Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy (book excerpt)

Grazia Ting Deng on Why and how local coffee bars in Italy—those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces—have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008

Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product—so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO’s official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. And yet, despite its nationalist bona fides, espresso in Italy is increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars. In this book, Grazia Ting Deng explores the paradox of “Chinese espresso”—the fact that this most distinctive Italian social and cultural tradition is being preserved by Chinese immigrants and their racially diverse clientele.

Deng investigates the conditions, mechanisms, and implications of the rapid spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars in Italy since the Great Recession of 2008. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic research in Bologna, Deng describes an immigrant group that relies on reciprocal and flexible family labor to make coffee, deploying local knowledge gleaned from longtime residents who have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard this arrangement as a new normal. The existence of Chinese espresso represents new features of postmodern and postcolonial urban life in a pluralistic society where immigrants assume traditional roles even as they are regarded as racial others. The story of Chinese baristas and their patrons, Deng argues, transcends the dominant Eurocentric narrative of immigrant-host relations, complicating our understanding of cultural dynamics and racial formation within the shifting demographic realities of the Global North.

Praise

"[A] well-written work."— Choice

“An exciting new ethnography of Italy that centers on espresso coffee—a nationalist commodity—to interpret changing racial dynamics and immigration patterns in the country.” —Lilith Mahmud, University of California, Irvine

“Deng paints a nuanced portrait of an immigrant community that learns, adapts, and comes to deploy local knowledge gleaned from local Italian residents, earning both their admiration and resentment.” —Elizabeth Krause, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Grazia Ting Deng is a full-time lecturer at Brandeis University's Department of Anthropology. She formerly served a European Commission Marie Curie Fellow in collaboration with University of Venice Ca' Foscari (2022-24) and a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center (2019-22) after completing her doctoral degree in anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Excerpted from Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy by Grazia Ting Deng. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

The Paradox of Chinese Espresso

Coffee bars are ubiquitous in urban Italy. They are liberally distributed across all kinds of urban spaces: in piazzas and along sidewalks, in centri storici (historic centers) and peripheral quartieri (neighborhoods), in both tourist zones and residential areas. And they are found not only in cities, but also in provincial towns and villages. All offer as their most quintessential commodity, Italian-style espresso-based coffees. But unlike Starbucks or other independent specialty coffeehouses in the United States or in China, which focus on coffee consumption, a typical coffee bar in Italy is a hybrid establishment serving as a bar, a convenience store, and often as a game room as well. These are places where urban dwellers, whether native Italians or recent immigrants, can have breakfast, take a break from working or walking, pass their leisure time, or simply use the restroom after buying a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. A coffee bar is also a place where people can meet friends, get up-to-date local news, and enjoy the sense of belonging to a community. The nearly 150,000 bars—one for every 400 people—thus constitute a fundamental part of the urban landscape of contemporary Italy and play an integral in the lives of its people.

Coffee bars were a fresh and foreign cultural experience for me when I was an exchange student writing my Master’s thesis in socio-historical linguistics at the University of Trento between 2005 and 2006. It was my first visit to Italy and my first time outside of China. During my ten-month stay in that Alpine city, I had few interactions with my co-nationals beyond the university circle. They were as mysterious to me—an international student from the same country—as to native Italians. I knew of a clothing shop run by a young Chinese couple close to my dorm, but I never went inside. My Italian friends brought me to a couple of Chinese restaurants, but I did not like their Italianized dishes. I visited Via Paolo Sarpi in Milan and Piazza Vittorio in Rome, both of which were known in Italy for their high concentrations of Chinese residents and their cheap consumer-goods shops and ethnic restaurants. Some Chinese academic friends who had lived in Italy longer than me told me that there were actually many more Chinese residents in Italy. They were immigrant workers hidden in small factories where they both worked and lived and thus became almost invisible to urban dwellers.

Back then, I had never encountered a Chinese barista or heard Italian friends talk about Chinese ownership of coffee bars. I could not even imagine any kind of connection between Chinese immi- grants, largely marginalized and detached from Italy’s urban life, and the omnipresent coffee bars at the heart of its urban culture. I was astonished when, in 2012, I heard by chance that many coffee bars in Italy had in fact been taken over by Chinese people. This contradicted my own experiences of Italy. My intuition told me that this phenomenon might make for a fascinating ethnographic study for my doctoral dissertation, and I almost immediately decided to pursue research on the topic.

As my project proceeded, I learned that there had been a few sporadic cases of Chinese ownership of coffee bars in Italy in the early 2000s, or even before that. Their rapid spread however coincided with the onset of the Great Recession of 2008. The FIPE’s annual reports reveal that since then more coffee bars had closed than were opened each year. However, as a counter to these closures, foreign ownership had rapidly expanded in Northern and Central Italy during that same period. In 2008, around 5,000 coffee bars, comprising 6.6 percent of the total number in Italy, were owned by people who were not born in the country. Ten years later, the percentage had risen to around 10 percent. Among the coffee bars classed as imprese individuali or “sole proprietorships,” which is the form of enterprise with the highest level of foreign ownership, some Northern regions reported numbers as high as 20 percent. Over the same period, the numbers of foreign workers had also grown considerably and, by 2018, nearly a quarter of employees in the coffee bar sector were born outside Italy. The Chinese were not the only foreign-born owners of Italian bars. I also encountered coffee bars managed by Russians, Moroccans, and Romanians, among others. But Chinese management was and still is the most visible due to Chinese baristas’ obvious phe- notypical differences and their large market share. Coffee bars managed by Chinese people have become quite common in both large cities and provincial towns and in city centers as well as residential areas.

