Migrant Struggles

https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books/catalog/484-and-other-such-stories
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/and-other-such-stories/9781941332542
https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/current/contributors
...and Other such stories book edited by Paulo Tavares,  Sepake Angiama , Yesomi Umolu
ISBN: 9781941332542

The 'Gran Ghettò' is a spontaneous settlement located in the Capitanata Plain, Apulia, Italy. Since the 90s, thousands of migrant workers have travelled to this " shanti town " transforming it in the vastest recruiting centre in the area, providing cheap labour for the tomato harvest. In 2012 Campagne in Lotta, a large political network of native and foreign workers, has established a project in the Gran Ghetto with the aim to break workers' seclusion and articulate collective demands for fairer labour conditions. This chapter is an account of that experience and of the political struggle which was born from it. The account will be structured in two sections corresponding to the two separate, but intertwined, moments of my own militant research as part of Campagne in Lotta. The first section will be concerned with an analysis of the existing conditions of life in the Ghetto: here workers' exploitation will be explained against the backdrop of the intersection between Capital and the many governmental tools for the control of migrant mobility. The second section, furthermore, will be concerned with Campagne in Lotta's political intervention in the Ghetto. The practices of Campagne in Lotta, I will argue, are based on the appreciation of and contribution to informal networks of migrant relations. These networks constitute the infrastructure of a virtual migrant metropolis, connecting migrant's movements on a global scale. In the three years of its existence Campagne in Lotta has managed to become a part of these travelling relations: moving across the metropolis through the accounts of people who have participated in its projects and finding new places of intervention as it's members change location. The embeddedness of Campagne in Lotta in this metropolis, therefore, constitutes its biggest strength and is precondition for a radically different political process to take place.

In this article I examine the history and main developments of the Askavusa Association, founded in 2009 in Lampedusa, the southernmost Italian territory, on the southern edge of Europe. As one of the most active and interesting collectives supporting the migrant struggle in Italy, Askavusa has received attention for its various activities held in Lampedusa and abroad, and especially for the organization of the LampedusaInFestival and the collection of migrants' objects in PortoM. As an activist and member of the group, in this article I concurrently identify some of the limits of the actions organized by the collective. As such, this article represents the natural outcome of my participation and collaboration with Askavusa, combined with an analysis of several interviews that I collected in Lampedusa over the years.

O texto analisa o protagonismo e as lutas migrantes na América Latina no contexto da Covid-19. O artigo forma parte do projeto (I)mobilidade nas Américas e foca especialmente no caso brasileiro, descrevendo as lutas pelo direito à saúde e à regularização.

Migrant struggles in contemporary Italy offer a critical standpoint for understanding the uses of race in times of crisis. This paper analyses racialization first as a structural feature of neoliberalism in Italian society, and then as a crisis management strategy in the transition to late neoliberalism. Against this background, migrant struggles – for freedom of movement and the right to life, for equality at work, for the right to housing – will be interpreted as examples of counter-racialization. Through the development of counter-discourses on the crisis and austerity, in terms of causes, responsibilities and alternatives policies, and through practices of solidarity those struggles deconstruct the dominant frame of "ethnic competition for scarce resources" and try to reunite "those below" against "those above" across national and other racializing lines.

In this article, I trace struggles regarding EU internal mobility and migrant labour as they emerge in the mobilization of South European migrants in Berlin. The effects of the 2007–2008 financial crisis and European austerity politics have reoriented migration flows within the EU, increasing South-to-North migration with Germany as a prime destination. German public discourse on the matter reveals a view on (EU) migration that focuses on its economic 'usefulness' and tries to regulate it accordingly. EU citizenship turns out to be a key instrument of such EU internal 'migration management'. The emergence of migrant activist groups, however, hints at another force at play. In their fight for social rights and better working conditions , migrant activists show they will not allow themselves to be easily 'managed' into precarious 'productivity'. Against this background, I argue that EU internal mobility is a field of struggle where attempts to control migrant labour clash with moments of autonomy and resistance. My aim is to explore this field from a migration perspective, analysing rationales of EU 'migration management' and their impact on migrants' lives as well as investigating the strategies that migrants develop in response. Based on an analysis of EU legislation and interviews with Italian activists in Berlin, I trace conflicts around EU internal mobility and migrant labour. Against the background of critical migration studies, I analyse EU internal 'migration management', especially regarding the role of EU citizenship. Then, I look at EU migrant struggles in Berlin through the lens of autonomy of migration, drawing on the example of the Italian activist group Berlin Migrant Strikers.

Critical scholarship on "the promise-of-the-political" thesis customarily understands undocumented migrant struggles (UMS) as being politically disruptive. However, the question of what gets disrupted, how, by whom, and to what effect tends to be ignored. Building on insights from the empirical literature on UMS and ethno-graphic research of the "Solidarity March With and Without Papers", this paper argues that three conditions need to be in place for UMS to be disruptive. First, undocumented activists need to craft collective intentions to challenge the institutional order in and through joint action. Second, protest acts need to effectively interrupt everyday routines symbolising the status quo and instigate replication. Third, UMS need to unsettle and force a response from the order in ways that defy existing institutional logics. These findings are translated into a research agenda that proposes to investigate the relative importance of collective intentionality, inaugural performativity and institutional recep-tivity for UMS.

This article investigates the acts of protest that occurred in the city of Barcelona and other Spanish cities in 2001 in response to imminent toughening of the Foreigners’ law 8/2000. The sit-ins, demonstrations and hunger strikes led to negotiation with the government and the government’s acceptance of some of the undocumented migrants or ‘sinpapeles’ demands for regularization of their status. At the same time, the sinpapeles also expressed a critique of the entire anti-immigrant border regime. These events demonstrated that citizenship could not be viewed exclusively as a fixed regime. Rather, it was a site for legal and political contestation. With the emergence of new subjects as claimants of rights, a number of scholars have pointed to the need for an alternative vocabulary of citizenship studies, one that includes certain practices that were previously excluded. The concept ‘acts of citizenship’ offers an approach to investigating such actions that considers actors not currently recognized as legal and political subjects. Applying this concept to the struggles of the sinpapeles, this article demonstrates how a number of acts converted previously undocumented immigrants into subjects of legaity, and to a certain extent, into citizens.

Este artículo propone un estudio de las nuevas configuraciones que asumen las luchas migrantes en Argentina entre los años 2016 y 2019. El surgimiento de organizaciones de migrantes, como el Bloque de Trabajadorxs Migrantes (BTM), y el impulso de espacios de articulación, como la Campaña Migrar no es Delito (CMND), imprimen nuevas características al campo político de la migración en Argentina. El análisis se orienta a describir y analizar las visiones, demandas, estrategias, estructuras de organización y los vínculos que estas organizaciones mantienen con el Estado. La metodología es de carácter cualitativo en el análisis de declaraciones y de registros de campo en movilizaciones y actividades públicas del BTM y la CMND.

Authors: Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti
Photographic Documentation: Luca Capuano
Contributors: Jad Tabet, Sari Hanafi, Ismae’l Sheikh Hassan, Pelin Tan, Ilana Feldman, Khaldun Bishara, Suad Amiry, Thomas Kenan, Foad Al-Laham, Nasser Ramadan, Osama Jafari, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Rasha Salti, Paul B. Preciado, Elias Khoury, Khalil Abu Laham, and Eyal Weizman.