"Transplanted" Lives: Stories of Sub-Saharan Migrants Working in a Sicilian Horticultural District - Subalternity and Processes of Subjectivation

In recent years, the debate regarding human mobility from the Global south to the Global north has been characterized, on the one hand, by the idea of forced migration, since it is “almost always” linked to a ‘necessary choice', a non-choice, determined by structural factors that model, condition and, in turn, determine individual decisions and trajectories" (Della Puppa, Sanò, 2020), and on the other hand, by the idea that migrations and secondary movements are new forms of the Underground Railroad, motivated by the right to escape to freedom (Queirolo Palmas, Rahola, 2020).

How can we overcome these contrasts? Perhaps the themes developed by global slavery (Zeuske, Conermann, 2020) can serve to better understand the contemporary world, where freedom and slavery no longer have a clear demarcation and embrace infinite nuances. "We must ask ourselves questions about who extracts labour, what is the nature of the relationship between production and labour, how property relations are maintained, and who profits from these circumstances. If these questions are not addressed, non-freedom will not vanish. (Rossi, 2017)». The plantation system, with its "constitutively racial and colonial" capitalist accumulation logic does not only concern the distant past, but remains an inescapable node of contemporary capitalism while maintaining the centrality of the "racialization" issue in any analysis of extraction and exploitation (Corrado, De Castro, Perrotta, 2017; Ippolito, Perrotta, 2021). What forms of racialization and exploitation therefore accompany current human mobility? How are the vulnerabilities produced by the security of migration and contractual precariousness in the labour market intertwined? To answer these and other questions, this research is based on intense ethnographic activity, conducted since 2021, particularly among young sub-Saharan workers in the horticultural sector of the Barcellona-Milazzo area, in the province of Messina, and looks into forms of discrimination and attempts at emancipation.