Abstract
Contadini—peasant farmers—are central figures of belonging in a Northern Italian winegrowing community. The skills and languages in which contadini are fluent and who is recognized as one of them organize the values attached to various roles in this world. I show how the immigrant vineyard workers who maintain local landscapes engage with this identity, producing new selves through the labor of caring for vines. Earning the title of contadino allows some immigrants to cross social boundaries usually policed by strict ethnic lines in Italy, generating recognition and benefits unavailable from the state. At the same time, Italian employers’ relation to the land changes as they hand off ways of knowing and doing to categorical outsiders. ‘Traditional’ labor and products are what pull these two groups into a collaborative encounter, but rather than simply keeping the past in practice, immigrants and Italians also generate new forms of personhood and value.
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Notes
The names of people in this article have been changed to protect their privacy, but the names of towns and regions have not.
Caught between exploitative sharecropping systems and the limits of small parcels of hilly land, Piedmontese peasants survived on a paltry diet of corn and wheat, seasoned with whatever fruit, vegetables, nuts they could cultivate or forage (Parasecoli 2014). Pellagra—a disease caused by niacin deficiency, often the result of a corn-based diet—was rampant and infant mortality was high (Whitaker 1992). Meat appeared on the family table at best once or twice a year. Today Piedmont is a gastronomic destination, home to distinguished red wines and rich meals of beef, goat cheese, eggs, and butter. But this menu reflects the diet of only the wealthiest Piedmontese less than a century ago, when most scraped by on more spartan fare (Revelli 1977).
Most media attention to immigrant labor in Italy focuses on the plight of migrant workers in the southern regions, highlighting gross labor abuses, violence, shanty towns, and caporalato contracting (which has older roots in Italian agriculture). Southern Italy remains more heavily dependent on agriculture than the North, producing the bulk of Italian staples like tomatoes, wine grapes, and olives. Northern regions industrialized during Italy’s mid-century economic boom, drawing much of the rural population to manufacturing jobs in urban centers (Blim 1990; Holmes 1989). As a result, the remaining northern agriculture is largely in the hands of smallholders, and the occupation of ‘farmer’ retains some bucolic qualities (see Black 2012; Cavanaugh 2007; Grasseni 2011). In the South, the unequal dynamics of Italian unification left most areas lacking infrastructure or industry and at the mercy of absentee landlords, brigands, and widespread poverty (Aprile 2011). This legacy inflects contemporary agriculture with a different set of ideas about labor and power than northern rural life, an important detail in considering how and why immigrant presence in agriculture differs widely in different regions of Italy.
Data from ISTAT studies conducted between 1980 and 1995, accessed at https://www.istat.it/
Macedonian winemaking dates back at least 4000 years, and wine and viticulture remained part of rural life and diversified agriculture into the modern period. In 1982, Macedonia had 40,000 hectares of vineyards, mostly organized into large vertically integrated agro-conglomerates that shipped bulk wines to Slovenia, where it was bottled and distributed through the Yugoslav market. A smaller portion was bottled in Macedonia for the local market (Porter 2006). After the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia, a few small boutique wineries established themselves in the 1990s, a number that continues to grow today. Unlike viticulture in Piedmont, winegrowing in Macedonia (and its neighbors to the east and north) remains largely divided between industrial winemaking and subsistence production in households. The industry is still considered nascent, with European investors eyeing affordable land in the Balkans outside of EU regulations (The Economist 2011). As in Italy, most winegrowers are smallholders who sell their grapes to larger wineries.
As a volunteer at three different family-operated vineyards and wineries, I paid careful attention to the ways that Italians and immigrants performed and described their work. Sharing in their tasks allowed me to appreciate the skill and stamina that each required, and to recognize the hierarchy of authority and responsibility that organized operations. My outsider status created space for Italians to comment on their employees, or explain what they thought I needed to know in order to understand an event or interaction. On the other hand, my association with Italian employers undoubtedly shaped how immigrant workers communicated with me and what was said (or omitted), and my analysis is weighted towards the Italian perspective as a result. Outside of the wineries themselves, an economy built entirely around wine production brought me into contact with labor cooperative owners and workers, exporters and sales representatives, and families with generations of winemaking stories to tell.
In Italy’s northern regions, ethnic Others from the South were considered backwards or otherwise ‘behind’ well before the 1990s. The South, or the mezzogiorno, is consistently represented to this day as a disorganized, immoral, and un-modern place populated by a different ethnicity than that of the inhabitants of Lombardy or Veneto. These perspectives structured the early stages of Italian Unification in the 1850s, underwrote political and economic inequalities between the regions of Italy, and fuel the contemporary right-wing separatist party, the Lega Nord (Aprile 2011; Derobertis 2012). Today, ‘backwards’ is a common term in Italian utterances about immigrants from the Global South, dismissing the unfamiliar as uncivilized. “They have a medieval mindset! They’re living in another century! They need new heads screwed on!” groused an elderly winemaker while pouring tastings at a fair in Asti. It was just after the Paris attacks of 2015 and emotions were running high, with many European media outlets categorically demonizing Middle Eastern immigrants. Time, in this logic, organizes a plurality of religions and cultures into a hierarchy of progress and stagnation with Europe unquestionably at the lead.
Hiring a full-time employee is a serious investment for small businesses in Italy. While anything official in Italy requires an intimidating amount of paperwork, winery owners insisted that it was the finances of employment that prevented new hires. “I’ll tell you why no one is hiring in this country!” exclaimed a young man working as a barista. “I studied economics, but a middle schooler can understand. If I want to hire someone at ten euros an hour,” he explained, “I end up spending twenty euros an hour what with all the contributi (contributions). No one can afford to hire full-time at a living wage. So what do I do? I hire people part-time, short-term, a tempo determinato, and this way I get out of paying those taxes and no one is making enough money to live.” His analysis, though painted in broad strokes, captures the general trend of short-term contracts and low wages that plagues anyone hoping to find an entry level (or above) job today. In short, taking on a long-term employee at full-time only makes sense if the business can expect to generate considerable value from that person’s labor, more than double what they plan to pay them.
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The author thanks the reviewers and editors who dedicated their time and care to this article, for which it is much improved, as well as the mentors and colleagues who provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this work. This research would not have been possible without the time, insights, and sincerity that the communities and individuals described here so generously contributed.
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Feinberg, R.M. The new contadini: transformative labor in Italian vineyards. Agric Hum Values 38, 15–28 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10125-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10125-6