Voices of migrants in a courtroom. Ethnographic analysis of the process "Sabor" (Lecce)

Abstract

The exploitation of migrant day-labourers in the Italian agricultural sector is a central issue in political and public debate since almost the last ten years. The so-called “new slaves” of the northern and southern agricultural areas are rarely depicted as actively opposed to the well- established system of exploitation and gang-master they’re undergoing. The case study presented in this paper seems to subvert this rhetoric representation. The Sabr court case has started on 31 January 2013 at the courthouse in Lecce, after a group of Western and Northern African day- labourers have sued their Italian employers – the owners of big agricultural factories – and their Sudanese and Tunisian gang-masters. The ethnographic analysis, held between October 2013 and January 2014 in the courthouse, uses the life-histories of the day-labourers and the official positions of the lawyers and the public prosecutor in order to create a choral description. In doing so, we will try to show the complex relationships between different points of views and different formal andinformal statements within the same procedure. Listening to the hearings and consulting the materials produced after the investigations by the Carabinieri will help us to highlight how each of the protagonists in the court case have expectations and imaginaries of his own. Each of them also contributes to create an idea of state, justice and legality far from being abstract and homogeneous.