Growing Up Between Cultures: How Second-Generation Migrants Perceive and Construct “Home”

Autor/innen

  • Francesca Celenta University College Maastricht
  • Catharina Klausegger University College Maastricht

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15273/jue.v11i1.10865

Schlagworte:

second-generation migrants, home, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, mobility

Abstract

The word “home” can refer to a house, a family, a country, or even to a feeling of safety and comfort. Through increased mobility, the conception of home as a static place loses its meaning. For second-generation migrants, the children of migrants, the concept of home is ambiguous. They can have transnational ties to their parents‘ home country and the country they grew up in. The ambiguity leads second-generation migrants to construct home through reflective practices. Through in-depth interviews with eight second-generation migrants, we found that home is necessarily a complex and varied concept. The most important aspects to constructing a home are family (nuclear as well as extended family), a sense of community through shared values, and lastly reflective practices on what it means to grow up between cultures. While nuclear family provides the first safe space to create a feeling of home, feeling like part of a community is essential for feeling at home in a town or country. Some second-generation migrants find a community in the country they grew up in, while others feel rejected due to discrimination. In those cases, second-generation migrants search for cosmopolitan communities that share values of openness to difference.

Downloads

Veröffentlicht

2021-03-19

Ausgabe

Bd. 11 Nr. 1 (2021)

Rubrik

Articles

Lizenz

By sending potential submissions to the editors, you grant The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography a royalty-free, perpetual, license to: use, reproduce, store, adapt, translate, and publicly display such submissions for any purpose.  In addition to the grant of the above license, you hereby consent to your name appearing as the contributor of any submission where applicable, and to the disclosure and/or display of such information and any other information which appears in or is associated with a submission. Further, you acknowledge and agree that The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography is not responsible for any loss, damage, or corruption that may occur to your submissions, and acknowledge and agree that any submissions you provide for display on the website will be considered non-confidential. If your manuscript is rejected, the above license is revoked, and your submission (manuscript, name, and associated documentation) will be stored only in the correspondence records of The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. You may submit your manuscript to other publications, but must withdraw if selected for publication in The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Your paper itself is published using a strict Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License that allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can‘t change them in any way or use them commercially. You retain the right to grant other permissions.