Abstract
Women comprise less than 15% of people crossing the Central Mediterranean, yet their representation in or erasure from accounts of precarious migration influences public notions of migrant deservingness in critical ways. This chapter recognizes European border spectacle as both racialized and gendered and posits the post-arrival reception period as a key site of negotiation of notions of deservingness. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted in Italian reception centers, I discuss how these dynamics are especially salient in the case of Nigerian women who confront widespread associations of their presence in Italy with sex trafficking. In oral history interviews with two Nigerian women, interviewees described how they navigate “invisible obstacles” during reception: their awareness of others’ assumptions about them affected how they positioned themselves in relation to others, and where they spent time. Situating this discussion within the Black Mediterranean framework, I show how these circumstances are not new aspects of migration “crises” but in fact recall colonial notions of foreignness and blackness. My discussion advocates for an intersectional approach to the study of Mediterranean migration that engages migrant reception as a racialized, gendered set of processes, as well as, for migrants, a period of active, rather than passive, waiting.
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1 Introduction: Race and Gender in Central Mediterranean Border Spectacle
In the last decade, increased sea crossings to Europe by people from multiple regions and with varied backgrounds have positioned the Mediterranean as a key site for global debates about migrant deservingness—who merits asylum and other forms of legal and social recognition in Europe. This chapter contributes to the growing recognition that these debates are both racialized and gendered. Women consistently comprise less than 15% of people crossing the Central Mediterranean, yet their representation in or erasure from media and popular accounts of precarious migration influences public notions of deservingness in critical ways. For instance, Nigerian women are alternately featured in narratives of vulnerability or presumed criminality, in particular through their sexualization in relation to accounts of trafficking (Lynes, 2020).
These dynamics became especially salient during Europe’s recent so-called “refugee crisis.” Following increased arrivals in 2014, popular and political attention focused on the distinction between refugees and economic migrants. The hyper-focus on surveillance and death at sea underscored this dichotomy as corresponding to legitimate need (refugees) and manipulation (economic migrants). This border spectacle fed a culture of suspicion towards Black migrants, whom popular discourses generally presume to be economic migrants and undeserving of protection (De Genova, 2018). As I have argued elsewhere, these narratives effectively racialize asylum, as Black African journeys are seen with less empathy, often framed in terms of a perceived threat to Italian security and ways of life (Paynter, 2022). Within a context so focused on spectacle, women’s experiences are especially invisibilized: in discursive terms, media and political narratives generally don’t attend to gender and feature women only periodically, in ways that reiterate the extreme stereotypes of vulnerable victimhood or sexualized criminality. In spatial terms, in large migrant reception centers throughout the country where migrants live while awaiting a decision on their claims for asylum or other forms of humanitarian protection, women’s presence is less marked, or differently marked – a point I take up directly.
Stereotypes about migrant identities shape not only the crucial rights issues that arise with regards to sea crossing, rescue, and detention, but also the post-arrival reception period. This chapter posits reception as a critical site of negotiation of notions of deservingness and a space where racialized and gendered ideas of migration shape how newcomers spend their time and plan for the future. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted in reception centers called CAS in Central and Southern Italy in 2017, 2018, and 2019, I advocate for an intersectional approach to the study of Mediterranean migration, engaging intersectionality, a concept developed by Black feminists (Crenshaw, 1989), to understand migrant reception as a racialized, gendered set of processes. As migration scholars increasingly recognize, “gender aggravates established racial divides in which immigrants are classified the moment they arrive” (Grosfoguel et al., 2015, p. 644).Footnote 1 Focusing on oral history interviews I conducted with two Nigerian cisgender women in a CAS (Centro di Accoglienza Straordinaria, or Center for Extraordinary Reception) in the Southern region of Molise, I reflect on how the women’s awareness of multiple assumptions about their past, present, and future by locals, center staff and residents, and relatives abroad affect how they position themselves in relation to different actors and how they access particular spaces while awaiting a decision on their claims for protection.Footnote 2
