The migratory crossroads of Alte Ceccato

Blog post by Andrea Calabretta, University of Padua, Italy; Francesco Della Puppa, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy; and Giulia Storato, University of Padua, Italy
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‘It is this fact of locomotion, as I have said, that defines the very nature of society’: this is what sociologist Robert Park[1] said exactly a century ago, seeing mobility as the characteristic and founding feature of humanity. It is no coincidence that the book in which he makes these considerations is titled ‘the City’ and brings together a set of essays on urban life. If people move naturally, at some point they also need to come to the – provisional – end of their journeys. To stop, at least for a moment, and to take root.
 
How then do migrants settle in cities and territories that are already inhabited? How do they develop relationships with the previous inhabitants? And with the future migrants, who will arrive after them?

​These questions have permeated the sociology of migration and urban sociology for over a hundred years. Our Identities article, ‘The migratory crossroads of Alte Ceccato: an emblematic case of migratory stratification’, attempts to analyze these questions from a new perspective. While migration studies have kept the ‘camera’ fixed on migrants and their complex movements, we focus on a specific place – the hamlet of Alte Ceccato in Italy – in order to observe the stratification and interaction between different ages of migration.

We propose the concept of migratory stratifications as a key to studying migrations, their characteristics and their entanglements with the destination context from a processual perspective in time, and a situated one in space.
 
Through this lens, we bring into dialogue over ten years of studies on Alte Ceccato, a small hamlet in the Veneto region characterized by strong industrial production and a historically stratified migratory presence. The first to arrive in the hamlet were migrants from Southern Italy in the 1950s, joined a few decades later by migrants from the Global South, and in particular from Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi and Indian communities, moved again during the years of the economic crisis, reaching England, just as new migrants were arriving in Alte from the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. As the composition of the town is renewed, its aspects change: the languages that people speak there, the food they cook, the Gods to whom they pray.
 
The population of Alte Ceccato changes and with it, the social dynamics of the hamlet are renewed. We can thus observe the change in this migratory stratification in terms of work (productive changes in local industries and new labor needs); housing (movements from one neighborhood to another and ‘ecological successions’); and relationships (development of community networks and relations with the rest of the population). In short, by observing the rise and change of a migratory stratification, we can understand how migration reshapes the material and symbolical dimension of (a local) society over time.
 
The study of migration offers new keys to interpretation. As humans are made to move – and therefore to stop – focusing on the places where many, at different times, have stopped can give us new insights into migration itself, its drivers and role in reshaping social orders, in the small hamlet of Alte Ceccato, as in the large horizon of our globalized societies.

[1] It should be noted that Park's study of ‘race relations’ was marked by a certain biological determinism, that was largely rejected by the later development of sociology.

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Image credit: Photo by Leonardo Barban. Used with permission. 

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Read the Identities article:
Calabretta, Andrea, Della Puppa, Francesco & Storato, Giulia. (2024). The migratory crossroads of Alte Ceccato: an emblematic case of migratory stratification. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2356430 

Read further in Identities:

Essentialism and intersectionality in the selection and recruitment of staff: the devaluation of migrant women’s skills in France and Italy

Kinning as intimate disaster response: from recuperation in host families to educational migration of the Chernobyl children from Belarus to Italy

​Ambivalences of the emotional logics of migration and family reunification: emotions, experiences and aspirations of Bangladeshi husbands and wives in Italy