Nordisti contro Sudisti: Internal Migration and Racism in Turin, Italy: 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The article focuses on the hostility against southerner immigrants in the public sphere in Turin during the internal migrations of the 1950s and 1960s. It reconstructs how the themes and images developed during one hundred years of the questione meridionale provided the repertoire to debate and understand internal migrations. Old stereotypes and prejudices — the south as a homogenous and static entity and southerners as indigent, violent, and uncivilized — were reproduced and reshaped within the historical conjunctures of the 1950s in order define identity, belonging, and alterity. Analyzing newspaper articles and readers' letters, I contend that “gli immigrati meridionali” were identified as the ultimate “other” by their northerners fellow citizens; to be a southerner meant to be economically poor, culturally deprived, and inferior.I will argue that this set of representations, based on the naturalization of culture and stereotypes, belong to a specific form of racism that emerges historically in the north–south relation.The topicality of these issues is evident to anyone familiar with current political and cultural trends in Italy. To understand contemporary anti-immigrant attitudes, as well as anti-southerner sentiments and the permanence of several conflicts along the north–south divide, we have to look at internal migration and at the ways in which southerner workers were constructed, stigmatized, and excluded in northern cities.