Recognition and refusal in Italy’s migrant labour struggles: building a better life from the picket line

Abstract This article examines citizenship practices among migrant workers and their supporters in Prato, Italy, through the lens of the presidio —a physical site constructed and maintained by migrant workers and native activists to sustain daily life at a permanent picket line. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2023), I analyze how the presidio demanded recognition of strikers’ right to a forty-hour workweek while rejecting the terms of the Italian state. More than a site of resistance, the presidio became a space to experiment with building a cross-national political community outside the dominant frameworks of migrant labour governance. Picketers understood that leaving the presidio due to perceived irreconcilable differences, such as conflicting gender norms, could jeopardize their collective pursuit of a better life. The presidio thus exemplifies what Craig A. Clancy calls a ‘temporal autonomous space’, a space where people could experience temporalities beyond those imposed by capitalism and confront their finitude. By refusing racialized work schedules and inadequate state institutions, the presidio offered a material space from which to reimagine the futures of both migrants and natives, encapsulated by picketers’ slogan per una vita più bella (‘for a better life’). In sum, this paper demonstrates how the presidio could achieve material gains for migrant workers, cultivate alternative ways of thinking about otherness, and enable participants to confront existential questions. In doing so, the presidio challenged the assumption that resistance and prefiguration are mutually exclusive, showing instead how they can coexist and reinforce one another.