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Giovanni Cocco
On a bright, sweltering morning a few days after Italy’s Aug. 15 holiday, during a week when most Italians were supine at seaside rentals, a squad of four female police officers pulled up on a leafy residential street in the Tuscan city of Prato. They parked in front of a 10-story cement apartment building, marched down a ramp, and pushed open a door into the building’s parking garage. Once their eyes adjusted to the dark interior, they spotted about 50 adults and children, who, it soon became clear, were all Chinese immigrants, living in an airless warren of gypsum cubicles. The group shared a single makeshift bathroom and a hobbit-sized kitchen with a plastic ceiling four feet off the floor. There was a freezer crammed with chicken feet and dried fish, and strips of dried meat hanging on clothes hangers.
Their sources of income were near at hand: 18 sewing machines coated in white lint, stationed next to plastic bags bulging with fabric—the raw material for dozens of identical white ladies’ shirts that the workers had been producing daily.
The policewomen rounded up the inhabitants and secured the sewing machines with red plastic cords. Then the officers started rummaging through the kitchen and filling out forms, charging the workers with living illegally in a factory. Some residents began packing belongings into garbage bags. A pregnant woman in a white negligee drifted past.
Prato police have been raiding Chinese-run factories several times a week for the past three years. Prato Police Chief Aldo Milone, who arrived on the scene after the bust, said the garage operation was better than many sweatshops because it had a few windows, although it was still stifling and dark. “Normally there are mice and rats on the floors,” Milone said. He gestured casually toward the workers. “They will just move to another factory tonight.”
Among those who would be searching for a new home was a pallid 35-year-old father of three who had taken the Italian name Enzo. Five years ago, his parents, farmers in the Fujian region of China, had saved €8,000 to send him to the factories in Prato. Enzo is what the Italians call clandestino—undocumented—and like most of the Chinese in Prato illegally, he entered on a tourist visa and simply stayed. But rather than working for Italians, he found himself employed by other Chinese immigrants who had come to Italy themselves and were taking over the factories. It was there that he took his Italian name and met his future wife, a small Chinese woman in jeans and a ponytail who stood wordlessly behind him as he told his story, speaking Chinese to a police translator. This raid wasn’t the first they’d lived through; they had been chased from another illegal workplace a year before. “Italy is not good for us now,” Enzo said. “I want to take my children back to China. We don’t have a hope of living here.”
Over the last 15 years, according to local officials, 40,000 Chinese immigrants have moved into the Tuscan town of Prato, population 188,000. The city has been famous since the Middle Ages for producing fine wools and other textiles, which artisans crafted into high-end clothing. Today, Prato produces 27 percent of Italy’s textile industry output. Now, though, the Chinese have introduced a newer, cheaper production method, and sometimes secretly produce goods for luxury brands, according to a 2007 Italian TV documentary called Slaves of Luxury. The Chinese substitution of cheap and fast for the Italian tradition of slow, fine, and expensive, has cut into the heart of Italy’s fashion industry and, by extension, into Italy’s economic culture as a whole.
