Where do we go from here? Exploring the future of mixed families between Italy and South Asia

Abstract

Family labor migration from South Asia to Europe is often framed as proceeding in a predictable pattern of “male first-time migrant, ethnic marriage and spouse reunion.” Migration to Northern Italy is no exception. Primary data from recent ethnographic fieldwork reveal a slow rise in mixed South Asian–Italian couples, which might bring into question the quandaries they face in raising children. This article considers the daily struggles in conjugal and parental relations in mixed-culture households formed by spouses, one of whom is from a South Asian background, and the other is an Italian “native.” Applying intersectional analysis to the life stories and aspirations of such cross-cultural new generations allows for revisiting the commonplace view of South Asia–Europe intimate links.

Keywords

mobility kinning mixed-parentage youth social change South Asian diasporas Italy

Introduction

This article deals with the unexplored terrain of intermarriages between South Asians and natives¹ in Italy today. Although South Asians represent a sizable share of immigrants across Southern Europe, there is little data available on the number of marriages they make with nationals of receiving countries. Italy, which hosts the second-largest Hindustani² community in Europe after the United Kingdom (UK) (Lum, 2012), is a significant case in point. Within the existing literature, intermarriages between South Asians and Italians are rare, and if they occur, they are more common among first-generation migrants than the second generation. As happens elsewhere with growing South Asian minorities, strong pressure develops from the elders to maintain family propriety and community cohesion, to which endogamy, that is, looking for a coethnic spouse either from the homeland or within the diaspora, contributes substantially (see Charsley, 2012).

In line with this, ethnographic data were collected from immigrants who had moved from the Indian subcontinent to Italy over the past two to three decades. Between 2012 and 2018, I conducted multi-sited fieldwork in Northern Italy and in Punjab, a region straddling the neighboring countries of India and Pakistan, where most research participants came from. The study sought to assess the emerging configurations of families between sending and receiving countries, and to analyze how this heterogeneous ethnic minority, which differs in class, and national and religious belonging, pursued homemaking activities in their daily lives.³ Snowball sampling of informants allowed a primary selection of migrant households where both spouses or parents had an Indian or Pakistani background. Qualitative interviews and ethnographic engagements were also carried out with a small number of Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans. The few South Asian–Italian couples in this study formed their relationships in the late 1990s or early 2000s; most of their children were teenagers at the time of data collection. Instead of looking at the exceptionality of these “mixed” families (i.e. any household based on intermarriage, following Tognetti Bordogna, 2019) as merely anecdotal evidence, their experience may indicate missing links in the integration process of South Asians in Italy today.

Though this contribution relates to migration studies (i.e., by considering transnational marriages, ethnic minority integration and second generations), insights from the new kinship studies in anthropology (Carsten, 2004; Levine, 2008; Qureshi, 2016) were useful in analyzing the nuances of the empirical evidence. While the data were not quantitatively representative, their deviation from the norm is worth looking into. What might these unlikely couples tell us of the intimate union between Italians and migrants from India and Pakistan, that is, between South Asia and Europe? What can we infer from the experience of the new generation who are raised in mixed families: binational, interreligious or cross-cultural? This article adopts a dual view of the mixed families presented, giving attention to both ascendant and descendant generations and looking at them through their childrearing style (their choices and constraints, effects and affects). Three case studies of different parent–child relations—within as many mixed-marriage couples—examine and compare the parenting styles adopted by each couple and the chances taken by their offspring (the so-called second generation) growing up. The discussion utilizes the lens of “kinning” (Howell, 2003), a concept in gender studies which emphasizes the process of making relatedness, that is, building kinship on defining factors beyond blood or law. Kinning fully accounts for not only the biological, but also the socio-cultural ties within one’s home. Within intermarriages, kinning is accomplished through an intergenerational investment in daily care, education and prevention of mixed-parentage children’s experience of discrimination (Singla, 2015; Seeberg and Goździak, 2016).

Notwithstanding the lack of intermarriage statistics for “native” Italians who have spouses from a South Asian background, delving into ethnographic evidence offers a unique perspective to appreciate how social life in times of diversity evolves at different paces (Wessendorf, 2014).

