Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the experiences of Ghanaian mothers, of different ages and generations, living in Italy, aiming at observing how mobility trajectories, reproductive experiences and aspirations towards the future are intertwined, represented, and reinterpreted in biographical narratives.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution focuses on the experiences of Ghanaian mothers, of different ages and generations, living in Italy, and aims at exploring how mobility trajectories, reproductive experiences and aspirations towards future are intertwined, represented, and reinterpreted in their biographical narratives. Considering motherhood as a process of becoming, in which moral and social expectations are continuously negotiated (Lowe 2019), this paper adopts a generational perspective and, therefore, observes how the meanings of giving life changes across generations, also in relation to mobility processes. In the ongoing research with women of Ghanian origin in Italy, indeed, “being a mother” clearly emerges as an important criterion for evaluating the success of a woman in migration and life trajectories, as well as a crucial step toward adulthood and autonomy within the scattered kinship networks. This is particularly evident among elderly Ghanaian women, many of whom became mothers in contexts of high socio-economic precariousness, without giving up their personal work projects. The maternal experiences of their daughters reveal a changed relations - albeit not less problematic or critical - both with the racialized imaginaries spread locally, both with gender norms and moral duties transmitted in kinship and diasporic networks. By exploring how notions of sameness and difference, repetition and change, distance and proximity are evoked and treated in their narratives, we will observe the processes of generating and negotiating identities, implicit in mothering practices, and how these express new individual and collective desires for the future.