Abstract
In agricultural Southern Europe, so-called ghettos are a consolidated phenomenon. In these spaces the most fragile migrants coming from the global South are employed as laborers. These spaces are often framed as the borders of Western modernity, where intermediators operate and reproduce what is defined as new slavery. In this work, drawing from a research-action carried out in agricultural Southern Italy (Eboli), I propose to abandon a logic of the border and look at the ways in which the ghetto becomes part of the larger context, of its social, legal, economic models. By ethnographically focusing on the ways in which informal intermediation navigates these structures, the ghetto emerges as a frontier: not a border but a frontline that shows the most violent effects of the structures that act on the reproduction of migrant presence.
Keywords:
frontier; mediators; ghetto; agricultural migrants; anthropology of the Mediterranean