This fact has touched a raw nerve in native Italians who associate the increasing Chinese presence in this niche with the growth of Chinese transnational investment in Italy more broadly. Many Italians express admiration for China, once a poor developing country that has emerged as an economic superpower seemingly almost overnight, while Italy has remained mired in economic stagnation. At the same time, I noticed that even Italians who historically identified with the left often resented China for “buying up” Italy with supposedly problematic money which, in their eyes, was invariably linked to suspicious economic activities or money laundering operations. With few exceptions, both left- and right-wing media have, with remarkable consistency, used provocative headlines and claimed an “invasion” of Chinese capital into the Italian economy. Their coverage spans the entire range of the Chinese economic presence in Italy, from large companies in the energy industry, banks, and infrastructure sectors, down to small businesses such as coffee bars, restaurants, barbershops, and dollar stores. They share similar concerns about the rapid growth of Chinese enterprises and worries about i cinesi (the Chinese) becoming the padroni (bosses) of more and more Italian workers, and maybe one day even the padrone (boss) of the entire country. These discourses often equate Chinese people with China in the same racialized category, regardless of the fact that many Chinese residents have lived in Italy for decades and have children who were born or have grown up in Italy.

The anxiety many Italians feel about the supposed loss of Italian culture on this very local level further exacerbates the controversy over Chinese ownership and management of coffee bars. The “coffee bar is not just any place,” a news article claimed

It has a soul, sometimes very deep roots, and branches that cover the communities of a territory or of a single area. A life, even a very intense one, takes place around the coffee bar, and this is why we can consider the coffee bar as a garrison of relationships, human relations and civility. It is a precious and intangible heritage that we cannot waste or abandon in our daily life.

Alongside its provocative anti-Chinese tone, this article highlights the integral role of coffee bars in shaping Italy’s urban cultures and local identities and argues for resistance to Chinese ownership due to its allegedly alien character. However, the article describes coffee bars in Italy as if they were ahistorical and takes no account of Italians’ diverse class, gender, generation, and other social backgrounds. Like other public discourses I heard and read, it also ignores the increasing foreign-born populations in Italy who today form an important part of the clientele of coffee bars. Like many Italians, these immigrants frequent coffee bars as part of their lifestyle and as a venue for building social relationships.

Another piece published in a local newspaper based in Ravenna, a UNESCO seaside city known for its mosaic art, recounted stories of how two Italian coffee bar owners reacted differently “when China approached.” The one who sold his business to a Chinese family was described almost as a traitor to his country, despite having expressed his reluctance in the face of a colossal global power from the “Orient.” The other owner, who refused a Chinese family’s offer, was depicted as a patriot whose rejection of the Chinese buyers was an honorable action taken for the sake of conserving local identity, cultural heritage, and national patrimony. The owner was quoted as saying:

I would rather give up my business to an Italian, even better to someone from the Romagna region. This isn’t an ideological choice, but simply because I want to see my small bar tabac- cheria [tobacco bar] in the hands of someone familiar, someone who can maintain the characteristic convivial atmosphere of a meeting place for the town.

This owner emphasized the “non-ideological” character of her decision. However, her words were certainly ideologically charged, even racist. Race is a “sliding signifier.” It is a social and discursive construct invented to justify human differences and inequalities rather than to signify anything inherent in a person’s physical or biological aspect. People of Chinese descent and other East Asians have been historically racialized as perpetual foreigners and unassimilable Others in white-dominant societies, where national identities have always been associated with whiteness. In this contemporary case, the owner assumed that the Chinese family, unable to understand Italian culture, would not maintain the “authentic” cultural environment of an Italian social space. She made it clear also that people of Chinese descent, regardless of their citizenship, were not Italians in her eyes, as if culture were a geographically bounded and immutable concept. Yet, according to Italian law, only Italian or EU citizens are allowed to purchase tobacco shops, which implies that there was at least one member in that Chinese family who held Italian citizenship.

The owner’s words expressed a common skepticism that many Italians share about Chinese baristas’ ability to manage coffee bars. She mentioned wanting to sell her business to “someone familiar,” on the grounds that local knowledge was critical for maintaining the social functioning of her tobacco bar as a community social center. This notion is furthered by the social and cultural implications of espresso, the staple commodity of an Italian coffee bar. Together with its variant, cappuccino, espresso is widely considered Italy’s national beverage and internationally recognized as a product that is a symbol of Italianità (Italian-ness). How could a person of Chinese descent, who presumably came from a totally alien culture, possibly make an authentic Italian coffee? This is one of the first questions that some curious Italians raise, while others simply pose it as a rhetorical question to which they already know the answer: They cannot.

This controversy and the resistance and skepticism it provokes, however, contradict the reality of Chinese-managed coffee bars and their seemingly convivial atmospheres, as we saw it described in Luca’s (Uncle Gumin’s) coffee bar in the Prelude. It seems in fact that, despite the racial and ethnic tensions exhibited in heated public discussions and in the media, Chinese baristas have managed to fare quite successfully in intercultural encounters with their local customers. It also appears that Italian consumers, albeit perhaps reluctantly, are getting used to coffee made by Chinese baristas, even while sighing over the “invasion” of the orientali.

Excerpted from Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy by Grazia Ting Deng. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

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