Abstract
In the valleys and villages of South Tyrol, a mountainous province in Northern Italy, traces of mobility, both ancient and contemporary, are omnipresent. Hikers cross national borders using old smuggler paths high up in the mountains; school busses shuttle children from remote farms to their classrooms where they meet classmates whose Slovakian or Pakistani parents work in local hotels. In public discourse, however, definitions of “the rural” continue to be rooted in discourses about century-old belonging to the land, age-old traditions, and a strict binary of insider versus outsider.
Add to that the fact that in South Tyrol categories of belonging - German, Italian, Ladin – are highly politicized, and legally and administratively institutionalized. This system of reified identity categories – instituted as part of the South Tyrolean Autonomy Statute as a measure of minority protection – exists in parallel with an ever-growing diversity of identities within the population (Zinn 2018). From bi- and multilingual families to people with migration background, an increasing number of South Tyroleans experience identity not as a fixed category, but rather a fluid process that blurs traditional ethno-linguistic boundaries and binaries of mobility/immobility or insider/outsider, and who thus struggle to identify, or even affiliate, with one of the three exclusive language categories.
Drawing on a study of second generation youth in South Tyrol (Mitterhofer and Jiménez-Rosano 2019), this paper explores how descendants of migrants define and experience identity in rural settings which are often portrayed as homogenous and immobile places even though migratory flows have shaped them for centuries such settings. How is second generation youth’s translocal identity – an identity tied not to one single location, but to multiple ones – perceived? What challenges and opportunities does this translocal identity constitute for them and the wider society? By focusing on identity processes (on how identities are constructed through an interaction of internal and external factors), rather than identity outcomes (which identity/identities are adopted or not), we explore the complex negotiations that go into these young people's attempts to find their place as a minority within a minority in rural Europe, and the effects their presence may have on local understandings of belonging and identity.