A boundary yet to cross—South Asians and intermarriages in Italy

For first-generation South Asian workers in Europe, the common migratory chain is mainly family reunification initiated by male spouses (Mohammad-Arif and Moliner, 2007; Bertolani, 2012; Bonfanti, 2016). The migrant breadwinner is rejoined by his wife and children once he has acquired a residence permit upon securing a regular work contract. This pattern continues among the second-generation South Asian youth in Italy, including those who have acquired Italian citizenship by naturalization. Once second-generation South Asians receive a European passport, they tend to marry within their diaspora, either by finding a partner among coethnics in the host country, or finding a spouse in the homeland who will later reunite with their partner in Europe. Following Mooney (2006: 389), “apparently, traditional practice of arranged marriage is a fully modern way of negotiating the boundaries of citizenship imposed by states.” For the younger generation, intermarriages between people with South Asian ancestry and native Italians appear problematic. Young South Asian women and men will have to juggle their intimate desires with the discrimination they might have experienced growing up as racialized immigrants, while considering the recommendation of their kin not to transgress ethnic boundaries when setting up a new household (implicitly heteronormative within a notoriously patriarchal culture, see also Gopinath, 2005; Dasgupta, 2014). Transnational marriages work within a system of civic stratification (Colombo and Rebughini, 2012), where natives are in a position of advantage, migrants are mere denizens and new natives struggle for social recognition (Bertolani, 2012). Furthermore, intermarriages that cross borders of both ethnicity and faith might be perceived as risky, especially when one partner comes from a Muslim community (see Mohammad-Arif and Moliner, 2007).

Research on Indian diaspora households who resettled in the Po Plain a long time ago seems to provide evidence that a Punjabi “home,” referred to as ghar in the mother tongue of my informants, has a relational and performative basis in their family bonds. This is even more salient in migratory contexts because when a relative migrates, it disrupts their kindred’s physical copresence or “mutuality of being” (Sahlins, 2013). For South Asian households, in becoming transnational, joint families turn nuclear and they devise new modalities of coparticipation in the diaspora to compensate for the geographical and genealogical distance (Boccagni and Baldassar, 2015; Bonfanti, 2020).

My ethnography⁴ sparked a debate with my colleagues (Bonfanti et al., 2018) on the challenge of developing trust and empathy with one’s participants, so that the latter could comfortably accept researchers into their private spaces. If the home itself is a threshold between the inside and outside, a place of belonging and separation, some ethical challenges emerged. Where did I (self-positioned with a certain age and gender, ethnicity and capital) stand in the field (see also Ganga and Scott, 2006)? How could I gain access to other people’s homes as a stranger wanting to be their guest? If I were not a woman and a mother and about the same age as these intermarriage couples, my research concerns might have been different. Also, my participants’ disclosures could have possibly taken different routes.

The following case studies bear traces of how conducting domestic ethnography is a tightrope walk between respect for privacy and involvement in the lives of families. Nevertheless, close insights into mixed families are a telescope for seeing the future yet to come. In The Future as Cultural Fact, Appadurai (2013) insisted on the interaction between three human capacities: imagination, anticipation and aspiration. Through these universal but culturally specific skills, Appadurai argues in favor of an ethics of possibility (building a better equitable world for us and our children) against an ethics of probability (of risk and securitization). In this article, I argue that if exogamy, that is, marrying out of one’s ethnic group, allows novel intimate relations between South Asian minorities and putative natives in Europe, their mixed offspring are also moving beyond narrow ethnic identities and reshaping a translocal space of affects and belonging (Boccagni and Baldassar, 2015; Groes and Fernandez, 2018). The intergenerational dynamics of these mixed families may lead to a broader understanding of transnational intimacies. Their lived experiences of cross-border love relations (Constable, 2005) may yield more inclusive possibilities to imagine, anticipate and aspire to. This is especially true in a nation-country like Italy, which still perceives itself as white and autochthonous, and where accommodating migrants is a latent emergency rather than the normalcy of contemporary multicultural social life) (Bonfanti, 2017).

Although the three intermarriages considered are not statistically representative of the research site—the Northern Italian city of Brescia, which has the highest record of foreign national residents and is the top destination for Indian and Pakistani immigrants in the country (Bertelli, 2019)—this exceptionality does not undermine its significance. On the contrary, the representational value of ethnographic records lies both in their qualitative thickness and in the analysis that questions their relative scarcity.

Ethnography of domestic lives

The renowned book Tales of the Field (Van Maanen, 2011) lists three genres of ethnographic writing based on people’s life accounts: realist, confessional and impressionist. As my respondents shared their experiences or reflections on migration and family affairs, they tended to adopt a confessional approach to the narration, due to the sensitivity of the topics discussed and the intimacy of the interview setting, generally their homes.

