No. 6 (2012): Travelling Women: Migratory Experiences from Italy and Spain to the Americas

This volume gathers critical studies and poems to provide an overall view of emigration to the Americas from a female perspective. Women were undoubtedly the protagonists of migratory flows in the last two decades of the XX century and the first decade of the XXI century. They had to endure not only linguistic obstacles and bewilderment in the new reality, but also the more painful and complex aspects of domination when casted in dictatorships or armed conflicts. The dialectical relationship between private and public provides the narratives with fertile suggestions from direct life experiences, which thus become metaphors for identity and cultural struggle. At the same time, they grant access to different ways of life and new re-appropriations of social structures. Among the multiple forms of female migration, some are momentous, others bizarre, and others still dramatic. They thus witness the range of different situations which urge one to leave the homeland, whether for a short period of time or permanently. Alongside old problems like displacement, nostalgia, integration and assimilation, there are others linked to globalization like the fragmentation of the self and of life, or else lead to excessive forms of localization. For these reasons, the suitcases of these travelling women are full of personal clothing, as well as recipe books, family pictures and mementos. Those suitcases carry mechanisms of displacement and relocation in new spaces, as well as the desire for dialogue and the urge to transmit ancient knowledge and forgotten words which have been reactivated by the need to rediscover roots and to create a new social order based on solidarity—a feeling often used by women as a tool for integration and an antidote to solitude and nostalgia in the most dramatic moments of their lives. The suitcases are full of dreams and of the real aspirations of these women who are constructively curious towards themselves, others and the world around them.