Soviet Signoras

Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration

Martina Cvajner

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226662428
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Across the Western world, the air is filled with talk of immigration. The changes brought by immigration have triggered a renewed fervor for isolationism able to shutter political traditions and party systems. So often absent from these conversations on migration are however the actual stories and experiences of the migrants themselves. In fact, migration does not simply transport people. It also changes them deeply. Enter Martina Cvajner's Soviet Signoras, a far-reaching ethnographic study of two decades in the lives of women who migrated to northern Italy from several former Soviet republics.Cvajner details the personal and collective changes brought about by the experience of migration for these women: from the first hours arriving in a new country with no friends, relatives, or existing support networks, to later remaking themselves for their new environment. In response to their traumatic displacement, the women of Soviet Signoras— nearly all of whom found work in their new Western homes as elder care givers—refashioned themselves in highly sexualized, materialistic, and intentionally conspicuous ways. Cvajner's focus on overt sexuality and materialism is far from sensationalist, though. By zeroing in on these elements of personal identity, she reveals previously unexplored sides of the social psychology of migration, coloring our contemporary discussion with complex shades of humanity.

ONE

A Room of One’s Own:

Managing Spaces, Lives, and Laws in Residential Care Work

When I met the first women in the streets of Alpinetown, their stories seemed (and claimed to be) remarkably similar. They talked of their previous lives as teachers, doctors, nurses, managers of small factories and offices, military junior officials, and engineers in the provincial capitals of the empire. Of their increasingly desperate attempts to find, after 1991, new ways of earning a livelihood. Of the consequences of the ruble crisis. Of the breakdown of their families. They spoke incessantly about their children, left behind with their parents.1

They all claimed they wanted the same things: to work, to save some money, to improve the living conditions of their families, and to return as quickly as possible to their “real” lives. They all worked as live-in care workers, providing around-the-clock care and assistance to working- or lower-middle-class elderly.2 Their lives were structured by the same rhythm, by the pressures of similar problems, and by the need to deal with similar risks.

Over the years of my fieldwork, however, a significant differentiation has occurred. Some women have remained in the live-in sector, maximizing the amount of income and energy targeted at their sending areas, to their “real” homes there. Although they are only a small fraction of the women who had originally wanted to do so, some of them have left Alpinetown and returned to their hometowns. Some have succeeded in creating new, hybrid homes with the elderly they assist, taking on ersatz family roles, developing complementary emotional attachments to the here and the there.3 Still others have maintained their work in the care sector, complementing it with the building of communal, shared spaces with other women. Many others have left the live-in sector, looking for a space of their own and slowly putting down roots here.

The causes of these transitions have been varied and sometimes unpredictable. It has been a matter of being employed by the right (or by the wrong) household, facing yet another family emergency that has required stepping up their remittances, finding better schools for their children in Alpinetown or the offer of a room available at a discounted rent, finding a lover, or breaking up still another relationship.

Starting from very similar conditions, the women have entered quite distinct trajectories in the social space, which I call “careers,” each accompanied by a different set of constraints, opportunities, expectations, and fellow travelers.4 Each of these careers has constituted an experiential environment that has often shaped their new understanding of themselves in an increasingly differentiated way. Such trajectories have rarely started, and even less subsequently grown, out of carefully laid plans. The women have crafted such trajectories out of uneven materials, out of encounters, expedient actions, adaptation to new conditions, and imitation of other women. Very often, wishes and desires have followed, rather than preceded, their actions. Over the years, the cumulative consequences of such trajectories have been quite remarkable, slowly fragmenting the initial community into increasingly separate lifeworlds.

A special role in differentiating these trajectories has been played by the various ways through which the women have tried to manage the problem, intrinsic and endemic in residential care work, of securing a private, personal space over which they can exercise some degree of control.

