Migrant friendships, migrant loves – taking the sociability of second generations seriously

Abstract

The children of immigrants, both foreign- and Italian-born, have become a sizeable presence in Italian high schools – one with which other students, teachers and administrators must interact on a regular basis. This paper presents findings – complemented by ethnographic observations – of the first two waves of a longitudinal survey among classi from high schools in Trento, Italy. It explores the sociability patterns and categorical identifications of both native- and foreign-born students at a phase of the life cycle when the changes brought by immigration interact with the social and psychological changes triggered by adolescence. The data reveal the possible existence of a weak form of ethnic hierarchy, but there is an absence of any significant processes of social closure. The length of stay is the key variable, associated both with having heterogeneous personal networks and with identification with Italy.

Keywords:

• Second generation
• friendship
• Italy
• personal relationship
• immigration

Notes

As in most specialized literature, I distinguish here among: the second generation (born and raised in Italy by immigrant parents), the 1.75 generation (born abroad and arrived in the country in the preschool years), the 1.5 generation (born abroad and arrived in the country between 6 and 12 years old) and the 1.25 generation (born abroad and arrived in the country between 13 and 18 years old). Concerning the reasons for such classifications and the debates on their usefulness, see Portes and Zhou (1993) and Portes and Rumbaut (2001a,b).

Most research on Italian schools, moreover, has been concentrated in the primary and intermediate levels of the educational system. For my purposes, however, I found it more useful to concentrate on the first grades of high school, where nearly all the students are adolescents and the importance of peer groups is more significant and fateful.

A major consequence of this state of affairs is that the number of children of immigrants among my interviewees is sizeable but still sometimes too small for giving the percentages of certain cells of the tables in this paper any real significance. While I have done my best to provide always also the absolute numbers, it is worth emphasizing that some cells with very low percentages are to be handled with care.

This is only a preliminary finding, as the size of these categories is too small for sustained analyses – the entire category is composed of only seventy-eight students in my sample of 2,887.