24

This article documents the role of language in social cooperatives, which work with transnational workers in Italy to promote these individuals’ access to employment and socioeconomic independence. This contribution argues that just like the state, whose management of inequality is framed by ideologies of colonialism and gendered/racialized nationalism, social cooperatives in Italy manage the contradiction between liberal democratic promises of equality and social selection through mystification processes that rely on language, which then leads to a reproduction of hierarchies that complicate transnational workers’ access to social equality.