Narratives of migration: Emotions and the interweaving of personal and cultural identity through narrative

Abstract

In this article we examine the role of narratives of migration as sense-giving devices that interweave cultural and personal dimensions in identity construction. The data shown come from a research project in which we comparatively analysed Andalusian (Southern Spain) internal migrants’ and non-migrants’ arguments about their cultural identity displayed in a focus group task. In that study we found that migrants used mainly personal narratives as rhetoric tools. In this article, we focus on the thematic and structural traits of these migrants’ narratives. The analysis illustrates that narratives of migration share some common features. They start with a canonical state, living in the homeland, visualised as a ‘lost paradise’; that is broken by the migration movement. The whole process is emotionally evaluated with a strong affiliation and commitment with the motherland. We finally conclude that narratives comprise a privileged instrument in making sense of life turning-points such as those faced in migration.

Keywords

Identity narratives migration discourse emotions

Migrants’ lives usually go through an apparent contradiction between their adaptation to the host community lifestyle and, simultaneously, the strengthening of the bonds to their original community traditions. The ways in which these two apparently opposite processes relate to each other in migrants’ everyday lives pose a crucial puzzle in the understanding of identity construction in migrant people, difficult to solve if not assuming a dialectical perspective. However, despite a vast number of studies in this area, the complexities of how home and host cultures interlace in migrants’ selves and practices have not been very fruitfully researched in psychology, as some authors have stressed (Rudmin, 2010).

In cultural psychology, discursive and narrative approaches to identity construction attempt to account for some of the nuances and complexities inherent to ongoing identity processes in migration experiences (Bhatia, 2007; König, 2009; Mahmoud, 2009; Mahalingam, 2006; Malhi, Boon, & Rogers, 2009). To do so, these approaches focus on individuals’ narratives (considered as self-making devices; Bruner, 2003) about their experience of ‘living in two worlds’ (Schrauf & Rubin, 2001). For the analysis of these narratives it is important to pay close attention to the emotional aspects, both for the special personal significance associated to migration experience as well as for the inherently evaluative nature of every narrative. Our goal in this article is to contribute to the study of migrants’ identity development through the study of migrants’ narratives. Our main idea is that narratives constitute a privileged semiotic tool for the construction of identities in migration situations. We argue that this is so because of their properties of expressing and elaborating emotional experiences, as well as their capacity for tracing a bridge between cultural and personal dimensions of identity. From a constructivist angle, we conceive identity as a mediated action aimed to perform social functions (De Fina, Shiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006; Macías, Amián, Sánchez, & Marco, 2010; Verkuyten & de Wolf, 2002).

The framework of our study is the intersection between cultural and personal dimensions in identity construction, which is facilitated by the integrative power of narrative as a psychological meditational tool (Hammack, 2010; Vygotski, 1987; Wertsch, 1985, 1991, 1998, 2002). Although we consider the differentiation between these two dimensions, personal and cultural, to be artificial, the literature shows that they have been addressed from different research traditions (Brockmeier, 2002). From one perspective, studies about cultural and social identities have concentrated either on individuals’ ascriptions to different cultural groups (Abrams & Hogg, 1995) or on the group construction of shared identities (Páez & Rimé, 1997). From another perspective, research on individual identity has mainly focused on personal constructive sense-making about oneself through autobiography (McAdams, 1996, 2001; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006). The reason why we consider the narratives analysed to be related to both personal and cultural identities is because, being based on the affiliation to a cultural group, they are presented in a very personalised way, through first-person narratives that resemble the autobiographical stories studied in the personal narratives tradition. We suggest that for individuals and groups involved in the construction of their identity in migration situations, narrative constitutes a bridge between the past and the present that makes sense of the past adjusting to the present conditions, thus creating a link with a desired future project (Wertsch, 2002). Following Verkuyten and deWolf (2002), we agree that ‘the co-construction of identity and culture is most salient in a particular form of social discourse: past personal narrative’ (p. 372).

Our study attempts to answer a general question: In which way do narratives function as a tool to make sense of displacement experiences (as a life turning-point experience) (McAdams, 1996, 2001; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006)? This general question can be translated into the following: How does the structure and content of narrative assist identity construction? And, related to the latter, how are the emotional dimensions of these narratives (particularly in relation to the homeland) displayed?

In order to tackle these questions, we examine both the structure and the thematic content of some individual-centred narratives of migration as told by a group of Andalusian migrants participating in a broader quantitative study comparing migrants and non-migrants’ discursive constructions of Andalusian cultural identity (Macías, 2002; Macías, García, & Sánchez 2008). In that quantitative study, we analysed the argumentative tools used for persuasion in focus groups. We found that participants in the migrant group used the narrative argumentative tools significantly more than participants in other groups. In this paper we will concentrate on a qualitative analysis of these narratives of migration.

