• by IPS Correspondents (mexico city)
• Thursday, December 08, 1994
• Inter Press Service

MEXICO CITY, Dic 08 (IPS) - The six million documented Italian expatriates - and incalculable numbers of people of Italian heritage - suffer from a "cultural identity crisis," according to a Sicilian resident of Mexico.

Francesca Gargallo de Castel Lentini, born in Syracuse, Sicily but a resident of this Latin American country for the past ten years, says that her "Italianess" is something that is becoming "progressively less clear."

"Rather than recovering our culture, expatriates need to constantly renew it so that it doesn't die out," said the author of several books of poetry.

Some of her compatriots feel it is important to diminish the distance between Italian communities abroad and their homeland, building confidence in the Italian institutions.

"This is valid only for those who discovered the corruption in the Italian state and of nearly all the institutional apparatus through the "Clean Hands" mafia links investigation," gargalla said.

She stated that Italian interest in the expatriate communities was falling as Italy is changing from a population exporter to a receiver of immigrants, with a related increase in xenophobic "patriotic" ideals.

Relations with emigrees could be improved by increasing political, social and cultural ties, giving Italians abroad the right to vote in national elections to set the process in motion.

Argentine Italians have had the right to vote in municipal elections for the last 50 years, but this rule has never been applied to other nations.

Better information could also improve the situation, following the model of the Committee of Italians Abroad (Comites), which records and distributes television programmes from the Italian National Television company RAI to migrant communities.

Comites has also established a link to the Italian Dante Alighieri Cultural Association, which offers courses, tourist information, and student travel grants.

"It's another Italy beyond the peninsula, but it would be unrealistic to try to freeze time: the Genoans who arrived in Buenos Aires at the end of the last century are more part of Argentine than Italian culture now, which is only natural," she said.

Neither would it be true to say that "Italianess" is suffocated by the new cultures it meets.

"On the contrary, the best part of being Italian becomes enriched by meeting and absorbing other cultures," she concluded.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

Where next?

Advertisement