The New Slaves

“A friend told me that I'd find work here, that I'd earn some money, given that I need to put something on the table for my wife and daughter, and I'd lost my job in Rome, where I've lived for many years now. They didn't tell me that I'd be coming to a living hell.”

Alcamo and Campobello di Mazara: The Exploitation Continues In the Sicilian Countryside

A few weeks after our last visit to Campobello, we returned to see our contacts living in the informal camp at Erbe Bianche. The tent city has grown hugely: more than 400 people now live there, awaiting the imminent commencement of the olive harvest.

Campobello di Mazara (Trapani): The informal camp at Erbe Bianche

Campobello di Mazara: Precarious Agricultural Labour and Discrimination

Campobello di Mazara is one of the most important stops in the cycle of seasonal labour in Sicily. Between September and December each year around 1,300 farm workers come to the area in order to work in the olive harvest, the majority of them originally from Subsaharian Africa. The situation is complicated. Although workers have been camping out in one of the nearby fields – “Erbe Bianche”, ‘White Grass’ – for many years, since 2014 a further space has been added, surrounding the former olive processing plant, confiscated from the Mafia.

The camp at Erbe Blanche, Campobello di Mazara (Province of Trapani)

Diary from Campobello di Mazara

We are Simon and Verena, two anthropology students from Bolzano who decided to visit one of the many social realities of migration which our friends at Borderline Sicilia had “narrated” to us. We wanted to see it with our own eyes, and accompanied by some of the activists from Campobello spent more than a month in a village which today is host to a large number of migrants during the olive harvest. We tried to maintain a diary to record our experience.