Throughout my fieldwork, the ideas, practices and emotions connected to kinship were part and parcel of an ongoing debate with the participants. How we interpreted the making of relatedness, which stems from intermarriages and cross-cultural parenting, is as much embedded in personal accounts as in the socio-historical milieu that these couples and children inhabit. Following Grillo (2008), the family seems to be “in dispute between insiders and outsiders” all over multicultural Europe. Besides the dilemmas in family reunification and new immigrant intakes (Kofman and Raghuram, 2015), how kinship and affinity figured in public policy perspectives and ethnic minority claims became an argument where different family members had their own say. Since the line between private and public life has become blurred, family-making may be considered a threshold at many levels, from the psychological to the political.

Within this landscape of intimate relations—conjugal and parental—hereafter I revisit the tales of three mixed families, which while replicating kinship along the mainstream of heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction (Carsten, 2004; Sahlins, 2013), transgress the conventions of ethnic marriage and challenge the exclusiveness of national majority.

Word of mouth remains an asset in ethnographic research. In August 2017, as I struggled to recruit Hindustani interlocutors (many had returned to their homeland for the summer vacation), an informant from Brescia city hall suggested I call one of her neighbors. The woman I ended up meeting is a divorced Italian who fell in love with a Pakistani immigrant man, with whom she raised her only daughter. It was almost twenty years since they had moved in together. Our conversation reconstructs this nuclear family’s history, focusing on the intersection between their economic and socio-cultural struggles: how did a binational and interfaith lower working-class unit cope with intermittent jobs and provide for a child’s upbringing against petty racism and mounting Islamophobia? To what extent was this young girl’s education affected by mixed parentage as she learned to accept a “foreign” stepfather?

The second case introduces the everyday life of a mixed family formed in the heyday of Punjabi migration to Italy during the early 1990s. An Indian transnational laborer and pioneer migrant, now retired and currently the spokesperson of a local Sikh temple, married an Italian woman who was then employed in the office of a trade union. The two met when he filed a complaint about racial abuse in the workplace. Not only did the couple overcome reciprocal qualms from their social networks, but they have also devised strategic ways to negotiate diversities as their three children came of age amid different peers and social alignments.

The third case involves an immigrant woman from Sri Lanka who married an Italian native man. The couple have two small children. Both are practicing Catholics; they first met at a parish church they used to attend. Considering the young age of their boys, I enjoyed interacting with this household by participating in family celebrations, many of which were related to Christian rituals. Invited as a guest into the privacy of their home, I could also observe close contacts between parents and children, trying to keep my gaze at an ethical distance because the boys were minors. I found that bedtime stories were an intimate part of their everyday routines, where small talk often reveals larger issues. How do the children of an ethnically mixed parentage grow up in a social context where they are embodied, and may be seen as others, also due to their skin color? What tactics do these parents implement to explain human diversities to their children and enable them to fit into a world which is increasingly becoming plural and yet remains unequal?

Overall, the cases in this article contribute to rethinking the fields of intimacy and transnational mobility, overcoming the dichotomy between love and labor and exploring “how the ‘intimitization’ of migration has a radical impact on meanings of kinship, race and gender, thus unsettling notions of family, equality and belonging” (Groes and Fernandez, 2018: 21).

Three mixed-culture families

A sofa in between: Tariq and Sabrina

Sabrina⁵ is an Italian woman in her 40s living with Tariq, a man from Pakistan who fled his homeland in the late 1980s for Italy as a political refugee (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018). The two have since lived together in a well-maintained small block from the 1970s in the multicultural urban belt of Brescia. A mix of “local, Southern Italian and foreign” surnames was listed on the doorbell pad of their condo. I felt awkward visiting on a Sunday, but Tariq was working weekdays in Milan as a technician, replacing oil-fired domestic appliances, and would be home only on Sunday afternoons to rest. When the plant he used to work for closed down, he moved to London for six months to seek employment. The construction industry was no better there for a man in his 50s. When Sabrina was diagnosed with breast cancer, he immediately headed back “home.” Home was the three flats they have moved in and out of over the past sixteen years, according to their household income. They have not married and never felt the need to. Tariq helped raise Sabrina’s only daughter, Sofia, who was from a short-lived previous marriage. She was the reason why he settled in the city while most other Pakistanis from his cohort had since left for other destinations or returned to their homeland. He was a Muslim who did not practice much, and she was a fairly devout Catholic.

