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Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects on the complexity of (im)mobility and (re)migration, through the lens of Bosnian Roma refugees living in a state-run ghetto in Rome (Italy), who invest in the construction/refurbishing of houses in Bosnia without actual plans of returning to the lost homeland.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on materials collected during ongoing research among Bosnian Roma refugees living in a state-run ghetto at the periphery of Rome (Italy). Despite housing segregation and diffused anti-Gypsy and xenophobic sentiments in Italian society, the families here described got rooted in the social, economic, and cultural texture of the Eternal City, where they have been living for 3 decades. These families nonetheless remain nostalgically attached to Bosnia, homeland which they forcedly left and which the war, international agreements and the transition to neoliberal economy wiped away. In the last 15 years, after regularizing their position in Italy, many Roma started building or refurbishing houses in Bosnia. These houses, situated in the surroundings of Tuzla (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), are regularly visited, especially in summer. Although rapidly spreading in the community, the new transnational practices revolving around houses do not foster fantasies of re-migration. Tuzla is not the Roma’s lost home-village – now situated in the Serbian Republic – and definitive returns to Bosnia are commonly connected to the failure of the migratory project in Western EU, or to death (as the bodies of deceased Roma are still buried in the home-village). This paper explores the ambivalence and complexity of practices and imageries of (im)mobility which stretch between EU and non-EU spaces, which reveal complex scenarios of (re)migration, and articulate alternative understandings and practices of European identity.