Migrant Women and Their Families in Italian Urban Contexts: Substantive Citizenship, Gender Regimes, Meanings of Social Spaces

The global crisis concerns the socio-economic, institutional and symbolic structure of European citizenship. It reopens crucial questions about the stratification of native Europeans, already mixed by the migratory flows from South to North. In contrast, the strategies practiced by the migrants reveal them as European citizens, even if enrolled in not-completed, differentiated and fragmented forms of citizenship. The dynamics of urban life transculturation have produced practices and meanings for the recogniction of rights and differences that constitute new forms of substantive citizenship. The city is organized memory. The every-day life of migrant women and men with  their families – that embed their work and caring relations, their transits and spaces of aggregation and their use of the institutions – has contributed to redefine the sense of the places of everyone, from “the feeling of home” to the territories recognized as physical and symbolic homeland or as land of exile. In this context, meanings, practices, social hierarchies related with gender relations, class distinctions, and cultural-linguistic stratifications has been also redefined. The Gender Order  reveals a multiplicity of arrangements that challenge the universalism of the European Human Rigths System and the  permanence of  stable identiies.

The paper – based upon qualitative research conducted in medium-small Italian cities characerized by high migratory density –concerns the ambivalences and tensions within the citizenship practices of migrant women and their families. The strategies adopted by the migrants to cope with the crisis contribute to redefine their way to remain in Italy as well as their transnational networks. “To feel at home” and “to feel at homeland” are invested with a multiplicity of contemporaty meanings, some of which indicate forms of resistance to the critical circumstances.