Reaching Alpinetown

The first women who arrived in Italy from territories of the former USSR had travelled along a very similar path. They acquired tourist visas, usually through an agency. Very few women paid for it with their savings, and only a handful of them pawned or mortgaged whatever property they had left. Most of them borrowed the necessary money, from a variety of sources. As the rate of interest was usually high, repaying the debts was the most pressing priority upon arrival.5

They boarded a bus, very often headed for Naples, in southern Italy. Upon arrival, they would face different situations according to their age, economic resources, language skills, amount of connections, and sheer luck.6

Most women would start working very quickly, sometimes even the same day, as live-in care workers.7 Conditions in southern Italy, however, were particularly tough. Salaries were low and working conditions demanding. Families regarded women as quick-fix solutions, and job training hardly ever lasted more than a few minutes. Above all, very few southern families seemed willing to guarantee any adjustment of legal status for their care workers in the future. In reality, many families regarded the irregular status of their employee as a guarantee she would not leave them for a better-paying job. The constant arrival of new women in Naples made competition fierce.

In the early 2000s, many new arrivals were pushed to look for new destinations, and some women tried to get away from Naples as soon as possible, seeking to improve their prospects by migrating again to northern Italy. Alpinetown, a wealthy area with a rapidly aging population, was among the favorite destinations. The labor market of Alpinetown offered slightly higher salaries, some degree of protection, and much higher chances that the family would support their adjustment of status when possible. To move to Alpinetown was not easy. The area did not have anything comparable to the network of sites, agencies, and bus companies already operating in the south.

Most of the first women arrived independently from the others, based on little more than rumors about the availability of jobs in the area. They would disembark at the railway station and ask passersby—including (more than occasionally) startled police officers—where they could go to look for a bed and a job. In many cases, the natives instructed them to visit one of the philanthropic services active in town that often functioned also as informal job centers for immigrant workers.

The women would also walk around the city looking for women “like them” whom they could ask for help and information. These women would provide the newcomers with some basic information—such as the existence of a shelter where they could sleep a few nights, or the best Catholic parishes to go to when asking for a job. But they also provided them with a precious form of emotional support and social recognition. They were the living proof that leaving southern Italy was possible and that they would not be completely alone in the “north.” As such experienced women were few and lived dispersed, newcomers faced the problem of finding them. Anastacia, a thirtysomething Moldovan who arrived in Alpinetown among the early followers, found an ingenious solution to the problem. Once she disembarked at the station, she walked through the streets and parks of Alpinetown singing Moldovan songs, confident that any other Moldovan woman, puzzled by her behavior, would start talking to her. She was right; it was exactly what happened. It nevertheless took her most of an afternoon to meet us and, when it happened, she had a sore throat and had started feeling desperate.

Every time I met one of them, I thought their actions required a dose of bravery bordering on madness. Still, to my surprise, and before my very own eyes, the handful of women I had initially met quickly became, in a few years, hundreds, and subsequently thousands.

Finding the First Job in Alpinetown

A few days after I had met my first Eastern European women in the street, and long before thinking of becoming an ethnographer, I happened to spend several late afternoons in the main local Catholic relief agency. The fact was, like any good emigrant, I was busy refurnishing a house in my hometown, even if I already suspected I would never live in it. The money I was earning with my day job was never enough. One day, somebody asked me if I was willing to work for a project on former refugees from the Balkans, chronicling their lives a few years after their flight. They asked me to stay in the waiting room of the agency, identify possible former refugees, and interview them. The money was good, and I could do it after hours, the ideal moonlighting job.

The Catholic relief agency was at the time one of the best places to go to meet immigrants of all varieties. Operating in the center of the city, it provided a wide range of social services. It enjoyed considerable moral authority that it often employed on behalf of migrants. In addition, it had a reputation of being able to cater to many difficult situations. It was a place nearly anybody, including myself, had used at least once during settlement in the area.

While doing my job there, I happened to meet Piero, a retired man working as a volunteer for the agency. Piero regarded solidarity with the immigrants as a moral duty and enjoyed talking with them. As a native, more at ease with the local dialect than with standard Italian, he was a trusted figure for local families, especially for those working-class households that faced for the first time the need of some paid help for their elderly. Unsurprisingly, he had quickly become a key broker in the local market for domestic services, providing a personalized match between supply and demand.

