Different But Not Stranger: Everyday Collective Identifications among Adolescent Children of Immigrants in Italy

This article deals with the problem of the future of the second generation in Italy. After a brief overview of the main perspectives currently adopted to theorise the future of the second and subsequent generations, the Italian situation is introduced. Our objective is to see whether and how the observations made especially in contexts with a long tradition of immigration, where migration processes are now culturally and institutionally embedded, can be useful to understand the Italian situation, characterised by recent immigration flows. The empirical basis to the paper is a set of interviews and focus groups with 105 young people of migrant origin in Milan. Analysis of their narratives reveals six self-identifications which we describe as ethnic enclave, mimicry, crisis, transnational, hyphenated and cosmopolitan.