Paper short abstract:

The paper shows how the social notoriety of a school in the Roman periphery has been reframed as an ethnic issue. Tying together gossip and legislation, parents and local politicians reconfigured a community case of social disadvantage into a national case of identity and failed integration

Paper long abstract:

Primary school "Pisacane" is located in "Torpignattara" neighborhood, the eastern periphery of Rome, namely in a sub-area known as Marranella. It has more than 90 percent foreign pupils, the vast majority of them being second generation immigrants. Nonetheless, it suffers from a serious problem of underutilization, since it could accommodate over 500 children but they are now about 130. The reasons for this uneven use of the school may be traced back to the bad reputation (crime, gambling and drug dealing) that Marranella began to have back in the 1970s, two decades before the arrival of immigrants. Since then Pisacane was known as the school of the infamous part of the neighborhood, and middle class parents more concerned about social distinction started to bring their children to a new school outside Marranella.

Thus, already from the late 1970s the numbers at Pisacane began to decrease and when the immigrants from Asia, North Africa and South America began to settle in the area, they found cheaper accommodation in Marranella and brought their children to the closest school, which was Pisacane.

In this presentation I show how the bad "social" reputation of Pisacane from the 1970s has been recast within an "ethnic" frame, thus keeping its notoriety with a new inflection. I focus on how gossip and word of mouth have been reconfigured by local and national politicians, so that a case of social disadvantage and under-representation of Italians in a school has been translated into a national case of failed integration.