‘My Husband Is a Patriot!’: Gender and Romanian Family Return Migration from Italy

Abstract

Return migration has recently become an important topic of research within the gender and migration literature. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out in Romania and Italy, this paper focuses on the gendered patterns of return, highlighting the relationship between the motivation to return, family life plans, challenges and individual responses to structural factors that shape the decision to return. Based primarily on participant observation and in-depth interviews with women and men from a Romanian village, the findings suggest competing ways in which men and women resettle in their community. While men transfer large amounts of money and make use of their new skills and their contacts with their Romanian peers in Italy in order to gain their livelihoods in the village, women encounter conditions that are deterrents to such economic transfers. Women tend, therefore, to maintain contact with Italian families as an alternative to their imperfect economic reintegration into the village.

Keywords:

• Family
• Return Migration
• Gender
• Romania
• Italy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous JEMS reviewers, as well as Marylène Lieber, Remus Anghel, Mălina Voicu, Claudia Câmpeanu and Professor Dumitru Sandu for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. This work was supported by the University of Bucharest through the strategic grant POSDRU/89/1.5/S/62259: ‘Applied Social, Human and Political Sciences. Post-Doctoral Training and Post-Doctoral Fellowships in Social, Human and Political Sciences’, co-financed by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007–2013.

Notes

1. Vulturu village has 4,000 inhabitants and is situated between two towns: Focşani (20 km) and Galaţi (60 km)—the seventh-largest town in Romania with its population of 300,000—situated on the River Danube. Focşani underwent a dramatic transformation because of the bankruptcy of all its factories in the aftermath of the collapse of communism. However, Galaţi still has work opportunities, especially in the iron industry, as this town is the biggest iron producer in the country.

2. This does not exclude the possibility that (a limited number of) such cases exist, but I was unable to reach them through my network of informants.

3. I use the concept bargaining power as defined by Kandiyoti (1988) with reference to the ways in which men and women make use of their asymmetric resources in order to improve their power of negotiation within patriarchal structures.

4. Investments in agriculture are developing, especially after Romania joined the EU in 2007 and is receiving financial support through the Common Agricultural Policy. In 2010, agricultural subsidies to cultivate land were established at 160 euros per hectare.