On a September afternoon in 2017, I interviewed them both in their sitting room. Sabrina sat, restless, at the dining table after serving me coffee in a Mughlai tea set, and Tariq relaxed on the couch, which used to be their daughter’s sofa bed. In the background was a heap of fashion magazines in Italian and news weeklies in Urdu. Sofia had since moved out of that one-bedroom flat; she had found a job as a hairdresser and was living on her own. The old cherry-red sofa looked like a totemic object, holding many stories and emotions. Bought by Sabrina’s parents and with a velvet cover handmade by Tariq’s brother, the piece of furniture is a reminder of their daughter’s presence at home. While I was interviewing Tariq, Sabrina moved around, tidying up. She intervened in his replies, and he let her overrule him. I smiled when they recounted that the last time a stranger had come to visit, it was a local officer checking on their co-living situation for administrative reasons. They struck me as a couple who were attuned to each other. Their rented flat in Brescia was as much Italian as Pakistani, both Catholic and Muslim, and feminine and masculine. The material culture of their tiny home, and the narratives and habits of their shared domesticity were both personal and conjugal, harmonious just like anyone might wish it to be.

A few weeks later, Sabrina arranged to meet me for coffee downtown. She was working as a daily cleaner in private homes and enjoyed taking a stroll whenever she was free. She suggested we stopped by at her daughter’s hair salon, which Sofia had opened a year earlier with an older Italian woman. As we sat on the saddle stools waiting to get a blow-dry, I had a chance to talk with Sofia about her unconventional coming of age in a mixed-culture family. Now aged 23, Sofia seemed delighted at her parents’ involvement in my research.

You see, nowadays newspaper headlines are all about rainbow families [in Italy, this term usually refers to nontraditional families, often related to gay parenting], while […] I mean, our home was all about “United Colors of Benetton” twenty years ago! (Sofia, 18 December 2017)

Growing up as an Italian child who was adopted by an immigrant Muslim man, Sofia has memories of “unpleasant rumors behind her back” from her early years. Nonetheless, she is grateful to Tariq for having taken care of her and her mother in times of hardship and for never imposing any foreign rule in their home.

You know that Pakistanis, South Asians in general, are seen as [having a] macho-culture. Not to mention about the radicalization of Islam! Never paint with a broad brush […] My stepfather has been always there for me, [giving] wise advice, no constraints. Not even on boyfriends, it was my mom playing the sentinel! (Sofia, 18 December 2017)

Sofia insists that Sabrina should overcome any fear or resistance, and travel to Pakistan to visit Tariq’s place and people. There is sincere acceptance and curiosity in her voice when she proposes to accompany her parents (calling them both by their first names) to this “fabled land,” which she has heard of since infancy. She recognizes that by now she has come to terms with the “elephant in the room,” that is, growing up in a mixed-culture family and often being talked about behind their back. Today, as an independent young woman, Sofia feels at home in a multicultural urban environment and it is not surprising that her partner, an Italo-Moroccan, also comes from a mixed family background. Looking around, the same commonplace diversities sat placidly under the hairdryers of her salon, where veiled Muslim women and elderly Italian ladies were equally welcome.

The turban and the cross: Anita and Kulwir

In my research with Punjabis in the Po Plain, Kulwir and Anita’s household is one which I consider as a model of intermarriage families. Both in their 50s, the couple had raised three children in a satellite town of Brescia, shifting to a new dwelling closer to the city with each newborn. Kulwir fled India in 1985 as a young man, when violence against the Sikhs threatened many and murdered some of his close kin. Like hundreds of those pioneer Sikh refugees in Italy (Bertolani et al., 2011; Lum, 2012), Kulwir and his younger brother first worked in a circus and then in the agricultural sector. By the 1990s, “done with bearing [the] exploitation” of coethnic bosses and Italian entrepreneurs, he began to fight for his rights. It was at the office of a local trade union that he met Anita, who helped him in obtaining a legal work permit and the corresponding residence permit. Three years later, the couple married, despite the adverse reactions from each other’s family and friends. Kulwir was the first among his immigrant cohort to marry a non-Punjabi woman. Although Sikhism allows for interreligious marriages, and Kulwir was entrusted with the role of spokesperson for the local Sikh temple, his spouse Anita was received grudgingly by the community. According to her, talk about them ceased as the years went by and their children were born. “With every childbirth, I brought home more and more respect.” Anita’s family, despite being known to be antiracist and socialist, had welcomed Kulwir in principle, but still occasionally remarked on his “difference.” When their third child was born, Anita’s parents thought it ironic that her husband had turned their feminist daughter into a child bearer and homemaker, just like any stereotypical Indian woman (Thapan, 2013). Having children not only altered the social expectations of each spouse’s networks, but also raised questions about how they, as parents, raised their children. What could and did Kulwir and Anita teach their children? Were they to be brought up as more Italian or Sikh?