I situate these two cases within the Black Mediterranean, an analytical framework and political praxis that understands Europe’s violent border regimes in relation to histories of racial capitalism that have long shaped mobilities and notions of otherness across the Mediterranean region (Proglio et al., 2021). In Italy, Nigerian women who arrive by sea are often survivors of sex trafficking (European Asylum Support Office, 2021, pp. 30–31). Yet their association with sex traffickers, including the Nigerian madam to whom they report, is rarely a straightforward victim-perpetrator relationship (Baye & Heumann, 2014; Belloni et al., 2018, p. 231; Campana, 2016, p. 4; Esposito et al., 2016; Giordano, 2008). My discussion of two migrants’ narratives extends recognition of women’s agency in precarious migration and trafficking to the reception period, where women present their experiences in terms of a series of choices and challenges. I call these challenges “invisible obstacles”: unlike the explicit legal issues or questions of location that overtly affect people’s experiences, the stereotypes that many migrants confront operate as unseen and sometimes unspoken challenges – a series of assumptions made inside and outside the reception center about migrants’ identities, past experiences, and motivations. Migrants’ awareness of these invisible obstacles, I argue, shapes how they navigate the reception period. The two cases I discuss here suggest that, no matter their actual connection with traffickers, Nigerian women in Italian reception centers confront invisible obstacles related to widespread assumptions that they are sex workers. Their experiences illustrate how, in the Mediterranean, “Blackness is connected to the symbolic and discursive instruments of a captive society, in addition to the physical instruments used to control Black people” (Proglio et al., 2021, p. 14).
This chapter also recognizes the post-arrival reception period as one of active, rather than passive waiting. While residents await legal decisions and adjust to life in Italy, they also navigate invisible obstacles. Recognizing reception as an active time helps counter the pervasive erasure of women’s agency in popular narratives (Belloni et al., 2018, p. 231). Women who remain mostly in their rooms, for example, may appear to be passively waiting. On the contrary, accounting for invisible obstacles reveals reception to be a time of ongoing reflection and careful decision-making.Footnote 3 What outwardly appears passive involves a great deal of strategy and care. Understanding the activity of this time reveals how the racialization and gendering of migration discourses shape women’s day-to-day experiences. The two interviews I discuss here are illustrative, rather than generalizable; that is, they demonstrate multiple ways in which invisible obstacles shape experiences of reception. Moreover, these narratives speak to the heterogeneity of experiences for African women recently arrived in Italy and, more broadly, to the significance of intersectional approaches to the study of Mediterranean migration.
The chapter proceeds as follows: First I present an overview of Mediterranean migration to Italy and trends in Nigeria-Italy migration, focusing on gendered migration and racialized tropes in the context of the Black Mediterranean. After outlining Italy’s contemporary migrant reception context, I discuss key themes that emerged in the very different narratives shared with me by two women, following the approaches of oral history and linguistic anthropological narrative analysis (Baird, 2012; Labov & Waletzky, 1997; Shuman & Bohmer, 2004). These interviews were among 39 I conducted between 2017 and 2019 with staff, volunteers, and residents of Italian reception and work sites, for the larger project of which they are part, following the ethical guidelines of the Oral History Association (Principles and Best Practices, n.d.). Throughout the chapter, I avoid referring to trafficking and sex work in ways that criminalize people’s movements and erase individual agency. In line with feminist scholarship (Pinelli, 2021; Rigo, 2017), I understand trafficking as a complex transnational network of relations, and I prioritize using the language offered by the women whose narratives inform this study. To that end, I have edited interviews minimally for clarity; both narrators opted to conduct interviews in English, a primary language for both women.
2 Nigeria-Italy Migration and the Black Mediterranean
While news stories occasionally feature a rescued woman or young mother who survived the crossing, most images of Central Mediterranean migration focus on crowds of men. Given popular associations in Europe of young Black border crossers as economic migrants, these images often implicitly affirm pervasive ideas that those reaching Italian shores are undeserving of protection or residency. These representations become further complicated in the context of trafficking. In the limited public and media discourse focused on sex trafficking, “victims” are often sexualized, simultaneously occupying positions of helplessness and threat or problem in the public imagination (Ifekwunigwe, 2004; Ponzanesi, 2017). Some media coverage of women migrants has sparked sympathy, for instance when Italy held a state funeral for 26 Nigerian women who drowned in November 2017 (Lynes, 2020). Yet the general mistrust of Black migrants has bolstered stereotypes about Black African women as prostitutes, and therefore dangerous and undesirable foreigners.
