Paper short abstract:

Our work attempts to analyse, comparatively, the discursive design of different museums focusing on European immigration to America in the contemporary period, with examples from both sides of the Atlantic.

Paper long abstract:

The most transcendental phenomenon of the Contemporary Age up to the present day is transnational migration. Among them, one of the most important, persistent and impactful flows has been the successive waves from "Old Europe" to America, flows which, for the so-called period of "mass emigration" (1880-1930), number in the tens of millions of people. The impact of this emigration has been and is absolutely transcendent in many countries from a quasi-mythological discursiveness (such as the "melting pot" in the USA or "branquitude" in Brazil). At the end of the 20th century, in several American and European countries, projects began to develop musealisation projects of the migratory experience to America (in the case of the emblematic Ellis Island, this began in 1982). In most cases, the museums are located in ports of departure or arrival, in facilities recovered from the points of access of immigrants to the frontiers of their new homelands, multiplying the symbolic role of their configuration. Our work aims to compare the discursive axes of the reference museum institutions in this field in order to find the transoceanic points of connection but also the significant differences in the interpretation of this recent past. The initial sample includes institutions from Argentina, Brazil, the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Portugal. These models, mainly from a discursive perspective, will be analysed with projects currently under design such as the Archive-Museum of the Emigration of Castile and Leon (Spain). The conference will be given in Spanish.

Keywords: transnational migrations, museums, access point, discursivity, cultural heritage.