Throughout six years of ethnographic engagement with Kulwir and Anita’s family, I was able to observe and inquire about the everyday dynamics that they had to balance with their children growing up fast. In our informal talks, the issue of religion received much emphasis. Coming of age with a father who was a Sikh preacher and a nonpracticing Catholic mother, the three siblings never took their mixed heritage for granted. Each child seemed to reappropriate their parents’ religious identities with his/her own variation: the elder son followed his father’s commitment to the Sikh temple; the middle daughter dismissed any religious involvement; and the youngest boy took to Catholic education on his own initiative.

The elder son, Namit, who was 19 years old at the time of fieldwork in 2016, had just begun to follow in his father’s footsteps with Sikhism. On her part, Anita had never opposed any spiritual devotion, but was quite lay about it. Like many other Punjabi elder males, Kulwir rejoiced at the opportunity to strengthen the bond with his elder son and engaged him in the local Sikh community. In the process, Namit had to learn to master the Punjabi language, which they did not speak at home. The middle child, Dina (whose name was also chosen since it is both an Italian and a Punjabi girl’s name), then 15 years old, came of age uninterested in religious matters. Was that a spontaneous choice or a reaction to an excess of pious expressions among some family members? The girl shrugged her shoulders when I verbalized the question one afternoon, after collecting her from dance class. Her mother’s stern look ended further discussion. The youngest son, Ravi, then 11 years old, was grandma’s little fellow. To the whole family’s astonishment, he had pleaded to join a Catholic church with his schoolmates. On Sunday mornings, while Kulwir and Namit would leave early to join the gurdwara (Sikh house of worship), Anita would drop small Ravi at church for mass and Catholic education. She and Dina would then go shopping for Anita’s aged parents. Once, when invited to the children’s grandparents’ house for lunch, I found Ravi tying his laces for a local soccer match, while Dina was chatting away with Namit as he was wrapping his saffron cloth around his unshorn hair before joining a gatka (Sikh martial arts) competition. Namit then revealed that he had experienced bullying in middle school when he was not yet turbaned. For Namit, wearing the dastar (Sikh turban) gave him more protection against people’s hateful comments:

Hard to believe for you, but the turban protects me from evil […] I mean, it’s a sign of respect among us Sikhs, but also among my mates whatever their background. When they used to call me Paki, which doesn’t even apply because my dad comes from India, it sucked. But I think that kids’ naughtiness was more curiosity then, or at worst just the echo of their parents’ ignorance. (Namit, 3 March 2016)

Diversity was the everyday normalcy in their home, where the Italian constitution, the Sikh holy book Adi Granth and the Bible all hold the same respect. Past the entrance door, Anita whispered while lightning frankincense on a windowsill before Diwali (the pan-Indian festival of light):

It is in our living room that my children, that all of us, can express our true selves. Whomever we wish to be, we can (be) […] Gods or men forbidding! (Anita, 7 November 2015)

Bedtime stories reread: Teo and Padmini

Houses of worship play a significant role not only for settled ethnic minorities, but also for promoting encounters between new immigrants and the locals who share the same faith (Ambrosini, 2016). The networks radiating from churches can pave the way for intercultural relations, and eventually for intimate bonds. This is where the love story between Padmini and Teo began. I was referred to this couple around Christmas 2017 by the leader of an organization advocating for migrants’ rights in Brescia that was supported by the local church. This man described the couple in celebrative tones: “You can’t miss out on our gem spouses, if you wish to understand what intermarriage means!”

Padmini was born in the town of Kuchi, a pilgrimage site for Buddhists in the central plateau of Sri Lanka. A small and impoverished minority of converted Christians also live in the area. Hoping for better life prospects, Padmini and her three siblings moved to the West in their early 20s. She came to Italy in 2006 on a tourist visa, and through the aid of an aunt who was already a resident, she was hired as a domestic worker and managed to remain in the country. Though she knew prayers in Latin, learned by heart as a young girl, Padmini struggled to acquire proficiency in the Italian language. It was in the parish church where she took classes for free that she first met Teo. “Same age, same passion for life in Christ,” were the words that Teo used to describe how their encounter was more than love at first sight. Both 28 years old at the time, Teo and Padmini started out as friends and later, their friendship evolved into intimate partnership and, eventually, marriage. They have two sons, Carlo and Antonio, who were five and eight years old, respectively, when I started visiting their home for fieldwork. As the months went by, I felt that I was turning from an occasional guest into a regular friend. Padmini shared with me that in part, she fell for an Italian man because it would help her secure a permanent stay in the country, a sentiment that Constable (2009: 50) describes as “commodification of intimacy” (i.e., targeting a partner for what he/she can offer in terms of exchange/advantage). Two years after marriage, she was naturalized as an Italian and could hold dual citizenship. Except for her cautious in-laws (who feared that a poorly qualified immigrant wife might downgrade their son’s middle-class status), she never needed to prove to anyone how well matched Teo and she were, subscribing to the idea that romantic courtship can take many forms. Sharing the same faith made it easy for her and Teo to raise the children within the ethics of Roman Catholicism.