Theoretical background: Narrative as a powerful tool for the construction of identities

Our conception of identity is based on a cultural–historical approach to the study of the human mind. This approach is supported by ideas of the social origins of individual higher psychological processes and the culturally mediated character of these processes (Valsiner & Rosa, 2007; Vygotski, 1987; Wertsch, 1985, 1991, 1998). A commonly accepted way of specifying this situated and socially constructed idea of psychological processes in general, and identity in particular, is to conceive them as actions. The choice of action as the unit of analysis for the study of identity emphasises the constructivist and anti-essentialist nature of our notion of identity, since it is considered as not merely represented by discourse, but rather as performed, enacted and embodied through a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic means (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006; De Fina, Shiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006; Wertsch, 1991).

We understand identity as an action that aims to define or characterise oneself, sometimes in relation to belonging to different groups (family, cultural group, gender, etc.). We understand acts of identification as mediated actions in which culturally originated communicative tools are used in socio-cultural settings to rhetorically persuade others and oneself about one’s characteristics or one’s belonging to a group (Macías, Amián, Sánchez, & Marco, 2010). Acts of identification are, therefore, mediated, communicative and rhetorical actions (Billig, 1987; Ramírez, 1995; Verkuyten & de Wolf, 2002). Special attention is paid to what, rhetorically, people are doing when using particular resources for producing an account about themselves – that is, to what is accomplished by a speaker when performing a given identity positioning in a social interaction (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006). For example, speakers can position themselves (and others) as victims or perpetrators, as passive or active, as Andalusian or Spanish, and so on. Among the different meditational tools used in acts of identification, we can point to narrative as one of the most studied and meaningful (Wertsch, 1998, 2002).

Narratives belong to a type of argument—practical arguments (Billig, 1987; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969)—which have the capacity of provoking ‘affective persuasion’, reached by increasing the presence of a concrete image provided by the vivacity and realism of a particular event. This property of narratives as a rhetoric affective tool will be recovered later in our text, when talking about the emotional dimension of identity and narrative storytelling.

Regarding the relevance of narratives as a psychological tool, classic texts such as Sarbin’s (1986), for instance, defend the idea that humans think, perceive the world, socially interact and construct their morality choices based on narrative structures. Narratives are also ‘ubiquitous’ instruments because, as many scholars have emphasised, they are employed to explain, justify, describe or interpret human actions in different moments throughout life, from early childhood and across different socio-cultural contexts (Bruner, 1986, 1990). In the case of personal identity, a number of studies have shown the fundamental role of narratives as a tool for the creation of coherence and sense-making of people’s autobiographies and, therefore, their identities (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001; Linde, 1993; McAdams, 1996).

Narrative as a privileged tool in the construction of identity

But what is specific in narratives in relation to other genres? There is common consensus that temporal and sequential organisation are the defining characteristics of narratives (Bruner, 1990). It is through their sequential ordering of events that narratives attain their power as interpretative and sense-making devices. Recent studies have stressed a flexible concept of narrative, defending that story structure and characteristics are deeply entrenched to the context and activity in which they are used (Georgakopoulou, 2006; Ochs & Capps, 2001). That involves the possibility of identifying narratives with different structural levels. These studies propose a broad definition of narrative, including any act of telling and exposing one’s own subjective experience to others.

Our study will be centred on the prototypical narrative in both literary and conversational everyday domains, which is storytelling. Stories are not only narratives with a sequential structure, but they also include a rupture of the expected course of circumstances that is repaired in some way (Bruner, 1990).

So, how are these temporal elements and complicating upheavals structured in stories? From a psychological perspective, Bruner (1986) conceives narrative both as a discourse mode (a way of speaking about experience) and as a way of organising experience (a way of thinking). According to this author, and coinciding with classical sociolinguistics (Labov & Waletzky, 1997), narratives start with an initial canonical state that has been breached in some way, recount means–ends actions by an agent attempting to restore it and finish with an implied assessment of the outcome. The story as a whole has a meaning or ‘gist’. The comprehensibility of a narrative is based on its mimicry of what the listener or reader accepts as possible in life. Narratives, thus, provide an interpretation of events, rather than an explanation.

