ROMA RESIDENCE

Abstract

This essay is based on the author's fieldwork at Residence Roma, a residential complex located at the outskirts of Rome, Italy, where over 2,000 immigrants, of which 800 citizens of Senegal, lived in the period 2001–2006 in rented studios. It focuses on one of its buildings, occupied solely by Senegalese migrants, and on its daily spatial operations (such as the creation of open-air kitchen facilities in the studios’ balconies) and organization, emphasizing the establishment of networks of support based on internal communal rules and functional to the residents’ cultural ends. The author argues that the transnational grammar of Mourid ritual communities allowed the creation of a unique hybrid model of spatial dwelling, one able to counteract the often alienating legal discrimination which privileges Italian nationals over non-EU foreigners in housing and rental policies. In the process, the very concepts of hospitality and integration were critiqued from within. The essay also considers political actions organized against such things as the complex's with the residence's final evacuation. Such actions were successful in contrasting the logic of real estate profit only in so far as they privileged mobile, visible migrant subjects. The essay includes samples of the photographic work carried along the fieldwork by artist photographer Severine Queyras.

Keywords:

• hybridity
• Italy
• Mouridism
• Senegal
• spatial practices
• transnationalism

Acknowledgements

This essay has been presented at the conferences Scontro/Incontro: the ‘Hybrid’ Experience of Italy and Its Colonies, organized by Derek Duncan and Jacqueline Andall at the University of London in December 2005, and The Cultures of Migration, organized by Graziella Parati and Anthony Tamburri at Dartmouth College in June 2007. I would like to thank the organizers and the participants for their useful questions and comments. I also would like to thank Isabella Clough Marinaro for her invaluable suggestions and careful reading. Special thanks to Severine Queyras, Daouda Diop and the friends of Roma Residence.

Notes

¹On the articulation of the difference between these two concepts, see Derrida (2000).

²According to the Ministry of the Interior, in 2007 Senegalese immigrants with a work permit numbered 43,940 (Ministero dell'Interno 2007). This data is rather controversial given the fact that, according to the 2006 Dossier Statistico by Caritas/Migrantes, at the end of 2005 the Senegalese in Italy numbered 46,327. Scholar Serigne-Mansour Tall (2008), who interviewed the leaders of the Senegalese associations in Italy in 2003, reports that the total number of Senegalese immigrants (including those without a permit of stay) is 150,000.

³An approximate estimate of Senegalese illegal immigrants is given by the number of applications for work permits received by the Ministry of the Interior on the occasion of the December 2007 deadline for admission to Italy under the quotas decree: 14,836 Senegalese without a work permit applied, that is, around 33 per cent of the total legal number. Yet only 1,000 work permits have been allocated for Senegal. The number of applications received for other African communities included 97,085 for Morocco, 16,010 for Tunisia, 12,057 for Ghana, 5,889 for Nigeria, 1,904 for Algeria and 159 for Somalia. See Polchi (2007).

⁴My estimate was made on the basis of an average of four people per rented apartment (Palazzina A included 220 apartments) and not on the number of actual rental contracts. The director-manager of Roma Residence did not make data available concerning the actual rental contracts. These would have not been of much use anyway since, according to my calculations, many of the inhabitants of Palazzina A were not on the director's records because of their status as illegal immigrants.

⁵Pierpaolo Mudu explains how the city council has been selling apartments in the historic centre of Rome in order to buy others in the outskirts, thus pursuing a policy of economic investment rather than one of preservation of the city's real estate patrimony. Rome's real estate business had seen the involvement of the Mezzaroma family on different occasions, such as the restructuring of the ex-deposit Sefer on Via Appia Nuova (see Mudu 2006). Roma Residence is a further example of this powerful family's involvement in the city's exploitative business of decentralized investments and gentrification.

⁶When I approached potential informants, they would immediately ask if I was a journalist for the local press. Once they were informed about the academic focus of the project, they felt reassured. Nonetheless, on many occasions, I had to disclose my private affiliations with the Senegalese community in Rome in order to gain their trust.

⁷All interviews were conducted in Italian, except for the interview with Badara Seck, which was conducted in French. Translation from French is my own.