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Chinatown Is a Hard Sell in Italy Romans Say Immigrant Area Isn't
Doing as They Would Do ROME -- This city that prides itself on welcoming all nationalities is wrestling awkwardly with an issue concerning its changing face: Should there be a Chinatown here? Elsewhere, this might seem a quaint question. But the prospect has created plenty of hard feelings here. City hall and Italian residents of Esquilino, the district where thousands of Chinese have put down roots, are aggressively resisting the emergence of what is being described as an ethnically defined ghetto. What might be fine for New York, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles or, on a smaller scale, Washington, doesn't wash here. "This is a neighborhood in the historic center of Rome. Rome is Rome and not a provincial Chinese capital," said Dima Capozzio, president of the Esquilino Block Association. "There are no butchers, no laundries. I have to go miles to buy mortadella." City hall has laid down rules to limit Chinese commerce in Esquilino and make it less of an immigration magnet. Wholesale outlets, a main source of livelihood for the Chinese, are banned in the district. New occupants of commercial space where one form of business existed for 15 years or longer are not allowed to change the nature of the business for two years. In effect, a bakery must remain a bakery, a cafe, a cafe. "We're trying to avoid development of ethnic neighborhoods. One ethnicity cannot dominate an entire neighborhood. There cannot be a Chinatown in Rome," said Maria Grazia Arditto, spokeswoman for the commerce adviser to the mayor and the department in charge of regulating trade in the city. For the Chinese, the issue is one of civic and human rights. "These rules are simply discriminatory. They apply only to Esquilino and only because of the Chinese," said Daniele Wong, an Italian-born Chinese activist who has mediated with city hall over the issue. "There's an atmosphere of yellow peril hysteria in Rome." The conflict is rooted in the Romans' view of themselves and their city. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" has become a rallying cry because, in the Roman view, the Chinese are doing as the Chinese do -- and in upsetting ways. They open shops that sell products in bulk, raise signs in Chinese characters, work long and odd hours and keep to themselves in a way that many Italians consider unfriendly and mysterious. Even matters of taste are a factor. When Chinese merchants recently began to hang red paper lanterns outside their shops, other residents raised an uproar. The city banned the decorations, with police enforcing a 1920s regulation that required signs in foreign languages to be smaller than those in Italian. Although ethnic wrangling is a staple of northern Italy, home of the anti-immigration Northern League party, it has been less pronounced in the south. Moreover, Rome's mayor, Walter Veltroni, has said he favors racial and ethnic diversity. Immigration into Italy from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South and East Asia has transformed sections of many Italian cities. Government estimates put the number of legal foreign residents at about 2 million in a country of about 57 million. The number of illegal newcomers is unknown, but police estimate at least 1 million people reside in Italy without documents. About 250,000 migrants enter the country each year. Many immigrants initially congregate around train stations where cheap hostels abound. The Piazza Garibaldi area in Naples has become home to North African migrants, many of whom work in unregulated factories and in the farming communities surrounding the city. Whole neighborhoods in northern cities such as Turin, Verona and Modena are home to Albanian, Romanian, Polish and North African immigrants. Rome's immigrant scene is dominated by Philippine house servants, Bangladeshi factory workers, African trinket salesmen and Eastern European day laborers. Chinese immigrants number about 60,000 nationwide, and no more than 10,000 in Rome -- the third-largest concentration after Milan and Prato, a leather-working center near Florence. But the Chinese in Rome have made themselves more prominent than in other cities. They are settling downtown rather than dispersing to the cheap and distant suburbs, and they have decided to make Rome a center for distribution of Chinese imports, Chinese residents and Italian officials say. The streets around Esquilino's Piazza Vittorio are dotted with about 600 open-front shops with names such as Great Wall, Celestial City, The Ruby and Heavenly Horse. About 90 percent of the Chinese population in Rome comes from the eastern province of Zhejiang, and most of them from the port city of Wenzhou and hamlets around it, according to the Catholic relief agency Caritas. Xu Xiaoming, a young immigrant who recently was loitering at the Yellow River boutique, offered a typical account of the immigrant journey to Rome. He traveled to Europe through Austria on a tourist visa, and because he had already entered the European Union and did not need to pass through any more immigration checkpoints, he continued on to Rome, where his cousins were living. "We are just trying to mind our own business. We don't bother anyone," said Xu, who speaks no Italian. "Why are they bothering us?" "One thing that irritates the Italians is that the Chinese have not come to serve them. They work for Chinese in Chinese businesses and in Esquilino, sell Chinese goods," said Laura Casanelli, a researcher who is fluent in Chinese. "They come, they buy up stores, they set up. They work among their own relatives. The whole Italian idea of integration is irrelevant to them." Casanelli said many Chinese also come through the Balkans, paying smugglers known as "snakes" thousands of dollars to arrange their transit. Two years ago, Italian police broke up a smuggling ring that included Chinese, Slovenian and Croatian operators. The bust coincided with the release of dozens of Chinese who had been held as virtual slaves in factories in central Italy until they could pay off a $12,000 fee for their trip. "The Chinese view Europe as a chessboard on which they can move freely. They chose Rome because it is near enough to Naples, where the goods move through, but more pleasant," Casanelli said. "The trend in Rome is inevitable, I think. The question is how to manage creation of a Chinatown, not stamp it out." Wong, the activist, said the Chinese were welcome when they first began populating Esquilino. The district had fallen on hard times and had become a haven for drug dealers. "Everyone has forgotten that. We are now the enemy," he said. |