Stress on the evaluative function of narrative is not new in discourse analysis. In fact, the socio-linguistic and discourse-analysis definitions of narrative – as a discourse analytic category involving an evaluation of characters and events – have been related to argumentation. Recent discourse-analytic approaches have shown how argumentative stories are told to back up positions, opinions and interpretations of experiences related to characters and events (Ochs & Capps, 2001). This idea of narrative as an argumentative mechanism links it more closely with the social contexts in which it is used. This happens because the normative constructions of what is a tellable or good story and the degree to which the canonicity expected has been infringed may differ across different cultural settings. The evaluative and moral dimensions of narratives related to their social embeddedness link them with the emotional and affective life as it is accounted, interpreted and experienced through the telling. In Edwards’ (1999) words:

A key feature of emotion is its deployment in narrative and rhetoric. Emotion terms occur not merely as one-off descriptions of specific acts or reactions, but as parts of interrelated sets of terms that implicate each other (syntagmatically) in narrative sequences, and also (paradigmatically) in rhetorically potent contrast between alternative descriptions. Narrative sequence and rhetorical contrast are ways of talking about things, ways of constructing the sense of events, and orienting to normative and moral orders, to responsibility and blame, intentionality and social evaluation (p. 279).

In short, by structuring acts in sequences, exploring characters’ intentions and emotions and explicitly or implicitly evaluating facts, stories help to organise the chaos of experience in a more or less sensible and coherent way. This integrative power of narratives is evident both in cultural and personal stories (Dien, 2000; Wertsch, 2002).This idea gains special relevance in circumstances of traumatic change during the life course. In these cases, narratives emerge as a necessary tool for the construction of a link between a previous situation and the effects of a major upheaval.

Migration and identity

Some recent studies have pointed to migration as an important breakdown in people’s lives which influences the construction of their personal autobiographies and identities to a great extent (Baynham & De Fina, 2005; De Fina, 2003; Fortier, 2000; Kraus, 2006; Lieber, Chin, Nihira, & Mink, 2001; Shrauf & Rubin, 2001; Syed & Azmitia, 2008). As expressed before, migration is one of these situations the individual and the group are confronted with a discontinuity (Bhatia & Ram, 2001; Hale & De Abreu, 2010). We might suggest that the study of narratives of migration could help us reveal the knitting of the process of sense-making that goes along with the course of identity construction in the experience of displacement. In this regard, we want to stress the relevance of emotions in that process, as they are embodied and experienced in the context of migration (Escandell & Tapias, 2010).

The emotional impact of migration on people’s lives has been analysed in a number of studies about psychological adjustment and mental health in different immigrant populations (Chen, Benet-Martínez, & Bond, 2008; Escandell & Tapias, 2009; Tilbury, 2007). In this paper we will understand emotions as they are ‘being’ represented and enacted in conversation (Edwards, 1999), that is, as part of the rhetoric display that affects the audience’s adherence as well as the speaker’s own feelings (Billig, 1987). Emotions are constructed in the narratives through different linguistic (lexical–semantic, syntactic and phonological) and non-linguistic (prosodic, body language, etc.) devices (Ochs & Shieffelin, 1989; Selting, 2010). As a precedent for the analysis of migrants’ narratives that accounts for the emotional enactment that goes along with the stories, we can mention Relaño & De Fina’s (2005) work on Mexican immigrant women. The authors analyse these women’s self-representations as agentive actors in their narrative strategy in reacting to situations of discrimination. A central focus in their analysis is the way in which emotions are displayed in the stories through an identified set of ‘affect keys’ such as changes of pitch, changes in loudness, lexicalisation of emotions, description of emotional states or use of lexical elements or expressive morphology. In our analysis of migrants’ narratives, we aim to grant special attention to these displays and enactment of emotions. We consider emotional display as a rhetorical device that might provide both empathy and affective persuasion of the audience (as we developed above when talking about the ‘affective persuasion’ involved in narrative argumentation); and self-understanding and sense-making of one’s own experience.

The general scenario of our study is the relation between Andalusian migration and the community construction of Andalusian identity. Andalusia is the second largest region in Spain and the most populated one, with over eight million inhabitants. With a rich history and body of traditions, an exuberant heterogeneity and a marginal position in the national economy, the status of Andalusia as an entity which is culturally differentiated from the rest of Spain has been a focus of discussion, debate and reflection throughout its history. Popular demands and political claims for a special status of autonomy from the central government for Andalusia have been heeded at certain historical moments, and silenced or dissipated at others (Moreno, 2008). The massive migration of Andalusian workers and their families towards other regions in Spain and abroad, which took place in the 1960s and 1970s, is considered by some anthropologists (Moreno, 2008) to be one of those moments that prompted a shared feeling of common identity among the Andalusian community. More than two million migrants left Andalusia to work elsewhere in Spain, mainly Catalonia and Madrid, or in Central Europe, especially Germany. This movement was so significant that Catalonia, with around 840,000 Andalusian-born inhabitants in the 1970s, was known as the ‘ninth province of Andalusia’. For some anthropologists (Moreno, 2008), this migration flow catalysed the emergence of an Andalusian identity. The experience of ‘otherness’ emerged in the migration movement as a collection of stories of difference and other social claims that started to evidence the region’s underdevelopment, thus having an impact upon public opinion.

