UMass Amherst Anthropologist Finds Family Separation an Inevitable Choice for Many Migrant Chinese in Italy’s Fast Fashion Industry

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AMHERST, Mass. – While forced family separations by government authorities continue to make headlines and stir debate in the United States, migrant Chinese factory workers in the Italian fast fashion industrial province of Prato have been making the choice to willfully send their newborn children back to China to live with relatives while they remain in Italy. In a new paper published in the October issue of the journal Current Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst professor of anthropology Elizabeth Krause and her colleague Massimo Bressan examine the reasons driving the decision parents are making to separate their families, and how capitalism and the “Made in Italy” label serve as both cause and effect of this choice.

Prato is a historic textile district that is home to what is claimed to be Europe’s most concentrated overseas Chinese community. The migrants produce low-cost items for the fast fashion industry, mostly for small family firms with an average of 10 workers. Over 4,000 individual firms were registered in the manufacturing category of clothing, leather or fur in the name of entrepreneurs of Chinese nationality in Prato’s chamber of commerce as of 2016, more than the 2,500 garment-sewing enterprises listed with the Wenzhou Clothing Business Association in China, and representing 45 percent of Prato’s manufacturing activity by 2013. In 2012, the province recorded a population of 248,477, of which 36,834—14.8 percent—were classified as stranieri(foreigners), more than double the 6.8 percent level of foreigners to the total national population. Beginning in 2009, more than half of the total births in Prato have been to foreign women.

These migrant workers provide the low-cost labor upon which suppliers to fast fashion retail chains and luxury brands rely. Typically both parents work, often 12–16 hour shifts across day and night—well beyond what Italian labor laws permit—and since workers are commonly paid by the piece, the faster workers cut and sew the more they can earn.

The researchers found that these work and pay conditions factor heavily the decision made by parents to “circulate” their children, either by leaving older children behind when undertaking the long and often costly journey to Italy to work, or by sending their children born on Italian soil back to China as soon as six months after birth. “There is not enough time,” “We even don’t have enough time to sleep,” “We cannot find a way to arrange our time,” and “I don’t have time to talk with him, to help him, or teach him” are among the responses the researchers report from Chinese parents.

Time and money were not the only reasons provided to Krause and Bressan for what ultimately becomes an inevitable decision for many of these parents, however. Factory raids “fill Chinese people with fear,” because if their workplaces are shuttered it may cause increased suffering to their children by being forced to leave the province or the country. Some families separate simply to avoid the complex bureaucracy and nightmarish paperwork associated with family reunification applications. And a crackdown on undocumented workers was a prominent feature in the tenure of Roberto Cenni, Prato’s mayor from 2009 to 2014.

The authors also found that parents find value in circulating children in its “power to activate systems of reciprocity across kin, to create networked bodies across territories and to secure affective bonds across generations.”

“Parents circulate their children between China and Italy, between Wenzhou and Prato, to the point that it has come to seem normal for many immigrant families,” Krause and Bressan write. “In engaging in this circulation, participants constitute kinship. That is not to say it is an easy practice—emotionally or legally. They must deal with visas and residency permits and a proliferation of rules and regulations related to crossing borders as well as staying put within them. Nor is it merely a timeworn traditional practice. Within the fast fashion niche, the circulation of children has become a coping strategy and one that we argue, in fact, strengthens mutual relations of being across territories and allows for close relatives to participate in the child’s existence across generations.”

Krause, who is also author of the recent book Tight Knit: Global Families and the Social Life of Fast Fashion(Univ. of Chicago Press, August 2018), based the report on extensive ethnographic fieldwork she conducted over the course of seven trips to Italy between 2012-15, during which she spent 220 days in Prato participating in cultural and political encounters related to immigration, the economy and the arts, and educator trainings and public health workshops, as well as her observations at immigration offices, markets, factories and wholesale settings. Krause and Bressan, president of the IRIS research institute Strumenti e Risorse per lo Sviluppo Locale (Tools and Resources for Local Development), also cultivated networks with associations, cultural clubs, schools and residents in two diverse neighborhoods.

Upon completion of these years of work, Krause asks readers to refrain from judging the parents negatively or cynically for their decision to willfully separate from their children.

“What if instead of viewing circulation as an inevitable consequence of global capitalism, as a dubious or even pathological form of parenting, or even as a case of cultural relativism—it is just what the Chinese do, it is their culture—we were to view it as part of the broad variety of diverse economic activities that coexist with and even underwrite capitalism?” she and Bressan ask. “Fast fashion could not exist, the prices could not exist, the market could not exist without the global household and practices of reciprocity. When such important aspects are left out of analysis, we have understood very little about the economy or the social relations that undergird it. Sustaining the global household is key to the fast fashion economy—how it works and how to understand it.”

The full report, “Circulating Children, Underwriting Capitalism: Chinese Global Households and Fast Fashion in Italy,” is available here.