Paper short abstract:

The arrival of migrants onto the local scene, represented by a middle-sized Italian town, provokes an urge for self-redefinition by the non-migrant majority and the migrant minority alike in an effort to come to terms with one’s own memories, with each other’s images, and with mutual representations.

Paper long abstract:

The arrival of migrants wishful of recognition in the public space is undoubtedly a moment of crisis for a host society. Our thesis is that the irruption of newcomers onto the local scene and into the regional political agenda provokes not only a shake-up in everyday life, but an urge for self-redefinition by the non-migrant majority and the migrant minority alike in a mutual effort to make sense of what is happening. Part of this redefinition involves a reconstruction of collective memories as pre-condition to imagine a society able to include both parts. Our narrative texts were mainly collected in a north-eastern Italian town located in Veneto, a region which hosts one of the quickest growth-rate of immigrant population on the continent. In this same region the memory of emigrants, who left poverty-striken war-burdened families by the thousands to seek fortune overseas, is constantly revived by the governing party to recreate a Venetian identity to counter-oppose the recent immigrants' histories and identities. Thus, memories of a recent past are introduced both to create empathy with newcomers and to mark a boundary-line with them. The large number of public events, out of which our narratives are taken, organized in different locations and by different actors, were only apparently isolated; if considered in a larger temporal and spatial context, they unveil threads which make actors and events intertwined and interdependent. The concept of mutuality, mentioned by Bauman (2003)is particularly relevant in the present study.