Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore imaginaries of Latin-American youths, that came or “are brought” to Italy once they become adolescences. Often their desires clash with their mothers ambitions, expecting them to make the sacrifice of their own migration worthwhile.

Paper long abstract:

As a wide literature has underlined, Latin-American immigrants in Europe are mainly adult women workers that take part of global care chains. Most of them have left their small children under responsibility of other relatives, expecting to be capable of bringing them later. The strategies of these women to take care of their children in transnational terms have drawn anthropology's attention. Nevertheless few studies have enquired about children that after spending time in their original countries, once they become adolescence they migrate to Italy to join their mothers. They decide to migrate either for their own decision or because they are forced by their families. In both cases mothers expect them to be repaid for the sacrifice realized. They hope that they are able to benefit from the study and work opportunities that migration should give them. Nevertheless the parent's "desire of elsewhere" clashes with the desires of their sons and daughters: they are overly aware of the inner contradictions of migration, they don't believe in the myth of Europe and often they refuse to inherit the sacrifice of their mothers. Their young trajectories challenge their parents imaginary and subvert their hopes of success. Conflicts arising from these contradictions undermine the whole sense of familiar migration. What kind of imaginary of mobility do these newly arrived youngsters create? How are using using their bodies, their sexuality and their desires to subvert their parents' imaginaries of migration? Based on ethnographic and clinical cases, this paper aims to explore these contradictions.