Much more than Italians : forms of identification among children of immigrants in Italy

The paper would analyse the processes and the forms of identification of 87 adolescents children of immigrants attending secondary school in Italy. The study was conducted using qualitative methodology – 62 narrative in-depth interviews and 5 focus groups involving others 25 adolescents, and was oriented to reconstruct the narrations these teenagers are using to speak of themselves, their contests of life, their present conditions and future hopes. The theoretical hypothesis leading the research was the necessity to develop more accurate and sensitive analytical tools to understand the processes of everyday multicultural relationships, in situations of increasing global interconnection. Getting over the hypothesis that the ways to face difference inevitably lead to assimilation and acculturation, sectarian ethnical closures or a never-ending production of hybrids and new forms of melange without consistency and stability, the research tried to fill with empirical evidences if and how these adolescents feel themselves included into a diasporic public sphere and if an how this transform the experience of time, space and relations of their everyday life. The concepts of generation and generation unit (Mannheim) – specifically marked by a particular experience of globalisation and the need to give new meaning to locality and membership – are use to underline how the children of immigrants virtually are in a particular position for developing new forms of identifications. Their specific condition – the experience of migration joint to a long socialisation into the Italian scholastic system – makes them more directly exposed to issues and events that consider membership and difference as problematic or more capable of giving them age-related meaning than their peers. The paper would try to identify some rhetorical strategies of identification, not to construct rigid and static patterns, but to stress the contextual work of meaning construction of membership and how it can shift moving from a context to another. Some rhetorical strategies of identification are similar to the narrations usually made by immigrants: - a strong inclusion into a familiar or ethnic network, which largely absorbs time and experience; - experience of crisis and marginality, feeling “out of place” both in relation with peers and with parental network; - forms of mimicry, hiding forms of difference to conform the behaviour to the external expectative. Other seem to be more innovative and connected to the globalisation processes: - trans-national identification, with a strong emphasis on the ability to pass over and through boundaries; - hyphened identification, where the double membership is considered a value, something adolescents are not available to easily dismiss; they feel themselves “more than Italians” and want other people recognise they are Italian and member of other communities; - cosmopolitanism, forms of self-narration that consider the difference as a relativistic and contextual variable, as a political and instrumental resource that can be used in different ways in different situations with different people; identification always requires some forms of irony for not limiting personal freedom and binding to a particular context