Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [148]
The reaction to the Ukrainian presence is more complex than might at first appear. The fear they engender is often expressed in terms of their failure to adapt to local customs or to respect the local sense of the square as a place for families and children. Yet it seems that they were damned as much by similarity as by difference; the old Fascist bogey of genetic contamination may have been a concern, although it was never openly voiced as such in my hearing, but it is also clear that what the immigrants were doing reproduced older patterns of interaction that locals could reconceptualize all too easily in their own terms. The drug dealers, for example, were pursuing activities that had been rampant among Roman operators in the area for a long time, and it seems likely, as a few locals admitted, that the pimps and pushers who hung around in the square, cell phones at the ready to transmit instructions to their minions, were in fact still Italian. One of the immigrants' most virulent critics actually acknowledged this and even identified two of the men as Italian pimps-although, he added, they were connected to foreigners, presumably traffickers of women from eastern Europe.
Thus, there is at least some recognition that certain kinds of crime may sometimes be committed, or at least directed, by Italians. A neighbor who had himself been a policeman told me that serious professionals-by which he meant "real Italians"-planned burglaries carefully and would have used their brains if they had been responsible for the attempt on our apartment. A neighbor who had some connections with the Roman underworld explained to me that successful burglars used local agents to case the joint before outsiders actually conducted the break-in. The immigrants thus provide a convenient scapegoat; but it is not clear that they should be held responsible for the increase in unsolved petty crime in Monti in recent years.
An observant non-Roman academic who had taken up residence in the area a few years earlier recalled a conversation between two elderly Monti ladies, who were commenting on what they saw as the inappropriate behavior of immigrant women sitting on the edge of the Renaissance fountain in the middle of the square. As he noted, they managed to hint that these women were prostitutes without ever actually saying so-until one of them remarked, "Yes, but let's let that fact go" (Si, ma lasciamo stare questo fatto), and went on to say that the real culprits were Italian men, meaning the pimps and their customers alike.
Sympathetic recognition that it was not only the foreigners who were lowering the tone of the square was relatively common among left-wingers. Not coincidentally, the national leftist leadership of the time was praising the influx of immigrants as a way of redressing the declining birthrate-a major political issue, and one that the neofascists, as the inheritors of old ideas about miscegenation and criminality, was instead exploiting to create fears of the disappearance of genuine Italians.' Leftists, in short, made a clear distinction between genetic and cultural inheritance, and regarded the immigrants as a source of national salvation; rightists, by contrast, represented them as a threat to national survival.
As in so much else, however, and despite a few fairly violent clashes between individuals, the Roman propensity for staying away from real trouble prevailed. The whole country, moreover, was learning the rhetorical art of embracing cultural diversity. In the years following the jubilee, with the arrival of a new parish priest and the opening of a dialogue between the parish church and the Ukrainians' religious leaders, as well as the active engagement of the newly constituted Monti Social Network, the gatherings of immigrants diminished in intensity and the tension ebbed away; in 2005 the two churches celebrated the feast of the Virgin, patron saint of the parish, together in a dramatically public show of communion shared by two groups with different symbols and differently attired clerics (the Ukrainian