Method: Narratives of migration in Andalusian migrants

The narrative data analysed in this article draws from a larger corpus of focus group interviews with Andalusian-born participants distributed into two different groups: migrants and non-migrants. These data were initially collected to examine the impact of migration experience (as an experience of alterity) in the discursive construction of cultural identity, comparing the structure and content of the arguments deployed by participants in the two groups mentioned when talking about their Andalusian identity (Macías, García, & Sánchez, 2008; Macías, 2002).

Our working hypothesis in that larger study was that both the structure and the content of identification acts carried out by participants in discussion groups would vary depending on their migration experience. The focus group task was selected as a data collection strategy because it offers a research setting that, although artificially created, resembles naturally occurring everyday conversations about identity belonging (Stokoe & Edwards, 2006). The sample consisted of 24 Andalusian adults (11 females and 13 males) distributed equally throughout two conditions (non-migrants and migrants). A total of four groups were arranged, two for each of the conditions mentioned above, each with five to eight participants. In the case of migrants, the focus groups took place in ‘Andalusian Houses’ in Madrid where the participants regularly met to join and organise cultural activities related to Andalusian society. In the case of non-migrants, they took place in Seville and Malaga (Andalusia). Where possible, the settings were also familiar scenarios for the participants, such as a group of friends that met weekly for lunch and coffee in a countryside cottage.

The procedure was the following. Participants were asked to discuss Andalusian cultural identity. The question leading the discussion was ‘Is there an Andalusian identity?’ Participants were prompted to give their opinions and argue about the eventual existence of some differential features that would justify a separation between Andalusian and Spanish or European identities. In all cases, this eliciting question was more than enough to make participants discuss the topic in an animated way. Different kinds of arguments and narratives emerged among them naturally in the debates, with no specific prompting question posed by the interviewer. In the few cases when the conversation got stuck in silence (and it did only happen on a couple of occasions), the interviewer would ask specific questions based on a previous pilot study run to track ‘probable topics’. In those uncommon cases, the interviewer would ask the participants if they thought Andalusia had its own identity in terms of gastronomy, language, folklore or habits. The duration of this activity, as it naturally occurred, ranged from 20 minutes to one hour. Most lasted for around an hour, but one did not, as expected, evoke long conversations, so it only lasted for 20 minutes. In terms of utterances, the focus groups had from 125 to 400 utterances. This measure is not illustrative of the length of the conversation, as utterances could have very different extensions (from just one word to long narratives). The sessions were taped in video and audio formats. The unit of analysis was the utterance (act of identification), understood as a participant’s turn. This unit of analysis was adopted from Bakhtin’s theory (1981) and has already been used in different research projects in the Laboratory of Human Activity (Laboratorio de Actividad Humana, LAH, 1993). For the purposes of our study, and mostly for methodological reasons, an utterance was defined as a speaking turn. Turn taking has been shown before to be a practical way of objectivising the Bakhtinian unit of analysis of utterance. All actions, not only verbal communicative actions, are ruled by turns. Turns offer a simple method for marking the objective and unambiguous beginning and end of an utterance. The first 100 utterances of each discussion were coded and analysed. This decision was taken after looking at all the focus groups’ development and proving that the tendencies were similar along the whole discussion, so we could consider the first 100 utterances as a reliable sample of the whole data set. As explained before, one group’s discussions did not last very long, and not much more discourse was produced. In terms of being able to compare the different groups, and following the previously described precautions, we decided to choose the first 100 utterances for analysis. Discourse was transcribed and coded using a category system developed by the LAH. The function of the category system was to analyse the structure and contents of the acts of identification performed by the participants. The system was divided into three main sections. In the first one, formal aspects of language were analysed; in the second, the speaker’s perspective was considered; and in the third, the discourse contents and affective charge (emotion) were studied. A statistical analysis was applied using a Chi-square procedure (see Macías, 2002 and Macías, García, Sánchez, & Marco, 2008, for details).We will briefly show the results obtained in that previous quantitative study. After that, we will concentrate on the focus of this paper, which is the qualitative analysis of some representative migrants’ narratives extracted from our data.

Main findings

The results showed that the members of the non-migrant groups used mostly decontextualized discursive tools in their argumentation. These were general utterances, not referring to any specific experience, but to ‘universal’ cases and agents. These generalities constituted descriptions or statements about Andalusia or about psychological traits of Andalusian people. In these utterances, when comparisons did appear, they referred to a ‘generalised other’ (other communities). Besides, they did not show emotional signs or personal involvement with the descriptions provided. Let us illustrate these results with some representative stereotypical examples of non-migrants’ utterances. These examples are just illustrative of some of the traits described above. As stereotypical excerpts, they all do not comprise all of the features described which resulted from the statistical analysis. The utterances are not sequentially organised, and belong to different moments of the conversation. Each of them was presented by a different speaker.

