Spatial (Im)mobility as a Threat to Social Mobility

Abstract

In the mid-1980s, the Roma population who had migrated to Rome from Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s amounted to about 0.1%. Yet, the unresolved issue of the settlement of small Roma communities led in 1987 to what has been called the “anti-Gypsy barricades” – a rebellion of the Eastern peripheries of the Italian capital against the relocation of a community of Roma on their territories. Using archival material that highlights this under-researched event, as well as a contemporary ethnography of formal and informal policing of the Roma, the chapter analyzes the barricades of November 1987 and current forms of anti-Roma vigilantism in light of the interplay between the securitization of spatial mobility, and that of social mobility. The chapter shows how concerns about the spatial mobility of those erroneously understood to be nomads reflected the fears of a newly formed middle-class group of Italians to lose their still precarious, but clearly ascending social status in the 1980s. Contemporary forms of informal policing through neighborhood patrolling show a similar dynamic, in which the spatial mobility of Roma is taken to be a threat to the descending social mobility of Roman suburbanites under conditions of precarization. The chapter shows how and why the securitization of spatial mobility needs to be analytically placed in the context of dynamics of social mobility.