Their family dwelled on the top floor of a detached house on a hill overlooking the city; the ground floor was home to Teo’s parents and sister. When I first came to visit, I noticed pictures of Jesus Christ from different artistic traditions on the walls, amid the children’s artworks. On the fridge door, I spotted a magnet of the statue of Mother Mary that Pope Francis had donated to Sri Lanka.⁶ I spent a few afternoons in Padmini’s company, sipping espressos that she prepared artfully. She needed coffee to remain awake as she was doing night shifts at a nearby hospice for the elderly. Like many female immigrants, care work for her was both a paid job and labor of love. After almost two decades since her migration to Italy, Padmini’s social life still affectively belonged in the local community of coethnics. The Sri Lankan community made for a sizable minority in Brescia due to the ties established by missionaries in the late 20th century. Padmini led their performances in traditional costume during the yearly “Mass of World People” on the 6th of January, and her two young sons, who speak some Sinhalese, seem to enjoy the roles that their mother assigns to them.

The older son has recently started to question his mixed-heritage status because of comments about his brown skin color. Christian tolerance may not always suffice. Teo had difficulty trying to meet everyone’s emotional needs and in addressing their family’s complex “geographies of relatedness” (Nash, 2005: 452), where kinship is linked to places of origin along with biological ties. His wife still longs for the homeland she can never forget, and their sons are ambivalent—both fascinated and nervous—about this half of their heritage. Padmini went back to Sri Lanka recently to attend her father’s funeral. The aquarium of tropical fish she carefully tends to every day is a memento of a homeland she still treasures in her heart and to which she returns for vacations. Among the story books she collected for the children, under the pretext of teaching them English, is the illustrated book Sri Lanka: My Home, written by a Montessori Sri Lankan teacher who moved to the United States of America. The book is a favorite night read for her younger boy, who dreams of food and smells he has yet to experience. One night in my presence, Padmini read the book aloud with a soft voice. Antonio asked about the stinky durian fruit while Carlo asked about the sweet mango. She lulled them both to sleep with a glass of warm cinnamon milk. Turning off the lights, she sighs:

Don’t get me wrong. Once I thought I had to ensure my kids knew about Sri Lanka, that 50 percent of their legacy comes from there. Now I feel I am doing it for myself to be honest, to keep a bit of myself there while I am here […] My husband understands. Our kids are born Italians, and I’m not worried about where they will go once they are grown up, but where I will be following them! (Padmini, 25 February 2018)

Doing ethnographic work with this welcoming intermarriage household, which was seemingly laid-back due to their full Italian nationality, good living standards and shared religious beliefs, revealed that affective economies keep playing a decisive role in family life (Ahmed, 2004). Although this family shared the same faith and social circles, cross-cultural parentage was not without challenges and the children had to deal with their mixed heritage in the face of covert racism.

Comparative discussion: Kinning revisited among Italian–South Asian families

Over the last decade, when austerity measures tightened migration policies and social welfare systems across European states, a debate as to whether interculturalism is taking over multiculturalism has mounted (Modood, 2018). The households mentioned here represent interculturalism in practice on many levels at the intersection of multiple social variables such as differing nationalities and ethnicities, religions and languages. Common to all three is the intimate partnership between a South Asian migrant and a “native” of Italy, whose whiteness was never questioned but taken for granted as a mark of being autochthonous (see also Britton, 2013).

Trying to compare and discuss the three intermarriage cases, I refer to Singla (2015), who developed an interpretative model out of her applied social research on cross-cultural family mediation with mixed Danish couples. While I conducted ethnographic work within family homes, thus engaging parents and children simultaneously, likewise the author maintains a dual gaze on raising and being raised in a mixed family, seen from her position as a psychology practitioner.

