Chinese Espresso is a revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation. It investigates the conditions, mechanisms, and implications behind the rapid spread of Chinese-managed coffee bars in Northern and Central Italy since the Great Recession of 2008. It shows why and how Chinese immigrant labor is increasingly managing this “traditional” local business niche regarded by native Italians as rooted in a distinctively local taste and constituting a uniquely Italian social space. This ethnography paints a nuanced portrait of an immigrant group which relies on reciprocal and flexible family labor to make coffee and deploys local knowledge gleaned from indigenous residents, earning both their admiration and resentment. 

Chinese Espresso thus represents new features of postmodern and postcolonial urban life in a pluralistic society where racialized immigrants, presumably embodying incommensurable cultural differences, assume fundamental roles in making taste and place for conviviality. The story of Chinese baristas producing an Italian nationalist commodity while preserving a distinctly Italian social space and local culture transcends the Eurocentric narrative about immigrant-host relations. It also complicates our understandings of the cultural dynamics and racial formation within the shifting demographic realities of the Global North. 

Chinese Espresso in the Media