In this context, women’s migration, which consistently comprises less than 10–15% of sea arrivals to Italy, appears as an exception to the norm. Yet in terms of sheer numbers, during the “crisis” following 2014, women crossed at higher rates than previously. For instance, between 2013 and 2014, as arrivals to Italy increased fourfold, the number of women crossing more than doubled, from 7658 to more than 16,800 (“More Women,” 2014).Footnote 4 Arrivals of Nigerian women increased more than sevenfold between 2014 (1454) and 2016 (11,099) (IOM, 2017).
Gendered representations of sea crossing also de-emphasize the longer history of women migrating to Italy. Women’s mobilities shaped the country’s 1980s transition from one of primarily out-migration to a migrant destination, especially through the arrival of domestic workers including badanti – nannies and caregivers (Angel-Ajani, 2000, p. 335; Olivito, 2017, p. 45). Nigeria–Italy migration is one of the oldest trends in this period and has long been associated with trafficking, through both survivor advocacy and popular stereotypes about African women.
Today’s sea crossings should be understood in terms of their continuity within this longer history, rather than as a rupture of norms, as crisis rhetoric suggests. By the 1990s, Africans comprised at least one third of Italy’s foreign residents, with a majority from West and North African countries. While precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, scholars maintain that in the 1990s, most West African women arrived with visas, often as domestic workers (Angel-Ajani, 2000, p. 335). Today’s arrivals underscore the extent to which, over the last two decades, often in the name of security, Italy and the EU have tightened immigration laws and bordering mechanisms to such a degree that crossing the sea and entering the reception (accoglienza) system is now one of the only feasible means of reaching Europe.
In the case of Nigeria–Italy migration, sex trafficking networks have long facilitated these mobilities and have adapted to shifting border and immigration policies. According to IOM, up to 80% of Nigerian women and girls crossing the sea to Italy may be “sex trafficking victims” (IOM, 2017). Women may initially take up sex work by force or by choice, to pay off debts to the people who arranged their travel. Since 1998, Italy has recognized temporary, renewable protection for “social reasons,” applied in cases of suspected or declared human trafficking (Decreto Legislativo 25 Luglio 1998, 1998). Yet people who might seek protection via the 1998 decree sometimes opt not to do so. The decree stipulates that claimants must enter a state-funded program, often run by nuns, oriented around rehabilitating “victims of human trafficking.” They also must file criminal charges against their traffickers (Giordano, 2008, p. 588). Survivors often fear consequences from traffickers themselves, especially given the thousands of euros they likely owe for their journey, and because in many cases they have sworn an oath to traffickers. Applying for protection via the 1998 law positions these border crossers to obtain what Cristiana Giordano terms “confessional citizenship,” that is, legal recognition that depends on (often) women initiating their relationship with Italian society through criminal proceedings, while also conforming to the views of good behavior emphasized in rehabilitation programs (Giordano, 2008, p. 589). In informal interviews I conducted in Italy’s Molise region, CAS operators and cultural mediators told me they knew women who had refused the offer to enroll in rehabilitation, even if it promised a stronger likelihood of obtaining protection, because they did not trust a system that would single them out in such a way. According to these staff, the women – including those I interviewed – felt that staying in the CAS offered the safety of a kind of anonymity, blending into a larger group of asylum seekers.Footnote 5
A Black Mediterranean lens prompts us to recognize how the invisible obstacles that women nonetheless confront in reception highlight how colonial notions of race and sexuality in Italy inform the present-day treatment of foreigners. The seeming anonymity of the CAS doesn’t protect migrants from racist discourses or stereotypes targeting Black women. Stereotypes about Nigerian women conflate the categories of trafficking and sex work, problematically positioning migrants as simultaneously victims and criminals, without regard for individual agency (Giordano, 2008; Pinelli, 2021, p. 18). In this way, they perpetuate the sexualization of African women in Italy, continuing a tradition traceable to the colonial racial logics that labeled the bodies of colonized women as “dangerous” (Carter, 1997, p. 187). Migrant women are seen to pose dangers “to the stability of the Italian family,” with African women seen to pose a particular danger, through their eroticization (Cariello, 2021, p. 167). Italy’s well-documented lack of reckoning with its colonial history and the entanglements of colonialism, contemporary migration, and racism (Lombardi-Diop & Romeo, 2012) enable these notions to continue to circulate relatively unquestioned in public consciousness, rendering the Black Mediterranean a site where colonialism’s longue durée shapes lives through widespread disregard for its influence (Lombardi-Diop, 2021, p. 3).Footnote 6 Nigerian women in Italy’s reception system at the height of the recent “crisis” thus navigated a complex web of stereotypes as they awaited an asylum decision and sought to establish independent lives in Europe.