On one afternoon, I found him particularly stressed. Some days before, he had placed one of the very first Ukrainian women to arrive in Alpinetown, Elena, in what he considered one of “his” best families. He had been extremely proud of having been able to find such a good solution for a newly arrived woman who was badly in need. Now, however, Elena was in his office, sobbing and crying, and he could not understand adequately what had happened. He asked me if I would go to his office and talk with her, hoping this would help ease the situation.

She was a blonde woman in her midthirties, sitting on a chair, head bowed, crying silently. She was modestly dressed, but very neat, with her hair in a bun. When I greeted her in Russian, I suddenly saw a light in her eyes. I introduced myself as a friend of Piero, and we quickly briefed each other on our biographies. She was a former child psychologist from a small town in Western Ukraine, the mother of two and the wife of a schoolteacher. The orphanage she used to work for had stopped paying her years before, and she had been unable to find another job, no matter how much she had tried. Her husband was also unemployed, and for years, they had barely survived, moving in with his parents, selling all their belongings, growing as much of their own food as possible, and getting whatever odd jobs were available. Her attempts at earning some money going to buy goods in Poland to resell in her hometown had been utter failures. In the beginning, they had planned to emigrate together, entrusting the children to her mother. They had been unable to borrow enough money for two visas, and she had decided to go alone to Italy, where she expected to find a job more easily. She had arrived in Naples, and a woman had dispatched her to a job in a small village just on Italy’s heel, with a severely disabled man who could hardly speak. She had taken care of him, in the solitude of his flat, without speaking to anyone for weeks. Her only contact with the outside world had been the television.

When the man she assisted died, she found herself suddenly unemployed, with no savings, and hardly more fluent in Italian than the day she arrived. The son of the man, who had always paid her late, refused to pay her for the last month of work (not to mention any severance pay) as his father was by now dead and she was useless. When she complained, he threatened to report her to the police. Elena called the woman who had found her the job. The woman said she could find her a new job, but she had to move to another nearby village and again pay a month’s salary for the new contract.

Desperate, Elena had called an acquaintance in Rome and asked for advice. Her friend told her there were just too many Ukrainians in southern Italy and suggested she take a train. She told her she had heard that in Alpinetown there were few women, and locals paid salaries on time. She said Elena should “go to the priests” and ask for a job. Elena had taken the train, scared somebody would ask for her papers, and after many hours, she had reached Alpinetown and gone straight to the agency. She had met Piero, and she had discovered that he did not expect a bribe. She said that the day she had entered her new employer’s house had been the happiest of her life.

She had done her best to make him happy. Her life in the new workplace had nonetheless quickly become miserable. Gianni, her employer, criticized her constantly, whatever she did, from morning to dawn. The very same morning, he had said he wanted to fire her. She said that keeping the job was her only hope of repaying her debts, helping her husband, sending remittances to her children, and giving meaning to all her solitude and distress. I briefly summarized the situation to Piero and he suggested we make a visit all together to Gianni and see if something could be done.

While we walked toward Gianni’s flat, Elena kept chatting constantly. She seemed hungry for talk. She wanted explanations regarding what she felt were bizarre Italian folkways. She was particularly interested in why Italians used so many different kinds of soap in their homes. She found it strange, slightly uncanny: Soap is soap, she kept insisting for most of our walk. We walked close to each other, with her holding my arm as if it were a last ditch promise of a better life. Piero tactfully walked a few steps behind.

After a while, we reached the building where Gianni lived. It was a gray, five-story building, likely built at the end of the 1960s. I joked about how the building was the Alpinetown variant of a Khrushchyovka, the mass produced five-story apartment buildings that defined Soviet urban landscapes in the early 1960s. Elena was not in the mood to see any similarity between her previous life and the current situation. She rang the bell and we waited a long time. She smirked and said that Gianni had walking difficulties. I asked her if she had forgotten the keys. She replied that Gianni did not like to give anybody else the keys to his house. Every day, when she returned from her grocery shopping, she had to ring him and wait—sometimes in the rain—for him to open the main door. Finally, we heard a croaking voice asking who it was. Elena answered—in broken Italian—that it was she. The main door unlocked, and Elena went in first.