Male, 55, Malaga (Andalusia, Spain), March 2000.

And also … perhaps tolerance has been more stimulated than in other places. Because here different cultures have coexisted. There have been Muslims, Jews, Christians, and they have lived together without problems.

Female, 58, Seville (Andalusia, Spain), April 2000.

It’s a way of thinking. Andalusians have a kind of different character … people who can, for example … we take life a bit less dramatically, but then we have ‘our things’ (as saying, our problems). And they say that we are less profound, but no, Andalusians are responsible.

Male, 61, Malaga (Andalusia, Spain), March 2000.

But he is also more open minded, the Andalusian is more open minded. He gets to all cultures.

On the other hand, people who had lived through a migration experience would argue on the basis of their personal experiences. This particular discourse was usually organised in the form of personal narratives. In most cases, these utterances were comparisons by which they contrasted Andalusian traits with those of the host community, talking about their homeland in a highly emotional state, idealising the homeland and feeling loss. This was mostly done by considering the Andalusian identity as distinctive from others.

One of the most outstanding aspects of our data was the greater use of personal narratives in the groups of migrants. Here we would like to highlight once again that all the groups were asked to discuss ‘Andalusian Cultural Identity’. When doing that, migrants tended to tell personal stories of migration. We could say that these narratives integrated personal and cultural aspects and were produced in a highly emotional state. These narratives are the focus of our main analysis in this article.

A qualitative analysis of the narratives of migration

Structure of the narratives of migration

The first issue concerning the narratives of migration that must be analysed is their structure. Migrants in our study performed different collectively constructed narratives, where we can identify different constituent parts. For this purpose, we have followed Labov’s classical analysis of narrative structure (Labov & Waletzky, 1997):

Initial setting

Female, 54, Madrid (Spain), February 2000.

In those days, I was so happy. There were four of us in the family: my parents, my brother and myself. My father was a born worker.

As shown in the excerpt, the participants usually described an idealised situation before leaving the homeland (‘in those days, I was happy …’). It includes a strong emotional load (nostalgia, as we will see below). There was a kind of canonical state (‘happiness in the homeland’) at the beginning of the narrative. That canonical state was broken by something (‘Things happened and my brother came to Madrid’), giving rise to the elaboration of the narrative that serves to make sense of the deviation of this canonical state.

Complicating action

In our narratives, this part is related to having to abandon the homeland because of different unexpected reasons.

Excerpt 1: Female, 54, Madrid (Spain), February 2000.

Things happened and my brother came to Madrid and, just like that, we all decided to follow. I didn’t really want to come but, you know, the excitement of living in the capital city of Spain.

Excerpt 2: Female, 65, Getafe (Madrid, Spain), February 2000.

And that’s the way things work … in the company where he was working, after his attempt to defend a workmate who was getting a rough deal, they fired him, and the other one stayed, and he got fired … so he went to Switzerland. However, he couldn’t manage on his own (without me) in Switzerland …

These excerpts allow us observe the violation of canonicity that gives rise to the narrative. In excerpt 1, we also find explicit references to mental states (‘we all decided to follow’ [the brother]; ‘… you know, the excitement of living in the capital city of Spain’). In excerpt 2, the complicating action that results in leaving the homeland is performed by other characters. This action is also evaluated in moral terms (‘he was getting a rough deal (…) we had … so he went to Switzerland’). In both cases we have agents (‘we’, that is, the family, the husband, the people in the company) performing certain actions in certain settings (Andalusia, Madrid, Switzerland), according to intentions and using some instruments to achieve certain goals.

Evaluation

Evaluation is produced in a highly emotional state. In all of our narratives, evaluation consisted of an unconditional acceptance of all the Andalusian cultural traits mentioned in the discussion, and a positive evaluation of them. This evaluation is, in most cases, overdramatised and loaded with emotion (gestures, intonation, words…).

Female, 54, Madrid (Spain), February 2000.

I do feel like an outsider, but I say it with a heavy heart’cos I’m Andalusian to the core. If I was to go back to my roots, I wouldn’t think twice.

Female, 60, Madrid (Spain), February 2000.

And that’s what I have left behind in Andalusia … isn't this what you are asking for, dear? … I miss it very much. Every time I go to Cordoba, when I come back, I feel empty … Now I will be there for Easter, and really, when I come here (to the Andalusian house), I feel happy, but when I leave Andalusia I get a stone in my stomach and it doesn’t go away until a couple of days later.

