Abstract
This paper explores how Sub-Saharan men construct and negotiate masculinities in the context of their migration project to Europe, and in particular to Southern Italy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with agricultural migrant workers, it examines how ideas of manhood—expressed in phrases such as “being a man” and “becoming a man”—are mobilised to make sense of the risks, sacrifices, and aspirations that shape their migratory journeys. While masculinity was not a central analytical category at the outset, it emerged as a key framework through which migrants articulated responsibility, strength and agency in contexts of extreme precarity. This study investigates how intersecting factors such as age, legal status, race, class, and religion complicate these gendered identities, and how the acceptance of suffering and death as part of God’s will provides a moral justification for the dangers endured. Faith does not produce passivity; rather, it enables migrants to act decisively under conditions of profound uncertainty. By situating these narratives within broader structures of marginalisation in Italy’s agricultural sector, the study highlights the ways in which masculinity functions not only as a personal aspiration but also as a socially embedded mode of survival.