Singla proposes to discern progressive phases of marriage life from the honeymoon to aging parenthood. I also observed how the temporalities of domestic life can impinge on a person’s wellbeing—as an individual, a spouse and a parent—as they are subjected to competing expectations from their different networks. My data demonstrate that from an initial stage in which cross-love (as Singla defines these mixed marriages) has to be strenuously defended from possible detractors, the next stages of childbearing and raising a mixed family are ongoing projects which ensure the couple remain close to each other. Amid daily challenges, the upbringing of children becomes a terrain where partners of mixed marriages test their mutual respect, giving space to each spouse to allow both parents to interact with their children on their own terms. Pakistani Tariq and Italian Sabrina fared well in raising a daughter over a span of twenty years with liberal orientations, despite being burdened with financial deprivation and having to face Islamophobia in their city. While their daughter Sofia was left relatively unaware of her stepfather’s culture (perhaps as a form of social protection from discrimination), what Singla (2015: 209) defines as “racial literacy” (i.e., “identifying racism as a serious problem and actively preparing their children to cope with it”) is an encompassing plan that Indian Kulwir and Italian Anita cultivated for their three children. The pious Sikh father endowed all the siblings with equal knowledge of his ethnoreligious background, but only his elder son adopted his faith tradition. Twice, both son and father went to Punjab together, once with the rest of their household. Sri Lankan Padmini, a longtime naturalized citizen after marrying Italian Teo, is waiting for the right summer to take her family on vacation to her native island. Her boys have been brought up as Catholic by both parents, but to hear them sing hymns in Sinhalese is cosmopolitan parenting that not all couples can afford. Mixed parentage and upbringing start in the home, but do not end there. Wider social circles and the external environment might hinder or support such cross-love care relations along the bumpy road of intercultural kinning.

Kinning is a gerundive form of “kin” that effectively reveals the cultural processes behind the construction of kinship. Whereas exploration of kinship networks has a long history in anthropology (and other social sciences too), there seems to be a growing interest in investigating and theorizing kin, since gender, feminist and gay studies have raised critical concerns over the substance of kinship, unsettling the normative idea of family and of biological reproduction (Carsten, 2000, 2004). What binds together recent scholarship on kinning is an understanding of kinship as a process that is based on defining factors beyond blood or law, rather than a static entity. Kinning is a word coined and discussed by anthropologist Signe Howell (2003, 2009). Considering transnational adoption in Norway, the author argues that adoptive parents enact a contradictory “kinning drama” in forging relatedness with their children on top of race and ethnic differences. I take the liberty in this article to adapt Howell’s premises to my analysis of kinning in the context of intermarriage and societal diversity across migratory experiences. The intersectional differences within the three case studies presented are embedded in heterosexual and cross-cultural parenting (either biological or adoptive), which question how both parents and children navigate their bonds of descent, and how the surrounding environment responds to this making of relatedness.

The kinning processes I was able to observe took place behind closed doors, within the private dwellings of migrant and native families. While maintaining some connection with either set of grandparents, most of these households appeared severed from other kinfolk. Compared with the emphasis that Punjabis of different generations put on their extended family networks, which may be close by, left behind or scattered in the diaspora, the three Italian–South Asian nuclear groups discussed here seemed rather self-reliant. Although aunts and uncles, cousins and the like came up in our talks, they were generally kept at a safe distance, both on the Italian and the South Asian side. I rationalized such incidence as a certain resistance from the intermarriage parents against being steered directly toward either half of their national–cultural background. It is also likely that the setting of my participants, that is, houses which are not shared with other kin either on the paternal or maternal side, emphasized the independence of such nuclear domestic groups. Overall, the daily ménage of these mixed families is anchored in a localized dimension, with an attachment to the place of residence despite their dual transnational belongings. This reminds us how relationships founded on the modern romance of soul mating can be an effective way to bridge cultural differences in spaces of intimacy (Slootman, 2018). Prejudiced views in Northern Italy have often regarded intermarriages with migrants as being problematic and short-lived (Bonfanti, 2015). The households discussed here, whatever their nationality, religion and class status, did challenge these doomed fate statements. They might still be in the process of kinning as their offspring come of age, but insist on the cosmopolitan openness that cross-love can instill irrespective of ethnic boundaries, in order to ensure the resilience of their homemaking project across cultural borders.

Conclusion

Insights from the comparative analysis of the three mixed-culture family experiences suggest two crucial points in anticipating the directions of intimate linkages between Asia and Europe.