Thematic characteristics of narratives of migration

The content-related characteristics we have found in narratives of migration are:

– Their topics are related to the homeland, visualised in a rather mythical way (‘lost paradise’).

– They comprise an intertwining of personal and cultural identification factors, sometimes tracing parallels between their personal and their social past and history.

– They are produced in a highly emotional state, associated with the fondly remembered homeland. We are going to relate this emotional state of loss to nostalgia.

Topic

The homeland is seen in a rather mythical way, so it appears as a ‘lost paradise’. The next excerpt exemplifies this characteristic.

Female, 50, Getafe (Madrid, Spain), February 2000.

It has a lot to do with going out to the streets and sitting at a bar outdoors outside. For instance, when I came to Madrid, there were practically no places to sit outside for a drink. The joy that was everywhere in Andalusia, I can tell you that, the first time I heard a guitar here in Madrid, when I went to a flamenco place here in Madrid, you can't imagine how sad I felt. I actually cried. I was in a flamenco place when I just arrived in Madrid; to be precise, I went there to take a foreign girl who didn't know where to find one. So, I went. I fancied it and I accompanied her. That was really awful. I compared what I had seen there, the joy, the gracefulness, how things are performed with scarce elements, with so much effort, with what one sees here, ‘ole, arsa’ [two words prompting enthusiasm] (making mechanical, graceless gestures), and, besides, you could see the foreigners enraptured by with them. I was crying my eyes out! I said: ‘My God, how can they call this flamenco?’ Come on. You go there to any May Cross celebration and can see children who are just starting and can sing and dance with such a joy. And you feel … well, in May, it does not matter, in Cordoba, in Seville or anywhere, with that happiness…

In the utterance above, the speaker compares the ways in which life and art (flamenco dancing and singing) are expressed in Andalusia and in Madrid, where she is currently living. The speaker portraits a picture of Andalusia as a place where grace and happiness are omnipresent (‘in May … it does not matter, in Cordoba, in Seville or anywhere, with that happiness...’). By comparing that ideal situation in Andalusia with the current situation in Madrid, the speaker gives the audience an idea of a lost paradise.

The lost paradise that appears in most of these migration narratives implies an idea of the homeland very much associated with the land and some of its physical–geographical characteristics. For example, traits such as climate (hot weather), the land, the ‘roots’, the Andalusian mood and happiness, the food, are mentioned and developed in comparison with the host community, which is always considered to be worse in terms of all the traits selected. The sense is then of having lost those traits valued as very positive—the sense of lost paradise. This sense of lost paradise is reinforced by the structure of the narratives, as we saw above.

Intertwining of personal and cultural identifications

We can also observe how personal and cultural or social references are used alternatively in the text. Pronominal choice has been considered an essential element in the linguistic study of identity and affiliations. The instrumental use of the first-person singular and plural as the agents of the narratives has been largely studied as a remarkable device for constructing alignments and misalignments (De Fina, 2003). We find it interesting how, in our data collection about Andalusian cultural identity, the ‘I’ and ‘we’ pronouns were used in the same story, expressing certain parallelisms and interdependence between personal and social identifications.

In the following excerpt we can see how the participant speaks about the history of her hometown in parallel with her personal history; how the town and her life have changed in the past 20 years. The parallelism between cultural and personal past can be interpreted as a way of maintaining her ties with the hometown. The personal history of migration is interwoven with the group’s history and traditions.

We find this characteristic of the narratives performed by migrants especially interesting as the instructions given were to discuss their cultural identity. In this context, personal narratives emerged as a common space between cultural and personal references for acts of identification. The next utterance illustrates this idea:

Male, 60, Madrid (Spain), February 2000.

I don’t know if you agree with me. This has changed. It has changed during the last 20 years and we must defend our land, each one of us. Because, before we were … I’m talking about my hometown, I am from La Rambla, and, there, we enjoyed something special when the village fêtes arrived; there were differences between the rich and the poor, because this is also something desirable. Well, there, we admired the cultural things we had. We were all expectant about village fêtes, no matter which, and we received them with lots of enthusiasm. Well, but then, I moved to Madrid when I was 17 and things changed totally. If we were used to the May Cross, that...

Emotional state and nostalgia

As we have mentioned above, for Labov (Labov, 1997; Labov & Waletzky, 1997), an important function of narratives is evaluation. For him, evaluation refers to the information about the consequences of the event for human needs and desires. Our narratives of migration incorporate a strong emotional evaluation. The statistical analyses revealed a higher emotional state in the migrants’ group. Of course, migration is an event of great significance in one’s personal history and, therefore, is filled with emotion. To illustrate this characteristic, let us go back to the example we analysed previously.

Male, 62, Madrid (Spain), February 2000.

