Migrant otherness: social representations, historical courses, educational patterns

Within the field of historical educational research the social history of education is increasingly committed to the study of the material and symbolic processes of any educational domain and its social actors, through investigating the ongoing creation of imagination and mind building, the spaces of one's private sphere, and the weight of cultural traditions in educational practices and transmission. The recognition and interpretation of sources, a fundamental issue of any historiographical research and methodology, allows the recovery of marks and fragments likely to narrate the experience of everyday life, thus tracing the nonlinear boundary between history and memory. With this perspective the present essay uses the narrating dimension of memory to retrace the patterns followed by the Italian emigrant families in their intercourse with the local communities and see how cultural variables have conditioned the relationship. Special attention has been given to women's narrating voice as the unavoidable and essential element in any further elaboration of identity in the light of each family's migratory experience. To give "voice" to subjects of a time past permits the emergence of an interpersonal dimension unveiling affectivity and states of mind, together with the feeling of cultural marginality and exclusion, through one's self perception, through the wish of belonging, and through the dimension of transgenerational ties in defining processes of female identities in migration.