Tag Archives: immigrants

African Immigrants in Italy: Slave Labor for the Mafia

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don’t live by the country’s infamous omert code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard.

Language: Spanglish Spoken Here

In Manhattan a first-grader greets her visiting grandparents, happily exclaiming, “Come here, sientate!” Her bemused grandfather, who does not speak Spanish, nevertheless knows she is asking him to sit down. A Miami personnel officer understands what a job applicant means when he says, “Quiero un part time.” Nor do drivers miss a beat reading a billboard alongside a Los Angeles street advertising CERVEZA — SIX-PACK! This free-form blend of Spanish and English, known as Spanglish, is common linguistic currency wherever concentrations of Hispanic Americans are found in the U.S

A Walk on Berlin’s Wild Side

Leather-clad punks and squatters fighting the police, leftist bohemians and amateur philosophers, Turkish immigrants creating a world of their own — Kreuzberg lures those seeking chaos and adventure. Before the Wall fell, in 1989, all of Berlin had a special edge to it, a sense that life here was dangerous and vivid and played for high stakes; Kreuzberg hasn’t quite lost that feeling