Prato, Italy

How does a community of invisible workers live?

They say this will be the Chinese century, and all those immigrants packed in the basement probably wish that will raise their wage enough to move out of it. The city of Prato hosts the biggest Chinese community in Italy, most of which lives along Via Pistoiese, in the San Paolo district. Other than a badass Kung Fu team, the community brought in a Chinese-Italian association trying to ease the processes of integration. Unluckily, some of the economic changes that followed the heavy immigration led to tensions in the local textile industry. Many of the big clothing brands would rather buy a cheaper textile Chinese craftwork – sometimes even made in China – and slap a Made in Italy label on it, rather than pay a decent wage.

Even though Italians are quite proud of "Made in Italy" - be it clothes, cars, opera singers or famous mobsters - they're also keen of saving money on manpower. Because of this, the renowned textile industry in Prato, which serves many big luxury clothing brands, is having a hard time dealing with the eastern entrepreneurs, who draw from an army of underpaid workers, often clandestine immigrants who sleep on mattresses a few meters away from their sewing machines. Many of the immigrants prefer Prato even in the poor conditions than to living in Wenzhou, where many of them come from. And the big name designers still happily pass off thousand euro t-shirts with a fake "Made in Italy" sewn in.

Mission Report

Prato hosts a very visible worker community. The Chinese are really tangible reality and their alleged invisibility is a bias usually linked with the forced netherworld of Chinese people in Italian life. But only in Italy, because Chinese people (and we're talking about the ones from the first generation) came here with only one thought: to work. The integration is just a minor detail, involving the second generation of immigrants, the sons and not their fathers.
Prato embodies an interesting crossroad, hosting not only the Chinese (even if they represent half of this immigration wave), but also the Roma, North Africans and southern Italians (we would like to suggest to add the travel bag the book "Prato China Guida", by Giacomo Bazzani).
The natural intolerance which marks Italy (and in our opinion, we dare to state that Prato is such a hostile small town) made the process of racial and cultural integration almost impossible. Italian media often used reportage to blame the Chinese community.
A camera in the middle of Via Pistoiese (the street where - with via Filzi as well - the community is settled and is growing) created a lot of problems and anger. After negative experiences with Italian media, the community doesn't make any distinctions anymore: a camera is a dangerous weapon. In English, "to shoot" has a violent meaning too, and for Chinese people who live in Prato, it's a threat, something to run away or hiding from, or even to assault.
And somehow, the invisibility pops up again. It pops up through the images, or better in their absence. We couldn't interview any of the Chinese inhabitants of Prato, and we weren't neither allowed to enter the shops with our camera. And we didn't find any real place where people can gather together, because shops, squares, streets of this day spent in Prato were almost bare. Maybe it was because of the heat, or maybe because these places are somewhere else, more hidden and less accessible. But maybe just for our camera.
Because the camera creates a blank... Like Alex Li, the ACLIC Counselour we interviewed. Despite his helpfulness, he avoided any chance of being his image "stolen" by the camera.
The integration, or even the possibility of it, which Giacomo Bazzani talks wisely and with precise data, at least in our short experience in Prato, seems to have disappeared, once again absent, invisible. Or maybe, the easier explanation is that we weren't allowed to really see it. And we want to give the benefit of the doubt to this context, we want to trust people who know better than we do, for their experience and their education.

Mattia Matteucci