3 The Italian Reception System and the CAS in Molise
The narratives I discuss here are taken from oral history interviews I conducted in English in May 2018 at a CAS (Center for Extraordinary Reception) in a city in the Southern Italian region of Molise, where I carried out ethnographic research including observations and interviews over multiple visits in 2017–2019.
CAS are locally-managed, state-funded centers often established in repurposed buildings, including former hotels, schools, and gyms. While Italy manages multiple center types, during the period covered here, a majority of newcomers were sent to CAS after completing prima accoglienza, or the first-stage reception that includes identification upon arrival (Che cosa sono i CAS, 2021). The staff-to-resident ratio is much higher in the CAS than in reception models that predate the “crisis,” and the support CAS offer residents varies significantly, beyond the required basic legal, mental health, and language course access. Some CAS offer cultural programming and job training; others operate with minimal resources; and some management teams have been indicted for corruption. In addition, as my interviews in Molise suggested, center residents often view staff as their only reliable contact with authorities and local communities, and as such, they are cautious about what they confide in them.
While observing Italian language classes offered at the CAS, I was struck by the near-total absence of women students. They rarely joined the classes, which were offered six days per week but not required. Given that women comprised only 10% of all those crossing the sea to Italy in 2018 (men 72%; youth 18%), I would not have expected a significant turnout, but the lack of women students was noticeable enough that I asked about it to male students, teachers, and center staff—also male. Their explanations ranged from women’s presumed lack of interest in learning Italian, to assumptions that women were out working or searching for work. While no one cited sex work in connection with specific residents, staff mentioned trafficking as a general concern. Exchanges I observed between women and male residents and staff included some innuendo, including teasing women as they entered and exited the CAS.
While class attendance fluctuated daily, the absence of women made me wonder what factors influenced their decision to attend and, more generally, how experiences in the CAS differed for women. I met Joy and Samanta (pseudonyms), both in their early twenties, while observing Italian classes, which took place at one end of the CAS cafeteria. Joy, a Christian woman from Edo State in Nigeria, often passed by the class while cleaning the center’s communal spaces. Samanta, a Muslim woman from Lagos, attended the class once during my May 2018 visit, and I wondered why she hadn’t returned.
Their narratives illustrate how women in reception confront invisible obstacles, which manifest through how they use the center space and interact with others both there and, at a distance, in Nigeria. These accounts also evidence women’s strategic agency across what is in fact a heterogeneous set of experiences shaping Central Mediterranean migration. In the following section, I discuss Joy and Samanta’s narratives thematically, moving from the journey to Italy, to their experiences of reception.
3.1 The Journey
Samanta and Joy both navigated multiple challenges in Nigeria and in Libya, before fleeing unsafe and precarious conditions in Libya and crossing the sea to Italy. Though the women position themselves differently in relation to sex work and victimhood, both describe reaching Italy through deliberate decision-making. Through different accounts about how these journeys took shape, both women underscore Italy as a site of freedom.
