ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the Italian left constructed ethnic diversity in the 1970s, taking the discourses and practices about Southern immigrants in Bologna, the traditional 'showcase-city' of the Italian left, as a case study. It considers how the left of the 1970s conceptualized immigrants at the ideological and policy levels. The chapter provides how the socio-economic construction of immigrants influenced people's attitudes and behaviours at the grassroots level. It also considers the 'presence' of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the social fabric. Both the PCI and the Church provide comprehensive systems of belief and behaviour, systems that are mutually exclusive. This is recognized in the dual categorization of mondo cattolico and mondo comunista. The PCI and 'the left on its left' emerge as powerful inclusionary actors whose discourse served to antagonize and deflate discourses of exclusion based on anti-Southern prejudices that circulated among significant sectors of the Northern Italian population.
