Memorie mobili: voci di nipoti e nonni nelle famiglie transnazionali

Abstract

The paper presents a section of a quantitative and qualitative research, which took place in the Italian North-eastern region between 1982 and 2013, aiming at finding the images and relationship that grandchildren live with their grandparents (Gecchele, 2015). The essay takes into account stories written by pupils of primary and secondary schools, children of migrant parent who were born in Italy or that came through family reunification. The younger ones, engaged together with their parents in the complex process of interacting and integrating with the realities of the host country, express the relationship with their grandparents by showing a cultural and a value-based crossbreeding passing through at least three generations. In the migration process, how does the generational transmission of family educational models get activated? What role is reserved for the elderly who normally remain in the country of origin? Which in the “weight” of oral memories when the youngsters during the migration process tend to forget the language of the elderly? The voices of the older and younger people, geographically distant and always in tension between a before-migration period and a contemporary now, call for expanding the queries on the relationship between the memories of family education and the forging of mobile individual and family identities.