Paper short abstract:

The Messina area in Sicily emerges as a migratory “timespace” marked by temporariness, transit and crisis, and produced relationally by the “entanglement” of “crafting politics” brought into play by the Catholic and Syro-Malabar Church, the State and the migrant worker communities from Kerala.

Paper long abstract:

The Messina area in Sicily, at the core of a significant migratory flow of Syrian-Christian caregivers belonging to Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in Kerala, emerges as a “vernacular timespace” (Bryant, Knight 2019) marked by impermanence, transit and crisis, and produced relationally by the “entanglement” (Fresnoza-Flot, Liu-Farrer 2022) of “crafting politics”. Interrelated political strategies cross different planes of temporality, craft from an uncertain present their “utopian” futures, and envision Sicilian reality as a crossing/transit place, in asymmetrical yet convergent ways. The Catholic Church (and in its own way the Syro-Malabar one) rules migration, in the long durée and transnationally at a global stage, in order to maintain its hegemony over the welfare system and open a new cycle of grandeur, via the idea of “missionary returns” (Napolitano 2015) as a counterbalance to secularization. The State, through policies of surveillance, carelessness and non-governance, “naturalizes” the emergency management of migration under socioeconomic crisis, reaffirming its apparent passivity and a governance model centered on the succession of different migrant groups as subordinate labor force. Migrants see themselves as “fleeting, in-transit and precarious presences” politically engaged mostly in informal practices of collective bargaining, and experience Sicily as the first hub, suitable precisely because of its structural weaknesses, of a migratory project imagined as multi-nodal and progressive. The “discreet charm” of this migratory timespace and its political game turns temporariness and crisis into the enduring of power relations in which the sum of multiple subalternities, marginalizations and systemic deficiencies transits to a permanent image of stability.