Second-Generation Transnationalism and Roots Migration by Susanne Wessendorf

Author:Susanne Wessendorf [Wessendorf, Susanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Marriage & Family
ISBN: 9781317058441
Google: TOreCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-01T03:21:10+00:00

Attempts to ‘Assimilate’

Antonio did not feel integrated among co-ethnics. Describing himself as a loner during childhood, he felt uncomfortable when spending time among people of Italian origin, for example, with his parents’ Italian friends, who were outgoing and sociable. Among Italians in both Switzerland and Italy, he felt pressured to conform to expectations to be sociable and open. Because of his shyness, but also because there were few other Italian children in either his primary or secondary school, Antonio did not acquire friendships with co-ethnics with whom he could have developed a more positive stance towards his Italian background. Furthermore, he felt limited by his parents in his choices regarding his professional career. For all these reasons, he consciously distanced himself from his co-ethnics. Like Claudia, he also felt embarrassed about eating in front of the Swiss, for example, on train journeys to Italy, when his mother unpacked Italian sandwiches while they were still riding through Switzerland. He also felt ashamed about going to collect dandelions in parks on Sundays with his parents, dandelions being an Italian speciality used in salads, but a rather strange ingredient from a Swiss point of view. Such feelings of unease were strengthened at school, where he was bullied by other children because he had to repeat the first year. In this context, and being surrounded by a majority of Swiss children, he had a strong desire to fit in with the Swiss and avoided attracting attention to himself. Because he experienced any signs which showed his difference as a burden, he tried to assimilate to the Swiss and thus distanced himself from everything Italian. One of my informants who was bullied because of his Italian background described this desire to fit in with the Swiss and not to attract attention to himself as a ‘survival instinct’.

These attempts to assimilate in reaction to hostility from the majority society have been confirmed in a Swiss study of Italians in Switzerland (Frigerio Martina and Merhar 2004). Experiences of stigmatization have also been shown to lead to attempts by members of the second generation to narrow the status gap separating them from members of the majority society through adopting high ambition and hard work (Juhasz and Mey 2003). Integration into the majority middle class is one of the patterns of ‘segmented assimilation’ described by Portes and Zhou (Portes and Zhou 1993), and the desire to fit into the majority society in reaction to exclusion has also been described as ‘over assimilation’ (Heckmann 1992). The ‘typical Italians’ who felt strongly embedded within the Italian transnational social milieu resolved feelings of exclusion by forming friendships with other second-generation Italian children and by celebrating their Italian backgrounds, a phenomenon also described as ‘reactive ethnicity’ (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). For Antonio this was not an option, as he did not feel comfortable within the Italian social milieu. Ethnic assertion did not represent an alternative to social exclusion from the Swiss because he did not relate to his co-ethnics either, not only within Switzerland but also during his holidays in Italy.

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