Negotiation of Identity in Transnational Contexts. The Case of Romanian Temporary Workers in Italy

Abstract

This paper 1 looks at migrants' negotiation of identity in transnational contexts. Intra-EU migration has brought about changes in the nature and significance of citizenship, social relations and symbolic ties in communities. The transnational interconnectivity between homeland communities and the diaspora poses a challenge to discourses of national belonging. Under current deterritorialized experiences and technological advances, the simultaneous incorporation of migrants within and across national entities sees the advent of plural representations of identity and national societies. In our analysis of interviews carried with Romanians working in Italy we started from the assumption that temporary workforce migration is a specific type of transnational context, which generates new cultural practices and requires migrants to define ways of belonging towards the host and home countries and to negotiate identitarian attributes. Our hypothesis is that in this transnational context the migrants do not employ attributes of essentialist identity in routine discourses about themselves, but rather strategically mobilize these attributes in order to justify the dynamics of belonging to home or host countries.

To return or to stay? The situation of Romanian badanti in Italy during the Coronavirus pandemic

“…2015). Furthermore, numerous previous research approached multiple dimensions of the Romanian emigration phenomenon (Anghel and Horvath 2009), including the situation of Romanian migrants in Italy (Sandu 2018), or identifying the migration routes (Ricci 2002), estimating the impact of the economic implications in emigrating decision-making and the destination area (Simionescu 2017), up to more complex aspects, such as the degree of integration and acculturation in the host-society (Anghel 2012;Mazza and Punzo 2017), or, depending on the situation, reintegration in the community of origin (Vlase 2011), the returning options for other types of occupations (Croitoru and Cosciug 2021) or identitarian dimensions of migration (Ciocea 2016). (Eurostat 2023), therefore, almost a quarter of the population is in need of dedicated care and assistance services.…”