Narrating authenticity in northern Italian historical cafés

• This article is about negative stereotypes about migrants in Northern Italy.
• This article focuses on oral narratives by a manager of a historical café.
• The manager changes stance toward the interviewers during his storytelling.
• The manager shifts from official representations to more unofficial ones.
• He moves from an inclusive authenticity to a more exclusive authenticity.

While many migrants are now legal workers in Italian corporations (usually holding less desirable jobs), tensions between this new migratory workforce and Italians continue today. During the 1970s and 1980s, Italy changed from being a country of emigrants to a receiver of immigrants (the so called “extracomunitari”). This increased flow of immigrants has affected Italian self-perceptions of national culture and identity, and has led to new forms of strong anti-immigration legislation, supported especially by the influential Lega Nord (‘Northern League’) political party. A new wave of narratives that either counter or foster these anti-immigrant discourses has emerged. Using a corpus of naturally recorded oral narratives about migrants that I collected in several northern Italian historical cafés, this article explores how executives redefine both their individual and their corporate identities in narratives about immigrants. In particular, this article analyzes the different stances, or positionings, that executives assume to construct their corporate identity vis-à-vis the challenging Italian political climate surrounding migratory politics.