3.1.1 Samanta
At the time of our interview, Samanta was pregnant with her second child; her boyfriend, the baby’s father, was another CAS resident she met after her arrival. Reaching Italy was not initially in her plans, but she recognized it as an opportunity and was careful in her use of space and time so as not to lose the freedom it represented for her.
In Nigeria, Samanta’s ex-boyfriend’s family took their daughter and kicked her out of their home. While struggling to survive on her own, she met a man who ostensibly hired her, along with three other women, as housekeepers in his home, but the situation was not what he promised. Samanta said that after a few days he told the women, “It’s not here [you’re] going to work. I said where; he said Europe.” Samanta pleaded with him, understanding the journey could be dangerous.
Samanta described the forced journey as a violent experience, including sexual abuse by “the man” and, later, in Libyan detention centers. Held captive there by traffickers, she escaped by sneaking onto a boat she had heard would soon depart for Italy.
Samanta: I thank God as the man[’s] number I don’t have, the woman I was gonna meet [in Europe] I don’t have, so I thank God that I’m free. I don’t have anybody that I want to go and meet. It’s God who helped me [evade] them because he know what I passed where I suffered and lost so I don’t – I’m just thanking God every day… .
Samanta recognizes the reception center as a site of freedom: like other center residents, she is an asylum seeker, awaiting a decision on her case. Unable to contact the madam she was supposed to connect with once in Italy, or the man who arranged her travel out of Nigeria, she views herself as free from the life they represented – one likely defined by debt and forced labor. She has lost “the man[’s] number” and the number of “the woman I was gonna meet… so I thank God that I’m free.” But as we will see, she also recognizes this freedom as conditional.
3.1.2 Joy
Like Samanta, Joy initially traveled from Nigeria to Libya in connection with sex work and eventually crossed from there to Italy. Unlike Samanta, who described being trafficked against her will, Joy was recruited into sex work at her school, where:
One day a lady came to my school who was like, I’m going to Italy. I’m looking for somebody else to go with me for prostitution. I was like, huh, this kind of condition – then I’m still very young… Then I was 20. And I was like, prostitution. [She said] I’m looking for some girls to come here for prostitution. I was like, ah, my mother is suffering. My siblings. I’m not the first. I’m the [younger of several children]. So I was like, I have to help my parents. This is not the house we are meant to sleep in. So I tell her I will go.
While Joy initially chose to work for the madam and travel to Italy to become “a prostitute,” her story exemplifies the additional risks that people undertake, including her kidnapping en route and subsequent captivity in Libya:
There’s a place they call Atlantis if you are coming from Nigeria. We got there and that place is very, very – it’s not safe. The people there are somehow bad, wicked, so they kidnapped us. Kidnapped even the woman that was bringing us, they kidnapped all of us, and they took us to different locations.
Joy’s kidnappers separated her from the woman who initially contracted her and took her to a “ghetto” she described as run by Gambian men who forced her into sex work. Joy protested conditions in the ghetto and negotiated her way into a safer position, becoming the girlfriend of the ghetto boss. But, unable to support her family in Nigeria, she continued to think about reaching Europe. Finally, her boyfriend insisted she go.
3.2 Negotiating Stereotypes and Physical Spaces
Despite their different journeys, both women understood Italian reception as a site of freedom, disconnected from trafficking networks. Yet this was conditional freedom – not the confessional citizenship Giordano describes in the cases of women joining rehabilitation programs, but nonetheless dependent on a series of factors (Giordano, 2008, p. 589). Neither woman remained in touch with her trafficking contacts, but their experiences in reception were still shaped by multiple invisible obstacles that emerged through stereotypes and associations of Nigerian women with sex work.
In particular, both women were careful about where they spent time. As Samanta explained:
Samanta: I thank God for all the things you do in my life because since when I leave Nigeria also I’ve been thanking God I don’t have any problem with anybody, I don’t travel. I don’t go anywhere. If I leave… I’m playing in the [city] garden. You know the garden?
Me: Yes, the villa comunale [municipal park].
Samanta: In front of comune [city hall]. I would just sit down there, be looking at those Italian children playing. After that I will leave there, I’ll come back [to the reception center]… I don’t know any place other than that.”