We climbed three floors. Everything was clean and reasonably maintained, but impersonal, faded, and gray. Even without evidence of it, I felt it was a building still inhabited by the original owners, the young couples who had arrived in Alpinetown from the countryside at the peak of the Italian economic miracle in the 1960s. The building had been aging with them. Gianni opened the door of his flat and welcomed us. He was a man in his late eighties, with a weary expression. Elena took our jackets. She hung them in the hallway leading to the tiny living room. Everything in the flat seemed to be there from time immemorial. I was brought back to my own experience as a care worker many years before, as the dark brown furniture of Gianni’s flat was very similar to that in the flat of the couple I had assisted. The flat also had the same slightly moldy smell. I was seriously tempted to ask Elena if Gianni always complained about the cost of heating every time she opened a window, as the elderly man and woman I cared for used to do.

Gianni invited us to sit on the perfectly preserved sofa, while he sat on a chair, as it required, he explained, less effort to get up. He asked if we wanted a coffee and, even before our answer, told Elena to prepare one. He quickly added, in dialect, that he wanted coffee and not dirty water. I was shocked by the rude comment, but Piero seemed rather amused by the situation. Elena rushed to the kitchen to prepare the coffee while Gianni started voicing a long list of complaints about her.

Talking mostly to Piero, he complained that Elena was indeed “a good woman,” but silly and primitive. I could not help smiling when he stressed the fact she had been using the same soap to clean the dishes, the glass of the windows, and the floor. The main scandal, however, concerned her cooking. When he had asked her for a simple dish of pasta with tomato sauce, Elena had just boiled the canned tomatoes, added water, and cooked the pasta in the liquid. “She cries every night,” he added. He was fed up with her. Piero told him he should be patient; he should not expect her to know how to cook Italian dishes properly. The first reaction to such proposition was quite aggressive.

Gianni said that Elena should know these things by heart. He paid her to do what a wife, any wife, does. How was it possible that “she says she is a wife and a mother and she cooks pasta and canned tomatoes together”? Gianni, who had never had any domestic worker in his house before, let alone a foreign one, clearly acted on the premise that Elena had been hired as a substitute for Maria, his beloved wife who had died a few weeks before.

He was neither willing, nor able, to make a distinction between Maria’s former knowledge and practices and what he could expect from any other woman, Italian or Ukrainian. For him, if Elena did not do things in the same way, it was an indicator not of ignorance but of sloppiness. Piero kept explaining to Gianni how Elena simply did not know many of the things he wanted and how she was often not even able to understand what he had said. When Elena returned with the coffee, Gianni was quick to stress that, as expected, it was not coffee but dirty water. Elena apologized and, with eyes ready to cry, turned to me whispering in Russian that she desperately needed this job. Everything among us four was frozen and I could see Gianni was on the verge of a big fuss.

I got up, put my arm around Elena’s waist, and walked her toward where I presumed the kitchen was. I told her that we would prepare coffee together as the Italians like it and told Piero and Gianni to chat a little bit while we did so. We entered the kitchen, tiny but well kept, with all the appliances clearly worn by many years of use. I felt as if I were in my grandmother’s kitchen, where I always expected a strudel and hot chocolate served in a chipped flowery mug. I quickly taught Elena to use the moka (coffeepot), with the right amount of water and coffee powder. This time, Gianni was satisfied and asked ironically if it was really so difficult to prepare a simple coffee. Elena did not answer but smiled smugly.

With Gianni apparently calmed down, Elena seized the occasion to take me to her small room. The room was tiny and sparsely outfitted: a cot, a small wardrobe, and a cupboard where Elena kept a photo of her family close to a snapshot of Gianni’s wife Maria. Elena explained that Gianni wanted the room to remain exactly as it was when Maria used it. She added she did not mind the photo of his dead wife in her room, as she seemed a...