First, family formation and/or reunion do more than simply occur in the wide and varied “migration corridor” between Asia and Europe. The mixed marriages between people from South Asia and Italy also account for a highly localized space where people might not be physically in transit anymore. After having settled permanently in a destination country, the place migrants and their families inhabit seems to change at a symbolic level: a transformation of ideologies about marriage and reproduction takes place, and kinship is reformulated within a so-called postmigrant society (Foroutan, 2016), where more locals trace their origins elsewhere. The obsolescence of a lasting “state of exception” (Agamben, 2005), which is for migrants their condition of being aliens, fades away as they go through their life course, and as they experience cultural encounters and social interactions that heighten people’s familiarity with diversity (i.e., being another among many others). Although intercultural competence often comes alongside social disputes and petty racism, raising and being raised as mixed children offers an everyday frame of reference for cultivating tolerance and mutual respect.

Second, the ethnographic tales narrated in this article defy the assumption that intimate linkages are always anchored on ethnicity. The intersectional approach has revealed that it is not only ethnic groups that bring about a complex internal diversity, but also differences in class, gender and generation. With increasing diversity, endogamy (marrying within one’s group) has been contested in public discourses as well as in private practice. Studies in social psychology have demonstrated how culturally mixed couples live their private lives in the public eye, often at the expense of their mental health (Singla, 2015). The cases presented here prove the endurance of such intermarriages despite challenges in cross-cultural love and mixed parenting. While the parental generation may take time to overcome social suspicion or stigma, the children resort to different strategies as they grow up with a mixed background which might be visible in their looks, skin color or habits. For the second generations, there is an ambivalent desire to fit into both worlds and remain true to themselves. As empirical evidence shows, these youths’ kinning (Howell, 2003), their way of making relatedness within the home, also informs their social experiences outside of it. “Growing up in migrancy” is in fact a terrain for contested childhoods, where challenges rise every day along with new ways to navigate them (Seeberg and Goździak, 2016).

Quoting Dina, Anita and Kulwir’s daughter, as friends toasted her on her birthday, “Why should I choose one [Italian] over another [Indian] identification? I don’t have to […] I am both my parents’ concoction, but I am also more than that!” That night, Dina disclosed that she dreamed of opening a restaurant in her hometown that would cater for all, appealing to Indian and Italian palates alike. There are quite a few such dining places in Northern Italy, often run by Pakistani restaurateurs, and they serve cheap street food from both cuisines. Her project sounds grander, she wishes to open “a marriage palace,” that is, an avenue for weddings. Anthropologists who work in South Asia know well how commensality and intermarriages are extreme taboos in caste-based societies (Skoda et al., 2013). There is no theoretical elaboration in the plans made by this Italian girl with an Indian heritage, just a capacity to imagine, anticipate and aspire to something on the basis of her family life experience. The mixed kinning she has come from is the one which she projects for her own future and social landscape. Following Appadurai (2013), it seems that in spite of current nationalist winds gusting from the urban fringes of Southern Europe, there drifts an ethics of possibility (and responsibility): Italians with a South Asian heritage seem to know where to go next in their kinning.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This contribution stems from work the author carried out as research fellow for the ERC HOMInG project (2016–2021), Grant Agreement no. 678456, awarded to Professor P. Boccagni at the University of Trento, Italy.

ORCID iD

Sara Bonfanti

1

The author acknowledges that the term “native” rests on the categorization of migrants vs. nonmigrants, which is more complex and biased than apparent (Crul, 2016). In this article, the “natives” are the research participants who considered themselves as such, that is, as Italian citizens by birthright (Colombo and Rebughini, ).

2

Hereafter, I refer to Hindustan in geographical terms, with no implicit connotation of the land of the Hindus (as a marker of social prominence of one religious majority over the rest). Regardless of national diversities, I focus on the cultural commonalities that South Asian diasporas share (Goel, ), with special reference to the Indian and Pakistani ones.

3

This article builds on two strands of my ethnographic work: doctoral (2012–2015) and postdoctoral (2017 to date). In the first, I conducted multi-sited ethnography with four diaspora families from India and Italy. In the second, I carried out mixed-methods qualitative research with South Asian immigrant households across European capitals. Data for this article come from my fieldwork in Italy only, in order to maintain a national focus on the Italian context and to study the country critically as a native researcher among migrant participants. Common to both investigations is the emic word ghar (family home), with which my research participants expressed their localized set of affective relations (Bonfanti, ).

4

The framework of my two research periods, doctoral and postdoctoral, might explain the different participants recruited. In the first case, I conducted an ethnic-based investigation, focusing on Punjabi diaspora households. In the second, I collaborated in a larger project which examined the nexus between home and mobility across countries and different migrant groups.

5

In order to respect the privacy of my informants, I have used pseudonyms throughout the article.

6

Although predominantly a Theravada Buddhist country, some 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s population are Roman Catholic (Raj and Jacobsen, ).

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