While Samanta considers herself free from trafficking debt, she recognizes that her experience in the CAS, during the limbo of reception, remains shaped by pervasive stereotypes about Nigerian women in Italy. Specifically, Samanta remains self-conscious of how locals, center residents, and me as an interviewer and observer may perceive her presence and movements in different spaces. In emphasizing that the only place she frequents outside the reception center is the public park, she portrays her own movements in relation to the site where local children play. Samanta marks the normalcy of this scene by underscoring the villa comunale as the only place she knows beyond the reception center.
Samanta’s concern that people viewed her movements about town with suspicion aligned with what I heard in informal exchanges with locals: people regularly remarked with surprise at the presence of migrants in the local mall, for example, or in the city center more generally, as if migrants had no reason to frequent these places. Yet moving within these spaces of local city life was also, for many, an attempt at building a life of their own there, potentially practicing the language and observing local culture. Moreover, in the heat of summer, locals and migrants alike took advantage of the mall’s air-conditioned corridors.
Yet both Samanta and Joy confirmed my observation that many women staying in the CAS kept to themselves, explaining that they did not want CAS staff and residents to have any reason to suspect them of problematic behavior.
Joy: Most of them don’t like coming out. Because in this place, there are some rules that if you come out of the camp, you don’t always stay inside [meaning you might sleep elsewhere]. If you don’t always stay inside that means you go out for prostitution. So we’re the guests, we’re like, okay, we don’t want to be a problem. We want our documents, so we have to stay in the room. So that the people working [at the CAS] will not think we are doing prostitution. [So we] sleep, stay in your room, eat your food come out, take food. Go back to your room.
Samanta made similar observations:
Samanta: [Since September] I was in this place, in [my] room, but I’m okay with it and with the girls I’m living with, I’m okay with this. You understand. So there is no problem… Focus on what I came here to do. And it’s time just to go to school. Come back. So I will stay in my room…
I don’t do the business… They always said girls in [this reception center] they are not good. They are doing this, they are doing that. But I said, I’m proud of myself. Because there is no boy that can say, Okay, this girl, I’ve seen her finished, I’ve done everything to her – Alhamdulillah. [I] just enter my room. Maybe it’s time for prayer. Go to prayer. Come back.
The women’s concerns that people would assume they were “doing the business” mark invisible obstacles that affected their use of space, as well as their relationships locally and across borders. For Samanta, staying in touch with her daughter in Nigeria was especially difficult, due not to distance, but to assumptions people made about her in Nigeria. Specifically, her ex-partner’s family assumed Samanta had gone to Europe to become a sex worker and prohibited communications between Samanta and her daughter:
Before I used to talk to her [my daughter]. When I [first] come here, I talked to them. But after if I call this father he says his mother don’t want me to talk to [the daughter]… Because they said any girls that go to EU, you understand they went to go and do – prostitute. I said, God forbid, what you know the kind of person I am? Even if you told my parents they are going to tell you, ‘I know the kind of daughter I have. And I give birth to. So. That is it. I’m proud of my daughter.’
Samanta appeals to her own reputation in and relationship with her own immediate family. She is a daughter to be proud of, a good daughter and a good woman.
The subjects of sex trafficking and sex work shape these interviews, despite being named in mostly oblique ways. Both narrators used euphemisms for sex work. Samanta said, “I don’t do the business.” Joy explained that she knew she was hired for “prostitution” but then generally talked around the subjects of sex trafficking and sex work. Samanta, too, used the word “prostitute” only once. The silent presence of trafficking and sex work in these exchanges linguistically mirrors the ways the women must carefully navigate the physical and social spaces of reception and the local community, tiptoeing around assumptions they both know and fear people will make about them, so as not to appear as dangerous, or undeserving of protection and residency in Italy.