I really do miss it. Every time I go to Córdoba, when I come back, I feel empty. I’ll be heading back for Easter and, to tell you the truth, I’ll be so happy. But, when I leave Andalusia, I have a knot in my stomach and until I’ve been here for a few days, I can't get over it.

The emotional load of these narratives includes, as an important component, nostalgia. Nostalgia is considered as a non-basic emotion and defined as the desire to come back to an idealised world (Bellelli & Amatulli, 1997). It is frequently associated with migration experiences. Bellelli and Amatulli distinguished two forms of nostalgia. Nostalgia as desire (often called homesickness) is regarded as a ‘negative form’. This form of nostalgia is considered to be typical of migrants. Its function would be to maintain basic scopes and values in the new setting. The second form, related to memory, is regarded as more positive and not so intense. Its function would be to reconstruct identity and self-cohesion. Some authors reserve the term ‘nostalgia’ for this form. Positive dimensions of nostalgia have recently been empirically explored by Vess, Arndt, Routledge, Sedikides, & Wildschut (2012) and Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut (2012). In their research, the latter authors found that nostalgia serves as a resource for the self that might ‘prepare the individual to respond less defensively to the challenges and threats of the present’ (p. 9). These findings highlight that people view nostalgia as a self-relevant and socially blended emotional and cognitive state, featuring a mixture of happiness and loss.

In the selected excerpt we can observe the first form of nostalgia, as the participant says ‘I really do miss it … Every time I go to Córdoba and then when I come back I feel empty. A clear feeling of having left something ‘back home’ is strongly and emotively expressed in many of our migrant participants’ utterances.

We also found some more positive aspects of memories in our focus groups that could be identified as examples of the second form of nostalgia, as described by Bellelli and Amatulli (1997). In these utterances, migrants seemed to enjoy sharing and jointly constructing a positive and idealised recreation of their homeland. This positive form of nostalgia can be traced in the next excerpt, where the participant illustrates how she has incorporated an Andalusian tradition into her life in the host city:

Female, 60, Madrid, (Spain), February 2000.

Well, you get this all over the place, you can’t move for flowers. I have already told you this, Pepe: I feel Andalusian through and through. I love flowers (a typical feature of Andalusian decoration) and, here, in my balcony, which faces north, I have flowers. Filled to the top with flowers.

To sum up, in our analysis, we have tried to describe the structure and content of the narratives of migration developed by the participants in our research. They were regarded as mediated actions used by the Andalusian migrants that participated in our study to rhetorically argue about their cultural identity. Those narratives have some meaningful traits, such as the reference to a lost paradise that is pined for and described with a strong emotional force.

Discussion

In this article, we have identified some common characteristics in the narratives of migration performed by the participants in a study of Andalusian cultural identity. These characteristics involved both the structure and the content of the narratives. The structure of the narratives of migration started with a canonical state (living in the homeland) that was broken by the migration movement. The content of these narratives was usually related to the homeland, very positively described and valued and presented in a highly emotional state. Another differential feature of these narratives is the constant interweaving of personal and cultural identifications. With these structures and contents, the narratives constitute the scaffold that gives sense to the migratory experience in the participants’ lives. These narratives seem to be crucial in the process of making sense of the participants’ experience of migration and the way it is incorporated into their life story and identity construction.

In relation to our results, we will develop some conclusions, reflections and proposals for further studies of the narratives of migration.

A first reflection that emerges from our results has to do with the way in which the psychological tool of narrative draws connections between individuals and society (Bell, 2006). It would seem that, in cases of experience of migration, personal stories play a relevant role in cultural identification and, in parallel, cultural identification acquires special relevance in individuals’ identities. The strict limits traditionally conferred in psychology to different sections of the person’s identities (cultural, gender, personal, etc.; Abrams & Hogg, 1995) are apparent in a more flexible and fuzzy way than expected. Our study reveals that the limits established between cultural and personal identity are, to a great extent, artificial.

Some examples of narratives of personal experience can be found in the literature, and they show common structural and content features (Labov, 1997; McAdams, 2001; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006).The events told in these narratives are emotionally and socially evaluated, and thus transformed from raw experience. As some authors have emphasised, under certain conditions, some personal narratives become stabilized and are reused as powerful instruments for sense-giving (McAdams, 2001; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006). These narratives can refer to different topics, such as narratives of women’s experiences regarding infertility, adolescent sex and the romantic narrative and narratives by teenage mothers (Kirkman, 2002); deafness (Hole, 2007); breast cancer narratives (Thomsen & Jensen, 2007), and so on.

