urban guerrilla
clashes with the police, and finally they became the target of a ‘black man
hunt’ unleashed by the resident population: during the same night many migrants
were beaten with iron bars and two were shot. In the next three days, with the
excuse of protecting them from the rage of Italians, about 2,000 African
workers were either moved from the site by the police or fled voluntarily.