3.3 Deservingness and Agency
Migrant “deservingness” often refers to popular and politicized narratives about who merits legal protection (Abdelaaty & Hamlin, 2022; Zetter, 2007). Joy and Samanta’s accounts of their journeys and navigation of reception suggest another reading of deservingness, in addition to legal status: that of being regarded without suspicion, as a potential resident of Italy or at least not as a deviant migrant. Here the women’s agency in responding to racialized and gendered stereotypes and racist remarks about their presence in Italy includes their navigation of invisible obstacles: decisions about which spaces to frequent, how to advocate for their own safety and well-being, and how to position themselves in relation to notions of “good” versus “dangerous” behavior.
For Samanta, her deservingness of protection and of being treated without suspicion concerns how she reached Libya and the fact that she had to flee Libya for safety. Unlike Joy, she did not know the nature of the work she would be forced to do, nor did she anticipate that the man who arranged her travel to Libya would abandon her there with traffickers. She also cites her faith to describe how she resisted her captivity and forced labor:
I’m a Muslim. I can never do this thing. My religion don’t tolerate nonsense like this. He said if I go out [leave the house where the man was holding several women] it’s a problem for me so I should just follow. I said, okay. I don’t have any choice. So do it. After doing it. I said okay. No problem but I know I – my faith is with God. And I know there’s nothing that is not possible in front of Allah.
Samanta also described reciting prayers. She positions herself as a Muslim woman, countering potential suspicion about her character through references to her virtue as a good woman and a good Muslim.
Joy’s employment as cleaning staff for the center kept her from attending language classes but offered a small salary. She described her time in reception in largely positive ways; she was able to earn money and was on good terms with CAS staff, whom she trusted. Joy’s employment at the CAS is another example of how she exercised agency despite stereotypes, and how she recognized deservingness through the right to be treated without suspicion. By law, CAS residents can work part-time, but there are strict limits on hours and wages. Finding contracted work can be especially difficult for those without legal papers and, in particular, for Black migrants. Joy was determined to find employment:
Joy: When I [arrive], I was talking to the main boss [CAS manager]: please, I need work. [He] was like, No, it’s not possible. So I have to go and look for work outside [the CAS] myself. I go to a carwash… and I started working there. Yes, I worked there for two weeks. [The CAS manager] came. ‘[Joy], this work is for boys not for you. You have to leave this work… I’ll give you a job.’ That’s how I got this job.
Me: Can I ask how much they pay?
Joy: Yes. 350. 350. A month, okay. And I’m very okay with that. Because I’m a refugee. Even if he gives me a hundred, I don’t mind I will take it because I’m not a citizen of this country… I’m very grateful because they are so kind. I don’t know, people are so kind like this [I didn’t know people were so kind like this.]
Joy positions herself as a grateful refugee, but not a helpless victim; she simultaneously underscores her own agency in reaching Italy and establishing a life there.
In addition to language classes, beginning in 2018, students could attend a school for adults (CPIA), earn an Italian middle school diploma, and potentially, meet locals. CPIA classes were an opportunity for the women to leave the CAS without concern about stereotypes related to their whereabouts. Yet it was also one of the places where they perceived stereotypes that circulated about them more broadly, especially in a period marked by the rise of right-wing politicians elected on anti-immigrant platforms. Joy described standing up to racist comments from Italian classmates.
Joy: [Some of the Italian students] were saying Africans came here to give us sickness. They steal our money… They use more smartphone than us. They steal our husbands, they steal our wives, and they give them thirty-five euros in the camp.
Once again, Joy chose to respond directly:
And I stood up I say why are you saying this? It’s not true! There was arguments that day. It’s true! It’s not true, it’s true, it’s not true! Don’t say that. If that is what you hear from other people, you need to call an African person and listen or hear from the person. They were like arguing, yes, [he posted] you give us sickness, you steal our husbands, and I told them, it’s not true.
Joy’s caution about her presence in public and communal spaces was not passive; she readily advocated for herself, as exemplified in these exchanges.
For both Samanta and Joy, the CAS staff are exceptions to the standard, everyday racism and xenophobia the women encounter in the city and in their travels within Italy.
Joy: Most of [the Italian locals in the class] believe. Most of [the CAS staff] don’t believe. I know somebody like [the CAS manager] don’t believe. People that work here don’t believe [those lies]. Because if they believe they will not come here and work with us. Because if they believe we give them sickness, they can’t stay here.
