Toxic fruits: tomatoes, migration, and the new Italian slavery

ABSTRACT

In Italy, tomatoes exist at the intersection of national-cultural culinary pride, Mediterranean petro-politics, agro-environmental policy, and even gender politics. They occupy such an important place in the Italian imaginary, and in the world’s imaginary of Italy, that their cultural and culinary stature obscures the deplorable conditions of their production, and silences the voices of those whose labour delivers them to the global table. In this article, we examine the tomato harvest in three contemporary works that confront the conditions of agricultural migrant labour in Puglia and Lazio: Leogrande’s (2016) book Uomini e caporali, the noir novel Bloody Mary by Vichi and Gori (2008), and Mariani’s (2017) docu-musical film The Harvest. Through an environmental humanistic approach we unravel persistent tropes in these different forms of representation: toxicity and toxic masculinity; socio-cultural isolation; narrative and biological hybridity. These themes foreground the human costs of the harvest, but they also expose the challenges and limitations of representing it. We argue that, although the work they do is of vital importance, by dedicating little attention to tomatoes themselves and sidelining the tomato’s cultural destination on the Italian table, these accounts risk reinforcing the divide between comfortable meals and the punishing labor of the harvest.

RIASSUNTO

I pomodori italiani esistono all’incrocio tra orgoglio culinario nazional-culturale, petropolitica mediterranea, norme agro-ambientali, e politica di genere. Occupano un posto talmente importante nell’immaginario italiano che la loro statura culturale offusca le condizioni della loro produzione e mette a tacere la voce di chi lavora per servirli alla tavola globale. Questo articolo esamina la raccolta di pomodori in tre opere che trattano il lavoro agricolo migrante in Puglia e in Lazio: Uomini e caporali di Leogrande (2016), il noir Bloody Mary di Vichi e Gori (2008), e The Harvest, film docu-musicale di Mariani (2017). Adottando un approccio umanistico-ambientale identifichiamo una serie di topoi ricorrenti, quali tossicità e mascolinità tossica, isolamento socio-culturale, ibridità narrativa e biologica. Anche se queste opere mettono in risalto i costi umani della raccolta, trascurano i costi ecologici dell’agricoltura industriale e la destinazione culturale del pomodoro nella cucina italiana. In questa maniera rischiano di rafforzare il divario tra gli agi dei nostri pasti e il lavoro duro della raccolta.

KEYWORDS:

• tomatoes
• migration
• hybridity
• toxicity
• agricultural labour
• southern Italy

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• pomodori, migrazione, ibridità, tossicità, lavoro agricolo, Italia meridionale

Notes

1. The news media gave ample coverage to the unequal and exploitative treatment of migrant agricultural laborers during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which workers were particularly vulnerable to coronavirus infections due to crowded and unsanitary living conditions (Unione Sindacale di Base Lavoro Agricolo 2020). In May 2020, the Italian government approved an emergency amnesty for certain categories of irregular migrant workers, including agricultural laborers, domestic workers and caregivers (Decreto “Rilancio,” May 19, 2020). The agricultural branch of the Unione Sindacale di Base, however, led by activist Aboubakar Soumahoro, denounced the government measure as too restrictive and organized a nation-wide “strike of the invisibles” on May 21 (De Nicola 2020). This protest aimed to make visible the precarious status of migrant workers in the Italian agricultural sector, despite their essential role in the economy.

2. See, for example, several 2005 articles archived by the Confederazione italiana agricoltori, one of Italy’s largest agricultural organizations. A piece titled ‘Convegno a Benevento sui problemi della zootecnia da latte. Sottolineata l’esigenza della difesa dei prodotti “made in Italy”’ quotes the then-president Giuseppe Politi’s concerns about the ‘“pericolo giallo,” cioè l’invasione di prodotti dalla Cina’ (http://www-old.cia.it/svl/documentiRead?doc_id=7326&tpl_id=7&tpl=99).

3. Monica Seger’s research examines another of the “toxic tales” at work in Puglia, specifically dioxin contamination linked to the ILVA factory, and at the entanglements of human and nonhuman tales evident in works treating the slow crisis. Narrative about the dioxin crisis, she argues, ‘provides space not only for dissemination of information but also for a reconfiguration of meanings, drawing out cause and effect and modelling new modes of co-existence’ (2017, 37).

4. The term ‘ecomafia’ describes the activities of organized crime that have a negative impact on the environment, including unregulated housing or industrial development and waste disposal.

5. Paola Clemente’s case garnered attention in the international press, including The New York Times (Pianigiani 2017). For an in-depth treatment of her story, see: Morire come schiavi. La storia di Paola Clemente nell’inferno del caporalato by Enrica Simonetti (2016) and a documentary short, La giornata by Pippo Mezzapesa (2017), which explore the working conditions of women agricultural laborers in Puglia.

6. According to a dossier published by the Open Society Foundation, based on data from Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale (the Italian social security institution) and the Istituto Nazionale Statistica (the national statistical office), almost one third of approximately one million agricultural workers are transnational migrants; of these, approximately 50 per cent come from outside of the European Union, with the other half coming from the most recently admitted E.U. countries (Corrado 2018, 7). According to the national Consiglio per la Ricerca e l’analisi dell’Economia Agraria, which until 2016 included data about irregular workers, in 2015 migrants constituted 48 per cent of the agricultural workforce (8). The largest national group represented is from Romania, with approximately 112,000 workers, followed by India, with almost 27,000 (9). Women account for about 25 per cent of migrant workers from outside the European Union, but more than 50 per cent of the agricultural laborers from new E.U. countries, such as Poland and Romania (9). Moreover, women are paid about 30 per cent less than men (Sagnet and Palmisano 2015, 42).

