ARRIVEDERCI

We leave for the U.S. in about ten days. How do I close my blog?

I could easily write pages on multicultural issues in Europe in relation to soccer and the recent World Cup. The French team was the opposite of the Italian team in many ways. Most relevant for me was how the French team, including the now infamous Zidane, represented the new multicultural Europe, while the Italian side looked pretty much the way it looked the last time gli azzurri won the tournament. The Italians may well be the only European team in the mondiale whose players all have European backgrounds. Although Italy had two foreign-born players—Simone Perrotta (England) and Mauro Camoranesi (Argentina)—both had Italian parents.

I could tell you that here in our town, two of the three Moroccan families have left for the summer (Back to Morocco, some say; just across to the larger city of Foggia, say others). D and Z never did get to say goodbye. One family is still here (father, mother, and two school-age daughters who appeared in town on and off over the last four months but who speak next to no Italian and who were not enrolled in school). Word is that they all have tuberculosis and presumably have had some medical care. We were just told this afternoon, by various neighbors, who warned us to stay away from them and not let D play with the girls. We haven’t been able to confirm if it’s true.

Instead, let me finish with a few more details. We took a trip down to Matera (about three hours away) and I met with Dorothy Louise Zinn of the Universita’ degli Studi della Basilicata. She took me to the Associazione Tolba (see my post “HELP FOR ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS”) where I got to see a mostly-privately funded organization that seems to be doing a lot of good work for immigrants in the Matera area. They offer free Italian classes, they help people find work and housing, they assist with paperwork. Further, the actual space is open to immigrants as a hang-out spot. They publish some books and pamphlets of immigrant stories (both of their lives back home and their lives here in Italy) and they have a small library of books in languages other than Italian.

The physical space they offer (they have two such “hang-out spots” in town) are particularly valuable to domestic workers, who often meet up with other domestic workers on their days off (traditionally Thursdays and Sundays). Tolba opens up their community rooms on those days, and, especially in the hottest and coldest months, they get a lot of visitors.

The folks at Tolba also told me that they would be happy to help start a kind of immigrant center here in the area of Alta Irpinia, but that they would need a single person—an Italian, presumably—willing to look into getting space from the province or one of the towns and who would be interested in being an organizer (getting the word out, getting people there, etc.). Tolba said they’d donate books and some general know-how in order to get such a place up and running. What’s too bad is that I don’t think I can think of a person who’d be interested in volunteering to do such a thing. If only we were going to be here longer!

And so it ends. And here I close my own return migration.

ROADS PAVED WITH GOLD

My blogging days are numbered since we return stateside toward the end of July. For now I’ve got a few more interviews lined up and a few more soccer matches to watch.

It’s a challenge at this point to try and come up with large, sweeping generalizations about what I’ve learned these past months—I don’t necessarily even see the point in such an exercise.

Nevertheless, I can say that migrants of all kinds are shaped in great part by various juggling acts. One is between their expectations and experiences—the balance between the two defines an individual’s life as a migrant. Another is how an individual’s identity develops through a kind of back and forth between how that individual sees himself/herself and how others see him/her. Neither of these ideas is new to migration studies, but it’s been useful for me to be reminded of them firsthand, as it were, by people’s stories.

It’s in part because of this constant exchange that the experience of young children is intriguing to me—their expectations are by definition limited and thus their experiences seem on some level less mediated. Stories recounted from this, dare I say, “innocent position” potentially reveal more directly the relationship between power, identity, and culture.

At the same time, I’ve also been fascinated by those individuals who have given some consideration to their experiences of mobility. That is, they seem to have given some thought to the effect that moving around has had on their lives, the different perspective it has afforded them. It would be a stretch to say that they’ve theorized their migrancy, but that is in a sense what they’ve done (Gramsci’s “all men are philosophers” idea works here). This goes as much for a recent immigrant from the former USSR as it does for someone who returned from Belgium thirty years ago. And unlike what you might expect, education level doesn’t seem to determine how much someone has reflected on the large historical forces that have influenced the course of his or her life.

Alla prossima…