Plans and Ideas for Independent Research - Immigration

            My group, whose focus is on immigration and migration, has decided to focus on a marketplace (or marketplaces) and analyze what these centers of trade tell us about the way of life of immigrants. We still need to concretely decide how exactly we will organize and divide the project, whether we will choose one market or study multiple ones, and what aspects exactly we will analyze.

Aspects to Analyze in Marketplace (a few ideas to investigate, I hope to come up with more)

·      Employment – do certain ethnicities fill certain jobs? why? do they choose to work in the market or if given the choice (or money or education) would they work elsewhere? if so what is keeping them from this? what are the employment laws like? where do they get the products that they sell?

·      Family – why do immigrants come to Italy? do they bring their families or leave them at home? what role does family play in the market? what is the education system like for immigrant children?

·      Gender Roles – where are the women in the market? what jobs to they fill?

·      Integration into Italian Culture – what do immigrants think of Italian customs? do they plan to stay or return to their home country?

·      Italian Opinion – how does this influence marketplace business? who frequents the market?

Possible Markets

·      Campo de Fiori – might be interesting to compare to other markets since we live and walk through it daily, tourist center, open Monday through Saturday from early morning to 130

·      Esquilino – indoor food, spice, and textile market, we visited 1/21, wide variety of ethnic food, fish, produce, I noticed that there was no place to find Central or South American food, fairly cleared out with few tourists, area with the very wealthy and the very poor, open Monday through Saturday until 1

·      Porta Portese – “flea market” with a little bit of everything, many blocks with multiethnic vendors, bartering is popular, not very touristy, open Sunday

·      Piazza Testaccio – produce, meat, and fish market, supposedly fairly tourist free, historic, open Monday through Saturday until 130