Inside a product of projective spaces, we try to understand which Chow classes come from irreducible subvarieties. The answer is closely related to the theory of integer polymatroids. The support of a representable class can be (partially) characterized as some integer point inside a particular polymatroid. If the class is multiplicity-free, we obtain a complete characterization in terms of representable polymatroids. We also generalize some of the results to the case of products of Grassmannians.