«Oppositional and Disobedient». «Ragazzi di mafia» between Archives and Reality

Abstract

Since 2012, the Juvenile Court of Reggio Calabria and, in more recent years other juvenile courts in Southern Italy have begun to issue measures to limit or declaim parental responsibility. Such measures provide for the subsequent removal of minors belonging to families connected to mafia organized crime, whose psycho-physical development is assessed as compromised. Young people removed are placed in community centres, family homes or foster families, mandatorily outside their region of origin, and included in a re-educational project called Liberi di Scegliere (Free to Choose). The methods of intervention of the institution and the construction of the image of the «child of mafia» in the pages of the State archive will be put into dialogue with the material that emerged during the ethnography with two young men, Domenico and Maurizio. The boys, finding themselves in different phases of their path, face and (re)act differently within the Liberi di Scegliere project. The boys’ experience highlights not only the way in which the State inserts itself into the intimate space of some families recognized as mafia-related, but also how the separation from the «children of mafia» is experienced and what strategies the two young men adopt in building their own individual path. For Maurizio e Domenico, body and time become the two fields on which real tactics of resistance are played out, both in the attempt to carve out a space for self-determination and intimacy, and to still feel, at least in part, the makers and subjects of their own existence.