Abstract
This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted for my PhD, Red Gold and Black Labour: Sub-Saharan Migrants’ Struggles for Survival in the Rural Ghettos of Southern Italy, and examines the lived experiences of Sub-Saharan agricultural workers in the province of Foggia, Puglia. Based on long-term fieldwork in the informal settlements of Borgo Mezzanone and Ghana House, the study analyses how racialised and irregularised labour sustains Italy’s tomato industry—“red gold”—through forms of “black labour” characterised by informality, precarity, and legal vulnerability.
The paper conceptualises the rural ghetto not simply as a space of marginality, but as an ambivalent socio-spatial formation produced through political abandonment, labour market restructuring, and migration governance. Historically rooted in processes of segregation and state neglect, these settlements concentrate multiple marginalised populations within a fragmented local welfare landscape. Yet they also function as hubs of transnational mobility, facilitating seasonal and onward migration across Europe.