Since 1990 Albania has witnessed rural outmigration on a massive scale: both abroad, chiefly to Italy and Greece but increasingly to other countries too, and internally to Tirana and other major towns. The scale of this migration has been such as to disrupt multi-generational rural social and kinship systems which, before 1990, were strongly
This paper focuses on the so-called 'zero generation': the parents of first-generation migrants who are initially left behind in the migrant country of origin and who may subsequently follow their children in migration or engage in transnational back-and-forth mobility. We challenge the prevailing optic on the left-behind older generation which sees them as dependent and in need of care, and stress instead their active participation both in migration and in the administration of care and support to their children and grandchildren. Drawing on interviews with mainly zero-generation Albanians, but also some first-generation migrants, in various geographical contexts -Albania, Italy, Greece and the UK -we trace their evolving patterns of mobility, intergenerational care, wellbeing and loneliness both in Albania and abroad. In telling the often-overlooked story of the zero generation, we highlight both their vulnerability and agency in different circumstances and at different times, shaped by family composition and the ageing process.
Older people have been the main social casualties of the collapse of the Albanian communist system and the ensuing mass emigration of younger generations since 1990. Some have had to forage for survival on a near‐starvation diet, making broth from grass and weeds. For others, remittances from emigrant children ensure adequate material well‐being, but a loss of locally‐based trans‐generational care and of intimate family relations occurs. Rates of emigration have been highest in the southern uplands, where our fieldwork took place. Migration has been mainly to Greece, but also to Italy and elsewhere. Interviews with elderly ‘residual households’ ‐ single people and couples ‐ reveal stories of loneliness and abandonment; cross‐generational rupture of hitherto tight family structures is seen as emotionally painful because of the impossibility of enjoying mutual benefits of care sustained by geographical proximity. Profoundly upsetting is the denial of the practice of grand‐parenting, which the older generation see as their raison d'être. Cost of travel, visa regimes and emigrants’ irregular status conspire to prevent international visits. Finally, we examine various strategies of overcoming the ‘care drain’ produced by this situation, one of which is for older people to try to join their migrant children and grandchildren abroad.
The nexus between ageing and migration throws up a variety of situations. In this paper we map out the various circumstances in which ageing and migration fuse together as entwined trajectories to produce situations of vulnerability, coping, active ageing, and variable wellbeing. The ageing process is seen to be socially constructed and culturally embedded; hence place-at 'home' or 'abroad', or some transnational mixbecomes a paramount structuring variable. Different models of successful ageing compete as migrants move and age in different countries and different cultures; the western model of individual self-reliance should not necessarily be imposed on ageing migrant populations. In the final part of the article we challenge the prevailing trope of vulnerability applied to the perceived double disadvantage of being both an older person and a migrant, and present four case-studies in which older migrants enact agency and independence to achieve a greater level of material and subjective well-being.
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