7. Leogrande published Uomini e caporali with Feltrinelli in 2016, a year before his untimely death in 2017. His work expands on previous journalistic investigations into the shocking conditions of migrant workers in southern Italy, including Yvan Sagnet and Leonardo Palmisano's Ghetto Italia. I braccianti stranieri tra caporalato e sfruttamento (2015), which focuses on living conditions in the loosely organized camps that house migrant workers, and Gatti’s (2007) Bilal. Viaggiare lavorare morire da clandestini. Gatti infiltrated a group of African laborers in the tomato fields of Puglia and reported on their working conditions. In Gatti’s book, agricultural work in the province of Foggia was a stop on a much longer undercover journey from Senegal through the Sahara and the Mediterranean to Lampedusa.

8. Before the inclusion of Eastern European countries in the E.U., the vast majority of foreign-born agricultural laborers were from Africa. One of the first films engaging with questions of immigration and labor in Italy was Placido’s (1990) Pummarò, which follows a Ghanian man, Kwaku, as he travels through Italy in search of his older brother. Kwaku’s brother is nicknamed Pummarò because his first job as an undocumented worker is as a tomato picker in the Caserta region. The film sheds light on the exploitative practices to which undocumented workers are subject to due to their precarious legal status. Many of these practices remain unchanged in the 2010s (see Jones and Awokoya 2019; Sagnet 2017; Sagnet and Palmisano 2015).

9. It is important to note that, as in the case of Paola Clemente, southern Italian women often find themselves in similar situations on the labor market.

10. The 2010 riots were included in Jonas Carpignano’s 2015 film, Mediterranea, which follows the story of two migrants from Benin through the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, to Rosarno, where they are employed off the books as orange pickers. Scholar Francesco Di Bartolo (2013) pointed out the parallels between these riots and the organized protests of orange pickers in the countryside of Siracusa (Sicily) in the 1960s.

11. Edizioni Ambiente’s editor-in-chief Marco Moro (2018, 195) explains that Verdenero ‘was conceived as a campaign to raise awareness through literature’. He observes that the series ‘was able to introduce into public discourse topics that were usually concealed by the gaps between national and local politics, between the official economy and the parallel one of organized crime’ (198). At the end of each novel, a short chapter titled ‘I fatti’ recounts the environmental crimes that inspired the fiction. Antonio Pergolizzi of Legambiente’s branch devoted to ‘Ambiente e Legalità’ writes these concise narratives, becoming an additional co-author of sorts for each novel. A final page describes the Legambiente, its goals, and some of its more prominent projects.

12. This racialization is made visible in many films about migration to Italy from Eastern Europe, beginning with Gianni Amelio’s 1994 Lamerica, which opens with archival footage of the Fascist regime’s annexation of Albania into the Kingdom of Italy, while the voiceover hails the conquest as a civilizing mission, thus constructing the Albanians as culturally and ethnically inferior. This racialization of the Albanian other is internalized by the Italian protagonist until his journey across the Balkan country forces him to question its logic.

13. In a discussion of Naples’ toxic waste crisis, Iovino (2016, 37) elaborates on the ‘invisible, socially intersectional, and massive “slow motion slaughter” (Nixon 2011, 312), which takes place in the opaque necro-ecologies of power, illegality, and political slackness’.

14. The Indian community in Italy is the country’s seventh largest immigrant group. According to research by demographic scholar Nachatter Singh Garha (2020), there were 150,436 registered Indian immigrants in Italy in 2016. Although nearly a third of them reside in Lombardy, in the province of Latina, they make up a significant portion (20.7 per cent) of the immigrant population.

15. Whereas in the U.S. the term ‘first-generation Americans’ would be used to designate immigrants’ children born in the U.S., in Italy the phrase ‘second generation’ is used, even when the children are Italian-born. This is due to Italian citizenship law, based on ius sanguinis, which does not automatically grant citizenship to children of non-Italian citizens even if they have lived in Italy since birth.

16. Stephen Hogan, who is the Italian-British singer for the rock band Slick Steve and the Gangster, interprets the role of Gurwinder’s boss; his henchmen are played by guitarist Alle B. Goode, double bass player Pietro Gozzini, and drummer Beppe Facchetti.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giovanna Faleschini Lerner

Giovanna Faleschini Lerner is Professor of Italian at Franklin and Marshall College. Her scholarship includes article and books chapters on cinematic and literary interpretations of history, visual and inter-art studies, women’s and gender studies, motherhood studies, Mediterranean studies, as well as the literature and cinema of migration in Italy. She is the author of Carlo Levi’s Visual Poetics: The Painter as Writer (2012), co-editor of Italian Motherhood on Screen (2017) with Maria Elena D’Amelio, and of a special issue of Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (2019) with Elena Past and Nicoletta Marini-Maio. She also guest edited the 2018 issue of gender/sexuality/Italy.

Elena Past

Elena Past is Professor of Italian at Wayne State University. Her research includes work on the toxic waste crisis in Naples, Mediterranean cinema and ecocinema, and Italian crime fiction and film. She is the author of Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction (2012) and Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human (2019), and co-editor of Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (2014) with Deborah Amberson, and of Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies (2018) with Serenella Iovino and Enrico Cesaretti.