Joy underscores that CAS staff differ in their behavior and beliefs from locals. Unlike local men who told Joy, “I hate Africa,” CAS staff “are very good.” Joy remarked that the language teacher “even eats my food if I cook. [The other CAS staff], they eat. They are very good. They don’t behave strange. They take you as one.”
Through gestures such as sharing food, Joy and Samanta both viewed the CAS staff as trustworthy. It was important to the women not to behave in ways that CAS staff might view as questionable, and this shaped their use of space within the CAS. In other words, they understood performances and perceptions of deservingness as directly related to maintaining trust with staff.
3.4 Conclusion
My interviews with Joy and Samanta took place soon after right-wing politician Matteo Salvini became Italy’s interior minister, a position he would use to close Italian ports to rescue ships and limit asylum applications within the country. The racist, gendered attitudes these women perceived in interactions with locals were amplified in national dynamics. As anti-immigrant discourse and physical attacks on people of color have increased in Italy and across Europe (Office of the High Commissioner, 2019), it remains crucial to understand how discursive and material violence shapes the lives of migrants overtly and through invisible obstacles they must anticipate, respond to, or avoid.
Beyond legal processes, the reception period is understood to be one of adaptation to Italian culture – a time when residents learn the language and how to handle various aspects of Italian life, from obtaining employment and housing, to understanding cultural customs. Joy and Samanta’s narratives illustrate that these processes are neither straightforward nor guaranteed, but require that CAS residents navigate the anxieties of waiting, as well as racialized and gendered stereotypes and potential discrimination. These dynamics are especially fraught for Black African women who are alternately sexualized and viewed as victims, and who weigh the need to find work, learn the language, and build networks, with social pressures to remain relatively invisible.
A focus on invisible obstacles in reception thus offers important perspectives on Black women’s navigation of reception and underscores the relevance of Black Mediterranean perspectives for understanding today’s precarious mobilities within longer histories of discrimination and exploitation. Intersectional approaches to the study of Mediterranean migration reveal reception as a set of heterogeneous experiences and as a critical site for understanding how longstanding stereotypes about foreignness, race, and gender shape the lives of newcomers awaiting status determination. Reception is a site upon which colonial notions of otherness act, yet for center residents, it remains also a time of negotiation and active decision-making. By demonstrating how race and gender – as well as religion – shape Joy and Samanta’s self-positioning and decision-making, this chapter highlights the need for intersectional study of reception, to enable deeper understandings of migration in Italy that do not rely on homogenized or generalized notions based on gender or race. In this context, the Mediterranean also figures as a critical site for understanding migration in intersectional terms.
Notes
- 1.
While this chapter focuses on questions of race and gender, as well as religion, class also certainly plays a role, including in terms of financing the journey and what newcomers can access once they arrive (Giansanti et al., 2022, p. 14).
- 2.
- 3.
My understanding of waiting as an active process is informed by the work of Shahram Khosravi, e.g. in Jacobsen et al., 2021.
- 4.
In the post-2014 period, youth have generally comprised up to 20% of those crossing, and men 60–70% (UNHCR, 2021).
- 5.
Women in larger cities may find support through NGOs and activist organizations as they determine which legal route to pursue. Organizations like Donne di Benin City (Women of Benin City) in Palermo support women’s integration into life in Italy as they exit sex trafficking networks.
- 6.
This is not to discount the numerous critical efforts by organizations and activists, but to recognize that dominant cultural narratives still cling to fascist-era songs about Black women, and sexualized language about the Black body still appears in mainstream cinema and television.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants from Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Office of International Affairs, and an Alumni Grant. Thanks to Gabriella Soto and Ibrahim Awad for feedback on earlier drafts.
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Paynter, E. (2024). Gendered Asylum in the Black Mediterranean: Two Nigerian Women’s Experiences of Reception in Italy. In: Zapata-Barrero, R., Awad, I. (eds) Migrations in the Mediterranean. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42264-5_9
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