On the other hand, in addition to their personal character, the narratives of migration that we have analysed were produced by the participants whilst arguing about cultural identity. In this sense they could be related to what Linde (2001) calls ‘narrative induction’. She states that personal and group narrative induction is the process by which people take on an existing set of stories as relevant to the shaping of their own story. In our study the institution involved would be the Andalusian Community or region (as an administrative and identity-creating entity). Some anthropologists have in fact considered massive migration in the 1950s and 1960s as a shared experience in the Andalusian community that encouraged a feeling of Andalusian identity and shaped the stories it was built with (Moreno, 1992). On the other hand, the narratives performed, even when thematically centred on cultural aspects of identity, are told in a very personalised way. Even more, these narratives comprise a strong personal meaning-making that is crucial in turning-point experiences, where past, present and future are understood wholly through the story gist. The personal sense of the narratives analysed as they embody emotional aspects of identity relates to our next reflection.

Our second reflection on our narratives of migration returns to their most salient trait: their strong emotional charge. The evaluation component of these narratives has adopted a special emotional force, expressed in the form of vivid and clear images and accurate descriptions of places, smells and physical experiences related to the homeland. Our results are congruent with the ideas developed by some academics who emphasise the essential role of emotions in identity construction (König, 2009; Mahmoud, 2009; Meijers & Wardekker, 2002). In our narratives, emotions of commitment to and nostalgia for the homeland seem to play a special role in identity construction in a migration situation. These results coincide with other authors when analysing narratives of forced displacement in a South African community (McCormick, 2005). In relation to identity construction in migration situations, we cannot neglect that migrants, in their adaptation to a new cultural context, need to adopt the tools required to participate in the host society, and that these practices are related to the acculturation strategy adopted by them in different life-settings (Berry, 2005; Tartakovsky, 2010). That adaptation (acculturation strategy) produces a change in their identities and everyday practices. Simultaneously, migrants can experience a reinforcement of their feeling of bonds to their home community, at an affective level (Norton, 2000). We can conclude that the role of emotions of attachment and commitment to the motherland, in these narratives, seems to constitute a crucial aspect in identity construction. The role of emotions contrasts with but does not delegitimise more instrumental dimensions in the process.

For the study of these emotional aspects, special attention must be paid to the emotional and socially shared aspects of the enactment at stake. The emotional aspect of identity construction as it is embodied and constructed through interaction is a fuzzy but crucial dimension of that process, especially in relation to turning-point life experiences, such as migration might be (Escandell & Tapias, 2010). In fact, emotions, as they have emerged in our study, were recreated in the sharing of past experiences and feelings in social interaction. Emotions can fulfil different personal, interactive and social functions. For example, as some authors have addressed when researching nostalgia, rehearsing autobiographical events socially might foster the maintenance of positive affect (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012). Attention to the interactive performances and embodiment of feelings when socially constructing a personal experience story might be relevant to uncover these processes.

Finally, we want to highlight the core issue of our approach: the consideration of these narratives as an intertwining of cultural and personal contents of identity through the emotional and integrative power of narrative as semiotic tool. To make this possible, emotions may play a central role, as the shared experience of migration leads identification to a cultural group (cultural identity in more traditional terms) to play a leading role in self-construction for the members of this group. Put in a more conventional way, we could say that in migration situations, cultural identity is very much constructed by personal narratives and, on the other hand, the identification with a cultural group becomes central for the self. In this respect we would agree with Froese (2010), who claims that more research is needed about the phenomenology of this interweaving process in each single case.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author Biographies

Beatriz Macías Gómez-Estern works as an Associate Professor at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, Spain. She has participated in different research projects on the discursive construction of cultural identity in people who have had a migrant experience. Currently she is involved in two branches of research regarding that general topic. On one side, she is interested in the enactment of emotions through narratives in the construction of the cultural identity of migrants. Secondly, in a more applied arena, she is studying the educative role of autobiographical narratives in educational settings, especially in culturally diverse classrooms and with adult minority students. She is coauthor of publications such as ‘Literacy and the formation of cultural identity’ (Theory and Psychology); ‘Cultural identity and immigration’, in Van Oers et al. (Eds.), The transformation of learning. Perspectives from activity theory (Cambridge University Press) and ‘Identity construction in narratives of migration’, in Hansen & Jensen (Eds.), Self in Culture in Mind. Conceptional and applied perspectives is soon to be published by Aarhus University Press.

Manuel L de la Mata-Benítez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Seville and a member of the Laboratory of Human Activity. His research has focused on the relationship between sociocultural activities, and especially formal schooling, and mental processes. He has conducted research on teacher–student interaction and text comprehension and memory, memory strategies, egocentric speech, argumentation and discourse in classroom interactions. In the past years, his main research focus has been the cultural construction of autobiographical memory and self. He has been a member of the Executive Committee of the ISCAR for the past six years and is currently Vice-President of the society.

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