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Rosarno, 7-10 January 2010. On 7 January, the main press agencies spread the news of a violent uprising of foreign laborers in the Piana di Gioia Tauro. The protest follows the attack that the same day struck Ayiva Saibou, a 26-year-old refugee from Togo. Ayiva was shot in the abdomen by some air rifle pellets fired from a car. The violence against Ayiva wasn’t the first one nor will it be the last one to happen in the Plain. The farm workers who rebel on that day in January are tired of the many racist violence they have suffered, but also of the conditions of exploitation at work that they have been forced to accept for years, in the countryside of the “Piana”. The media narration of the Rosarno revolt reminds us that information can contribute to feed a distorted representation of foreign citizens, dramatizing the narrative of the forms of their protests and at the same time removing the causes and the context that move them. The contribution offers a reconstruction of the events of those days.
