Migrant Memories

The migrant has been designated the central or defining figure of the 20th century. Yet, for much of this period, research and theory have centered on adult men as representative, ignoring women's part in international migration. Weaving together history, theory, and immigrant women's own words, Memories of Migration reveals women's multifaceted participation in the mass migrations from eastern and southern Europe to the United States at the turn of the century. By focusing on women's responses to Americanization organizations, coethnic community networks, and income-producing opportunities, this book provides rich insight into the sources of immigrant women's distinct fates in America.

Migrant Memories provides an innovative perspective on the power of cultural memory and the influence of cinema on the Italian diaspora in Britain. Based on extensive interviews with Southern Italian migrants and their children, this study offers a fresh understanding of the migrants' journey from Italy to Britain since the early 1950s. The volume examines how the experience of contemporary Italian identity has been mediated through film, photography and popular culture through the generations. Beginning with an analysis of the films of Frank Capra and Anthony Minghella, the book goes on to address the popular melodramas of Raffaello Matarazzo and ultimately argues that cinema, and the memory of it, had a significant influence on the identity formation of first-generation Italians in Britain. Coupled with this analysis of cinema's relationship to migration, the cultural memory of the Italian diaspora is explored through traditions of education, religion, marriage and cuisine. The volume highlights the complexities of cultural history and migration at a time when debates about immigration in Britain have become politically and culturally urgent.

This volume explores ideas of home, belonging and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location. Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies.

Anastario investigates the social memories of rural Salvadorans from an area that was heavily impacted by the Salvadoran Civil War, which fueled a mass exodus to the U.S. By working with travelers who exchanged parcels containing food, medicine, photographs and letters, Anastario tells the story behind parcels and illuminates their larger cultural and structural significance.

Increasingly, the European Union and its member states have exhibited a lack of commitment to protecting the human rights of non-citizens. Thinking beyond the oppressive bordering taking place in Europe requires new forms of scholarship. This book provides such examples, offering the analytical lenses of memory and temporality. It also identifies ways of collaborating with people who experience the violence of borders. Established scholars in fields such as history, anthropology, literary studies, media studies, migration and border studies, arts, and cultural studies offer important contributions to the so-called “European refugee crisis”.

Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913.

Migration and forcible displacement are growing and impactful dynamics of the current global age. These processes generate mobility flows, travel patterns and touristic behaviour driven by personal and collective memories. The chapters in this book highlight the importance of travel and tourism for enabling such memories and memory-based identity practices to unfold. This book investigates how diasporic communities, transnational migrants, refugees and the internally displaced recreate home in their host place of residence through material culture, performativity and social relations; and how involuntary tangible and intangible stimuli evoke memories of home. It explores an array of diverse geographical contexts, balancing ethnographic vignettes of contemporary migrant societies with archival research providing historical accounts that reach back more than a century. Memory, Migration and Travel makes an original contribution by linking the emergent field of memory studies to the disciplines of tourism and migration/diaspora studies, and will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of tourism, geography, migration/diaspora studies, anthropology and sociology.

Corridos in Migrant Memory examines the role of ballads in shaping the cultural memories and identities of transnational Mexican groups.